In a shocking development, Random Perspective has inadvertently proved beyond doubt that the majority of Internet users in the world are completely stupid. Whilst, in most cases, determining stupidity is a matter of opinion - in this case the stupidity is of pure scientific grade quality.

"I'm stunned," Random Perspective Ben Dickson would have said had he been interviewed on the matter, "It all started out in February 2005 when I wrote a satirical article criticising the American media's handling of the terrorist situation. The article ran with the headline '37% of Americans Believe Jack Bauer is real' - you know, picking up on the fact that some people do think the government operates like that thanks to those types of TV shows. The literal meaning of the headline is obviously completely false - it was just a satirical metaphor for me to convey my point."

It did not take long for several websites to pick up the headline and report it as fact. Most of them were Dutch using the article to highlight how stupid and gullible Americans are.

"It was the irony of ironies - at least the pinnacle at the time. All these Dutch people saying 'How stupid these Americans are for believing something fictional... when they were coming to that conclusion by their believing of a satirical article."

This led Ben Dickson to write a follow up article. The article, again like all of the content on this website, was satirical in nature and ran under the headline 'Holland Officially More Gullible Than USA' - the rather self explanatory article led to many major discoveries, most notably that Holland is not actually called Holland.

Deciding to push the envelope further, Ben decided to write one of his most genius inspired pieces of all time. Having inadvertently fooling a load of mostly Dutch people that 37% of Americans believed in Jack Bauer - why not take that concept further by using the same headline to satirize itself?

The result was a piece entitled '75% of Americans Believe Everything They Read' - in this case, instead of being a metaphor - the headline was a deliberate lie. The irony came in that anyone who used it to support their argument or to disagree with it was believing something that was completely fake. The article too was full of similar instances, or clues to the article's true nature.

The thing was, Ben never expected the article to have quite the effect it had:

"It's crazy, I thought maybe one or two people would quote it in their blog and everyone else would laugh at them," he announced to a huge gathering of assembled journalists, "I mean, the clues are so obvious. Twice in the article I make references to not believing everything you read. I state an example where news satire is believed as fact. I make reference to the Holland - I mean Netherlands - incident by having a 'European' Professor state that everyone knows Europeans are more intelligent than Americans. Maybe I should have put a big flashing 'THIS IS A FAKE STORY' banner at the top or made people sit through an IQ test before being allowed to view it."

Instead, many web forums across the internet started referencing the article, leading to long discussions about how stupid Americans were, or about how stupid the article was for conducting such shoddy research - both instances being equally ironic.

These forums include (please note, some may require registration to view the comments):

Able2Know.com Forum

TiVo Community Forum

Google Groups

Boards.ie (Starts from post #8)

Armageddon General Discussion Board

Nation States Forum

Overclocked Remix

Omnipotents Forum