What grinds my gears

And now for something completely different. I played quite a lot of chess in my youth, but then I got bored of it. About ten years ago I started playing again, and found my love of the game rekindled. In the era of the modern internet this is very convenient, as you can very easily play against people from all over the world. However, while that's nice and all, at least for me personally nothing beats playing the game in real life, with a real board, and real people in the same room, with whom to have casual conversation and socialize. It's so much more enjoyable and relaxing when the other person is not just a completely faceless person on the other side of the world, and when you can actually handle the pieces and look at a real board, and there's no time pressure so you can think and play at your own leisure, while having an amicable conversation with your opponent and possibly other people in the room. Hmm... Did I say "relaxing" because "there's no t...

"Nothing new under the Sun" and "history repeats itself" are common sayings, and they turn out to quite often be true. No wonder they have become sayings. The history of medicine has always had huge episodes of malpractice, beliefs based on unfounded assumptions, and horrendous de facto human experiments done on patients, for pretty much as long as medicine has existed. The history of medicine is stock full of beliefs and practices, some of which were quirky and hilarious, other absolutely horrendous stuff of nightmare. One of the more recent examples of this was the practice of lobotomies, which happened for the most part of the 20th century. Considering how horrendous of an operation a lobotomy is, it may be a bit hard to imagine that, instead of it being considered an extremely drastic procedure to be used only as the utmost last resort when nothing else has worked, during the latter half of the 20th century some doctors prescribed them like candy, to "cure...

Sometimes you might encounter some youtube video or other piece of media where some people try to Do The Right Thing for at least one person, by going to a homeless person and giving him a new chance at life. As in not just giving him some pocket money, but going all the way out: Give him a place to stay, find him a job, give him some serious starting money, all so that he can get back on his feet, get his life in order and start a new one where he can sustain himself and stop being poor and homeless. These projects try to show altruism: Helping someone who has fallen to hard times to get back on his feet and get a new chance. Help a homeless person get a home and a job, a stable income, and thus a higher quality of life and a brighter prospect for the future. Helping some poor guy, as a random act of kindness. While these sound really good and commendable, the problem is that they seldom work out in the end, and usually end up failing catastrophically. The main problem with this idea ...

It is quite well known that Disney, as with the rest of the majority of the American entertainment industry (especially Hollywood) has become "woke" since quite many years ago. One of the defining core characteristics of modern "woke culture" is the absolute hatred and disdain of not only white people in general, but consequently anything that can be considered traditionally European, or part of European culture (which is often misnamed as "white culture", even though there's no such thing .) One way in which far-leftist "woke" people show their disdain for European history and culture is to take this history, or parts of this culture such as traditional fables and stories, and distort them in a way that changes or erases white people from them. So-called "race-swapping" is the most common way to do this: Take such a story, and change traditionally white people from it to non-white people. Quite often this is deliberately provocativ...

I have written several blog posts about " inconvenient perpetrators of hate crimes ", where extremely egregious and unambiguously racism-motivated violent physical attacks are being committed almost daily in the United States against minorities, such as Mexicans, Asians and Jewish people, yet these hardly make headline news because the perpetrators of these attacks are inconvenient for the narrative (meaning that they, usually, are either black, or if they are white they are members of antifa.) Sometimes the situation is inconvenient from the opposite direction. In other words, rather than the perpetrators being inconvenient, it's the victims of racist discrimination that are inconvenient, and thus the far-leftist cult and mainstream media don't really know how to approach the situation. The most prominent example of this is the situation that Americans of Asian descent have experienced for like a couple of decades now, especially when it comes to college and univers...

As of writing this, the government of the United Kingdom is spending over 5 million British pounds in order to house foreign nationals who have entered the country illegally. They are being housed in luxury hotels (four-star, in some cases even five-star hotels), expensive motels, immigration centers built for this precise purpose and, in the most egregious cases, even in luxury passenger liner ships. "5 million pounds? You mean in total, or every year?" you might ask. No, not every year. Not even every month. Every single day. That's 150 million pounds a month, 1.8 billion pounds per year. The UK government is quite literally treating illegal immigrants much better than the homeless, and those living under the poverty line. These are people who have entered the country illegally, breaking the laws of the country and trespassing its sovereign borders without permission. And the government is housing these criminals in luxury hotels instead of expelling them or putting th...

Some time ago I watched a youtube video about someone infiltrating an American ultraconservative cult, using hidden cameras. At one point one of the cult members tells about knowing someone whose grandparents had been slaves, but who actually liked that position. It then shows the video creator making an expression to the camera (I think it was filmed afterwards) of the sort of "WTF dude, that's so messed up! That's such a racist thing to say!" I don't know if that story is true or not, but I find it curious that in the modern (western) world there are certain things that you just can't say, even if they were true and factual. Such as, for example, claiming that some American slaves actually liked their position and didn't find it wrong nor oppressive. This kind of claim just irks people in the wrong way, and usually causes a very strong reaction, that of outrage and disgust. I don't know if this type of taboo has a name, but at least at this point I a...