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 ...