My Top Ten Rants of 2023: A Look Back at What Infuriated Me Most This Year

The list was not short

Paul Combs
Blow Your Stack
Published in
4 min readDec 18, 2023

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Photo by River Fx on Unsplash

The end of the year is only two weeks away (and good riddance to it), which makes this the ideal time for my Third Annual “Year in Rants” wrap-up. As in years past, the list of things that set me off in 2023 was long and varied; I am an equal opportunity ranter. Also like in previous years, my screaming into the void had exactly zero impact other than entertaining a few readers and keeping me from having a heart attack from the pent-up frustration. In the end, I suppose that’s a win.

Some things have remained maddeningly consistent: imbeciles still troll our comment sections, get-rich-quick schemes and disaster porn are omnipresent on this site, and Texans remain more afraid of books and immigrants than they are of guns and deadly diseases. Here’s hoping that 2024 sees some changes in all these areas.

Given the events of this past year, it’s no surprise that my most common (and most read) rants were about censorship in all its many forms. If we thought that the book-burnings of the 1930s were a relic of the past, we were sorely mistaken; the only difference today is the censors use legislation and school board decrees rather than flames. Either way, the result is the same.

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Paul Combs
Blow Your Stack

Writer, bookseller, would-be roadie for the E Street Band. My ultimate goal is to make books as popular in Texas as high school football...it may take a while.