Moved away, Jimmy Blue?

Ha, you wish!

No I haven't given up on blogging and nor did I run away to sulk in a corner with my tail between my legs over recent heated arguments (which I'm not done with yet but will be putting my final say to shortly by the way). First, some unexpected events in Real Life™ forced me to miss putting a note on the blog to say I was going back to Blighty on holiday, and then I went on said holiday and had far more enjoyable things to do than argue with people who aren't listening or won't hear, or who appear to be absolutely convinced that they are only ever right.

So I am back and normal service is hopefully about to be resumed whether you like it or not and whether I've pissed off my one or two readers or not.


Whilst I was away though I had plenty of time to do a lot of, for me at least, unusually in depth and introspective thinking and eventually decided that I need to be more assertive, aggressive and confrontational in my blogging - in particular with regard to other skeptics and bloggers. In the past when I have disagreed with other skeptics I have tended to just ignore those blog posts where I didn't agree, and I have also certainly treated other bloggers with more uncritical respect than I should have done. This is something that I've actually been thinking about for some time, in fact since Mark made this comment a couple of months ago, and the recent discussion here just confirmed it.

So I've decided to stop ignoring the obvious fact that skeptics get it wrong (even if it is not as often as they get it right) and I will be calling it like I see it more often. So a word of warning to the faint hearted - it will undoubtedly get ugly at times. Skeptics apparently don't like the idea that they might be wrong, or at least not completely right.

No doubt I will also get it wrong sometimes and I encourage people to point that out with a reasonable argument that actually takes into account what I said, not what you think I said.

One further word of warning - I will never accept or agree that in a discussion you can make a claim or assertion in support of your position and expect me or anyone else to simply accept it as an undeniable or accurate fact and that the burden is then on me or someone else to disprove it. That's not how it works, and if you ever think it is then you are exactly the sort of person I am going to eventually butt heads with.

Let the games begin..