What grinds my gears

On the first days of Russia's full-scale invasion attempt of Ukraine, they occupied the city of Chernobyl. Yes, exactly  that  Chernobyl. The logic behind this beggars belief. It's a mind-bogglingly stupid move. It shouldn't be any surprise to anybody that the Pripyat area, including Chernobyl, has no military value. There are no military bases there, or is there anything of military strategic value in the area, for rather obvious reasons. It is, for all intents and purposes, a radioactive toxic wasteland with zero value. The land has no value, and there is no military value to the area either. What makes the invasion of Chernobyl particularly stupid is that the soil, especially in the so-called Red Forest, is still radioactive, and driving tanks on it disturbs the soil and releases huge radioactive dust clouds. (Yes, tourists visited Chernobyl all the time prior to the invasion, but these visits were extremely controlled, and one of the strict rules for any visitor is to n...

There is one thing that flat-earthers just cannot explain in any way, shape or form, not even with made-up claims, not with pseudoscience, not by throwing fancy terms at it and pretending it "explains" it, and they can't even deny that it happens. This one counter-argument is completely impervious to all flat-earther arguments. And that is: How is science able to predict every single solar eclipse years and even decades ahead of time, to the accuracy of seconds, and the exact places where there will be full and partial eclipses? Even they cannot deny that it happens. They can deny the validity of photographs, video, scientific tests and measurements when it comes to other topics. They can even argue about the nature of solar eclipses themselves (ie. what they are and what causes them). However, the predictions are so utterly and clearly undeniable that even flat-earthers and their kindergarten-level IQ can't deny that it happens: Every single time that science has pre...

This slide is from a 2023 presentation by the famous video game development company Activision Blizzard: Let's put aside for a moment the racial discrimination in hiring that's quite clearly happening in that company. Here Activision Blizzard is meticulously observing and documenting the race of their employees. They are paying members of their staff to observe, research, classify and document people by their race, compartmentalizing them based on that innate trait. Activision Blizzard: Do you know what that's called? It's called racism. Pure, unadultered,  bona fide  racism, plain and simple. In an actual non-racist environment it shouldn't matter what people's "race" is supposed to be. It plays no role. People would not be classified nor compartmentalized by it. And especially it wouldn't be something that's meticulously researched, documented and charted. Activision Blizzard, you are a racist company, plain and simple. There's no way aro...

I have written about this very subject before, but I think it deserves repeating because I see it on YouTube pretty much every single day, and to this day I have absolutely no idea why they behave like they do. If you are in the United States, try going all on your own, alone, for example to a car of local law enforcement of federal agents, and damage the car in their full view, like slashing a tire or breaking a windshield wiper. What happens? You'll be arrested in a millisecond. You'll be lucky if they don't shoot you. However, gather 50 people to accompany you, to show slogans and be all angry at the cops, and then go and damage their car. What happens? In most cases, nothing. Perhaps one of the cops  might  shove you aside, but that's it. No arrest, nothing. This is not hyperbole or just hypothetical.  It happens all the time . Nowadays it happens many times a day. In the vast, vast majority of cases the result is the same: No arrests. The cops  refuse  to e...

Donald Trump recently made essentially a PSA in one of his speeches warning pregnant women from taking Tylenol, as it can be harmful to the fetus. Tylenol is the most common brand name in the US for over-the-counter pain and antipyretic medication containing paracetamol. Cue a bunch of pregnant leftists on TikTok deliberately taking Tylenol just out of spite. One of them says in the video that she believes in medical science rather than an old man who knows nothing about medicine. The kicker? Trump's announcement was precisely based on medical publications and a medical consensus. And, in fact, the manufacturer of Tylenol themselves warn against pregnant women taking it, precisely for the reason Trump mentioned. It can be harmful to the child. These leftists with terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome simply  assumed  that if Trump says it, then it must be false and against medical science, without so much as doing a quick and simple google search on the subject. They just  ...

As I wrote before, while they have shown it quite clearly for the past 10+ years, recent events have truly opened it for everybody to see: Far-leftists are complete psychopaths who do not value human life and who are incapable of feeling true empathy towards another human being, not at the instinctual level nor even at the intellectual level (ie. even after having consciously fully processed the situation, being able to make fully intentional conscious decisions, and are no longer reacting based purely on first instincts.) They  pretend  like they care about human life (although even then only  some  human life), but that's only as long as those people are useful for their agenda; the very second that those people stop being useful and step outside the tight boundaries of the doctrine, they turn on those people and start attacking them, showing that in fact they didn't really care about them in the first place. However, a recent video by Matt Walsh made me realize s...

Like with so many American social justice organizations that are a century old, give or take, also the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) started as relatively good and reasonable but turned into a complete far-leftist propaganda machine during the last 20 or so years, and par for the course, they have been spouting far-leftist propaganda, distortions and lies ever since. But since the ADL still mostly carries its old reputation, ie. it's riding on its own past, most leftist publications and people just love to cite it as a "credible" source (including, obviously, Wikipedia.) Of course for about 20 or so years the ADL has been as reliable of a source for politics as a refund scammer is for the status of your refund. One of the latest pieces of propaganda that they have published is some statistics about mass shootings in the United States, which points out that over 75% of them have been committed by far-right extremists. Well, that's some compelling evidence about how viol...

Some time ago I saw a video (unfortunately I can't find it anymore to link to it) of some leftist talking about how in many African tribes their concept of time was quite different from the western world. Something about not even having the concept of a "future" and everything being thought of and talked about in past terms. Unsurprisingly, this wasn't presented as some kind of curiosity about an antiquated culture and belief system, and most definitely not as some form of criticism. Indeed, in a very modern leftist fashion she was presenting this as if it were a completely valid alternative and perhaps even a better system than this concept of "time" of ours. At least something to consider as a legit alternative, or something. Of course she's not the only one talking about that, as it has been a far-leftist talking point for quite many years now. Somehow strict timetables, being on time, planning for the future, organizing things to happen in the future...

Some time ago VISA, Mastercard and PayPal, as well as some intermediaries, received a huge backlash because they abused their power to censor online digital distribution platforms of video games. There was, unsurprisingly, a huge controversy, and their helplines were absolutely flooded by furious people. Yet, rather than backing down and ending this censorious abuse of power... they are still continuing it! Nothing has changed! They are still demanding those platforms to censor games, regardless of all the backlash. I suppose they are just playing the long game and waiting for the storm to pass, waiting until people stop caring. But the question still remains: Why? What exactly do they have to gain with this? What's the end goal? They have got a huge loss of reputation due to their actions. What's the upside that compensates for that? What is it that they are trying to achieve? How does it benefit them so much that it's worth the loss of reputation? What's the long term...

Some time ago a new web animation series took the internet by storm: The Amazing Digital Circus. The pilot episode has, as of writing this, 394 million views on YouTube. The second episode has 166 million views. While the subsequent episodes don't have as many views as the pilot, we are still talking about nearly 100 million views each. This is an astonishing amount of views per episode, and speaks quite clearly about the success and popularity of the series. The series is so notable and popular that, unsurprisingly, it has got its own Wikipedia page, IMDB page, tvtropes page, and so on. The series was produced and created by the company Glitch Productions, stylised as "GLITCH" (eg. on YouTube). While the series is wacky and somewhat abstract, it's surprisingly enjoyable, and at points has quite deep character development. Even with all the wackiness and abstraction, it's still surprisingly easy to follow what's happening (something that's greatly helped b...

Some people have made the claim, perhaps even observation, that if you make a statement that says something about the average of a group, and the person you are talking about gives a counter-argument by presenting an exception (as if that exception discredited the claim), then you are dealing with a low-IQ person. For example, if you say "on average Asian people are shorter than Americans", and the other person objects to it with "but there are very tall Asian people" (or any variant of that), as if that were a counter-argument to the claim, it quite clearly shows that the person doesn't understand what "on average" means. Such people might even, at some level, know what averaging is, and might even know how to calculate an average (eg. they are able to calculate that the average of 2 and 6 is 4), but somehow their comprehension of what an "average" means or implies does not seem to go beyond the mechanical mathematical calculation (assuming ...

I have written about this before, but it's just something that boggles the mind. It's also a bit surprising. It's not surprising that the leftist started the rhetoric. What's more surprising is how many people just believe it wholesale without question, without skepticism, without thinking about it, without doing any kind of research. Before Donald Trump became the presidential candidate for the Republican Party for the first time sometime in 2015, he was widely considered just a somewhat eccentric, a bit quirky and maybe a bit silly multi-billionaire. He had starred in some reality TV show, and made guest appearances in others, as well as some movies and, if I remember correctly, even the WWE at one point. As far as I know, nobody considered him somehow particularly evil, or racist, or anything like that. He was not known for that kind of thing. He was just like most other billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer (perhaps even the closest mat...

There are many rules on what can and can't be patented, even in the United States, but the three most important rules are: The invention has to be original, not something that has existed for years and decades (ie. "prior art"). You can't patent someone else's invention, even if that hasn't been patented (it's prior art). Only physical devices can be patented, not algorithms. For the longest time the third rule didn't apply in the United States, but at some point, about a decade or so ago, that rule changed, and now also in that country algorithms cannot be patented, only physical devices. In other words, you can't patent techniques, ways to do something, instructions on how to do something, ie. algorithms. Even if the instructions are on how to create a physical device, the instructions themselves cannot be patented (even if the device itself is.) Pure algorithms, just the way to do something, is doubly not patentable because there's not even ...

There's a video of an American conservative anti-abortion activist, a friend of Charlie Kirk, having conversations at a university campus about that subject, at the same time that the shooting happened. She gets a phone call telling her what happened. She is distraught and tells the students that are there that Charlie Kirk as just been shot. What was the very first immediate instinct and reaction of the leftist students that heard it? The very first thing that they immediately did when the heard the news? They laughed. All of them. The conservative activist got understandably angry and started yelling at them. How dare they not only laugh at someone's murder, but moreover at her friend's murder? What was the students' reaction now that they had a bit more time to think about the situation and hear her reaction to it? Were they perhaps apologetic, saying something like "sorry, that was insensitive, I don't know what came to me." Nope. As you might guess, t...

For some reason there has recently been a flood of videos on YouTube about some "experts" arguing against "the covid-19 vaccine", how utterly dangerous it is, and how it's a crime against humanity, some even outright comparing it to a genocide. I don't know why there has suddenly been a surge of such videos, but they are not only tiresome, they are also quite dangerous fear-mongering. For starters, all of these videos talk about THE "covid-19 vaccine". As if there was just one. Or at least just one single type of vaccine. Quite clearly these videos and these "experts" have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. There is no "the" covid-19 vaccine. There isn't one single such vaccine, or even one single such vaccine type. There are multiple ones, using different activation mechanisms. As Wikipedia lists: "Platforms developed in 2020 involved nucleic acid technologies (nucleoside-modified messenger RNA and DNA), n...

Even though the Unity game engine has been a huge competitor, it's still undeniable that Unreal Engine has been, by far, the most popular game engine for video games, particularly the big-budget ones. And its market share is only increasing by the year, as game studio after game studio is abandoning their own game engines (and sometimes even Unity) to move to Unreal Engine. Even game studios that have developed their own game engines for decades (such as CD Projekt RED, which has been using their own custom engine in most of their games, including Cyberpunk 2077) are one by one moving to Unreal Engine. The motivation is understandable, of course: Why spend enormous amounts of time, effort and money to develop, optimize and add new features to a custom game engine, when you can get all of that and much more from an existing one? Particularly one that doesn't even cost anything up front! (Indeed, Unreal Engine is free to use by anybody without an up front payment. It's only w...

In the United States (and I believe in a couple of other countries) there's a common practice that feels absolutely incomprehensible and preposterous to most other countries: And that's the phenomenon of delivery companies (and, I believe, even governmental postal services) leaving people's orders and packets near the front door of their home (usually on the porch, or even on the driveway if there's no porch). Yes, completely unattended, for any passerby to steal. Some such delivery companies might ring the bell to see if anybody is home, but others don't even do that. They just leave the package there and go away, without even notifying the residents. This is absolutely incomprehensible and, I believe, actually illegal in most countries: They are legally responsible for people's property until it has been picked up in person by the legal recipient. In most countries such packages need to be either picked up in person, delivered to the recipient in person, or lo...

As I have written many, many times in this blog, I consider myself a free speech absolutist : The fundamental right to free speech is both universal (ie. it applies to everybody regardless of anything) and inalienable (ie. it cannot be removed, restricted or punished regardless of who that person is or what he may have done), and I have always strongly subscribed to the sentiment written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who attributed it to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." And I have always had that attitude: I might disagree with many people, particularly with modern far-leftists, and sometimes I may even find their opinions absolutely repugnant, but I have always had the attitude of defending their fundamental  right  to express those opinions, freely and without punishment. If, for example, some far-leftist was banned from some platform for something heinous that he might have said, I was at least metaphorically ...

When Charlie Kirk was murdered at a speaking event, the immediate reaction by many far-leftists, particularly on certain social media platforms, was completely unsurprising but nothing less disgusting: Posting videos of themselves cheering and celebrating. In one particular example the women says something about knowing that cheering on someone getting murdered is wrong, but then proceeded to do it anyway, very visibly and very provocatively, completely on purpose. These people are literal psychopaths, and they are completely disgusting. They are some of the worst scum of this Earth, and I have so much disgust towards them that it literally makes me want to puke. But of course those are not the only "vultures" encircling Kirk's corpse. Also unsurprisingly, many leftists have taken the opportunity to piss, spit and trample on his grave, at least metaphorically speaking because he's not yet buried. They are making videos smearing him, insulting him, and making all kinds...

Charlie Kirk was a very strong believer in discussion. He believed in, and often expressed the sheer importance of people talking to each other. He believed that differences in opinions should be resolved via peaceful discussion and debate. He often compared the entirety of society to a married couple: What happens when a married couple stops talking to each other? What happens when they stop telling each other what they think and what they feel? What happens when the stop listening to each other? He was a strong believer in not just the universal inalienable right to free speech, but in giving everybody a voice. He didn't try to silence his political opposition. He didn't try to shut them off, or have them go away, or them experiencing negative consequences for their expression of opinion. He didn't try to "cancel" anybody, not even his fiercest opponents. On the contrary, he was always happy to have a civil discussion even with people who hated him and opposed e...

Nathan Oakley is one of the biggest flat-earth activists. He is quite notorious for being, arguably, by far the most obnoxious, smug and condescending of them all. His tone of voice, his manner of speaking, the way he expresses himself, and even his facial expressions all exude smugness and condescension. It's a very smug and hostile tone, and whenever someone doesn't agree with him, very often he resorts to just petty insults and his smugness turns into a very aggressive tone and words. Unsurprisingly, if he is in control of the conversation, eg. if it's happening during an online live stream and he has the capability of muting and kicking out the other person, he's more than happy to do that and he abuses that power very easily and often. Also unsurprisingly, when he isn't in control of the conversation, he always tries the next best alternative, ie. to control it by constantly interrupting and shouting over the other person. He is the epitome of the Dunning-Kruge...

In 2018 several European countries investigated whether so-called "loot boxes" in certain video games, especially ones that are purchased with real money, could be considered a form of gambling and thus would violate the gambling and lottery laws of those countries. The investigations arose primarily because of raising concerns that these "loot boxes" were potentially as addictive as other forms of gambling, especially for younger people, which is particularly bad when real money is involved in the purchase of these boxes. It was noted that they seemed to fulfill the definition of a "lottery" or "raffle" to an extent that falls under the definition and thus restrictions of the gambling/lottery laws: Each "box" is purchased with real money. The contents of the "box" are randomized rather than fixed. The customer does not see the contents of this randomized box prior to purchase. Some of the potential prizes that can be gotten f...

There are quite many YouTube channels that are dedicated to showing "sovereign citizens" being confronted (and often arrested) by cops (most often in traffic stops). One big problem I have seen with many of these channels is that they use the term "sovereign citizen" extremely loosely, slapping that term in the title of almost every single video completely regardless of whether the person depicted in the video presents any actual "sovereign citizen" talking points or not. At worst, that I have seen, is maybe half of the videos of one of these channels having "sovereign citizen" in the title, yet the person being confronted by cops and arrested very clearly does not believe in any of that nonsense. Indeed, it seems to me that these YouTube channels don't really care what the term actually means, and just slap it in the title of the video (and often use it while narrating or commenting in the video itself) almost automatically. They use the ter...

Of course there are multiple such videos, but I recently encountered this one , where a trans activist is interviewed and asked questions about the subject, and the video encapsulates perfectly what they believe and, particularly, how  dogmatically  they believe it even against all evidence of the contrary. For example, the trans activist presents the old tired claim that puberty blockers only "pause" puberty and their effects are fully reversible, that when the blockers are stopped, puberty then resumes and goes through its normal course. When presented with the fact that puberty does not somehow magically just get paused and then continue normally, and instead puberty always stops at about 18 or so regardless of any blockers, and that boys who have been on puberty blockers during all that time end up with a permanent micro-penis, she just denies it, all she has to say is: "They probably want that." (A bit irritatingly the interviewer doesn't press on that, ie....

There's a large segment of the human population that has, for the lack of a better term, an outright "phobia" towards math. Like all phobias, the severity varies a lot. Many of these people have no problems with most basic arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction and multiplication, and may even be quite adept at doing those things in their head (for example, summing up the result of throwing multiple dice). However, any mathematical subject that goes even  slightly  more advanced than the four (or even three!) basic arithmetic operators not only goes beyond their comprehension, but they have an outright aversion towards even trying to understand it. Even something as "advanced" as division, or understanding multiplication by negative numbers, might cause them problems (yes, that happens. I have witnessed it first-hand.) Not to talk about "rocket science" level of advanced mathematics, like elementary algebra! Then there are the more severe cases for ...

For many years now I have written about one of my pet peeves: How the popular math youtuber Matt Parker contracted a "they pronoun fetish" some time in late 2019 and has since then clearly had the mission of trying to force the pronoun "they" as a singular pronoun, by using, overusing and abusing it constantly, even to refer to people whose sex is absolutely unambiguous. (In one particularly egregious and funny video he was chatting with a historian. They were talking about a guy who lived a couple thousand years ago. The historian kept referring to the guy as "he" while, at the same time, Matt kept referring to him as "they". It was really cringe.) Of course, and unsurprisingly, Matt Parker is not the only "they pronoun activist" out there. There are many others, such as this particularly egregious example . However, I have found another big youtuber who beats hands down Matt in the use of the "they" pronoun to refer to one ...

I have written about this very subject several times, but I think it deserves repeating because the problem just continues year after year, with no end in sight. The fact is that Wikipedia is  heavily   politically biased . Wikipedia articles about people and subjects hated by the American far left have almost zero encyclopedic value (and this is not just petty badmouthing, it literally is so) and are nothing but endless lists of irrelevant minutia that act as resources for far-leftist activists to use. In these articles about people or things that the American far-leftists hate, copious amounts of article space, and even the table of contents, will be dedicated to listing irrelevant minor thing after irrelevant minor thing that can be used to attack that person or thing. Unsurprisingly source bias is likewise rampant, with absolutely ridiculously biased far-leftist sources being frequently used, while the vast majority of even major and credible right-wing sources are banned....