What grinds my gears

Some political commentators have said that protests are the Church of the left. Where Christians go to Church, leftists go to protests. This is quite an apt comparison. It's just a fact that whenever there's yet again a massive protest by the far left, the vast, vast majority of people were summoned there, they are in essence "hired protestors", they are there because they were called to be there, not because they actually care or even know the intricate details of what the protest is about. There are numerous examples of people going to interview people in such a protest and (when they actually get someone to talk, perhaps because that someone had not been successfully indoctrinated into not talking to "the enemy") these people are pretty much oblivious to what the protest is actually about. They might be able to tell the headline version of the reason, but that's it. Ask any details, and they usually have no idea. In one particularly funny video the

One of the surprise hits of the summer of 2023 was the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer , which is a biographical "historical drama" movie about the eponymous Robert Oppenheimer, who had a key role in developing the first nuclear weapons during the second world war. The film was released to public acclaim. It became, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the second highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (only behind the 2019 film Joker ) with a world-wide gross revenue of almost a billion dollars. It received universal acclaim both from critics and from the public, and a big bunch of accolades, including seven Oscars (including the most prestigious award of Best Picture), five Golden Globe Awards, and many others. I didn't see it in the movie theater, but because of the enormously positive reception (and especially because of no negative politically charged criticism), I went and purchased it on Blu-Ray, expecting to have an enjoyable and didactic viewing experience. I deep

A police cruiser signals a citizen's car to stop. Allegedly one of the car's headlights isn't working and, on top of that, allegedly, it's speeding. The car stops at a gas station. When the cop gets to the car he demands a driver's license and when the 18-year-old teenage girl takes more than about 10 seconds to try to find it from the glove compartment, or wherever it was, the cop gets angry, opens the car's door and demands that she get out of the car. She asks repeatedly what she did but the cop, like is so common in the United States, is so ego-driven that he refuses to tell her before she gets out of the car and shows ID. And when she takes more than 10 seconds or so to get out of the car, the cop violently grabs her and slams her on the ground. You can see a video discussing this event here . This incident is just the perfect chain of events that demonstrates how corrupt many cops are in the United States: The cop is clearly extremely ego-driven, a "r

I have been playing Elite Dangerous actively for about 2 years now. I really have to rant about two types of players that I truly, truly despise: Gankers and whiners. So-called "gankers" are a bane of most online multiplayer games that allow player-vs-player combat (in games where that's not the sole goal of the game, eg. "arena-style" first-person shooters. Although in certain types of even those games there can be what could be considered "gankers" as well.) These are players with extremely advanced end-game equipment or builds who will attack and kill weaker players, just for the sake of it. In Elite Dangerous, for instance, they will attack players, including much weaker players who have absolutely no way of defending themselves, and shoot them in the back while they are trying to flee. Their only and sole purpose is to ruin the game for other players. Nothing else. If the victim complains to the ganker that he had no way of defending himself and

Dear Japan. Your government is betraying you, and is on a very fast path of destroying your society, your culture, your country. It's not yet too late to stop it, but you have to do it NOW. You cannot wait 10 or 20 years, just watching it happen, until it's too late to do anything. Your government has either believed, or for one reason or another is actively pushing, the lie that diminishing birth rates are an impending catastrophe for the country, and that the only solution for this looming "disaster" is to import as many immigrants as possible into the country, mostly from poor countries. Millions and millions of immigrants. Do not believe these lies. Falling birth rates might have some relatively minor effects on the economy of the country, if it continues for long enough, but these effects are nowhere near catastrophic, and are always temporary. Your country, like most other countries, has had significantly worse economic catastrophes many times in the past, and

I wrote in an earlier blog post how South Korea is making a HUGE mistake . What mistake? Believing the modern "falling birth rates and an aging population is a big impending catastrophe" and that unrestricted mass immigration from poor countries is the only solution to fix that "problem". Indeed, South Korea, one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world, with some of the lowest crime rates, drug use and poverty, is already planning on opening its borders to millions of immigrants from, you guessed it, the poorest countries in the world. Well, not to be left behind, it appears that Japan has swallowed the exact same lie about this being a "problem" and that the only solution is unrestricted immigration. Japan, too, is planning on increasing immigration by orders of magnitude, in order to fix this impending huge disaster looming in the future. Japan is genuinely one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world. Crime rates are astonishingly low

The far-leftist "feminist" "social justice" ideology, which started mostly in American universities in the early 2000's and earlier, and from there spread like a cancer to the entirety of society (because the vast majority of journalists, politicians, CEOs, and so on and so forth are university graduates and, thus, have been indoctrinated into the cult and trained for political activism), has successfully taken over the vast, vast majority of American society (as well as the society of many other western countries) and are no invading and taking over every single aspect of society they can. Anything that they can take hold of, they will, and this is very much their very explicit intent and purpose, and they are completely open about it. Their indoctrination and training of university students exists for the very purpose of invading and taking over every single aspect of society. They aren't even secretive about it, and will say so out loud. Their methods, t

Some time ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about how consistency is not one of the strong points of far-leftist "social justice" ideology. They will strongly defend and fight for a particular position today, and do the same thing for the exact opposite position tomorrow. Whichever position suits their agenda and gives them most power, that they will defend. The exact same people can extremely strongly say one thing today, and the exact opposite a year from now, and they will not even bat an eye (and, of course, they will be completely silent about their past opposite opinion.) There are several examples behind that link above, but here's yet another one: Many years ago the far left was strongly advocating for the notion that there is no such thing as a "male brain" and a "female brain", that both men and women have literally identical brains and it's impossible to distinguish between the two. Many articles were written about how scientific study

The Nazi mass book burnings are and will probably forever remain as one of the most remembered and symbolic events of recent history. They are one of the most prominent symbols of totalitarian ideology that stands as the polar opposite to the principles of free speech and free expression, and freedom in general. As is so common, totalitarianism and other similar oppressive ideas can only withstand and survive by suppressing, censoring, gatekeeping and destroying all dissent, all criticism, all contradicting opinions and ideas. There's no more striking image that symbolizes this act of censorship than a bonfire made of books that are considered "harmful" to the totalitarian ideology. The destruction of literature for the purpose of censorship and gatekeeping is considered abhorrent and against the core fundamental ideals of freedom and liberalism. Good ideas can survive and, in fact, welcome criticism and scrutiny. Bad oppressive ideas can only survive by banning and destr

I have written quite many posts in this blog about the absolutely ridiculous mentality and behavior among American police forces. This mentality and behavior seems to be very uniform across the entire country, even though local cultures otherwise can vary very wildly from state to state and even within a state. The United States is one of the very few countries where you can actually refuse to identify yourself to a police officer if he doesn't have an actual legal reason to demand your ID (ie. a reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime). This is a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution (something that most other countries lack). Most other countries are so-called "stop-and-id states" where you are legally required to identify yourself to a police officer if he demands it, no matter what the situation, no matter why he is demanding it. If you refuse, you can be issued a fine. The United States is one of the very few countries in the world that is

Far-leftists, especially those who are enamored with roleplaying all kinds of "sexual orientations" (and who have a gazillion made-up neo-words to compartmentalize their very specific brand of it), also love to come up with all kinds of "preferred pronouns". Unfortunately far-leftism has got such a strong hold in western society, especially in the United States and the UK, that there are more and more places where these "preferred pronouns" are being displayed among people's names. In fact, there are already some organizations that pretty much force their employees to announce their "preferred pronouns" in their private and public information, wherever their names appear. (Recently there was a controversy when a long-time worker of a big charity organization in the UK was asked to add her "preferred pronouns" to her bio, and she, being something like a 70-years-old woman and not being up to date with the latest fads, asked what it

I have written quite many blog posts about how the average American cop is an absolute coward and a 50-IQ bumbling moron who is scared of his own shadow. Sometimes this results in absolutely hilarious events that just show that they are complete clowns. This is when, luckily, nobody gets murdered by them. Othertimes these cases would be hilarious if they weren't so absolutely tragic because they end up murdering someone. This example is, luckily, one of the former kind. However, it was really, really close to become the tragic kind, where the coward 50-IQ clown almost murdered someone because of his own cowardice. It was likely up to mere inches. So this cop pair go to someone's home to arrest him, and the male cop puts the suspect in handcuffs and takes him to their police cruiser and locks him in there, in handcuffs. The police cruiser is parked under an oak tree. An acorn from that oak happens to fall at that moment onto the roof of the car. Because of the sound that it m

If there is one thing that the modern far left loves, it's wordplay. They love to take existing words, change their meaning, and then confuse people by conveniently leaving it unclear which meaning they are using, letting people believe that the word is being used with the old meaning (and thus the old connotations and implications) even though they are using their own replacement meaning in order to advocate for their own political agenda. Sometimes they are more subtle, though. The perfect example is one of their most favorite pet words: "Equity." Organization after organization, company after company, institution after institution, activist after activist, is loudly proclaiming how they support and engage in "equity" (and other beloved buzzwords, like "inclusion", "diversity" and yada yada.) This is especially devious because the average person has never before heard that word, "equity", and easily gets fooled into believing that

I have zero problems with climate science and the research, studies and measurements made by climate scientists, as well as their conclusion that we are in an almost catastrophic man-made climate crisis that's soon approaching (probably in the next 50 or so years). However, I do have a problem with many of the measures (and non-measures) taken especially by several western countries in order to combat this crisis and reduce human-produced harmful emissions. This is because many of these measures consist of severely hindering local production of food and goods, by putting sometimes extreme restrictions on them, making the price of locally produced food skyrocket and putting many local farmers and local businesses out of business. That, all in itself, would be bad enough. However, the worst part about it is that hindering so severely local work only causes the demand for cheap products from abroad to likewise skyrocket. And the problem is that most of these other countries that prod

One of the core principles of a free democratic constitutional country is that criticism of the government, of the people in charge, is a fundamental protected right. In fact, it is well established in most free democratic countries that criticism of the government (and the people running it) in particular has even more protections than things said to other people. The threshold at which someone could be prosecuted for saying something about a politician in government is generally much higher than when said about some other person. In other words, criticism of the government, and the people running it, is one of the core pillars of a free democratic constitutional society. In several countries the far left is quickly trying to change this. They are trying to remove your right to criticize them. In more and more countries politicians, pretty much solely far-leftist politicians, have been talking more and more about how "dangerous" it is to throw caustic criticism at a politic

Since at least the 1990's a genre of television show that has been named "reality TV" has been wildly popular, only gaining popularity in the 2000's. The concept of "reality TV" can be hard to define exactly, but the key characteristics are that they are mostly unscripted and involve participants or contestants who are just everyday people rather than professional actors or other people who do TV content as a profession. The distinction from a "TV game show" (such as "Wheel of Fortune" or "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?") can sometimes be hard to define clearly, but the unscripted nature of the show is the key. (After all, even game shows are fully scripted even if the answers or actions by the contestants are not known in advance.) And, generally, "reality TV" shows try to depict something from real life, or the lives or (unscripted) actions of people in real-life settings, rather than it all being just a TV play or m

Recently a comment made by an Ubisoft executive that "gamers need to get 'comfortable' not owning their games for subscriptions to take off" caused, once again, a lot of furor among gamers and gaming youtube channels. This is nothing new, of course. This always seems to be an extremely touchy subject among gamers. The idea that they would somehow "not own" the games they have purchased, and instead the game companies dictating how, when and if they can play those games. The funny (and ironic) thing about this is that nobody seems to be able to explain what "owning a game" even means. Seriously. I have asked many people online, who are outraged at such a preposterous proposition as uttered by that Ubisoft executive, what exactly they mean by "owning" a video game. Some of them never answer the question and instead go to unrelated tangents, being outraged about the idea of "subscription based" games, and companies being able to re

I have written several blog posts about the rather incomprehensible obsession that almost every single police officer in the United States seems to have about demanding people's IDs, and being astonishingly insistent about it, often in situations where they don't have the legal right to do so. (The United States is one of the few countries in the world where the police actually needs a legal reason to demand people's ID, and can't demand it willy-nilly, just because they want to. This is a direct consequence of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.) Examples of previous blog posts about the subject include a cop threatening to arrest a suspected victim of an assault if he refuses to identify (and speaking to him like he's being suspected of some kind of crime), a cop mistaking a woman for a 10-year-old girl from behind and then handcuffing her when she refused to ID, for absolutely no suspicion of any crime , and another cop mistaking the cane of