What grinds my gears

There are all kinds of videos where someone goes to the streets and challenges people to do something, often in the form of "beat me in this, win 100 dollars". The absolutely most horrendously irresponsible challenge of this form I have ever seen, and there are several such videos out there, is "beat me in armwrestling". And not like in some kind of professional setting, or in a gym full of bodybuilders or anything like that, but on the streets with regular people. Never, ever, EVER do that! It's horrendously irresponsible! The major problem with this is that most people don't understand how dangerous it is for an untrained person to do armwrestling at full force, trying to beat someone stronger than them. Somehow the average person doesn't realize how easy it is to get a very serious injury from this. Torn ligaments, torn tendons, torn joints, and even outright broken bones. And not just like some minor fracture, but the entire humerus broken in half. B...

Literally thousands of migrants are entering the United Kingdom illegally every single day, and the government is welcoming them with open arms. This even though 100% of them are coming from a safe country (primarily France) and thus there is no international agreement that would bind the government in this regard, and they would be completely free to return them to the country where they came from. Not only that, but the UK government is, without exaggeration, spending millions of pounds every single day to finance this. The illegal migrants are not being put into tents, or unused hangars, or unused storehouses outfitted to host these migrants. No, they are put in luxury hotels and expensive homes. All at 100% the expense of the taxpayers, at a cost of several million pounds per day . Moreover, the government isn't asking the people, and in many cases not even telling the people, where they will be putting thousands of illegal migrants next. Town after town, some so small that...

I have written several blog posts about the quite notable differences I have noticed between American "right-wing" conservatives and the far-leftist social justice warriors, both when looking at the vocal activists producing content (such as videos or social media posts) and when looking at their viewers and followers. I have noticed over the years yet another such clear difference. Unsurprisingly, I have watched quite a lot of videos by famous American conservative content creators, such as Matt Walsh, Joseph Watson, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and so on. I have also sometimes stumbled across the YouTube channels of very notorious and infamous prolific far-leftist activist bigots. Almost without exception a pattern emerges when examining their uploaded videos lists: The topics that the American conservative activists are producing tend to be very varied in their content. Sure, sometimes they will talk about Joe Biden (when he was still the President) or Trump, but those te...

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an indie game made by an extremely small studio of just 33 people (I do not know if the number in the title of the game is a reference to that or not) founded in 2020, which appeared almost from nowhere, and has taken the gaming community by a storm, breaking all kinds of sales numbers records for games at this budget level, and possibly getting the best user scores ever for a video game and, perhaps a bit surprisingly in this day and age, even getting very good reviews from "professional" game reviewers (who are notorious and infamous for always going against the "gamers" and bashing what they like, just because they like it.) And the thing is that the game is not some kind of very small retro-style 2D game like Balatro or Shovel Knight . This is a full-on open-world 3D game with modern graphics and professional-quality acting, motion-capturing, cutscenes and so on. It's in no way out of place along big-budget triple-A games fro...

There are many ways in which the police forces in the United States are almost unique in the entire world. One of them, which I have discussed in this blog many, many times, is how much of an absolute coward the average American cop is. When cops get a report of some elderly man possibly having hit a car with a baseball bat (no reports of any firearms), why do they need six cops pointing their drawn guns at his back from 10 meters away, while a seventh cop yells orders at him like an insane asylum lunatic? This was not some kind of spree shooter fleeing from a crime scene where he had shot twenty people. This was 70-or-so years old homeless guy, slowly strolling ahead with difficulty, who had allegedly hit a car with a baseball bat. Why does an American cop, who has locked up a handcuffed suspect in his patrol vehicle, start rolling around on the ground like a complete clown when an acorn falls onto the roof of said car from the tree branches above, and after having rolled around on ...

I wrote earlier how American cops routinely abuse trespassing laws in order to trick people into giving them their ID even in situations where the cops have no legal right to demand it. (In summary: Solicit a trespass from a nearby property, even if the person has never even been on that property, and then claim that they need the person's ID to enforce the trespass. That's actually not how American law works, but cops trick people with this ruse all the time anyway.) Well, apparently there is another way in which American government officials (illegally) abuse trespassing laws in order to bypass their legal duty to openness. You see, thanks to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, there are very strong and strict laws in the country that maximize the openness of what governmental institutions do. Very typically this includes, for example, that most official county, city and state meetings are open to the public, particularly to members of the press (with very...

Absolutely yes. And that's because pretty much all of them were political prisoners convicted in corrupted kangaroo courts, for political reasons rather than actual crimes. There are literally hundreds of examples of absolute travesty in this regard, but one example is particularly egregious: An older woman, a grandmother, happened to be in front of the Capitol Building during the riot (which was significantly milder of a "riot" that most far-leftist protests). She didn't really know what was happening, but she saw that a lot of people were entering the building through its open doors. She also entered the building alongside all the other people, just to see what happened inside. Since nothing much was happening, she left the building after a minute or so, and went on her way. She didn't break anything, she didn't assault anybody, she didn't threaten anybody, she didn't even say anything to anybody. She literally did absolutely nothing, other than just...

The widespread extreme leftist ideology whose advocates at this moment are mostly called "woke", and previously called "social justice warriors" (ie. "SJWs"), were prior to that term having been coined mostly called "multiculturalists". The "multiculturalist" ideology goes way back, probably a hundred years, gaining a lot of traction during the 60's and 70's "hippie culture" movement, and going into high gear and actually gaining power in society (at an ever-accelerating rage) from the late 90's forward. Not a lot has changed, really. Perhaps the major change that has happened during the past couple of decades is that the ideology has become, like, 95% about "trans rights", to the point that it appears that nowadays that's almost the only thing they care about (with a good majority of the remaining 5% being about abortion and the hatred of white people.) This likely because at some point they found ou...

I wrote about the lawsuit and the huge controversy surrounding it here , so I won't be repeating that. If you need context, please read that blog post first. One thing that irritates me, although it's by no means surprising, is how quick people are to jump to extreme conclusions, based on nothing more than hearsay and small tidbits of information. The vast majority of people who were following the lawsuit situation were under the impression that Mitchell had sued Jobst for claiming that Mitchell had cheated his famous Donkey Kong scores. In other words, that the defamation claim was that Jobst had knowingly and falsely accused Mitchell to be a video game cheater. That is absolutely true. I mean, the fact that the vast, vast majority of people who were following the situation thought that. I myself also thought that, the entire time. It is also a fact that it turns out the lawsuit that went to trial and which Jobst lost (at least as of writing this) actually had nothing to do wi...

To the government and law enforcement of the United Kingdom: You have made your country a totalitarian fascist police state. Your country has no free speech rights. You are arresting thousands and thousands of people every year solely because of their expression of opinion. You are sending grieving mothers to jail for years for a single expression of opinion online. You are literally silencing expressions of opinion by throwing people in jail. You are sending police officers to harass, intimidate, interrogate, arrest and incarcerate people who express the "wrong" opinions, opinions against your totalitarian fascist regime. You have political prisoners. You are literally and without exaggeration giving people longer jail sentences for expression of opinion than for physical assault, robbery, theft, home invasion and destruction of property. When your country throws more people in jail for their expression of opinion online than for example Russia does, that should be pause for...

Alyssa Mercante is one of these modern "gaming" journalists who is an extreme far-leftist "woke" social justice warrior activist (ie. a so-called "urinalist"), who has written hit piece after hit piece against "gamers" and the "far right" in general. She also appears to be quite sue-happy, trying to intimidate and harass her critics with lawsuits. She was working at the (somewhat infamous by this point) publication Kotaku, and apparently even they couldn't stand her antics any longer because she was fired from her position. Rather obviously, she blamed the "right-wingers" for having caused her to lose her job: Well, what do you know: When it's the far-leftist activists who become "cancelled", when they get a taste of their own medicine, suddenly they don't like it. It's ok when they do it, but when they get the same thing done to them, they start crying. Well, Alyssa, in case you happen to read this: ...

The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has become famous, and infamous, among the scientific community, especially among the particle physics community, for being highly critical of how the entire field is being currently run. And most other physicists in the field really hate her for that. She has, in many ways, become essentially the enemy #1 of that particular field of physics (and to some extent the physics scientific community at large.) But not for the reasons you might expect (ie. identity politics), but what for all intents and purposes is fraud. Particle physics made progress in huge leaps during the majority of the 20th century, and new discoveries on that field were made almost by the week. All of this was not just theoretical and to satisfy our curiosity. All that research has resulted in some of the most important technological discoveries and advancements in human history, such as the discovery of the properties of semiconductors, the invention of transistors (one of the most ...

Recently a black young man stabbed a white young man to death over a completely trivial argument (the black kid had entered some meeting that he wasn't invited to and was asked to leave, so he just stabbed the person who asked in the heart with a knife. Absolutely incomprehensible.) The parents and family of the teenager have been essentially on a tour, doing press conference after press conference where they recount with tears in their eyes how he was such a good kid, raised in a good family, and how good of a person he was, demanding justice, and how this entire thing is a complete injustice. In a recent press conference the father of the other kid showed up, and he was berated and told that it's absolutely "disrespectful." In fact, the police was called and the father was escorted out. If you watched all of these press conferences and had no context, you would think that it was the parents of the murdered teenager who were tearing up and making touching speeches ab...

There are many characteristics that are typical to "richer" countries with a high quality of life, mostly in what's often classified as "the first world". People who live in such countries don't often pay attention to these characteristics because they have usually lived their entire lives with them and don't know anything else. One of the most prominent signs of a higher quality of life at the societal level is cleanliness: Outdoor areas in general are very clean. Streets, parks, public areas, even roadsides outside cities are clean of garbage. Building facades look clean, windows are clean, insides of buildings that have public access (either public buildings or private buildings with public access) are all very clean. This cleanliness is not just the product of the city having efficient garbage disposal services, but also the citizens themselves having a culture of cleanliness: People don't just throw garbage outside. Instead, they dispose of thei...

Sometimes when you go to a restaurant they will have absolutely huge menus, with literally hundreds and hundreds of dishes of all sorts. There is (or was, haven't checked lately), in fact, a pizzeria here that advertises itself has having over a hundred pizzas in its menu, as if that was a badge of honor and some kind of guarantee of quality. There is, at some level, this odd misconception, probably even among many restaurant owners, that having a huge menu with hundreds of dishes is somehow a sign of the restaurant being of high quality, and something that people will take as a positive thing, something desirable. After all, you have a huge amount of dishes to choose from! You could eat there every day for a year and never have the same dish twice! However, if I have learned anything from TV shows like the ones by Gordon Ramsay and other similar celebrity cooks, it's that it tends to actually be the exact opposite. In other words: The larger the menu, the poorer the quality of...

In many countries, particularly the United States, Canada and certain other countries, men in general, and white men most prominently, are being genuinely discriminated against in most levels of society, and there's pretty much nothing they can do about it. Men are being actively discriminated against in higher education admissions. White and Asian men in particular are the most discriminated (with the admission threshold being the highest for them than for any other group of people). Men, particularly white men, are being very actively and egregiously discriminated against in hiring, especially in the United States and some other countries. For example a recent statistic that examined the hiring practices of the top 500 companies in the United states showed that only 6% of new hires during the last several years were white, and an even lower percentage were white men. This even though over 80% of the population of the country is white. And it's not only that. Statistics show t...

Earlier I wrote about how for some months now the YouTube automoderation system has been completely out of control, apparently removing something like 90% of all replies to comments, and a good portion of original comments as well. And this completely regardless of what the comments contained (or what the video was about.) It made having any kind of conversation in the comment section impossible. And it seemed to be completely random. One particularly egregious example that I encountered was replying to someone's comment, my comment immediately disappeared, but when I edited my comment and added something to the end of it , the comment stayed. So it was not about what the comment contained (as I left that completely intact), it was completely random. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that something suddenly changed, and comments were now staying and were not being removed. And, in fact, I noticed that many of my comments (especially replies to someone else's comments) had reappe...

There are lots of absolutely horrifying stories of absolutely invaluable archaeological and anthropological artifacts and fossil remains being destroyed by completely inept and clueless people, or outright vandalized and destroyed by people with political or religious motives (such as Muslims destroying invaluable statues that are thousands of years old, because of their religion). Not to be outdone, the Australian government wanted to join this group of absolute lunatics. In Australia there have been discovered human fossils from about 40 thousand years ago, at the shores of former very old lakes (which had the precise conditions for fossils to be preserved). These humans had been clearly buried after death and ritualistically, giving us an invaluable amount of information about these very early human societies. The fossils were also extraordinarily well preserved, giving us almost entire skeletons. Human fossils that are this old and well-preserved, and which clearly show indications...

Probably for as long as humans have existed, children of certain age and up have been given a lot of leeway, "free range", in terms of what they do during the day. Meaning that they can go out with friends or even on their own, for hours on end, even the entire day, in many cases without the parents having any idea where they are going, and come back home in the evening. This was still the case almost worldwide up to the 1970's and even largely to the 1980's, and it's still for the most part the case in many countries to this day (even though the introduction of extremely affordable cellphones has somewhat changed this dynamic to some extent in most places.) In fact, in many countries even to this day parents outright encourage their kids to go outside and play. And not just on the front yard of the house. However, in some countries, quite prominently in the United States, some time in the 1980's and 1990's a moral panic started spreading like wildfire. T...

I have written about this very thing in the past, but I think it deserves repeating now that the fight against men competing in women's sport is once again in full swing, largely thanks to Trump's executive order related to this. Many girls and women in the United States (and in a few other countries) are once again raising their objections to males competing against them in sports, using their locker rooms and so on. Unfortunately only a microscopic minority of these girls and women dare to speak out. And who can blame them? I certainly don't. In the current political climate if you speak out against it, you are very likely to experience harassment, discrimination, verbal attacks and, in some cases, even outright physical assault. The current American far-leftist ideology has normalized harassment and violence against dissenters, against anybody who criticizes the ideology. A woman might literally get punched in the face for saying that she doesn't want to compete agai...

A 2023 research paper published in the Nature magazine used neural network AI to try to predict, among other things, people's political affiliation based solely on their facial features. The results seem to show that while for men there was very little difference in terms of traditional attractiveness, for women there was a quite clear pattern of more traditionally attractive women being more likely to be conservative right-wing, while less attractive women tend to be left-wing. While the result might be somewhat surprising, it actually makes sense, psychologically. For the most part the self-esteem and confidence of men is rarely tied to their outwards appearance. While, obviously, traditionally attractive fit muscular men tend to be more confident and have a higher self-esteem, among the more "mundane" looking men there's usually less direct correlation, and even "ugly" men can have a pretty high self-esteem, as they don't care much about their appear...

American cops really, really love to ID people. They have an outright ID fetish. Most of them have an extreme "papers, please" attitude. This even though the United States is one of the few countries in this world where the police actually can't demand your ID willy-nilly for whatever reason they want. They need an actual reasonable suspicion of a crime that they can verbalize in order to lawfully demand your ID. Many are suspecting that this is not them just merely being tyrants (because the custom is oddly global, ie. the exact same in the entire huge country regardless of state, city, local customs, local government, local politics, etc.) Many suspect that it's a form of mass surveillance by the federal government (most likely the FBI). The sad thing is that the vast majority of people don't know their rights in the country, and are too intimidated to refuse when cops demand their ID, even when there's literally no lawful reason for them to do so. Sometim...

Billy Mitchell became famous for, allegedly, making a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong in 1982 (as well as several other games), and becoming featured in several events such as some kind of Nintendo award event, as well as the (somewhat controversial) documentary King of Kong that focuses largely on him and his achievements in the 1980's and since. He has also been a regular in many gaming conferences and events as a speaker. He has also become infamous because of quite strong evidence that his scores were not legit, cheated in some manner. Most notably, his scores were removed from the video game high scores platform Twin Galaxies (which for a time was the largest and most reputable such platform, even used as an official source by the Guinness Book of Records.) Even more notably, Mitchell sued Twin Galaxies because of this, which was eventually ended with an out-of-court settlement with agreed compromises (Twin Galaxies restored his scores in some kind of "historic...