THIS is the Age of The Crank. I'm at screaming point with cranks. I hate cranks, writes Peter Goers.

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THIS is the Age of The Crank. I'm at screaming point with cranks. I hate cranks. Cranks are anti-vaccination, anti-wind farms, anti-climate change, anti-desal, anti-women bishops, anti-gay marriage, anti-fluoride, anti-evolution, anti-meat.

The crank always knows better than anyone else. The crank ignores acknowledged, expert, peer-reviewed evidence. The crank believes in conspiracies.

The crank blames government, pharmaceutical companies, big energy companies, Satan, political correctness, the collapse of family values and, if all else fails, blames the media.

The crank does not listen. The crank is paranoid.

The internet is the great soapbox for the crank and the great research tool because, no matter how wacky your idea, you'll find support on the internet.

Cranks are zealots. I could be one.

Here's how it goes. Get a crazy idea, ridicule all evidence to the contrary, link it to a conspiracy and away you go.

Perhaps I decide on some flimsy whim that there's cholera in Adelaide's water supply. I find pseudo-science to back me up. I convert three other people to my crazy cause.

I immediately distrust the highest possible scientific opinion and claim those scientists and public health officials are in the pay of big multicultural water companies.

I bombard the media with my arguments. I blame the media when I don't get enough attention but I've become an expert so that anyone with a cholera outbreak anywhere in the world will refer to me. Governments start to listen and placate me.

This is ludicrous but no more so than the anti-vaccination brigade.

The anti-wind farm lobby is the most virulent, dogmatic and organised lobby I've encountered in 30 years in the media. It wants to wear you down.

It is relentless. This lobby will not be contradicted. Only it knows best.

The anti-wind farm people are disarming when they say: "We're not opposed to wind farms." That means not here and not there, either. Simon Chapman is Professor of Public Health, at the University of Sydney, and highly respected. He has led the anti-smoking campaign (very successfully) in Australia. He recently wrote a scathing attack of the opponents of wind farms.

He is now the wind farm anti-Christ; loathed, attacked, defamed, pilloried.

Why? He said, well, you claim wind farms cause many deaths of humans and sheep. Show me one.

He also suggested that wind farm opponents may be motivated by envy.

The farmer down the road has no problem with wind turbines and a tidy income from them but the people next door missed out and now can't sleep and are dying and so are their sheep.

I've investigated wind turbines at Marabel. I couldn't hear a thing.

Aahh, the cranks say, you weren't there at 3am. You weren't there when the wind was coming from the South-East. They call me a liar and a tool of the power companies.

People who want to stop everyone from being vaccinated want to kill you.

You stupidly want to risk your child getting whooping cough and dying by not being vaccinated and you risk spreading an insidious disease.

Suddenly we are all at risk. Whooping cough is on the rise because of cranks.

Scientists must tire of having to say vaccinations do not cause autism. The scourge of polio has been virtually eradicated from the Western world thanks to vaccinations but for how long? The anti-vaxers are dangerous, hateful, bloody-minded cranks.

A quarter of a century ago, the Church of England allowed women priests. Until those women can become bishops, they have a second-class role in their church. So, 42 out of 44 dioceses in Britain vote for women bishops and a few cranks within the church who have the final word vote it down. This may destroy the Church of England.

The opponents of gay marriage are an increasingly cranky minority. Future generations will look back at this debate with the same distaste for the cranks that once fervently rejected inter-racial marriage. Nuts.

If only cranks were right once in a while. If only NASA suddenly announced the moon landings were faked, perhaps cranks would finally get some credibility. But pigs just can't fly and if they could they'd fly into a wind turbine and that'd be further "evidence" that wind farms are bad.

Peter Goers is on leave after this week. His column will return in the New Year.