I'm no hypocrite. My opinions? They don't matter either. Not to you, anyway. They matter to me, of course--if I'm deciding which movie to rent, I'm the first person I ask. But I wouldn't expect you to care one way or another. I could type lengthy manifestos about my religious, political and fashion preferences all day. If you were polite you might pretend to read them.

But I'd be kidding myself if I really believed I'd converted anyone to my way of thinking. By the time we get out of high school, we're all pretty much hardwired, for better or worse, into our own modes of thinking--we've sampled the buffet table of life, as it were, figured out what was tasty and what smelled like old boots, and no amount of arm-twisting is going to get us to try those weird-looking shrimp balls next to the sweet and sour pork.

We look for outside opinions to reinforce our beliefs, not challenge them. We pick out sympathetic ears that relay our crises to mouths waiting to say things like "Of course you were right to steal it" and "Where does she get off?" We seek out knowledge that reiterates what we've always believed to be true. We'll look to film reviewers that we've handpicked for their similar tastes.

Never is this more apparent than on the internet, where millions of people spend their entire day getting furious at those unfortunate enough to be less intelligent than themselves (i.e. everyone else). It infuriates us that no one else is selective enough to like what we like, or wise enough to like it for the same reasons. We're so preoccupied with defining ourselves through our preferences that it's not surprising we often confuse taste with intelligence. I know I do. When a grown man or woman tells me they're reading the new Harry Potter book, for instance, I instinctively add quote marks over 'reading', envisioning the sad, spartan bookshelf they must keep at home; the two diet books and a Tom Clancy novel I'd find there, fighting unsuccessfully for dominance with shelves creaking from the weight of DVDs starring Freddy Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles.

Internet debate exhausts me, and it's everywhere. If you looked at one side of a pointless argument as a zero and the other as a one, you could easily see the internet as it is: an unending stream of binary code stretching off monotonously into the horizon. We'll debate about Jesus, we'll debate about Bush, we'll debate about which Evil Dead movie left the other installments behind--the subject matter is irrelevant. What matters is the conviction that we've got it all figured out, and no effort should be spared to drag everyone else on the planet into the bright, unblinking dawn of our rightness.

I might be more inclined to do this myself if it wasn't that even a cursory scan around my room shows a monumental deficit in the naked cheerleader department, proving rather conclusively that while I might have some things figured out, other more important areas have eluded my grasp entirely. Subsequent glances show an embarrassingly large collection of comic books, a Lord of the Rings super-sized DVD with more extras than I'll ever have the time to watch, and, though I can't remember what I even needed it for, a hammer. I think that anyone who can confidently explain Galacticus's role in the Secret Wars probably has no business dictating their stances on international policy to others, and I include myself in that.

The other problem with net debating is the logical paradox that anyone with sufficient intelligence to have the sort of insights you might listen to is probably also the sort of person with more pressing time commitments than grabbing TittyMaster67 and BladeLovr in the iron fist of reason on the Picard/Kirk debate. This same reasoning is what makes Amazon.com's customer reviews so infinitely entertaining. Here are people with no time commitments in evidence at all. I could be charitable and envision them cooling their dogs in front of a laptop for the afternoon after a taxing liaison with the Chinese Ambassador, but something tells me deeper investigation would reveal collectible figurines, filthy children and bullet-ridden cars on blocks in the backyard that a family of raccoons call home.

Interestingly, both Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Dr. Phil's The Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide get consistent five-star ratings from Amazon.com's crack customer review team. Giving Dr. Phil a slight advantage over Proust, though, is one customer's glowing review title for The Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide that states "If you read one book in your lifetime..." Call me a snob, but I think that any book reviewer who finds it reasonable to assume this might well be the only book you ever read isn't going to have a lot of reference points as to the Ultimate Weight Solution's place in the literary canon. I'm similarly doubtful that the person who's made a conscious choice to read just one book in their lifetime is the sort to power through a few reviews during their lunchbreak.

Other review titles include the mathematically sound "Buy It, Read It, Follow It = Lose Weight" and my personal favorite, "Great companion to The Ultimate Diet book". I love this one for the sheer balls of it. Forget the fact that Dr. Phil is pushing multiple weight loss books while hardly being a svelte man himself--here's a guy who titles his effort the "ultimate" diet book, then has the moxie to write a sequel to it and call it the "ultimate" weight solution, like these were two disparate concepts that he's put out as companion pieces.

After the five star reviews are out of the way, the zero star reviews of course follow, and lines are quickly drawn in the sand on The Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide battlefield. Tammy comes forward with the bold treatise that "The negative reviews state these people didn't even read it," working under the unfailable logic that since a) the book is good and b) someone did not think it was good, then c) they did not read the book. Though you'd be hard-pressed to question her logic, someone soon does just that, casting new points to consider into the ring with their assertion that Dr. Phil is "a fuckin fatass."

And so on and so on. Sometimes I'll do random searches on books just to read the reviews, making my Amazon.com Auto-Recommendation list look like I'm the sort of person who eats with a bib. According to Amazon, for instance, my recent surfing choices suggest I might be interested in Diane Stein's Healing With Gemstones and Crystals. One Customer Review for Healing With Gemstones, the discerning 'Tigerave', gives the book what must have been an exhaustively debated-upon five star rating. Tigerave buttresses the stars by explaining that Healing With Gemstones is a "concise, not-overwhelming book of healing properties of stones," presumably meaning that it manages to cut through all the complex science involved in curing headaches with quartz and just spells it out for you in layman's terms. (If you were interested, other books Tigerave found sufficiently review-worthy were Gloria Estefan's Destiny and Sarah Wells' Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr: Affirmations for Cynics , an author who clearly didn't research her target audience with her title choice. Of Tigerave's 15 reviews, all are glowing five-star affairs. I chalk this up to her successfully nourishing her inner cynic-martyr, possibly with gemstones.)

I'm told that customers who enjoyed Diane Stein's Healing With Gemstones and Crystals might also be interested in Crystal Healing, Vol. 2 by Katrina Raphaell. I don't doubt it. Once you've conclusively failed to heal your chest pains with one mystic amulet, I think it would necessarily follow that you should hunt up as many books as you can on the subject until you get it right.

If, on the other hand, you've decided to read just one book in your lifetime and can't afford the luxury of two volumes dedicated to getting cancer in a Full Nelson through the magical powers of feldspar, you've at least got the solace of knowing Tigerave's out there somewhere, gemstones weighing down her knuckles as she puts fingers to keyboard, steering the one-book-per-lifetimers the right way with her concise, not-overwhelming reviews.

If the internet wasn't exactly built for circular anonymous debate, it's adapted well enough to suit it. And if you disagree, I'll meet you at Amazon.com. Look for my review of your values under "You + Opinions = Wrong" by BigDickAwesome, and refute as necessary.