What grinds my gears

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....