What grinds my gears

Recently Destin Sandlin, the owner and author of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay (one of the biggest channels of its content category) made a video about the so-called "Johari Window" . Said "window" is a sort of classification about knowledge about oneself, as an individual person, about your personality traits, behavior, customs, beliefs, and other personal characteristics, divided into four categories: Things that you know about yourself which is also known to others. Nothing to hide here. Things that only you know about yourself, which you have never revealed to others, and which others have no way of knowing about you. Things that you don't know about yourself but which others do, as they can see things about you that you yourself don't even notice. In other words, personal characteristics that you are unaware of, but which others have noticed and can see. Things about yourself that you are unaware of and which nobody else knows or has noticed eithe...

For some reason for a couple of years now videos about "owning" video games pop up at semi-regular intervals. And, so far, I have not seen a single one that actually handles the subject correctly. It has become really tiresome to see authors, even those who should know better, talk about the ownership of video games and very explicitly and directly comparing it to ownership of physical objects. Indeed, just recently I saw once again such a video, where the author (who is the kind of educated person who should know better) explicitly made the stereotypical comparison with "imagine if you buy a hammer, and later the manufacturer comes to your home and takes it away." He also explicitly talked about how video games "have become" license-based (or at least attempted to, by the publishers), as if they had not been in the past and this were a new thing that the gaming industry is trying to introduce into the mix. Sigh. The sheer ignorance is so tiresome by this ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently made a post about how they are leaving X/Twitter in favor of other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon and TikTok. They made a long post about their reasoning for it, and it just doesn't make any sense. They talk about how small businesses might use Instagram or someone's "abortion fund" might use TikTok to spread information, or how "you're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community" and a bunch of other weird justifications. None of that makes any sense because they are writing as if using Twitter was somehow mutually exclusive with using all those other platforms. As if, unless they leave Twitter, they can't use those other platforms to communicate with people. Which, of course, is completely asinine. There's absolutely no reason why they can't duplicate their posts an all social media platforms, including Twitter. Posting on Twitter does not somehow exclu...

The title of this blog post is probably not a surprise to anybody, but it's still a horrifying fact of American policing: The vast, vast majority of American police officers have zero or extremely minimal training in how to deal with a citizen having a mental health crisis. This is particularly bad and scary because cops get constantly called to such situations, and thus they go there with no idea how to handle it. And, thus, they usually just handle it like they have been taught to handle dangerous people who are a potential or actual danger to the cops: In other words, with violence and sometimes lethal force. I don't know what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised that, given the size and population of the country, cops are being called to people having a mental health crisis probably several times every day. Given how prevalent this situation is, one would think that they would have extensive special training for it. But no. They don't. Or, at least, extremel...

Flat-earthers tend to have very childish notions about pretty much everything, and how space rockets work is no exception. A 10-year-old child often wonders why space rockets don't go straight up rather than making a curve that ends up with the rocket flying almost horizontally. Wouldn't it be easier to just go straight up? And, of course, flat-earthers can't understand it either because they are at the same intellectual level. Well, I'll try to explain it as simply as possible: Space rockets, even those that end up launching probes or space capsules away from Earth, need to get into low-Earth orbit first. Why? Because getting to space requires an absolutely humongous amount of fuel, and the main rocket booster (the biggest cylinder) and the auxiliary boosters (the slightly smaller cylinders on the sides) have only a limited amount of fuel in order to get to space before running out of fuel. In other words, the big rocket booster does not have enough fuel to go on forev...

A few weeks ago King Charles III of the United Kingdom made several speeches about Ramadan, and even organized events and banquets for Muslim dignitaries explicitly celebrating that festivity. Can you guess how many speeches he has given about Easter, even though such speeches have been a tradition for the British royalty for decades, perhaps even centuries? Zero. Not one single speech. Not even a social media post. Nothing. When it comes to the King of the United Kingdom, this is not just a small thing. He has advisors, he has family members, he has an entire staff organizing every single public appearance, every single speech, helping him with every single decision he makes, and who understand how important each public appearance is, and what kind of signals such public appearances and speeches give to the public and the world at large. Both the King himself and especially his staff are hyper-aware of the signals they are giving when he gives or does not give particular speeches for ...

For something like 20 years now the far left, most prominently in Europe, has been repeating the mantra "diversity is strength", over and over and over. They were saying it 20 years ago, they were saying it 10 years ago, and they are still saying it to this very day, over and over and over, at every possible opportunity. The thing is, and I'm not making this up, during these 20+ years I have never heard, not once, any of them even trying to explain  why  or  how . Not once. They just repeat the mantra as if it were a self-evident fact that doesn't need explanation. It just is, because it is, period. No explanations needed. Recently some Irish TV program interviewed a school teacher about how there are children from multiple nationalities in her class, and how many of them are struggling with even basic understanding of English, and how this requires extra resources to try to teach them to understand and speak English, and how this is a burden to the schooling system. ...

The United States is notable for an almost unique quirk of its (current) laws, which automatically grant citizenship to anybody who is born within the country. This completely regardless of the circumstances of the birth. Indeed, if for example, say, a pregnant Belgian woman just happens to be visiting the United States for a week as a tourist, and she happens to go into labor and give birth when there, the child will be automatically given US citizenship merely because of the location where the child was born, and no other reason.  And, indeed, the United States is probably the only country in the world that has this quirk (or, at a minimum, is one of the extremely few that do.) Pretty much no other country in the world has this, and citizenship is not granted automatically even if you are born in the country. This is the result of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdic...

Several free open-source projects are once again, as of writing this, virtue-signaling for the millionth time with some completely made-up bullshit event, like this: As if "trans" people were not already "visible" enough, given how much they have been pushed to the forefront everywhere by everybody in every single aspect of society. It's all nothing but empty virtue-signaling, political activism and social engineering. What they are saying there is also quite clearly completely made-up. KDE, and all the other open source projects out there, would be completely fine without the self-appointed "trans contributors". This is nothing but empty words placating to an agenda (not even to people, ultimately, but to the political agenda). Also it is extremely clear that the vast, vast majority of those alleged "trans contributors" are not actually transsexual. They just claim to be. A common response to that is "why would anybody lie about it?...

Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician who infamously recently got convicted for "incitement against a group of people" because she is a practicing Christian and she made public comments about homosexuality that are in accordance to conservative Christian beliefs. When I say that she is the victim of a political witch hunt, I'm being 100% serious. I'm not throwing that term lightly, I'm not blowing things out of proportion, I'm not exaggerating. This is because of the process how the conviction came to be. Firstly, after she had made those public comments, a complaint was made to the Finnish police about it. The police made the decision that what she said is fully within her right to free speech and that there is no reason to suspect any criminality, and thus they didn't even start a preliminary investigation (which is the first official step that the police performs when investigating a crime and deciding whether to prosecute.) However, the Prosecutor Gene...

The YouTube channel BantuCityDiaries, who I have mentioned before in another blog post , recently did something that has been  de facto  taboo and verboten in most of the rest of the world, particularly the western world: He want ahead and performed an IQ test in Nigeria to see if older reports on it are actually accurate or not. Turned out that his results match those old reports quite well, and it appears, according to this experiment, that at least in Nigeria the average IQ is extremely low (somewhere around 73, give or take.) Of course in the west this is a taboo subject and such studies must never be conducted and the results and the subject overall must never be discussed, and any results must be categorically denied, excused and rationalized, and cannot be taken at face value. If we approach these results without any prejudice, without any judgment, without any preconceptions, without jumping to any questionable conclusions, just taking them as they are, in a completel...

Earlier I wrote a blog post about " five types of First Amendment auditors ". The first type I listed is the best kind of such auditor: They are always polite and respectful, always try to de-escalate, know and respect all the relevant laws, and never actively confront nor make contact with other people unprompted, and they show respect for government officials and people in general if they likewise show respect for them. The second type I listed is a kind that I don't like very much: They also know the relevant laws and for the most part respect them, but they are always extremely rude and confrontational, provoking people, throwing insults and cursewords, and being extremely disrespectful even when eg. the cops act completely professionally, respectfully and correctly (and don't even do so much as asking for ID). There is, however, a type of First Amendment auditor that sits somewhere in between those two extremes, which can also be considered its own "auditor ...

Some time ago YouTube officially embraced the raise of AI-generated videos. Their official stance was that AI allows people to express themselves and their ideas in video form, something that was previously exclusive only to people with the time, equipment, talent and knowledge on how to create such videos (often a very arduous process that can take days or even weeks of intense work). AI has opened up this possibility for everybody, so anybody can put their ideas and expression in video form without it being exclusive to the few. Yet, to the surprise of nobody, that's not how the vast, vast majority of people are using AI-generated videos. Completely unsurprisingly, well over 90% of all AI-generated videos I have seen on YouTube has been created for the purpose of deception. Fake stories, fake events, fake outrage, trying to be passed as real just for the clicks, with the video authors going their way to try to hide that it's an AI-generated video, a complete fabrication. Only...

I have been writing a few blog posts about the youtuber who goes by the nickname Thunderf00t, who is one of the longest-active youtubers with a significant amount of subscribers, having been there since almost the very beginning of the platform, and still uploading videos semi-regularly. He became originally famous for his science content, particularly his videos debunking scam crowdfunding and other similar projects that promised physically impossible things. Then at some point, he became a notable anti-feminist, one of the first ones on the platform, and a very notorious one. He had a long beef with the part of the world-wide (although primarily American) atheist community that had been completely invaded and taken over by radical far-leftist activists set on aggressively pushing their leftist political agenda onto the atheist community. He still created videos on the topic of science and crowdfunding scams while doing that. However, at some point, for some reason, he suddenly became...

Some years ago law enforcement in the United Kingdom, quite clearly having taken notes from the Chinese government, decided to install surveillance cameras in several cities that had automatic facial recognition software in them, to more easily find criminals. Unsurprisingly, and quite justly, a lot of people raised concerns about the question of privacy issues that this would create, and commented and protested on how this was once again just another step towards a totalitarian surveillance state, just like China. However, turns out that UK citizens had nothing to worry about because, very much unlike in China, in the UK the problem solved itself. Why? Well, consider the ethnicity of the majority of criminals identified by the automatic surveillance system. Do I even need to say more? (Indeed, the British government is now worried about "racial bias" and "racial profiling" that these automated systems are, unsurprisingly, engaging in.)

Nelson Mandela is most famous for being the South African leader who ended Apartheid and became the president of the country for five years. He is, in a way, also somewhat famous in an ancillary way for the so-called "Mandela effect", named after him, and that's the misconception that Mandela was imprisoned and died in prison, when in fact he lived for years after (and became the president of the country). However, that's not the misconception I'm talking about here. The misconception, by far and large more common than "he died in prison", is that he was a pacifist, and that he ended Apertheid and became the president of the country through extreme pacifism. This couldn't be farther from the truth. In actual reality Nelson Mandela was a violent Communist revolutionary who advocated for and associated with other violent revolutionaries, most of them staunch Communists (some of them, in fact, having moved there directly from the Soviet Union). In fact,...

There are many crafts and professions in this world that have two rather different layers to them: The superficial layer that only cares about the end result, and the layer where the professional is passionate about the crafting itself, where the end result is rewarding but not the ultimate source of the passion for the craft (and, moreover, the end result is rewarding  because  of the effort put into it, rather than regardless of it.) For example, to most people a car is just a convenient tool: It's very handy to travel to places and to transport people and stuff from one place to another. They don't really care all that much what happens under the hood as long as it works and gives them what they want. But then there are the car enthusiasts: To them the passion is not just driving the car, but about what happens inside. They might spend hours and hours every day for example fixing an old car, or fine-tuning their existing car. Sometimes they spend more time in the garage tin...

Some years ago I wrote a blog post about the sad fact that, very much unlike far-leftists, when anti-leftists try to promote and fight for some cause, if it doesn't immediately take hold, they just give up and move to something else. Sometimes they might try to fight for the cause for a few years but eventually it will just fade away and they will give up. Sometimes they give up in just mere weeks. (There's a great deal of irony that being independent individualists who think for themselves and are not just brainwashed drones is both a strength and a weakness: It's rather obviously a strength because they are much harder to manipulate and dissuade into destructive behavior. But it's also a weakness in that trying to organize them is like trying to herd cats: They just don't want to follow the crowd, and even if they do show some interest for a little while, they quickly get tired of it if it doesn't seem to produce immediate results, and move to something else....

Tyler James Robinson is the primary suspect for the infamous assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened on September of 2025. He was arrested in that same month. As of writing this, that was 6 months ago. One might ask: How is the lawsuit going? Well, the lawsuit has not even started yet, as of writing this, even after six months. In fact, the first  preliminary hearing  is scheduled to happen two months from now, in the 18th of may. Why is that? Because his lawyers are stalling the entire thing like mad, that's why. They are issuing motions, complaints, objections, arguments, every single possible legal tool at their disposal, to delay the proceedings as much as possible. Every single minor thing they can think of, they are throwing at the legal proceedings to try to stall them as much as possible. That's how they have managed to delay even the first preliminary hearing by 8 months after the arrest. Why? I don't really know. Standard sleazy lawyer tactics, I suppose. ...

While they are a fringe microscopic minority, there are a few American far-leftist zealots who have been brainwashed and fear-mongered so deeply and so completely that they have or are planning to actually leave the United States and move to another country (obviously "to escape fascism"). In the few cases that do this and they do follow-ups on their new lives in those new countries, it almost invariably turns out that those other countries were not the socialist paradises that they thought they would be (and often they are shocked about how expensive and difficult it is to live there, after having lived their entire lives in the US, where everything is relatively speaking cheap and taxes are very low.) There are two rather curious things about these people that I have noticed: 1) Every single example of this that I have seen has the far-leftist move to a rich western country where, most usually, the population demographic is even more white than in the US. This even when the...

A British man in his 50's is at an airport with his wife waiting for their flight to go on vacation, when a whopping six armed police officers show up to arrest him. Was he suspected of some kind of heinous crime? Robbing a store with a knife? Assaulting someone? Beating up people with a baseball bat? Threatening to kill someone or plant a bomb somewhere? Nope. They were there because of a Facebook post he had made. So surely that post must have been something very serious, like threatening to hijack or bomb the plane, or threatening to kill someone, or something like that? Nope. The cops were  suspecting  that the Facebook post was "racist" and "offensive to someone". And the kicker is that he had made that Facebook post something like six months prior, not like a couple days. After six months of the post sitting there the UK cops finally found it and decided to send a whopping six armed police officers to arrest in at an airport while he was waiting for a flig...

A notorious flat-earther, David Weiss, has for quite some time now issued a Kent Hovind style "challenge" for anybody to give him a single proof of a globe Earth, the prize being three bitcoin. What is a "Kent Hovind style challenge", you might ask? It's a type of impossible-to-win challenge that was popularized by the infamous young-Earth creationist Kent Hovind: He offered thousands of dollars for anybody who would give him a proof of the theory of evolution. The problem? Not only has he not given any description of what he would consider valid proof, but more egregiously, Kent Hovind himself is the only and sole judge of whether your proof is valid or not. Thus, it's a very easy and safe "challenge" to give: He can simply reject all proofs given to him (usually just by saying "that's not evolution") and he doesn't have to pay. Because he is the only and sole judge, he is the only person who decides whether he has to pay or not....

Jacinda Ardern was, essentially, "the Justin Trudeau of New Zealand". Indeed, just like Trudeau, she was elected Prime Minister of New Zealand, she is a raging far-leftist lunatic, and she was so incredibly proud and smug about having elected an "incredibly diverse" (her own words) cabinet for the government of the country. Which, of course, mirrors almost exactly Trudeau in Canada. And what do you know, just like Trudeau, she quickly became an absolute tyrant, curtailing freedom of speech, enacting totalitarian measures, and surprise surprise, opening up the borders of the country to almost unrestricted immigration. There was no justification for opening the borders. New Zealand's economy was doing just fine (and, in fact, was one of the richest countries in the world), birth rates were just fine, none of the go-to excuses for opening the borders applied. And what do you know, eg. in 2023 over 225 thousand immigrants were taken into the country. At the same tim...