What grinds my gears

Australia recently passed a law that criminalizes all "hate symbols" (the government, of course, giving itself the power to determine what's a "hate symbol" and what isn't), including the Nazi salute, with mandatory jail time. Margaret Brennan, the host of the CBS show "Face the Nation", recently argued on live broadcast that freedom of speech was the major contributing factor to the raise of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in Germany. (And she wasn't just making some kind of off-hand mention among other arguments. She was doing this explicitly and directly as an argument for why freedom of speech should be restricted.) These are just the tip of the iceberg. More and more countries over the last ten or so years have either seriously considered outlawing, or have gone and actually outlawed, "hate speech" and "hate symbols". Some countries, like the United Kingdom, have taken an astonishingly inclusive interpretation of what...

Historically, and for the longest time, the press had been one of the biggest and strongest tools of Freedom of Speech, one of the strongest assets that the citizens have had to keep those in power in check, ie. the government, the military, large megacorporations, and so on. Especially historically the press has always had an enormous amount of reach, as the vast majority of people read newspapers regularly and, later, watched the news on TV even more regularly, and thus the press has always had an enormous power to inform and influence the wider public. And, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, which is why most if not all members of the press are, at least theoretically, morally obligated to follow a widely agreed-upon set of journalistic ethics. These ethics delineate, among other things, the responsibilities of a journalist to try to seek and report the truth, to be impartial, to give everybody a fair chance of presenting their side, and to report as accuratel...

10-15 years ago, when the complete takeover of American universities by radical far-leftist activists was in full force (which was just a culmination of literally decades of more under-the-hood work by leftist professors and activists working at universities), one of their favorite talking points was that "one in five" women in universities experience sexual abuse of some kind. (And, unsurprisingly, this just got inflated more and more over the years as the takeover became more and more widespread, eventually becoming "one in four" and sometimes even "one in three", with literally no sources for any of these claims.) In reality the amount of sexual abuse in American universities is actually lower than in the rest of the population, and in the rest of the population is more like one in 35, or something like that. (Of course this is still admittedly way, way too large, but nevertheless, it's nowhere even near that "one in five" number.) The sou...

Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp" if he got elected in 2016. He was elected, and while he did many things, he didn't really do much in that regard. However, now that he was elected again in 2024 he has gone into full gear and has achieved in just a few weeks more than he achieved in the entirety of the four years of his previous presidency. Which is great, don't get me wrong. Finally someone is doing something. One of the many things that his administration is heavily planning to do is to declassify the governmental documents on several high-profile events, including the investigation and death of Epstein, as well as the documentation on the 9/11 attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, UFOs, JFK, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. On one hand this is absolutely great: Openness is always good. The people have the right to know. These are not huge state secrets that need to be kept secret for national security purposes (eg. the current location of military tr...

Most people tend to think that everything that's done in medicine, in medical practice, is the result of extremely rigorous testing using the scientific process. That nothing is allowed to be done in medicine that hasn't passed these rigorous requirements. That is, indeed, the case with many things in medicine, in most countries. Most if not all prescription drugs need to be approved by the highest authority in the country, and this approval is given only if the drug in question has passed some of the most rigorous testing procedures that exist in this world. The same is true for most medical devices. In fact, in many countries there are strict laws that regulate the use of such devices and drugs for medical purposes, or from any substance from being sold and advertised as "medicine" if it hasn't been tested appropriately. It is most probably for this reason that most people think that everything in medicine has gone through this rigorous testing. Sadly, this is ...

Wizards of the Coast, the current developer and publisher of the Dungeons&Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, has been "woke" for over ten years now, and they have introduced leftist ideology into their products at an ever increasing rate (going into high gear immediately following the infamous BLM riots in the United States). One of the most cringe ways in which they have shoved the modern far-leftist ideology into the game is by adding a "phobias" questionnaire to be used by game masters when creating character sheets, as well as the infamous and cringe "X cards". According to their most recent version of the game master's guidebook, these "X cards" must always be available, and any player can raise one at any moment, for any reason, without having to state the reason, and the current events happening in the game must be immediately stopped and skipped, without question, without the player having go give any reasons or explanations. (Th...

One of the biggest lies promoted by modern far-leftism, and this quite sadly and horrendously includes many doctors (especially in the United States), is that suicide rates are very high among "trans" people who are uncomfortable with their bodies, and that these suicide rates go way down after the sex change operation. This is such an obvious and blatant lie that it's astonishing that they have gall to just state it and repeat it over and over (in a very "Big Lie" manner). There has never, ever, in the history of humanity, been some kind of suicide epidemic among people who don't identify with their own sex. And, on the contrary, actual statistics show that suicide rates go up many-fold after the operation (something that the activists and doctors vehemently deny and dismiss, of course.) It shouldn't really even be necessary to explain why the suicide rates go up after the operations, but I'll do it anyway. For starters, a sex change operation is n...