An all-too-HR agenda to niqab reality in the mediocritizing name of fostering trigger-minimal (and so growth-minimal) “safe spaces” has metastasized beyond office watercoolers and Christmas parties, into comedy clubs and literary magazines and even into one of the primary furnaces of self-improvement—the very place where citizens go (well, used to go) precisely to be unsettled: the university classroom! The conviction that humans have a right not to be unsettled, which has spread from campuses through social media to the world at large (innocent countries too), is now championed (read: lucrative) enough that professors—forced to allow students to opt-out of triggering readings (such as ones telling of the Holocaust or of whatever the power-havers, flouting the subjective nature of triggers, deem a true trigger)—can be fired for teaching the Chinese word for “um” (since, yes, it sounds perilously close to the n-word).

Now that unsettling someone has become a mortal sin worthy of instant cancellation, and now that it has become hip—beyond even scarf-replete universities of medded-out saviors desperate to escape guilt and boredom and lack of purpose—to declare oneself “traumatized” (which has resulted, together perhaps with increased childhood sheltering, in the bar as to what counts as a trauma receding to abyssal lows), it is highly recommended that you ENTER THE SITE ONLY IF YOU WERE BORN BEFORE 1970 (AND NEITHER HAVE PURSUED NOR ARE PLANNING TO PURSUE ONE OF THOSE HR-FEEDER MAJORS LIKE FAT-STUDIES, ANTIRACIST CHOREOGRAPHY, TRANS MUSIC THEORY, AND COMMUNICATIONS).

Play it safe! If you would censor art, whether it be because it depicts a trans character getting a papercut (on the extreme-left hand) or a toddler trying on his mother's bra (on the extreme-right hand), this site is NOT for you.

Dr. Michael A. Istvan Jr. 2021

UPDATE 2023

People, my licked finger is in the air and I feel it! Be prepared for a hard pendulum swing from the excesses of leftwing bullshit to the excesses of rightwing bullshit. The pendulum will swing, for instance, from (a) protecting "precious trans students from ever having to hear comedians poke fun or ever having to read the professor's transphobic Plato reading assignments" (even if it means firing “triggering professors” on grounds of ensuring “a safe space for vulnerable populations”) to (b) open ridicule of trans people as disgusting vermin (Nazi shit that could very well culminate in nice doses of violence that will prime yet another swing). Both extremes are as disgusting as they are ruinous. But Americans love their cheap melodrama, don't they? One of the best drugs to block out the nauseating fact that each of us has a date with oblivion!

Especially for those of us who were so hurt by excesses  of the left (with all its censoring and silencing and shaming of diversity in the ironic name of “diversity”), the backlash might feel good at first—but try to resist. Participating only serves to keep the pathetic all-too-American cycle going.