What grinds my gears

While not enormously popular, and at this point in time still pretty fringe, there's nevertheless a small section of the modern far left that, for some reason, wants to depict ancient Rome as, essentially, this multicultural paradise, a melting pot of different cultures and races, where diversity was embraced and welcomed, with people of all kinds of ethnicities, races and nationalities were accepted and even got to high positions of power. A perfect example of "diversity is strength".  However, we know from history that in reality ancient Rome was not like that at all. In reality ancient Rome did not only embrace expansionism and colonialism, but did so in the most brutal of ways. Ancient Rome did not embrace diversity: They conquered and subjugated peoples by brutal force. Rome was not "diverse" because they embraced and welcomed people of all creeds and colors: They conquered nations, subjugated them, took them as slaves, and demanded tribute and absolute obe...

A somewhat common narrative among the American left is that entering the country is a "misdemeanor" and that "a misdemeanor is not a crime", and thus they have committed nothing illegal. I'm not exactly sure why there appears to be this quite common misconception that "misdemeanor" means some kind of small infraction that's not considered a crime. Maybe it's because it resembles the word "misbehavior"? After all "demeanor" is pretty much a synonym for "behavior". Of course in reality in American law a "misdemeanor" is a crime. It's a type of crime. The statement "a misdemeanor is not a crime" is just outright false. But what do you expect from American leftists? Honesty? 

Recently a massive "pro-Palestine" riot happened in the city of Bern, Switzerland, with over five thousand rioters engaging in violence, assault, destruction of property and arson. They attacked police officers, injuring 18 of them. What's worse, they deliberately set fire to a local restaurant, with ten employees inside, who were unable to escape the building. It was almost miraculous that they were saved by the fact that, unlike American law enforcement, the Swiss police forces use water cannons to deal with riots, and in this case the water cannon was used to put out the fire which was getting completely out of hand, saving the people inside the restaurant. Without this it's  extremely  likely that those people would have died. Officials reported that it was probably a question of mere minutes before the fire would have gone completely out of control and become unstoppable. The Swiss police forces mostly stopped the rioters from advancing and eg.occupying and blo...

More people are  legally  and deliberately murdered worldwide in one single year than the total amount of people murdered by the Nazi regime during its entire existence. In just two years more people are legally and deliberately murdered worldwide than the Soviet Union killed people in total during its entire existence. There is no genocide, no holocaust, in the entire history of humanity that surpasses the amount of people deliberately and legally killed worldwide in just a couple of years. And just like with those atrocities, the people being killed are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. They haven't committed any crimes (in fact, they are literally incapable of committing any crimes), they have done absolutely nothing wrong, and the reason why they are killed has nothing to do with with they may nor may not have done. Just like with those other atrocities, they are being murdered just because some people don't like them and don't want them around. Dehumanization of t...

The so-called " motte-and-bailey fallacy " is, essentially, an argumentative tactic that tries to defend an objectionable position by presenting an extremely simplistic more agreeable version of it whenever it's being criticized. In a way, it's a sort of "reverse straw-man" argument: In other words, it's like a normal "straw-man argument" except that instead of the argument being simplified in order to attack, discredit or mock it, it's simplified in the opposite direction in order to try to make it sound more acceptable and agreeable. One of the most perfect examples of this is feminism. Well, at least it was until about 5 or so years ago, give or take, as pure straight feminism has fallen out of fashion from the far left, as the "trans" ideology superseded it and, especially, when famous big-name radical feminists came out to oppose the invasion of women's spaces by "trans" people. In this example I'm talking a...

For some reason the developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution have decided to replace all the GNU core utilities, which are written in C, with replacements written in Rust. The problem? For an unfathomable reason they are rushing the publication of these new replacements even before they are ready. Indeed, the GNU core utils have a big bunch of automated tests that are run on them every time before a new version release. The Rust replacements developed by the Ubuntu developers fail hundreds of these tests. Some of the replacements fail  all  the tests for that particular utility. On top of that, many of the replacements written in Rust are significantly slower than the originals that are written in C. Some of the utilities run a whopping 17 times slower than the original C counterpart. Not 17% slower; 17 times  slower! Other utilities (such as sort ) can't handle files even nearly as large as the original C version, failing with files that the C version has no problems ...

A McDonald's restaurant calls the police because one client of theirs has been in the bathroom for over an hour. (The story doesn't tell what the actual concern of the restaurant workers was, but I think it's pretty safe to assume that they were concerned about the guy's health, in other words, they were worried that he might have suffered some kind of medical episode and was in need of help, and thus they called 911.) The cops arrive and order the guy to exit the bathroom and the restaurant. He does so. Now, because American cops have an insatiable ID fetish, they absolutely demand the guy to ID himself even though he had not committed any crime, nor did they suspect him of any crime. They just wanted to ID him. It was clear that something unusual was going on because the man is confused, has difficulties understanding what he's being told, doesn't seem to remember even basic things, and is visibly in a confused and dazzled state. At points he doesn't even ...