News Feeds

A huge bar of iron has been discovered lurking inside the iconic Ring Nebula. The structure is enormous, spanning hundreds of times the size of Pluto’s orbit and containing a Mars-sized amount of iron. It was detected using a new instrument that allowed astronomers to map the nebula in far greater detail than ever before. The origin of the iron bar is still a mystery, with one theory suggesting it could be the remains of a vaporized planet.

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend themselves. The findings could help improve phage therapies against drug-resistant infections.

I now have two sets of photos after this one, but I’m still nervous. If you have good wildlife photos, please sent them in. Thanks!

It’s been a cold week in Chicago (right now it’s 9°F or -13°C), and it’s going to be cold this coming week as well. I hope the turtles at the bottom of Botany Pond are okay. But given the weather it’s appropriate that today we have photographs of Antarctica from reader Paul Turpin.  Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My brother Mark recently returned from a cruise to the Antarctic on the Scenic Eclipse. I told him you loved penguins and he gave me permission to send you these photos.  I believe these are all gentoo penguins [Pygoscelis papua] except for one which included a chinstrap friend [Pygoscelis antarcticus].  The open water photo is when they were at the Antarctic Circle. 

The Vote 

On March 30–31, 1979, Iranians went to the polls. The ballot contained a single question: Should Iran become an Islamic Republic? The choices were “Yes” (Green) or “No” (Red). The official result: 98.2% voted Yes.1

Fifty-Eight Days Earlier 

On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran after fourteen years in exile. Millions filled the streets of Tehran—the estimates range from two to five million.2 But the man they cheered was a carefully constructed image. During the flight, Khomeini remained secluded in the upper deck of the chartered Boeing 747, praying.3 When the plane landed, he chose to be helped down the stairs by the French pilot rather than his Iranian aides, a calculated move to prevent any subordinate from sharing the spotlight.4

He chose his first destination deliberately: Tehran’s main cemetery, where those who died during the revolution were buried. The crowd was so dense his motorcade could not pass; he took a helicopter instead.5 By speaking among the graves, Khomeini positioned himself as the guardian of those who died in the revolution and as someone who would fulfill what they had sacrificed for. 

In the weeks that followed, Khomeini offered both material goods and spiritual salvation. He promised free electricity, free water, and housing for every family. Then he added the caveat that would define the coming era: “Do not be appeased by just that. We will magnify your spirituality and your spirits.”6

A Coalition of Contradictions 

The crowd that greeted him was not a monolith, but a coalition of contradictions. Marxists marched hoping for a socialist future free of American influence. Nationalists and liberals sought constitutional democracy. The devout sought governance by Sharia—and for them, the revolution was holy war: the Shah represented taghut, the Quranic term for tyrannical powers that lead people from God, and those who died fighting him became shahid, martyrs. 

Khomeini managed these competing visions by keeping his actual plans vague. He spoke of freedom, justice, and independence, terms each faction could interpret as it wished.7 His blueprint for clerical rule, Velayat-e Faqih, remained in the background. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who would become the Islamic Republic’s first president, later recalled: “When we were in France, everything we said to him he embraced and then announced it like Quranic verses without any hesitation. We were sure that a religious leader was committing himself.”8 Khomeini himself would later state: “The fact that I have said something does not mean that I should be bound by my word.”9

Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani casts his vote in the March 1979 Islamic Republic referendum.The Empty Phrase 

Now, let’s return to the ballot. 

A republic places sovereignty in the people. Citizens choose their laws. An Islamic state places sovereignty in God, but not “God” in some abstract, philosophical sense. The God of the Islamic Republic is specifically Allah as understood in Shia Islam: a God who communicates through the Quran, whose will was interpreted by the Prophet Muhammad, then by the twelve Imams, and now (in the absence of the hidden Twelfth Imam) by qualified Islamic jurists. This is not a deist clockmaker or a personal spiritual presence. This is a God with specific laws, specific requirements, and specific men authorized to speak on His behalf. 

So, what did God want? The ballot never said. 

The 1979 Iranian Islamic Republic referendum ballot showing the “نه” (No) option in red. Voters chose between a simple yes or no on whether Iran should become an “Islamic Republic”—a phrase containing no constitution, no enumerated rights, and no definition of which Islamic laws would apply or who would interpret them.

“Islamic Republic” contained no details. No constitution, no enumerated rights, no definition of which Islamic laws would apply or who would interpret them. Voters were not choosing a specific system of government. They were choosing a phrase, and trusting that its meaning would be filled in later by men they believed spoke for God. 

For those paying attention, there were clues. Khomeini had written extensively about Velayat-e Faqih (the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) a system in which a senior cleric would hold supreme authority as God’s representative on Earth. He had lectured on it in Najaf. He had published a book.10 But in the noise of revolution, in the flood of promises about free electricity and spiritual elevation, these details were background static. The crowds were not voting on constitutional theory. They were voting on hope. 

The 98% voted Yes. Forty-seven years later, we can measure what exists in Iranian society. 

Religious Faith 

For this case study to be valid, we must establish a baseline. Was Iranian society already irreligious before 1979, or has religiosity declined under the theocracy? 

Available evidence suggests the latter. 

In 1975, a survey of Iranian attitudes found over 80% of respondents observing daily prayers and fasting during Ramadan. The methodology is not fully documented in accessible sources.11 However, the broader historical record supports the baseline: the 1979 revolution mobilized millions under explicitly Islamic banners, clerical figures commanded genuine social authority, and the Iranian government’s own 2023 leaked survey found 85% of respondents saying society has become lessreligious than it was.12 Forty-seven years later, mosques are empty. 

Official Iranian census data reports 99.5% of the population as Muslim.13 This figure measures legal status, not belief. Under Iranian law, a child born to a Muslim father is automatically registered as Muslim, and leaving Islam carries severe legal consequences. While formal executions for “apostasy” are relatively rare—the regime prefers to charge dissidents with crimes like “Enmity against God” or “Insulting the Prophet”—the threat is sufficient to enforce public silence.

Saadatabad district, Tehran, January 8, 2026: A mosque burns amid protests. (Source: Press Office of Reza Pahlavi)

In June 2020, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) surveyed over 50,000 respondents using methods designed to protect anonymity.14

Results: 

• 32.2% identified as Shia Muslim 
• 22.2% selected “None” 
• 8.8% identified as Atheist 
• 7.7% identified as Zoroastrian 
• 5.8% identified as Agnostic 
• 1.5% identified as Christian 

While this online sample skews urban (93.6% vs. Iran’s 79%) and university-educated (85.4% vs. 27.7% nationally), the magnitude of divergence from official statistics—32% Shia vs. 99.5% in census data—is too large to explain through sampling bias alone. Meanwhile, face-to-face surveys suffer the opposite problem: when GAMAAN asked respondents if they’d answer sensitive questions honestly over the phone, 40% said no.15

An interesting outcome of this study is that Iran has approximately only 25,000 practicing Zoroastrians (the total population of Iran is around 92.5 million), yet 7.7% selected this identity. Researchers interpret this as “performing alternative identity aspirations”—claiming pre-Islamic Persian heritage to reject imposed Islamic identity.16

The key findings are, however, clear: 44.5% selected a non-Islamic category when asked their current religion and 47% reported transitioning from religious to non-religious during their lifetime. 

The second figure suggests active deconversion rather than inherited secularism. 

In 2024, a classified survey by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (conducted in 2023) was leaked to foreign media.17 This data provides a comparison point from within the regime itself. 

Indicator

2015

2023

Support separating religion from state

30.7%

72.9%

Pray “always” or “most of the time”

78.5%

54.8%

Never pray

3.1%

22.2%

Never fast during Ramadan

5.1%

27.4%

The same survey found 85% of respondents said Iranian society had become less religious in the previous five years. Only 25% reported trusting clerics. 

Based on my years of closely following Iranian society, the pace of religious abandonment has accelerated significantly since the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The leaked government data confirms this trajectory: the sharpest shifts in prayer and fasting occurred within the 2015–2023 window, with 85% saying society had grown less religious in just the previous five years. 

In February 2023, senior cleric Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi stated that 50,000 of Iran’s approximately 75,000 mosques had closed due to low attendance, a claim partially corroborated by the leaked government survey finding only 11% always attend congregational prayers.18

Election participation has also declined. Official turnout in the June 2024 presidential election was 39.93%, the lowest in the Islamic Republic’s history.19

The Evidence on the Streets 

The data on paper is corroborated by the specific vocabulary of the street. The protest chants have evolved from requesting reform to rejecting the entire theological framework. 

Art by Hamed Javadzadeh — Woman, Life, Freedom Movement (2022)

Consider the chant: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” 

This is a direct rejection of the regime’s core ideology. The Islamic Republic prioritizes the Ummah—the transnational community of believers—over the nation-state. By rejecting funding for Hamas and Hezbollah in favor of national interests, protesters are secularizing their priorities: the Nation has replaced the Faith as the object of ultimate concern. 

Even more specific is the chant: “Death to the principle of Velayat-e Faqih.” 

The protestors are not merely calling for the death of the dictator (Khamenei); they are targeting the specific theological doctrine that grants him legitimacy. They are rejecting the very concept of divine guardianship. 

But the most striking evidence of the revolution’s failure is the return of the name it sought to erase. In a historical irony that defies all prediction, crowds now chant “Reza Shah, bless your soul,” and call upon Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, to return. The same population that staged a revolution to overthrow a monarchy in 1979 is now invoking that monarchy as the antidote to theocracy. 

The Mechanism 

A note on terminology: When this article refers to “Allah,” it means the legislative deity of the Islamic Republic—a God with enforceable commands interpreted by authorized clerics. This is distinct from the personal God that 78% of Iranians still believe in. 

As mentioned earlier, Iran’s constitution establishes Velayat-e Faqih—the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist. Article 5 declares that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam (a messianic figure believed to have been in supernatural hiding since the 9th century), authority belongs to a qualified jurist. The Tony Blair Institute’s analysis states it directly: “the supreme leader’s mandate to rule over the population derives from God.”20 Khamenei’s own representative, Mojtaba Zolnour, declared in 2009: “In the Islamic system, the office and legitimacy of the Supreme Leader comes from God, the Prophet and the Shia Imams, and it is not the people who give legitimacy to the Supreme Leader.”21

This is not metaphor. The system’s legitimacy rests on the claim that its laws are Allah’s laws, its punishments are Allah’s punishments, its wars are Allah’s wars. 

When morality police detained Mahsa Amini, leading to her death, they were enforcing the mandatory religious duty of “Forbidding the Wrong.” When courts execute apostates, they enforce Allah’s law. When the regime sends billions to Hezbollah while Iranians face poverty, it pursues Allah’s mission. When it pursues a nuclear program that invites crushing sanctions, it frames the resulting economic ruin not as policy failure, but as a holy “Resistance” against the enemies of Islam. Every act of misrule carries Allah’s signature.

0:00 /1:04 1×

Khorramabad, Iran, January 8, 2026: Protesters raise the pre-1979 lion-and-sun flag, described as a symbol of secular restoration, atop a statue of the Ayatollah. (Source: Press Office of Reza Pahlavi)

In a secular dictatorship, citizens can hate the dictator while preserving their faith. The North Korean who despises Kim Jong-un can still pray. But in a theocracy, the oppressor and God speak with one voice. To oppose the oppressor is to oppose God. To want freedom is to reject divine authority. 

The regime created conditions where, for many, opposing political authority became entangled with questioning religious authority. 

The Psychology of Religious Rebellion 

Jack Brehm’s reactance theory (1966) demonstrates that when people perceive threats to their freedom, they become motivated to restore it, often by embracing the forbidden alternative.22 Subsequent research has applied this specifically to religion. Roubroeks, Van Berkum, and Jonas (2020) found that restrictive religious regulations can trigger reactance that leads to both heresy (holding beliefs contrary to orthodoxy) and apostasy (renouncing religious affiliation entirely).23

The critical insight: In cases of psychological reactance, the emotional pushback against coercion often precedes the intellectual dismantling of the belief system. 

The sequence is rarely a straight line, but the components are clear: 

1. Coercion: The lived experience of religious enforcement 
2. Dissonance: The widening gap between the regime’s claims of divine justice and the reality of corruption and violence 
3. Access: The internet provides a “vocabulary of dissent” 

This third point is crucial. Iran’s internet users grew from 615,000 in 2000 to over 70 million today.24 Despite billions spent on censorship, officials admit 80–90% of Iranians use VPNs, which allow to circumvent restrictions by changing the user’s internet location to that of another country.25

For the intellectually curious, the internet offered arguments against Islamic theology that were previously banned. But for the average citizen, it offered something perhaps more powerful: validation. It showed them that their anger was shared. It broke the “pluralistic ignorance,” the state where everyone privately rejects the norm but publicly conforms because they think they are the only ones. 

Whether through deep study or simple emotional exhaustion, the result was the same: the breaking of the psychological bond between the citizen and the faith. 

The Unintended Outcome 

Iran’s religious decline is among the fastest documented in modern history. Stolz et al. (2025) in Nature Communications established that Europe’s secular transition took approximately 250 years. Iran’s comparable shift from over 80% observing daily prayers in 1975 to 47% reporting lifetime deconversion by 2020 occurred in roughly 45 years. Pew’s global data shows Muslim retention rates averaging 99% across surveyed countries.26

However, Europe secularized without internet or satellite television. Iran’s shift occurred alongside a 90-fold increase in internet access. Theocracy may provide the motive for questioning imposed faith; technology provides the accelerant that compresses generational change into decades. Ex-Muslim testimonies, apostasy narratives, ordinary lives lived without faith—these demonstrated that abandoning religion was survivable. The forbidden became imaginable. Others found arguments that validated what they already felt. The reasoning matched the shape of their anger, and that was enough. 

For forty-seven years, the Islamic Republic worked to manufacture belief. Mandatory religious education from childhood. State control of media. Morality police enforcing dress and behavior. Apostasy punishable by death. A constitution grounding all authority in God. They did not leave this to chance. 

The data suggests it did not work.

A new census of more than 8,000 galaxies finds active black holes rising in frequency with galaxy mass, jumping sharply in galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way.

Engineers have created a device that generates incredibly tiny, earthquake-like vibrations on a microchip—and it could transform future electronics. Using a new kind of “phonon laser,” the team can produce ultra-fast surface waves that already play a hidden role in smartphones, GPS systems, and wireless tech. Unlike today’s bulky setups, this single-chip device could deliver far higher performance using less power, opening the door to smaller, faster, and more efficient phones and wireless devices.

Engineers have created a device that generates incredibly tiny, earthquake-like vibrations on a microchip—and it could transform future electronics. Using a new kind of “phonon laser,” the team can produce ultra-fast surface waves that already play a hidden role in smartphones, GPS systems, and wireless tech. Unlike today’s bulky setups, this single-chip device could deliver far higher performance using less power, opening the door to smaller, faster, and more efficient phones and wireless devices.

Researchers have turned artificial intelligence into a powerful new lens for understanding why cancer survival rates differ so dramatically around the world. By analyzing cancer data and health system information from 185 countries, the AI model highlights which factors, such as access to radiotherapy, universal health coverage, and economic strength, are most closely linked to better survival in each nation.

A United Nations agreement for the “conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity” in the open oceans has now taken effect

Our nearest neighbor, the Moon, is still something of a mystery to us. For decades, scientists have wondered why it appears so lopsided, with dark volcanic plains on the near side (the side we see) and rugged, cratered mountains and a thicker crust on the far side. Now we might be closer to knowing why.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have contributed to a new study which has found that iron-rich asteroids can tolerate far more energy than previously thought without breaking apart - a breakthrough with direct implications for planetary defence strategies.

This collection of new images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showcases protoplanetary disks, the swirling masses of gas and dust that surround forming stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. Through observations of young stellar objects like these, Hubble helps scientists better understand how stars form. These visible-light images depict dark, planet-forming dust disks […]

Chemistry on other worlds varies widely from that on Earth. Much of Earth’s chemistry is driven by well-understood processes, which typically involve water and heat in some form. Mars lacks both of those features, which makes how some of its chemicals formed a point of ongoing debate in the scientific community. A new paper led by Alian Wang and Neil Sturchio of Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Delaware, respectively, and published recently in Earth and Planetary Science Letters offers a new framework for understanding chemical reaction processes on Mars. Despite the differences, Earthlings will still be familiar with the driving force behind Martian chemistry - electricity.

“When a regime turns off the Internet during mass killings, and at the same time the leaders of the same regime [use] the privilege of freedom of speech on social media to mislead the rest of the world, it is not about restoring order. It is about destroying the evidence.”  —from Masih’s speech below

In a comment this morning, Norman Gilinsky linked to the speech below given to the UN Security Council by anti-Iranian-regime activist Masih Alinejad. Norman called it amazing, forceful, unrelenting, and powerful. As a huge fan of Masih, I of course had to listen to it, and yes, it’s forceful, passionate, and ineffably sad given the UN’s inaction. I’ve put it below for your edification: it’s 15½ minutes long.

So far the UN hasn’t issued any statements criticizing the behavior of the Iranian regime in massacring thousands of protestors.

Masih calls out the UN for failing to respond to the massacres, sending a message to Iran that what it’s doing is pretty much okay. She argues that “it will get much worse if the world does not take serious action”, and that all Iranians are united in calling for the freeing of Iran from the present regime. (This is in sharp contrast with the UN’s repeated criticisms of Israel during the war with Gaza, apparently sending the message that massacres are okay with the UN so long as they don’t involve Jews)

Masih probably knows more about what’s going on in the streets of Iran than anybody else, as she has lines of communication with the protestors that others don’t have. (Iranians are using Starlink satellite phones.)

A representative of Iran was among the listeners, but I wonder if any of them really took to heart what Masih says. Particularly moving is her description of some of the young protestors who were killed, which she does to personalize and drive home the regime’s brutality, and she breaks down in tears at 11:35, unable to give more names of the slaughtered.

What is she asking the UN to do? She’s not explicit, but something to stop the killing—perhaps to stop treating Iran as a “legitimate government”.  The UN of course cannot do that, though it can help.  I hope that after hearing the list of murders and murderers, the listeners absorb the same lesson George Patton imparted to his soldiers from his real speech of June 5, 1944 (not the movie speech):

“When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it’s not dirt, it’s the blood and guts of what was once your best friend, you’ll know what to do.”

Young protostars populate the cloudy regions in the Orion Molecular Cloud complex in these images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Three of the telescope's new images are part of a scientific effort to understand the gaseous, dusty envelopes around protostars. Scientists know that these young stars have powerful stellar winds and jets that carve caverns and bubbles out of the surrounding gas, but they have unanswered questions about that process.

I’m not sure that the readers here, though savvier than those on most Internet sites, fully realize how dire the free-speech situation is in Europe. Germany, France, and, especially the UK are rife with “hate speech” laws that would not be be passed in the U.S. because they violate the First Amendment.  And yet there are still calls in America to limit free speech.  One example includes those people who argue that we should ban statements like “Globalize the intifada” because, somewhere down the line, such statements may contribute to someone’s harming of Jews.  But of course all hate speech is of that nature: it may, by demonizing a group or even questioning their principles, lead some loon to go after people (it’s usually minorities at issue, but no group is immune, nor is any religion).

In the post below on his site The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), calls attention to the growing suppression of speech in Europe, giving lots of examples. He does this to warn Americans that we cannot allow ourselves go down that route, and to remind us why “hate speech” banned in Europe should never be banned in America.

I remind you that Lukianoff is a liberal and an atheist, so when he defends the promulgation of religious and conservative ideas that most of us find odious, he’s only adhering to the First Amendment. FIRE, because it promotes free speech, is sometimes demonized by blockheads as a “right-wing organization”. It’s far from it. Promoting freedom of speech is a liberal, humanistic, and democratic idea.

The article is long, but I recommend reading it (it’s free if you click on the link below) to buttress your commitment to free speech and to learn how Europe is convincing itself to punish people who wouldn’t be punished in America. I’ll give extensive quotes in case you’re too busy to read. (But if that’s the situation, you need to chill!)

Lukianoff begins by giving kudos to Kristen Waggoner, president of the conservative religious group Alliance Defending Freedom. Despite their political differences, Waggoner and Lukianoff share a commitment to free speech, and Waggoner won (as did Lukianoff last year) the Richard D. McLellan Prize for Advancing Free Speech and Expression.  Although Lukianoff and Waggoner differ on many isssues, her acceptance speech apparently prompted Greg to write this article.

In what follows, my own headings and comments are flush left, while quotes from the article (or other sources) are indented.

Why America should not crack down on ‘hate speech” and maintain our present construal of free speech

Here’s the thing: censors always think their motives are pure. From inquisitors to commissars to modern “hate speech” units, they all believe they’re preventing some existential harm. That has never made it okay to strip people of their basic rights, and it doesn’t change the fact that this is precisely what they’re doing.

In the United States, we (still) recognize that. In the EU and the UK, they increasingly do not. And that’s more dangerous to how we treat speech in the US than the abuses that happen in places like China or Iran, because we aren’t likely to turn into China or Iran. But we may turn into the UK, or Germany, or Finland, where they purport to maintain their belief in free expression but have rationalized it into a corner where it can do very little good. So while we’re never shocked at horrifying censorship in China or Russia, we should continue to be shocked by the retreat from liberalism that we’re seeing in the Anglosphere and in Europe. We also need to be vocal in opposing it, because it really could happen here.

If the forces arrayed on the left have their way, we will look a lot more like the UK. And if the forces on the right have their way, we will look a lot more like Hungary. Either way, we won’t be recognizably American.

. . . .Equal citizens in a free society have a right to:

• Object to immigration policy.
• Quote their religious texts on sexuality.
• Say “there are two sexes.”
• Insult a rapist or abuser in a private text or message without becoming the one the state prosecutes.
• Quote the Bible.

If you can be arrested, prosecuted, fined, or professionally shattered for any of that, you are not living under free speech in the sense the First Amendment enshrines.

The Supreme Court has a blunt way of putting this: Speech on matters of public concern is “at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection,” because speech about public affairs is “the essence of self-government.” In other words, we don’t protect speech because it’s polite. We protect it because we are supposed to be citizens — voters — whose judgments matter. And voters can’t do their job if the state trains them to speak in euphemism, or only in whispers, or not at all.

And if we, in the United States, start to lose faith in that — if we decide that the European model is more “civilized,” that being spared offensive opinions is more important than retaining equal rights — then the strongest bulwark for free expression left in the world will have fallen.

A decent way to measure whether you’re actually free is to ask what you’re allowed to say about the subjects that matter most: rape, child rape scandals, violent crime, immigration policy, religious doctrine, war, and even basic claims about sex and the human body. If you have to watch your language on questions that cut to the very heart — because the wrong phrasing can bring the police, a prosecutor, or a professional tribunal — then you’re not a free and equal citizen in the ordinary sense. You’re a subject being managed.

And, once again (we can’t hear this too often), we learn why free speech was instituted by the Founders:

Here’s another radical idea: you are an equal citizen, not a subject. You get to hear ideas, weigh evidence, change your mind, or not, without the government protecting you from other people’s thoughts. If your rights end where someone’s feelings begin, you don’t have free speech of any kind. China is just as willing to let you say things that don’t offend anyone; it’s just more honest about whose feelings are really determining when the cops show up at your door.

Probably the most important point to make here is that, if you have even one example of someone being arrested, getting a visit from the cops, or being charged for taking an unpopular position on one of the biggest political hot-button issues in a society — immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism, religious expression — they will not trust what they hear in the media, or even what they hear in society, as being genuine or authentic.

This leads to a genuine epistemic crisis, where people cannot tell what their countrymen honestly think, or what the world actually looks like in terms of public opinion and perception — and that is a disaster. People in control, or at the top of society, can be such fools in thinking that if they could just better control the opinions people express, popular opinion will go right along assuming the preferred ruling class’ position is correct. But that relies on a model in which people are even stupider than ruling class people often assume they are.

What happens instead is people conclude that no one is saying what they really think, and that the media, politicians, and even their fellow citizens cannot be counted on to show what they really think — because if there’s even the slightest risk of being arrested or punished for it, who would?

That’s what a chilling effect is, and it is poison to any society — particularly a democratic one, or at least nominally democratic one.

Lukianoff concludes that Europe, with its bans on hate speech, is going down the wrong road, for those bans chill you from speaking up, and, by quashing what we know about other people’s views, put democracy in a vise.  I agree. The examples that he gives are telling.

What’s happening in Europe.

Professor and philosopher Peter Singer talks about the “expanding circle”: the way moral concern spreads over time to include more groups — slaves, women, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and so on. That’s real, and often good.

But there’s a dark twist. In much of Europe and the UK, we’ve now used that expanding circle logic to shrink the circle of free speech. We say, “To show compassion for vulnerable groups, we must criminalize speech that offends them. It’s not really censorship if we do it to protect people.”

From the UK:

If you want to see what speech policing looks like in a country that still considers itself a liberal democracy, look at the UK.

Between the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, British police have broad power to arrest people for messages that are “grossly offensive,” “annoying,” or likely to cause “distress” or “anxiety.” Recent statistics show more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for online speech — over 30 people a day. (For a sense of scope, If the US were to arrest people at the same rate per capita, it would be 60,000 a year.)

Behind that number are real people in real handcuffs.

A 51-year-old army veteran named Darren Brady shared a meme that arranged pride flags into a swastika to make a heavy-handed point about authoritarian tendencies in parts of the LGBT movement. Hampshire Police turned up at his house, arrested him, and, in a bodycam clip, an officer calmly explains that someone has “been caused … anxiety” by his post, and that’s why he’s being taken away. He was offered a “hate awareness” course in lieu of prosecution — ideological homework as punishment. Only after national outrage did the police back down and scrap the course.

Catholic commentator Caroline Farrow was making dinner for her kids when Surrey officers came through her front door in 2022, arrested her on suspicion of “malicious communications” and harassment over a feud with a trans activist, and seized phones and laptops — including her children’s devices. She was taken into custody, questioned for hours, then released without charge.

Here’s one of the most surreal cases I’ve seen: a 34-year-old mother of four, Elizabeth Kinney, who says she was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. In private text messages to a friend afterwards, she called him a “faggot.” The friend reported her, and prosecutors charged her under the Malicious Communications Act. She pled guilty and was convicted of a homophobic offense, receiving an enhanced community order, unpaid work, and rehabilitation days. As of the last reporting, no one had been charged for the assault.

Note that being able to call someone a “faggot” is legal in America, yet also outs the person who says it.  One could argue, I suppose, that letting people use names like that could, in the future, promote violence against gays. But that’s not a good enough reason to prevent this kind of name-calling, odious as it is.  Lukianoff also argues against the tendency in the UK to “avoid recording or analyzing ethnicity in organized child-abuse cases,” for such recording could presumably promote demonisation of ethnic groups.  But he claims this is misguided, since suppressing that information not only fails to deter predators in a group, but conveys information that could be essential to the safety of young girls. Frankly, I don’t see why recording ethnicity (which also occurs in the U.S.) should be formally or informally banned, as it’s useful not only for “grooming gangs”, but for compiling statistics important to society. I believe John McWhorter recently discussed how Americans tend to drastically overestimate the number of African-American shot by white police officers. One example:

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

By withholding information from the public so as note to pollute a favored narrative, the press promotes misinformation that exacerbates racial tensions.

From Germany:

Germany, because it may have learned some of the wrong lessons from its history, has long had strict speech laws — among them, bans on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial. But the logic has spread.

In Berlin, police raided the apartment of American novelist and political satirist C.J. Hopkins in November, seizing his computer and interrogating him on suspicion of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. The basis for the accusation was a book critical of COVID-19 policies, its cover using a swastika-and-facemask image as political satire.

That’s it. That’s the “Nazi material.” Never mind that its use is to make an unflattering comparison between modern health policy and national socialism. Nobody who can read is going to look at the book cover and say, “Well, I was just in favor of mandatory masking, but now that I see this book cover, maybe death camps are a good idea.” Hopkins had already been prosecuted in 2023 for tweeting the image of the book cover.

Another case that deserves more international attention involves a group of nine young men who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg. They were convicted but because they were underage, all but one avoided jail time. Later, a woman in Hamburg sent furious WhatsApp messages to one of the perpetrators, calling him things like a “disgusting rapist pig.” The convicted rapist complained and the woman who sent the messages was prosecuted for insult and defamation, convicted, and ordered to spend a weekend in jail.

Yet another German case: politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, from the right-wing AfD, posted about gang rapes involving Afghan men and suggested that welcoming more Afghan refugees risked more such crimes. She referenced real statistics about Afghan suspects. Courts convicted her of Volksverhetzung, “incitement to hatred,” and an appeals court upheld the conviction, saying her post violated the “human dignity” of Afghans by presenting them as dangerous sex criminals.

From Finland (!):

Kristen’s speech in November started with a case from Finland, and once you know the facts, it’s hard to shake.

Päivi Räsänen is not some anonymous troll. She’s a physician, a mother, a grandmother, a long-serving member of Parliament, and a former interior minister. She’s also a conservative Lutheran.

In 2019, she posted a tweet criticizing her church leadership for officially supporting Helsinki Pride. Attached was a photo of Romans 1:24-27 — the standard “traditionalist” passage condemning same-sex relations. Years before, in 2004, she had written a short church pamphlet explaining the Lutheran view of sex and marriage. She also did a radio debate along the same lines.

For that, Finland’s Prosecutor General charged her with “agitation against a minority group” — essentially “hate speech” — under a section of the criminal code that sits next to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged too, for publishing her pamphlet.

Police interrogated Räsänen for hours about her beliefs. Prosecutors pored over her pamphlet and sermons line by line, asking which parts of the Bible she intends to believe. She faced the possibility of fines and a criminal record.

She won. In 2022, a district court acquitted her unanimously. In 2023, the Court of Appeal acquitted her unanimously again.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t, but before we finish, I want to point out that being visited by police and interrogated, even if you’re not convicted are jailed, are still things that will chill your speech.  Räsänen’s ordeal, in fact, continues:

Instead, prosecutors appealed again. In 2025, the Supreme Court of Finland agreed to hear the case. The state is still arguing that quoting Romans 1 and defending historic Christian doctrine about sexuality can be a criminal offense.

Switzerland (!):

It is not an especially controversial idea that sex can be usually determined by examining skeletal remains, even if there are exceptions. Not so in Switzerland, where Emanuel Brünisholz, a musical instrument repairman, was sentenced to ten days in jail for an anti-trans Facebook comment. In a 2022 reply to a member of the Swiss National Council (sort of their House of Representatives), Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

Brünisholz was arrested in 2023 and convicted in December 2024, where he was fined 500 Swiss francs. After exhausting his appeals, he refused to pay on principle, announcing in September of 2025 that he would be serving his alternative punishment — ten days in jail — last month.

I’ve discussed the Swiss case before. If you have a whole skeleton, biological sex can be determined with 96%-98% accuracy, which falls to 90% if you have a skull with lower jaw. The diagnosis is not complete, of course, but if you look at skeletons 200 years old, the guy is pretty much right—the exceptions whose sex can’t be determined are rare. Note as well that there were no drug or surgical interventions back then that would modify skeletons, and even today this is something that should be investigated only in trans people, as LGBQ people undergo no modification of their bones.

The point is that jailing somebody for saying this is heinous, even if the guy were wrong about bones. (I’m not dealing with the “mental illness” comment, which, though odious, should not be illegal.) Because if he were wrong about skeltons, the proper remedy is counterspeech and criticism, not fines and jail time.

Wikipedia gives a long list of other countries with hate-speech laws—laws that can get you prosecuted, fined, or jailed for criticizing religion, ethnicity, gender identity, and even class.  Note that the “United States” entry says this:

The United States does not have hate speech laws, because the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.There are categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group.

Let’s keep it that way.

Longevity diets often focus on going plant-based, but a study in China has linked eating meat to a long lifespan, particularly among older people who are underweight

Humans pay enormous attention to lips during conversation, and robots have struggled badly to keep up. A new robot developed at Columbia Engineering learned realistic lip movements by watching its own reflection and studying human videos online. This allowed it to speak and sing with synchronized facial motion, without being explicitly programmed. Researchers believe this breakthrough could help robots finally cross the uncanny valley.

Professional mathematicians have been stunned by the progress amateurs have made in solving long-standing problems with the assistance of AI tools, and say it could lead to a new way of doing mathematics

If your New Year’s resolution is to understand quantum computing this year, take a cue from a 9-year-old podcaster talking to some of the biggest minds in the field, says quantum columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan