What grinds my gears

I have written about this very thing in the past, but I think it deserves repeating now that the fight against men competing in women's sport is once again in full swing, largely thanks to Trump's executive order related to this. Many girls and women in the United States (and in a few other countries) are once again raising their objections to males competing against them in sports, using their locker rooms and so on. Unfortunately only a microscopic minority of these girls and women dare to speak out. And who can blame them? I certainly don't. In the current political climate if you speak out against it, you are very likely to experience harassment, discrimination, verbal attacks and, in some cases, even outright physical assault. The current American far-leftist ideology has normalized harassment and violence against dissenters, against anybody who criticizes the ideology. A woman might literally get punched in the face for saying that she doesn't want to compete agai...

A 2023 research paper published in the Nature magazine used neural network AI to try to predict, among other things, people's political affiliation based solely on their facial features. The results seem to show that while for men there was very little difference in terms of traditional attractiveness, for women there was a quite clear pattern of more traditionally attractive women being more likely to be conservative right-wing, while less attractive women tend to be left-wing. While the result might be somewhat surprising, it actually makes sense, psychologically. For the most part the self-esteem and confidence of men is rarely tied to their outwards appearance. While, obviously, traditionally attractive fit muscular men tend to be more confident and have a higher self-esteem, among the more "mundane" looking men there's usually less direct correlation, and even "ugly" men can have a pretty high self-esteem, as they don't care much about their appear...

American cops really, really love to ID people. They have an outright ID fetish. Most of them have an extreme "papers, please" attitude. This even though the United States is one of the few countries in this world where the police actually can't demand your ID willy-nilly for whatever reason they want. They need an actual reasonable suspicion of a crime that they can verbalize in order to lawfully demand your ID. Many are suspecting that this is not them just merely being tyrants (because the custom is oddly global, ie. the exact same in the entire huge country regardless of state, city, local customs, local government, local politics, etc.) Many suspect that it's a form of mass surveillance by the federal government (most likely the FBI). The sad thing is that the vast majority of people don't know their rights in the country, and are too intimidated to refuse when cops demand their ID, even when there's literally no lawful reason for them to do so. Sometim...

Billy Mitchell became famous for, allegedly, making a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong in 1982 (as well as several other games), and becoming featured in several events such as some kind of Nintendo award event, as well as the (somewhat controversial) documentary King of Kong that focuses largely on him and his achievements in the 1980's and since. He has also been a regular in many gaming conferences and events as a speaker. He has also become infamous because of quite strong evidence that his scores were not legit, cheated in some manner. Most notably, his scores were removed from the video game high scores platform Twin Galaxies (which for a time was the largest and most reputable such platform, even used as an official source by the Guinness Book of Records.) Even more notably, Mitchell sued Twin Galaxies because of this, which was eventually ended with an out-of-court settlement with agreed compromises (Twin Galaxies restored his scores in some kind of "historic...

Do you know how many people were arrested in Russia last year because of social media posts that they had made? About 600. Do you know how many people were arrested in the United Kingdom last year for the same reason? About 3300. The United Kingdom has literally become more of a totalitarian police state than even Russia. Let that sink in. And mind you, the exact same police who arrest people by the thousands every single year for things they have said online are the same who have too few resources to investigate actual crimes. In many parts of the country the number of solved cases of eg. robbery, burglary, home invasion and car theft is absolutely abysmal (in the low single-digit percentage). In fact, if you call the police because your home was robbed, in many parts of the country there's actually a good chance that the police will not even show up at all! They just take the report by phone, and that's it. They never even bother sending any cops. I wish I was making that up....

For quite a long time I have occasionally stumbled across a YouTube video where the author talks about "carbon dioxide" where, for some reason, he seems to have a hard time pronouncing that pair of words clearly. More particularly, most of these people pronounce it so that it becomes almost indistinguishable from "carbon monoxide". And this is not just one or two people I have seen having this problem. I have encountered at least a dozen or so people on YouTube who seem to have this same pronunciation trouble. And no, it's not that they are confusing the two compounds and saying the latter when they mean the former. It's usually very clear that they know and mean it's "dioxide". In fact, in one video the author was actually talking about both compounds, comparing them, describing how they are different and so on. I am not kidding that several times during the video I had a genuinely hard time telling if the guy was saying "carbon dioxide...

I wrote earlier about the absolutely asinine fact that, in the United States, if the police invades your home in pursuit of a suspect, and causes tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to your property, it's all on you. They will not pay you a single penny. Also, even if your property was insured, insurance companies will usually not pay either. Law enforcement can just cause hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your property, at no fault of your own in any way, and you will be the one who has to pay. Nobody will help you. You just lost all that property, and there's nothing you can do about it. Ok, but what happens if cops damage your property by accident? For example, if they are involved in a car accident that's 100% their fault. Well, what do you know, apparently in this case it's also 100% on you. They will claim immunity, they will not pay you a single penny, and your insurance company will not pay you anything either, citing the c...