What grinds my gears

Fox News is pretty much the only large conservative pro Republican Party news network in the United States (while pretty much all the other major news networks have always been at a very minimum left-leaning and, nowadays, so far to the left that they have broken the left wall of the political spectrum). And not like slightly conservative-leaning and slightly pro-Republican. American conservatism to its absolute extreme, at full blast. For decades Fox News used to be the laughing stock of other countries, with all their silly antics, baseless asinine claims, and conspiracy theories (quite naturally every single conspiracy theory of American conservatives, the reasonable ones and the most ridiculous ones, Fox News parroted at full blast). Essentially, Fox News was the conservative counterpart of the modern CNN and MSNBC, being a full-on 24/7 anti-Democrat propaganda channel. What CNN, MSNBC and the other major far-left pundits are doing today, Fox News was doing for at least a couple of...

Not in the sense that they shouldn't exist (it's up to each individual's personal opinions and convictions whether they should or not), but the motivations for having pushed them into legislation. Take the United States, for example. Currently it's estimated that from long-term heterosexual couples over 60% are married. This is significantly lower than it was in the past (I believe you only need to go back in time by 20 to 30 years and the proportion was over 80%), but it's still quite high. For several decades the leftist activists really pushed for the same "right" to be bestowed on homosexuals, ie. that same-sex marriage would be legalized. Clearly same-sex couples were eager to get all the same legal benefits from marriage as heterosexual couples. Thus, when same-sex marriage was finally legalized, there was a rush of same-sex couples getting married, to finally get the benefits of this legal contract... Or was there? Can you guess how many long-term s...

4chan is a forum where everybody posts completely anonymously, and no post can be linked to anybody in particular. Some of these groups of people posting there are notorious for organizing all kinds of activism and trolling campaigns (some of them surprisingly effective, like "Project Chanology", which was an absolutely massive and quite successful protest against the Church of Scientology and their crimes and abuses.) Some years ago these activists came up with a funny way to troll the western mainstream media and far-leftist activists: They started spreading the notion that the "OK" hand gesture (which has existed for decades, if not centuries) is a "white supremacist" and "neo-nazi" hand gesture (because the hand gesture kind of contains the forms of the letters W and P, which according to them means "white power"). This was purely an invention of these activists at 4chan. As far as I know, no actual white supremacist neo-nazi had ev...

A viral video which got millions of views was published a bit ago of some black man expressing extremely racist rhetoric at a 2-3 year old white toddler who was traveling with his family in a New York subway. The man called the toddler racial epithets, as well as stating how he is superior because he's black. And he was clearly not just some random drug-addict junkie because he was well dressed and spoke using quite high-level academic terminology (that looked like directly from the depths of some university). Unsurprisingly, nobody intervened, nobody even knows who the man is, the mainstream media has been completely silent about the event, and there has not been any sort of outrage. Just imagine if the races had been reversed, with a white man spouting racial epithets at a small black toddler and saying how he is superior because he's white. The man would have probably been lynched by now, and the mainstream media would talk about nothing else, and probably Democrat politicia...

Political persecution of people has existed since as long as there has been any sort of government and politics in human societies. It is, quite naturally, extremely common (so common as to be pretty much expected) in dictatorships, military juntas, and other types of totalitarian regimes. Sadly, it's also quite common in modern free democratic constitutional countries, even though in theory that shouldn't happen. While the means by which people are politically persecuted may be slightly different in them, the fact is that it's extremely common. Dissenters, wrongthinkers, "troublemakers" and other personae non gratae are commonly politically persecuted even in the least corrupt free democratic countries in the world. Yes, it does happen in pretty much all countries, even the most peaceful and least corrupt ones. Take Finland, for example, which is regularly ranked among the freest and least corrupt countries in the world. While perhaps not extraordinarily common...

In the United States, at some point in time, it became a somewhat common phenomenon for some people to declare themselves as "sovereign citizens". I don't think even they themselves can give a clear definition of the term (most probably if you ask three "sovereign citizens" to give a definition you'll get seven different answers), but very broadly they think that they are citizens that are independent of the current government and its laws, as if each such "citizen" formed its own independent country or sovereignty that's separate from and independent from the United States government. They widely believe that this status of theirs is based on and supported by the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and the founding documents they wrote. They think that since they aren't citizens of the current United States, instead being their own "independent countries" of sorts, the laws, law enforcement and courts have no jurisdiction over the...

"Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime" was one of the mottos of the secret police of the Stalinist Soviet Union (notoriously coined by its secret police chief). This is in general used to describe the mentality and behavior of tyrants and oppressive authorities who will always find some kind of excuse for punishing someone using outwardly legal reasons. After all, law books are really vast, with literally thousands and thousands of laws, codes and ordinances, which are so extensive and numerous that it's almost impossible for the average citizen to never break any of them in the slightest. You have probably technically broken at least some laws or codes, no matter how small, during the past week alone, probably without even knowing. In totalitarian regimes this principle has been and is often used for political persecution of dissenters and other undesirable people (while still maintaining a facade of legality). At a slightly smaller level, even in free democr...