What grinds my gears

I don't know how long the feature has been on YouTube, but it might be relatively recent. And that's the feature of shadow-banning comments. Quite egregiously (well, depending on your personal perspective, I suppose) channel authors can affect this shadow-banning. "Shadow-banning" means that your content is secretly and silently censored behind the scenes in such a way that you yourself still see it completely normally, without any indication that something has been done to it, but it will be hidden from everybody else so that they won't see it. YouTube has at some point implemented this for the comment section of videos (something that people, including myself, have corroborated via extensive testing): If your comment gets shadow-banned, YouTube will still show it to you as normal, as if it had been successfully uploaded and is there for everybody to see, but it will be hidden from everybody else (something that you can corroborate by viewing the comment section ...

Joey Swoll is a social media commentator and influencer who is a bodybuilder and primarily makes videos commenting on people's bad gym etiquette and behavior at the gym, and other tangential topics. Some time ago he uploaded a video where he was cosplaying as his childhood hero Hulk Hogan, and I think he also recently made an eulogy because of his recent passing. Unsurprisingly, because Hulk Hogan was one of these assigned enemies of the far left, the leftist mob got angry at him and started their endless whining. At first Swoll responded with a video where he said that "just because someone [ie. Hogan] has made a mistake in his life doesn't mean he hasn't done good things" and so on. Since the only "crime" that Hogan has been accused of by the far-leftist cancel mob is using some Bad Words (heaven forbid!), this seemed very reasonable. Hogan apparently said Bad Words, and then later himself made a groveling apology about it and, as far as I know, never ...

There are certain symptoms to look for that are warning signs that a once free country is becoming more and more authoritarian and totalitarian. These symptoms include, among others: Increased surveillance of citizens, and making it harder and harder for citizens to do things anonymously (in real life or on the internet). In other words, if the country is becoming more and more of a surveillance state. Ever advancing erosion of free speech rights, in other words, more and more citizens are being legally punished (or at least investigated by the police) for their expression of opinion and their words, either by abusing existing laws or passing new more restrictive laws, and often both. Citizens being legally punished for their criticism or derogatory comments aimed at the government, government officials (especially those in the legislative branch) and/or law enforcement. This alone is already a huge red flag, a huge warning sign of the government becoming more and more authoritarian. C...

From time to time you hear of cases in the United States where someone is accused of some kind of wrongdoing against a government official, usually a police officer, such as assaulting him or other such crimes, and the accused accepts a plea agreement from the prosecutor that reduces the sentence (for example from jailtime to just community service and a fine), and this plea agreement has several stipulations. Sometimes these stipulations include the defendant having to write an apology letter to the police officer, and usually this stipulation is agreed and enforced by the judge. This is absolutely incomprehensible and it genuinely baffles my mind. That's because this is a textbook breach of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. It's a breach of that guarantee because it's compelled speech: In other words, forcing someone to say (or in this case write) something at the threat of more severe punishment if he refuses. And this is indeed a genuine textbook ...

For well over ten years now resorting to physical violence for political purposes has been more and more normalized among the American far-left. It started in the early years of the 2010's primarily at universities and a few other places by activists blocking people, impeding their free movement and so on, although physical attacks were still relatively rare. However, rioting and vandalism started becoming more and more common even back then (for example when protesting someone they didn't like coming to their campus to give a speech.) This included things like breaking windows, arson, destroying police barricades and similar things. Quite quickly this started escalating more and more. It didn't take many years where this kind of "obstruct but don't attack, reserve violence only for inanimate objects" to escalate to just outright physical violence and assault against people. "Punch a Nazi" became the slogan, and many far-leftists took it literally an...

It's quite appalling, and a bit scary, that the sociopolitical and psychological cancer that's modern far-leftism is not limited to the United States (and perhaps Canada). The cancer has metastasized to many European countries as well. Many European countries would be perfect examples of their absolute insanity, but there's perhaps no better example than that of Spain. The far-leftist activists in Spain make even the American ones seem sane in comparison. From the many, many core characteristics of the sociopolitical far-leftist ideology, one if them is that it doesn't follow any sane logic. It doesn't need to follow any sane logic. And, moreover, its members will just blindly obey like brainwashed drones whatever insane idea has got traction during the current week. You see, in Spain the far-leftist activists have gotten in their heads (using insane troll logic) that tourists are not welcome in the country, and they have been harassing them for months, trying to ma...

 Essentially: SKG: "We want video games that we have purchased to remain playable even after the publisher has dropped support for it." AAA company: "It's not reasonable nor feasible for companies to keep supporting games and their servers forever." SKG: "Yes, agreed. All we want is that games remain playable  after  the company has dropped support, by either providing a single-player mode (even if it lacks some features), or a way for third-parties to run the servers at their own cost." AAA company: "It's just not economically feasible for companies to keep supporting games forever." SKG: "Yes, we know, and we agree. We are  not demanding you to keep supporting your games forever. What we want is being able to keep playing the game AFTER you have dropped support for it." AAA company: "But it's not possible for companies to keep supporting games forever." SKG: "WE AGREE! YOU ARE CORRECT! But that's NOT wh...

I think it's a bit sad of a realization that the existence of true flat-earthers, true believers, in this day and age is actually not surprising, given the stupidity of the average person. (As the joke goes, "think of how stupid the average person is. Now consider that half of all people are even stupider than that!") There is a running theme among the vast majority of flat-earthers, and it's something that likewise is not very surprising: Many of them have extremely primitive, simplistic and childish notions about even the most basic things. Notions that a clueless 10-year-old might have, a mental age that they apparently have never succeeded in growing out of. Here are some of them: The concept of "force" Unsurprisingly, most flat-earthers completely misunderstand what a "force" is in physics. Curiously and funnily, they seem to have the same misconception about it as a childhood friend of mine had when we were something like 12. (Even back then ...

Perhaps not in every single place in the entire country, but certainly at many places many "cop watchers", "first amendment auditors" and other similar "holding officials accountable" type of activists have noticed many, many times how cops seem to think that they are above the law. That many laws that apply to citizens (and which the cops constantly enforce on citizens) don't apply to them. This particularly when it comes to cars. If there is, for example, a city or state ordinance against heavily tinted windows (and something that cops bust drivers constantly for), you can be goddam certain that many cops will have heavily tinted windows, not just in their patrol cars, but quite particularly in their personal private cars. Likewise if there's an ordinance against license plate coverings that may make it harder to read the plate, you can be sure that many cops will use the most extreme of such plate covers in their personal cars. They will be happ...

I have written before how, by this point, whenever the American left makes an outrageous claim about their political opposition, if you just assume it to be a lie, a fabrication or a complete distortion of facts, you'll most probably be right , without even needing to check. By this point it has become more or less just an intellectual challenge trying to figure out what the actual truth is behind the lie, if you really want to bother, just for the investigative challenge. One has to admit that sometimes their lies are pretty convincing, sound plausible, and can fool even conservatives, such as their narrative about the "transgenic mice" in that blog post above, or their narrative about Abrego Garcia . Well, here's another one: Recently a social media post has made the rounds that shows a video of ICE agents violently arresting a United States citizen. The video is being filmed by his wife, who is screaming and pleading with the ICE agents telling them that he's a...

Suppose you are a big known company with some really beloved and liked franchise, and one day you announce to the public that, like you have already done with other franchises of yours, you will be making a movie about this one as well. Then, some time later, when you have gone through the casting process, you announce who the actors are who will be taking on the main roles for the movie. Out of the blue, the twitter mob goes completely crazy and starts attacking you for your choice of actors. Why? Are they horrendous choices, with actors who look absolutely nothing like the characters they are supposed to depict? Or are they somehow actors who are known to be absolutely horrible people who have done something completely heinous and despicable? Nope. There's nothing wrong with the actors. They look really decent for the roles, and there's nothing objectionable about them. The massive backlash is because you didn't choose an actor proposed by some anonymous random nobody on ...

There's this YouTube channel (you can trivially find it it with the titles below if you really want) that appears to be one of the biggest and most successful channels on the entire platform: 14 million subscribers and, most astonishingly, every single of its several dozens of full-length videos has views in the millions. There are only two videos that have less than a million views (which are named like "Q&A #2" and "Q&A #3", something the channel owner probably learned her lesson about). From the rest well over half have views in the tens of millions. And the thing is, this is not some kind of high-production-value YouTube channel which content is being created by an entire large team of professionals, even if the channel is named or only references the author (think of the MrBeast channel, who has a professional team of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people behind him creating his videos.) This is an extremely low-budget channel genuinely run by a s...

Microsoft's Xbox team used to be absolutely huge, in the 5-digit amount of employees. Recently Microsoft announced that they will be significantly reducing, and firing something like 9 thousand people. Why?  I don't know. But I can well guess. Sure, Microsoft's Xbox team has probably been a huge money sink for a decade or two now. But why? Sure, their consoles are not the best-selling ones, and their games aren't the best-selling ones (and, ironically, over the last years they have killed more games than they have produced), but still... my guess is that that's not the sole nor even the main reason for the financial troubles. Do you know what I'm  guessing  is the main reason why the Xbox team has been so inefficient and such a huge money sink into which hundreds of millions of dollars are being thrown into, and only a small fraction is coming back? Well, over the past decade or so Microsoft has been very notoriously far-leftist, spouting all the far-leftist rhe...

I have written about this very subject several times before, but I just keep encountering the same misconception again and again, so I decided to write about it again. In the United States, in most if not all states, cops need "reasonable articulable suspicion" (ie. "RAS") of a crime before they can legally demand your ID, or arrest you for failure to provide it. This means that they need to be able to mention a particular crime by name, and their suspicion of you possibly having committed that crime needs to be reasonable, considering the circumstances. (This requirement and limitation is a direct consequence of the protections provided by the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.) However, many people (not just so-called "First Amendment auditors", but lot of other people as well) think that the "RAS" requirement extends to  detaining  people as well. They just keep repeating it over and over in their videos, when they have been deta...

One of the, perhaps in some ways, least "non-disagreeable" parts of the modern feminist social justice far-leftist "woke" western culture has been the emphasis on "consent". Which, of course, in the far-leftist world view means that women have all the power and men must be subservient slaves to whatever women say, quite particularly when she says "no". I think that this is once again a (perhaps slightly more minor) example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Yes, it's a good thing for a gentleman to respect women and not force them to do anything they don't want to do, nor be pushy. A gentleman is polite, friendly, shows good manners, and respects women. A true gentleman is someone that people (not just women, but people in general) find nice and a good person to hang around with, and that involves a lot of respect and taking into account other people's feelings and boundaries. However, like with so many thi...

Ok, perhaps if we count from "launch the game" to "uninstall the game" then perhaps technically not the least (as there have been ones I have uninstalled in under a minute), but from "start the gameplay proper within the game" to "uninstall the game": And that would be a record-breaking 0 seconds. Indeed, I didn't even get to the gameplay proper. Unless you count the character creation as "gameplay proper" (which I don't really.) I tried this game because it was a complimentary game on PlayStation Plus some months ago. The description seems to allude as this being some sort of online multiplayer Pokémon clone of sorts, where you are a kid who captures and tames creatures (named "Temtems" rather than "Pokémon"). When starting a new game, it starts with a character creation, before launching the gameplay proper. So far so good. However, instead of selecting "boy" or "girl", you have to selec...

It's always funny when a country wants to be environmentally friendly and safe, and then proceeds to do astonishingly stupid things that do the exact opposite of that goal. There is, for example, Australia, which has completely banned nuclear power plants. This even though Australia has a wealthy uranium mining industry that produces nuclear fuel for other countries (which means that it would be extraordinarily cheap for Australia to run nuclear power plants because they don't need to buy the fuel from other countries, as they are producing it themselves.) So if there are no nuclear power plants in Australia, how are they producing their electricity? With coal power plants, of course. What did you think? And a good portion of it is actually using so-called brown coal, which is even more polluting than black coal (because brown coal is more abundant in Australia). And, indeed, Australia is one of the biggest polluters and contributors of atmospheric CO2 in the world. Not to be l...

The term "conspiracy theory" has become extremely popular in the last decade or so, most often used as a dismissive term to discredit someone's claims: "That's just an unfounded conspiracy theory." The term quite literally means: A hypothesis that some entities, usually some people in power or with a lot of influence, or some organizations, are secretly conspiring among themselves in order to do something that the public would object to, or may even be outright illegal, or to hide some kind of facts from the public and give them a completely false or distorted narrative. Obviously, the key elements of a "conspiracy theory" is that it involves a "theory", in other words, an uncorroborated unproven hypothesis, and a "conspiracy", in other words two or more people or entities scheming secretly behind the scenes, agreeing among themselves to keep their (or some other) actions or facts hidden from the public. If such a conspiracy the...

I wrote earlier how Japan is already experiencing the first symptoms of "multiculturalism" and mass immigration, in other words, what many people sarcastically call "being culturally enriched." Well, here's a more comprehensive list of more symptoms to expect and look for. When you start seeing more and more of these symptoms in your society and everyday life, you know that your country has been infected by the far-leftist "multiculturalism" cancer: The amount of petty crimes and vandalism clearly increases: Broken and robbed vending machines, people being mugged, cars being broken into, people being harassed on the streets, and so on and so forth. Safety , particularly for women and children, degrades significantly: Where for decades and decades you could walk along city and town streets completely in peace without being bothered, with anything happening to you being astronomically unlikely, even if you are a young woman, in rapidly increasing manner...