What grinds my gears

I'm going to assume that you know what the "Covington kids" case is, about the viral video involving the Covington Catholic kids and a native American, and the shitstorm that ensued, and skip summarizing here what happened. The parents of the affected kids sued, among others, Washington Post for defamation, because they published defamatory reports about the case with complete disregard to journalistic integrity and the identity of those affected. The Washington Post lawyers submitted a "motion to dismiss" to the judge, in this case one Senior District Judge William O. Bertelsman, who granted the motion. Why is this most probably a case of the judge bypassing proper legal procedure and, possibly illegally, dismissing this case without letting the victims defend their case? In the United States legal system, a "motion to dismiss" is submitted and should be granted in cases where no trial is necessary because the lawsuit is frivolous or inactionabl...

Semi-regularly several organizations will perform a sort of international "audit", comparing different countries with respect to several basic human rights, such as freedom of speech. Year after year for example Finland places easily on the top places in these lists, especially when it comes to free speech. The thing is, these studies can be, and often are, quite misleading. One of the major problems with them is that they almost exclusively concentrate on freedom of the press , instead of the freedom of speech of individual citizens. In these studies freedom of the press is pretty much equated with freedom of speech, and is the main, and perhaps only, measurement stick used to determine that ranking. The problem with measuring freedom of the press, especially in Europe, is that the mainstream media, the press, is almost unanimously left-leaning, with the vast majority of it being far-left, and pretty much all the remaining being complacent to the ideology and almost ne...

The people of the United Kingdom voted in 2016 to leave the EU. Nothing happened. The ultimate deadline for finally leaving the EU was the beginning of 2019. That deadline came and went, and nothing happened. The UK is still in the EU. Nothing has changed. They are still in the EU parliament. They are still electing MEP's. They are still paying billions of pounds to the EU mafia. In fact, the protection money paid to the EU actually increased this year because the UK economy is booming. There is no exit in sight. Yet, to this day, people are still talking as if the UK is going to leave the EU. Any day now. Sure, it didn't happen in 2016, or in any of the following years, nor even the absolutely final deadline at the beginning of 2019. But surely any day now it will happen. Let's see if in 2020 they will still be talking as if the UK is going to leave the EU any day now. Just a bit more, and surely the UK will leave. Then in 2021. Then in 2022. You know the drill. ...

As a matter of principle and competent practice of medicine, doctors in general do not, and must not, trust blindly a self-diagnosis of a patient, especially if the treatment for that diagnosis is prescription drugs. A doctor must always corroborate that the patient really has the illness before prescribing any treatment. Doctors must never just blindly take a self-diagnosis presented by a patient as the truth, with no corroboration and checking. Any doctor can tell that self-diagnosis is quite common in patients, who have read things online, and made wild assumptions about their symptoms, without any sort of tests or corroborating evidence. Even if the patient is being honest, and is not trying to deliberately lie, prescribing the wrong treatment can be very dangerous to the patient, and could even lead to a lawsuit for malpractice. And of course there's always the possibility of an abuse of the system when we are talking about prescriptions drugs that are used for recreational pu...

At some point in the recent past regressive leftist feminist academics came up with this idea that any content shown to people (especially students) that may contain something that may "trigger" anxiety or distress in people who have experienced trauma should contain "trigger warnings", to help them either mentally prepare for that content, or to skip it completely. Supposedly this helps them because the upsetting content doesn't come by surprise, and they can expect it. Several studies have been made about this, and basically invariably they have found that these "trigger warnings" actually have the exact opposite effect. In other words, rather than alleviate the anxiety and stress caused by the potentially upsetting content, they only make it worse. They only increase the amount of stress, anxiety and negative feelings that these people experience (compared to there not being such warnings at all). When you think about it, it actually makes sen...

For a couple of decades now there has been a constant and almost cult-like campaign to get "women into STEM". They keep repeating over and over and over like a mantra that girls should be encouraged to enter the STEM fields, that we absolutely need more women in STEM, that it's of the utmost importance . Thus tons and tons of effort and money is poured into brainwashing girls to enter the STEM fields, and to enroll into universities, up to the point that in many countries there's actually a gender imbalance, with a sizeable majority of university students being women. At no point, however, have I ever seen a rational reason for this. Why should women be specifically and particularly encouraged into the STEM fields? With this, rather obviously, I don't mean that they should be stopped from doing so, or discouraged, or that additional hurdles should be put in their way. What I mean, which should be quite clear even without having to state it, is that no parti...

Many people keep commenting how the American Democratic Party is in complete chaos, they are eating themselves, there's infighting, and way too many presidential candidates, and that all this is just ensuring that Trump will be re-elected in 2020. But the thing is, it doesn't matter how much chaos and how insane the Democratic Party may be. The presidential election system makes that completely it completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if there's a million presidential candidates, or how few votes each one of them gets, the election system will still make it so that one of them will be running against Trump in the end, no matter how large the difference in number of votes between them may be. Trump can get 100 million votes and the other candidate can get 100 votes, and it makes absolutely no difference; they will still be running against each other in the end. And it doesn't matter what kind of person the Democratic candidate is, or what his policies are. Ev...

Ufologists have been going crazy during the past year or so because the United States military has been in the news announcing that they are investigating the UFO phenomenon, and whether there's something behind it, and whether it might be a threat to the security of the country. The motivation behind this is several pieces of surveillance and training footage that show (seemingly) flying objects of unknown origin seemingly defying all known laws of physics, doing impossible maneuvers, and which don't seem to have any natural explanation. They have published some of these videos, and they probably have a lot more of them. Is there something behind this phenomenon? Perhaps ufologists are not as crazy as it seems? Maybe there is something there? After all, if the military is taking it dead-serious, and are going to spend a lot of resources investigating the phenomenon, something must be happening? This cannot just be birds, weather balloons and lens flares... I suppose it...

In the Nordic Countries in general, and perhaps most prominently from among them in Norway in particular, there's basically no antifa presence at all. In the other countries there's a very little presence, where some random kids will roleplay as communist revolutionaries and sometimes vandalize public property by putting some antifa stickers there... but that's about it. There are no public demonstrations, there are no protest marches to speak of, there is no violence. In countries like Finland there's perhaps some minor demonstrations sometimes, but they are very minor and mostly incident-free. In Norway, however, it is my understanding (although I have not corroborated it) that there's pretty much no antifa presence at all. Note that this isn't a feature of Europe in general. It's particular to the Nordic countries. In many other countries antifa can be even more violent than it is in the US, as hard as that might be to believe. (Their protests at G20 su...

Some time ago I pondered if modern "multiculturalist" politicians are guilty of treason . I feel compelled to ask this question once again, given the actions of the American Democratic Party. When a politician in the government is actively advocating for and working towards the delegitimisation of the sovereignty of the country, its lands and its borders, questioning the rights of the people as citizens of that country, eroding the rights of the country to control its borders, and is directly advocating for and working towards bringing millions of foreign nationals into the country illegally, bypassing all immigration laws and regulation, at the expense of and with complete disregard to the actual citizens of the country, couldn't this be seen as a bona fide act of treason? This is a politician actively working against the legitimacy and sovereignty of his or her own country, and working towards eroding the very existence of the state as a sovereign entity with its o...

As may have become clear from past blog posts about the subject, I have been trying to campaign against political bias in Wikipedia, which is absolutely rampant there. I have semi-regularly made suggestions in the talk pages of politically charged articles about changes to make it more neutral. Most of them have been quickly dismissed and even locked. In one instance it actually led to an actual change to more neutral tone (in the article for Donald Trump, no less). Many years ago I started a discussion in the proper Wikipedia policy discussion page about the political bias there and how it could be avoided. Recently I tried again. Apparently this ruffled some feathers because the discussion was locked within minutes and one (anonymous, unaccountable) administrator decided to block me indefinitely from making any edits, and moreover removed my user page, where I discussed more in depth about the political bias problem in Wikipedia. No clear reason was ever given why my user page had ...

Tommy Robinson has been persecuted by the United Kingdom government, its court system and the police, for over a decade now. The police has routinely harassed him, his family and his relatives, often with no legal reason at all. Some of the most despicable acts of harassment is the British police trying to intimidate him by harassing his parents, repeatedly visiting their home for no reason whatsoever and using all kinds of intimidation tactics. The police. Not some antifa thugs, or a Muslim gang. The British police. And not only has he been thrown to prison several times, but he has been deliberately put into prison that are notorious for the amount of Muslim gangs in them. He has been subjected to months of solitary confinement, which is considered a full-fledged form of torture by pretty much all humanitarian organizations. Recently the British courts probably broke all kinds of speed records by arresting him for "contempt of court", prosecuting him and sentencing him to...

Sometimes when I watch a video that meticulously and accurately debunks in detail some conspiracy theory, snake oil salesmanship, or anything else that generally goes against what we know for certain about science, I like to make a joke in the comments, that goes a bit like: "I could post a long essay debunking every single point you are making, but why bother? There's a much easier way: You are just a paid shill. There. Every single one of your arguments refuted with one single sentence." I'm of course being completely facetious and jestful there. However, it references a rather common tactic among conspiracy theorists and peddlers of hogwash: Dismissing the criticism, not by refuting it, but by calling the critic a corporate shill (with zero evidence, of course). Well, there's another word that has been recently appropriated by the regressive left to dismiss, belittle and disregard any criticism that they or anything they like get: Just call the critics ...

Some time during the last century the medical community came to the consensus that consuming fats, especially so-called "trans fats", is bad for your health and causes obesity and all kinds of cardiovascular diseases. Similarly, cholesterol was deemed even worse, and a killer, and one of the leading causes of deaths. As a consequence, many countries, especially western countries, have engaged in a massive decades-long awareness campaign warning of the dangers of trans fats and cholesterol. It has been also a massive success. Grocery store shelves are stock full of "fat free" products, and products seem to compete with each other on how visibly they can announce that they contain low or no fat. Many people are outright morbidly afraid of consuming anything else, and think that even small amounts of fats is unhealthy to them. Also cholesterol is a real bogeyman, and many people will eg. avoid eating too many eggs too often for the fear of the evil cholesterol. Also ...

Simple question: Have you ever seen an obese Muslim? Because I can't remember a single example. There probably are, but they appear to be extremely rare. On the contrary, any time you see Muslims, especially here in western countries, be it live or on some YouTube video or news segment, or whatever, what's the most typical demographic of them that you see? Young men (typically men who look between 20-30, rarely much older) who look very fit and, in many cases, even muscular. I have absolutely no idea what goes on in Muslim communities and within Islamic culture, but from outwards appearances it seems that somehow it promotes or induces its members to take care of their own bodies, to eat well, to exercise, and to be fit. If there are obese Muslims, they seem to be a real rarity. This all in itself, in isolation from everything else, would be quite admirable and commendable. It's always nice if a culture induces its people to be healthy and fit, and to take care of t...

For literally decades (the website was first created in 1994), Snopes was a really interesting and quite high-quality fact-checking website that dealt primarily with urban legends, widely circulating anecdotes, and other such stories, researching whether they were based on real events or completely fictitious. For a very long time it was a quite good source of information (perhaps not in itself a good authoritative source per se, but a good starting point for further investigation into urban legends and stories). For quite a long time I thought that the people behind the website were (and perhaps they really are) Christians, and perhaps even American conservatives. That's because semi-regularly they would upload articles with titles like "prayers requested for (such and such person)" which typically dealt with a missing person, or a person that had suffered some accident or other misfortune, and in many cases these were ranked as "true". Given how these articl...

The amount of violence in the United States is only escalating and escalating. The recent attack on a gay Vietnamese-American reporter, Any Ngo, by a mob of terrorist thugs, which hospitalized him due to a brain hemorrage, is merely the latest example, out of literally thousands of examples. The unilateral violence committed by these terrorists is only escalating and escalating, and becoming worse and worse. Yet, there would be a quite easy solution to solve this problem. A solution that shouldn't even be controversial in the least: The police starting to actually enforce the law. The major problem in the United States is that the police does nothing to these mobs. The terrorists are free to break the law, and the police will just watch from the sidelines, doing nothing to stop it. Harassing people is illegal. Deliberately throwing things at people is illegal. Disrupting traffic is illegal. Rioting is illegal. Assaulting people is illegal. Vandalism and damaging public and p...

It's certainly a mistake to think that news outlets, newspapers and journalism in general have only recently become extremely politically biased and propaganda machines, and that previously journalism had much more integrity and abode much more strictly to journalistic ethics and principles. Heavily politically biased journalism has always existed, even in free countries (where the government isn't controlling them). However, I think it's safe to say that in the past journalism tended to have more integrity than it does today. In other words, there were many more newspapers and news outlets that had much stricter standards of good journalism in the past than there is today, and egregiously politically biased journalism (by news outlets not being pressured by a totalitarian government) that bypassed journalistic principles for the sake of political propaganda was significantly rarer. In the past news organizations and journalists prided themselves for doing hard invest...

Recently I was in a bus when suddenly it had to hit the breaks very hard from a considerable speed because of some kind of traffic incident. Since the bus was approaching a bus stop, there were several people standing up on the aisle. The breaking was so sudden and from such a speed that at least three or four people fell on the floor quite hard. Several women screamed quite loudly when this happened. Only women screamed. I didn't hear anything from any male. Not a sound. This is actually quite common, as anybody would know from experience. When somebody gets suddenly startled or scared, women tend to scream loudly, while men tend to either not make any sound or, at the very most, make a much quieter gasping sound. (In general, men tend to scream only if they experience sudden unexpected strong physical pain, but very rarely if they are merely startled.) I'm convinced that this difference is evolutionary, and probably can be traced back hundreds of thousands, even some m...

For several decades there has been a kind of cultural zeitgeist, a widespread notion, that western society, especially the fashion and modeling industry, including fashion magazines, TV shows, and so on, are giving young girls an "unhealthy" picture of normalcy, of what being a normal attractive woman is like, in the form of "unrealistic" and "unhealthy" beauty standards. I have often semi-joked (well, not really even joked at all, when I think about it) that this "unhealthy" beauty standard induces young women to: eat healthily, avoiding junk food, exercise regularly, take care of their skin, hair, etc. hit the gym... I fail to see the problem. Now, don't get me wrong. Anorexia and bulimia can be real health problems. The most severe cases of anorexia can be incredibly jarring and even incomprehensible to people who have never witnessed nor have any first-hand experience with it. People with severe anorexia can develop a strong ...