Pet peeves
There are times when I feel as though I've died, and gone to hell---and my eternal punishment is to be surrounded by fools. Foolishness has as many faces as Campbell's Hero, but it goes on, eternally, world without end.
One thing that's very popular these days is "virtue signaling" by loudly proclaiming one's love love LOVE of animals. Even though it isn't really a good diet for people, veganism is very popular among trendy people. Rather like ostentatious teetotalism was in "respectable" circles back before the Twenties. Celebs are jumping on the vegetarian/vegan bandwagon left, right and center, and fervently chanting about their unconditional love of all four-footed beings with the fervor of Red Guards praising Chairman Mao. I wouldn't be surprised to see "struggle sessions" being held against holdouts. "Ted Nugent, confess your deviationism and embrace the right Party line!"
Like a lot of things we Americans grab hold of, this is not a bad idea in and of itself, but it has been taken to ludicrous extremes. And for a lot of its adherents, it seems to mainly be an opportunity to pose as the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, and loudly denounce anybody who isn't 100% on board as the second coming of Jack the Ripper.
(For what it is worth, I do not myself hold with wanton mistreatment of any living creature. That said, I have no particular objections to hunting as such, or to meat-eating, or to circuses. I think a lot of the wilder accusations made against circuses are made by people who wouldn't be happy with them using animal acts no matter how the animals in question were treated. And circus people who mistreated their valuable trained animals would have to be complete idiots, even without the rarity of some of them.)
Another thing is the idiotic "political correctness" fad on-campus and elsewhere. Any speaker daring to oppose far-left orthodoxy runs the risk of being screamed down and literally mobbed. This sort of thing existed earlier, even back in my day (when dirt was new and dinosaurs roamed the earth), but was by no means universally supported on campus. When Ian Smith, the ex-prime minister of Rhodesia, came to speak at my school, a bunch of demonstrators (some of them from my school, but mainly from the Twin Cities branch of the Progressive Labor Party) took over the venue and wouldn't let him speak. Even people who bitterly opposed everything Smith was supposed to stand for were furious. They had a TV crew there reporting on the incident, and nobody had a good word for the demonstrators. The letters-to-the-editor column in the campus paper was filled with denunciations of the demonstration.
When I see these "antifa" assholes, with their oh-so-trendy black clothes, face masks and helmets, I wonder what they're so afraid of that they won't let opposing messages be promulgated. I also wonder what they'll do when they provoke retaliation in kind. I know of people on the right side of the aisle who're getting even sicker of this nonsense than I am, and a lot of them are also younger than I am and itching for a good set-to. Sooner or later, these Weather Underground wannabes are going to find that their collective alligator mouths have written checks that their canary arses can't cash.
One side-effect of "antifa" on me is to make me utterly opposed to anything they say or do or want, because it's them. After listening to their stupid rationalizations for running speakers off campus, and their endless howls of "Racism! RACISM!" I start wishing that Elvira Naldorssen, S.M. Stirling's Draka philosopher, was real, so I could read her writings and quote them just to watch the antifas' heads explode.