What grinds my gears

For many decades in the very recent past (as in, even up to the 2000's), and possibly even to this day, there was quite a slavery problem in several Middle-Eastern countries. I don't know if it's still the case today (because the issue has been brought up in international media and light shed on the problem internationally), but for example Qatar had actual bona fide slavery for decades, up to at least the early 2000's, and possibly even to this day. It worked like this: Many factory owners would import workers primarily from sub-Saharan Africa (which makes it extra ironic and blatant), confiscate and keep their travel and identification documents, and keep them working in the factories for inhumanely long hours (usually 12 hours and even more), and sleeping in absolutely deplorable conditions in what usually amounted to little more than warehouses stuffed with beds. Doors of both the factories and the sleeping quarters were almost always kept locked to stop them from l...

There has been a relatively recent trend of alphabet people "fleeing" so-called "red states" in the United States and move to more "blue states", and especially to the city of Seattle, which has been one of the most far-leftist cities in the entire country for over ten years now. They allege "persecution" in states like Texas which, according to them, are eroding their "trans rights". Are they really being persecuted in states like Texas by the government? Are they being jailed, or discriminated against, or in other ways mistreated by the government? Nope. (That's actually impossible because it would very quickly lead to a Federal lawsuit and the Federal government intervening.) Are they perhaps being persecuted, harassed and assaulted by citizens? Not really either. (If they were, you would see it blasted from every single news outlet 24/7. The far-leftist activist journalists would be all over it. Yet, nothing. Pretty much cricket...

With the proliferation of free AI tools that can be used to generate video material (something that, quite sadly, YouTube is still outright supporting and promoting) YouTube has been flooded by such videos. And the thing is, AI tools have become so astonishingly good that they can give the outwards illusion of a high-quality high-production-values video, at least judging from the thumbnail, description and the first few seconds of the video. For the longest time it used to be that that "professional look" required actual work, actual effort, actual talent. Good thumbnail pictures (that are not just a random frame from the video proper) required work and knowledge to produce. The contents of the video itself, if it wasn't just someone talking to the camera, required at least some production values, relatively good camera and filming equipment or, if it was some kind of animation or presentation using eg. vector graphics, clip-art or outright hand-drawn animation, it requir...

Many flat-earthers somehow seem to think that this is such a great "gotcha" question that proves their flat Earth delusion, and which they often present in debates: "Do airplanes need to constantly pitch their nose down to follow the curve of the Earth?" And the answer to that question is a big fat YES! Yes, yes, yes, yes, a thousand times YES! Yes they do! That is the  only  correct answer. There are no "buts". By this point I'm getting sick and tired of the vast majority of debunkers and, incredibly, even some airplane pilots answering something other then a clear unambiguous "yes". Astonishingly, and sadly, some of them, sometimes even some airplane pilots, outright answer with "no", which is just mind-boggling, and goes to show that even experienced professional airline pilots don't know every single detail about their own profession and specialty, even though they really should. I'll explain why I think that misconcepti...

Something quite strange has been happening in the Linux development community over the past few years. It's not one single thing, but a number of things, every one of them bad on its own, but the situation being all the worse because of the sheer number of changes in said community. For almost three decades the Linux development community, especially the Linux kernel development team, have been very careful and conservative in the sense of how they approach the development work and what kind of tools, languages and technologies they adopt for said work. In fact, the Linux kernel itself has had for a couple of decades one of the strictest rules in existence for any major software project in terms of the requirements for its code and accepting patches and updates. Yet, all of this has been radically changing in the span of just a few years. The Linux development community at large, including the Linux kernel development team, for some unfathomable reason has been rushing to adopt eve...

In the UK, not only are cops infamously looking the other way while foreigners are sex-trafficking and raping teenage girls, not only is there a clear two-tier policing system where the population is divided into two very distinctive tiers based on ethnicity, with one being policed much more leniently than the other, and not only are the cops making Gestapo-style raids on people's homes because of posting mean words online, but now the cops will even be complicit in your murder if you happen to be of the wrong ethnicity. Not some kind of figurative or metaphorical "murder", but  literal  murder. Indeed, recently a Sikh man, who is on the privileged tier of people who are allowed to carry knives around even though the rest of the population aren't, stabbed an English man. When the cops arrived, the Sikh man alleged "racism", and even though the English man was clearly bleeding from his upper body and was in clear distress and saying that he couldn't breat...

I previously wrote about the motte-and-bailey fallacy , and how feminism, particularly 10+ years ago, was rife with it. And one of the most perfect examples is: If you criticize feminism and its excesses and abuses, the standard reply (particularly back then) was: "So you don't support women's rights?" In other words, with an accepting audience "feminism" has a huge amount of tenets, dogmas, ideologies, agendas and goals, many of them rather destructive ones (ie. the "bailey"), but when criticized feminists would retreat to the "motte" with "oh, so you don't support women's rights? Feminism is just about women's rights and nothing else." Here's another perfect example: Abortion. The modern western world has been by far and large socially engineered and brainwashed into supporting abortion no matter what, no matter the circumstances. Heck, a lot of people think it's "a basic human right", believe it ...

A lot of terms that originally had, and in fact even today have, a particular meaning often get misunderstood and used incorrectly, with the incorrect meaning in a context that doesn't fit. One that's gets misused a lot nowadays is "gaslighting". Curiously, in my experience it gets misunderstood and misused by all sides, not just the far left (which loves misusing words and change their meaning to suit their agenda.) A lot of people seem to think that "gaslighting" is synonymous with "deceiving", in other words, making someone believe something that's not true, to have them have an incorrect belief about something. While "gaslighting" is a  form  of deception, of making someone believe a falsity, it's not the generic term for it, nor a synonym for it. It's a very  specific  form of such deception. In particular, "gaslighting" is making someone doubt his or her own memories about something, with the end goal of having...

Christopher Nolan is one of the most famous film directors in the world, up there with the greatest and most famous of them. He is best known for highly successful movies such as Memento , The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception , Interstellar and Oppenheimer . While his writing/directing style might not be exactly as recognizable and unique as eg. that of Quentin Tarantino, it's still quite much so, and he is famous for it (a style that he most clearly demonstrates in Inception and Interstellar .) In the context of this post and his most recent upcoming movie, his previous movie,  Oppenheimer , is quite notable: It's a historic docudrama that depicts the eponymous historic person and the development of the atomic bomb as historically accurately as possible, with only very slight deviations from actual historic events for the sake of drama. The movie prides itself for its historic accuracy, and isn't pushing any political agendas or sugar-coating anything. It is, thus, incomp...

There are not enough words in the English language to describe how absolutely despicable and abhorrent of a grifter Anita Sarkeesian is. Over ten years ago she knew nothing about video games and, in her own words, actually hated video games, but only nominally entered the gaming sphere for one purpose, and one purpose only: To invade the entirety of the video game development industry and to change it to become a propaganda piece for her far-leftist "feminist" "progressive" agenda. And she is still at it, to this day, as has been seen numerous times. For some unfathomable reason she is being used as a consultant by many video game developers, she is giving private lectures to said developers (some of these videos have been leaked online) and she is engaging in all kinds of activism. If you are a gamer, she despises you. If you oppose or criticize what she's trying to do, you are an "asshole" according to her (yes, her own literal words.) According to h...

I have written about the American "sovereign citizens" several times (although they don't call themselves that anymore because of the bad reputation and the FBI having declared them domestic terrorists, but their beliefs and conspiracy theory remain exactly the same to this day), and how the conspiracy theory that they believe in is absolutely enormous and explaining it full detail would require an entire thick book or a 4-hour-long documentary video. However, here's a summary of one part of this conspiracy theory that's relevant to the question in the title of this post: The American "sovereign citizen" conspiracy theory asserts and believes that the United States government is, secretly behind the scenes, behind the public facade, a private corporation, which operates like a private corporation, and which considers citizens to be "abstract corporate entities", each with their own super-secret bank account worth billions of dollars (in which b...

As I wrote in a previous blog post , the recently published video game "Mixtape" has been raising some eyebrows because something like a whopping twenty professional video game journals have been giving it review scores of 10's and 9's out of 10, many of them (such as IGN) calling it a "masterpiece" and a "game of the year candidate". This has raised many eyebrows for several reasons: Almost no video game in existence has received this many perfect and almost-perfect scores from 20+ professional reviewers. The game was made by some extremely obscure "indie" game studio with no fame at all, prior to this. The game is complete crap. It's a 3-hours-long game that's nothing but cutscenes occasionally being interrupted by a walking simulator with occasional minigames that have no failure conditions of any kind. In other words, you can't fail and there is literally zero challenge to the game. On top of that, the cell-shaded graphics...

There are many far-leftist activists, mostly women, who constantly express the idea that society would be better if there were no men at all, and they dream of some place, like a city or an entire state, where men are not allowed and thus there would only be women. One of the main problems they have is that not only are they deluded by their politics, but they are completely uneducated, they have done zero research on anything, and they just don't think. They just don't understand how society works. And by that I mean: They don't understand how society keeps running. What makes it work rather than completely collapse. They never stop to think what exactly keeps electricity coming from wall sockets, what keeps water coming from faucets, what keeps sewers working, where food comes from, how is that food produced and how it gets to stores, how other items are produced and how they got to stores, how roads, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure are maintained so that they...

"Mixtape" is a recently published game that about twenty professional game journals have given a 10 or a 9 out of 10, many declaring it a "masterpiece" and a strong "game of the year candidate". So clearly it rivals previous industry-changing masterpieces like Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild and other similar epic scale games? Nope. This is shell-shaded game with extremely choppy animation (that's supposedly "artsy") and pretty much no gameplay at all (raising the question of whether it can be called a "game" at all), where there are only three things you can do: Walk around, click on things to get some textboxes, and occasionally play some minigames that cannot fail, ie. they have no losing conditions at all. And that's in between lengthy non-interactive cutscenes. And the length of the game? About 3 hours.  And that's not just hearsay, or badmouthing, or something that critics of the game are saying. That's literally wh...

If you search for the richest people who ever existed, some such lists will have one "Mansa Musa" at the top, some kind of king of western Africa from the 1300's. How rich was he? How much wealth did he have? We don't know. Nor do these lists tell how much it was. So how do we know he was the richest person who ever existed? We don't. He just is, because he is, period. Sure, we don't know how much wealth he had, but he's still the richest person who ever existed. Because. I'm not even kidding. Historians, and of course Wikipedia , have a very detailed account of his life and acts. These are recounted in great detail and with conviction, as if they were very well known and certain indisputable historical facts. These include the historical "fact" that he once traveled from western Africa across the Saharan desert all the way to Egypt with several tens of thousands of people and innumerable amounts of gold, and freely distributed this gold ther...

The FBI some time ago officially declared the so-called "sovereign citizen" movement a terrorist organization. This is based on about a dozen or so incidents where "sovereign citizens" engaged in a deathly shootout with police officers that have happened during the last 30-or-so years (these shootouts very directly, clearly and unambiguously having been motivated by their belief system.) Note that there are thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people in the United States who subscribe to the sovereign citizen conspiracy theory and belief system. Compared to the number of believers, the amount of deadly altercations caused by the belief system is abysmally low. Probably less than 0.1% of all the sovereign citizen believers have ever engaged in a violent altercation with anybody, much less the police. Yet, those dozen-or-so incidents still have justified the FBI to declare the entire movement as a terrorist one. Now compare and contrast that to the far-leftis...

There's currently a citizens' petition going on in Finland asking the parliament to officially add a third option for gender in all official documents. I heavily oppose this petition and really wish it will either not gather enough signatures, or be rejected. Leftists could ask: "Why? Why do you care? It doesn't affect you." I care because I know it  will  affect me eventually. I have seen it happening in country after country: The UK, Germany, Canada, several other countries. Once the far-leftist cult gets a foothold on the government and starts enacting laws, it's going to be a slippery slope. This is  not  just the "slippery slope fallacy" because we already have several examples of what this causes. I care because I don't want a few years from now the cops kicking down my door, taking me to jail and confiscating my computers because of things I have said online. Because that's what always happens. It starts "innocently" with the...

Rather obviously this was extremely easy to predict already over 10 years ago, in other words, that the open source development community, particularly everything involving Linux, would be invaded, taken over and completely radicalized by far-leftism and far-leftist activists. But while this was always an extremely easy prediction to make, it's still sad to see it happen before own very eyes. The invasion was quite slow, quiet and "under the radar" for over a decade, but in the past year or so it has been put in full gear, and they are not holding back anymore. Project after project has become openly, blatantly and brazenly radicalized, with the most radical views and actions. For example, the organization that's primarily in charge of the development of the X.org software and its attempted "successor" Wayland software, has for a couple of years now been on a very active and aggressive quest to completely kill the former and replace it with the latter (their...

We are witnessing history in the making in the United States, and worldwide, because never before in the entire history of humanity has there ever, ever been in any country that has ever existed, constant country-wide violent daily protests for about 10 years now, non-stop, without fail. During some days the protests might be somewhat fewer and somewhat less violent and disruptive, but it's safe to say that during the past 10 or so years there has not been a single day, not one, when there was not a single far-leftist protest somewhere in the country. And the vast, vast majority of the time it has been at a minimum in several dozens of places. In fact, some cities have seen periods of literally  months  of constant non-stop violent protests, every single day without fail (usually with the blessings of the city government.)  Before this, the left in the United States, ie. the people who vote for the Democratic Party, have been brainwashed and radicalized for about a decade...

Ask any American lawyer, and he will tell you that you should never, ever voluntarily consent to cops searching your car. If they ask you, you must always clearly state "I do not consent to any searches". A Floridan man had clearly not gotten that memo and some time ago found out the hard way why that's a good idea. Cops stopped him for "window tints", ordered him out of the car, put him in handcuffs (which is already legally questionable) and asked if they could search his car. The man, knowing that there was absolutely nothing illegal in his car, was naive enough to consent. He probably thought that the traffic stop would go easier if he just consented. A lawyer would have told him a huge categorical "NO!" but alas, not many people know this. There was indeed nothing illegal in his car, but what followed was a year-long nightmare for him that not only had a big psychological toll on him, but cost who knows how much money. The cops found some prescrip...

As I have written before , flat-earthers cognitively live in a very strange world. A world that's effectively like the Bronze Age with modern technology inserted into it. In other words, a world where yes, maybe we have some technology, but we still have no idea how the universe works, we know very little about physics, astronomy or the world itself, we have no idea what's beyond the visible sky, and most of what we do is nothing but guesswork and religious beliefs. They seem to think that all scientists are nothing but cult members who blindly believe what they are told and never question anything, and who most certainly don't know what's going on in the universe, or what the shape of the Earth even is. And, somehow, this cult spans the entire of the Earth, all countries, all the hundreds of thousands if not outright millions of scientists, all of whom unanimously agree on the same belief system without question, without skepticism, without corroboration, completely bl...

In this era of global easily accessible internet, of digital distribution platforms, of online discussion forums, of social media, of huge video sharing distribution platforms where anybody can upload their videos for millions of people to see, traditional video game journalism is completely obsolete. It has been for at least 10 years now, even longer. But that's not the worst of it. It's not merely that the profession has been long obsolete and unnecessary. The worst of it is that, like so many other professions and industries, it has been almost completely taken over by far-leftist activist zealots, most of who are not even gamers by any measurable way or definition of that term. Video game journalism has since long become yet another platform for political activism, and more damningly, for political activism that has absolutely nothing to do with video games and, on the contrary, is most often fighting  against  gamers, not  for  them. Indeed, modern video game jo...

Rust is a programming language introduced a couple of decades ago. From a programming language design point of view it's relatively unremarkable, even ugly, lacks quite many features that most other programming languages have (such as inheritance), uses horrendous naming schemes especially for its standard library, and is not very different from the literally hundreds and hundreds of similar languages that have been  invented in the past 40 years. However, if you were to listen to the Rust cult, it's the Second Coming of Christ. And the strangest thing is that a lot of program development companies and communities are rushing to replace everything they have with Rust code, for no discernible reason. It's literally like a religion. There was, for example, a recent speech given at a conference related to a large open source software project (I think it was related to Wayland, or Ubuntu, or something like that), where the presenter sounded more like a preacher than a programme...