What grinds my gears

There exist quite some conspiracy theories about statins, about how dangerous they might or might not be, and people having these doubts about their safety and efficacy include some doctors of medicine. However, this blog post is not about that. I don't know if they are safe and beneficial or not. Maybe they are. But this is not about that. Recently I had a routine blood checkup with an employer-provided health benefit physician, and almost all blood levels related to obesity were above recommended levels and good cholesterol was below recommended levels. In a followup phone consultation the doctor  immediately  suggested statins, and gave a spiel about them that almost felt rehearsed. He gave several points and several arguments, literally like a rehearsed speech. I'm not even kidding. What's most curious about it is that he had never seen me personally and, most importantly,  he didn't ask a single question  about my health and life habits. He didn't even ask abou...

One of the most fundamental principles of freedom of speech is the right to make public reviews of commercial products. In pretty much every single country where there's a right to free speech (and probably even a few that don't), product reviews are an  extremely  protected form of speech. It doesn't matter if they are positive or negative. The idea behind this protection is, of course, pretty simple: It's a form of consumer protection. Consumers have the right to know what they are buying by being able to know about the experiences that others have had with the product. If there's some kind of flaw or negative aspect to a product, consumers have the right to know before buying. Sellers and manufacturers cannot be expected to reveal every single aspect of their product, so protecting the right of people to publish their own reviews is extremely important. Which, of course, means that in most countries a company trying to sue a reviewer for giving a negative review ...

Recently the Spanish prime minister undermined once again the sovereignty and borders of the country by passing a law that gives amnesty to any person who arrives in the country by the sea, no questions asked. Literally tens of thousands of Moroccans immediately took advantage of this and started a literal full scale invasion of Ceuta and Melilla. That's not hyperbole, a figure speech, or exaggeration. Tens of thousands of foreigners entered those places en masse and immediately started doing what invading forces always do when they invade a country: They started looting stores and breaking into homes, breaking doors and windows. And where was the Spanish police when literally hundreds of invaders were breaking into and looting stores? Absolutely nowhere to be seen. In fact, the police forces were restricting the locals from doing anything about it, with video footage showing the cops literally beating Spanish citizens with batons. While doing literally nothing about the hordes of ...

The " motte-and-bailey " fallacy is an argumentative tactic where a larger questionable ideology, when challenged, is defended by retreating to a small portion of the ideology that's generally more accepted. The analogy is that in normal circumstances ("peace time") the ideology preaches all of its tenets, most of which are morally or otherwise questionable (in other words, it operates in the wider "bailey" area), but when questioned and challenged ("war time"), the apologist retreats to the more defensible much smaller area of the ideology (in other words, the fortified "motte" at the center). Here are some concrete examples of this very tactic used by the modern far left, which clarify how this tactic is actually being used in practice out there: Feminism Especially 10+ years ago (perhaps a bit less nowadays because the concept of "feminism" has got a bad reputation among the left, mainly because of J. K. Rowling ), when...

Or, perhaps, "theft" is not technically speaking the right term to use, because it implies that the action is illegal, which in these cases it might not technically be. However, it's an extremely common practice and it's tiresome. Whether one likes YouTube's copyright enforcement system or not, at least it does have the positive effect that if you create and upload an original video, if someone just downloads it and uploads it as-is on their own channel, you can take it down immediately when you notice. However, what happens when the footage is public domain, or in other ways not really falling under copyright of an entity who could take it down? One example of such footage is, in the United States, court camera videos: These are in the public domain by law, and thus anybody can distribute them as they want. There are also many other similar examples of footage created by the government or other entities that do not fall under copyright (or where the copyright is ...

If you watch, for example, this video by the YouTube channel Team Skeptic, where the author comments on yet another "sovereign citizen" who is foolishly representing himself in court, you'll notice how, particularly in one part of the video, he again and again insists that he "doesn't understand anything". He uses lots of other words that mean the same thing, but he just outright refuses to say that he "understands" a single thing. He "comprehends", he "grasps", he "knows", he yada yada yada, but most definitely and categorically he doesn't "understand" anything. This even though the judge quite clearly expresses that she herself doesn't understand why he is having such a huge problem with that word, and why he is playing that kind of word games. The judge makes it pretty clear that "understand" just means the same thing as to comprehend, to grasp, to know what's being said, there's...

Unlike many American far-leftist activists love to claim, the US does not have "hate speech" laws. So-called "hate speech" is not illegal because it's, still, considered to be speech protected by the First Amendment. Of course that doesn't stop cops and courts from prosecuting people for "hate speech" anyway. They just masquerade it as something else. As the saying goes, "the good thing about laws is that there are so many of them to choose from". It's the stalinistic principle of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Or, in this particular example, the woman. Some time ago a controversy arose when someone published a video of a white woman using the "N-word" against a child, as well as some random man who was loitering near the playground (not related to the child), in the city of Rochester, New York. Obviously that sent the far-leftists completely crazy. The city wanted to sue her because quite obvio...