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...