Thinking for myself and sharing it with you

Gadfly

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Supporting the current thing

Supporting the current thing

Critical thinking, thinking for yourself, and not accepting what you're supposed to believe are values to which we only pay lip service. Perversely, in the era of a multitude of information sources and easy access to detailed statistics, it has become the norm to accept what governments and

If only people obeyed more

If only people obeyed more

"Communism would have worked if people hadn't tried to cheat the system". This is probably the most ridiculous (or blood-boiling, depending on my mood) argument I heard in defense of an indefensible ideology that killed tens of millions of people, imprisoned at least as many, and

The beauty of math

The beauty of math

My son and I love to play Keyforge, a fascinating card game. Each of the two players has a unique deck containing 36 cards, 12 cards from 3 "houses".

Mask down

Now that vaccines turn out not to decrease the spread of Covid, governments of the world are back to commanding NPIs, Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, like social distancing and wearing a mask. The latter has become the loudest slogan: "Just wear a mask." We're bullied into accepting that

Why I'm not an environmentalist

Why I'm not an environmentalist

I cared about the planet's future before it was cool to do so. I carried huge stacks of paper home from the office on my bike to throw them in the recycle bin. I protested with four others to prevent trees from being cut on an island in

Taking it to the extreme

Taking it to the extreme

Less than three months before the 2022 general elections, the Hungarian government fixed the price of six food items and required shops to keep a minimum stock of each. Instead of going into why it's an atrocious idea aimed at gaining votes (fixing the price of utilities before

Companies can't pay taxes

Companies can't pay taxes

Making corporations pay taxes instead of people is an often-used political slogan. Like other political slogans, it is entirely non-sense and easy to debunk by the primary weapon of the rationalist thinker: looking beyond the abstract concepts used to trigger emotions and understanding what the consequences of the tax raise

A tirade against outdoor mask mandates

A tirade against outdoor mask mandates

Fuck me, Spain, really? Outdoor mask-wearing again in 2022? When 85% of the population are double-, and half of them are triple-vaxxed? With omicron, which is way milder than previous variants? Even the New York Times knew back in the spring of 2021 that this is the stupidest of all

Will sanctions work against Russia?

Will sanctions work against Russia?

Originally written on March 7th, 2022. The government of Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby starting a war. One of the non-direct interventions that almost everybody seems to agree on is necessary is sanctions against Russia. Of course, you can’t sanction a country, you sanction its citizens. Most people know this,

I'm not my country, not my president.

I'm not my country, not my president.

There's the popular notion that one should apologize for the actions or behavior of others in a group they didn't choose to be part of. It's an absurd idea. How can I be responsible for something totally beyond my control and that I can

The Years of Covid – Never let a crisis go to waste

It was frightening to see how values that I thought were mainly widely accepted (like the freedom of expressing one's opinion) were promptly discarded in the name of the war against Covid and how simplistic slogans were made up and propagated to prevent any form of discussion. You

The Years of Covid – Double Vaccines, Double Standards

The Years of Covid – Double Vaccines, Double Standards

The appeal to get vaccinated against Covid always comes with the addendum that by doing so, not only you protect yourself but also others as you're less likely to transmit the disease. Now that this proved to be false (Israel and Iceland seeing a huge surge in case

The Years of Covid – The Seen and the Unseen

When thinking about the consequences of the pandemic's government actions, I couldn't help but think about Bastiat's famous "seen and unseen" phrase. To assess a certain measure, one needs to look at both the direct and indirect effects: the short-term, easily visible

The Years of Covid – Stay Home, Save Lives

One of the slogans invented to make people fall in line was "stay home, save lives." It's deceptively simple and tough to argue against: after all, who'd dare to put other people's lives at risk, especially if all you have to do

The Years of Covid – Focused Protection

SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous virus, especially to elderly or otherwise vulnerable people: there's no doubt about that. Almost the entirety of 2020 was spent fighting it, and since large-scale fighting is always carried out by governments, the details of the struggle have quickly become heavily politicized. Therefore, I&

The Years of Covid – Death by Lockdown

"If it even saves one life" is another slogan that's impossible to contend with. If locking down whole countries -and since most governments copied each other, entire continents- saves just one life, you'd be a heartless bastard to oppose it, right? Yet lockdowns have

The Years of Covid – Listen to the Science

A common blurb invariably used to stop any arguments criticizing the Covid-related restrictions dead in its tracks is "listen to the science." The statement first seems ironic because whatever guidelines were followed before the Covid pandemic were promptly ignored as if the virus was a beast of a