What grinds my gears

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....

Tyler James Robinson is the primary suspect for the infamous assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened on September of 2025. He was arrested in that same month. As of writing this, that was 6 months ago. One might ask: How is the lawsuit going? Well, the lawsuit has not even started yet, as of writing this, even after six months. In fact, the first  preliminary hearing  is scheduled to happen two months from now, in the 18th of may. Why is that? Because his lawyers are stalling the entire thing like mad, that's why. They are issuing motions, complaints, objections, arguments, every single possible legal tool at their disposal, to delay the proceedings as much as possible. Every single minor thing they can think of, they are throwing at the legal proceedings to try to stall them as much as possible. That's how they have managed to delay even the first preliminary hearing by 8 months after the arrest. Why? I don't really know. Standard sleazy lawyer tactics, I suppose. ...

While they are a fringe microscopic minority, there are a few American far-leftist zealots who have been brainwashed and fear-mongered so deeply and so completely that they have or are planning to actually leave the United States and move to another country (obviously "to escape fascism"). In the few cases that do this and they do follow-ups on their new lives in those new countries, it almost invariably turns out that those other countries were not the socialist paradises that they thought they would be (and often they are shocked about how expensive and difficult it is to live there, after having lived their entire lives in the US, where everything is relatively speaking cheap and taxes are very low.) There are two rather curious things about these people that I have noticed: 1) Every single example of this that I have seen has the far-leftist move to a rich western country where, most usually, the population demographic is even more white than in the US. This even when the...

A British man in his 50's is at an airport with his wife waiting for their flight to go on vacation, when a whopping six armed police officers show up to arrest him. Was he suspected of some kind of heinous crime? Robbing a store with a knife? Assaulting someone? Beating up people with a baseball bat? Threatening to kill someone or plant a bomb somewhere? Nope. They were there because of a Facebook post he had made. So surely that post must have been something very serious, like threatening to hijack or bomb the plane, or threatening to kill someone, or something like that? Nope. The cops were  suspecting  that the Facebook post was "racist" and "offensive to someone". And the kicker is that he had made that Facebook post something like six months prior, not like a couple days. After six months of the post sitting there the UK cops finally found it and decided to send a whopping six armed police officers to arrest in at an airport while he was waiting for a flig...

A notorious flat-earther, David Weiss, has for quite some time now issued a Kent Hovind style "challenge" for anybody to give him a single proof of a globe Earth, the prize being three bitcoin. What is a "Kent Hovind style challenge", you might ask? It's a type of impossible-to-win challenge that was popularized by the infamous young-Earth creationist Kent Hovind: He offered thousands of dollars for anybody who would give him a proof of the theory of evolution. The problem? Not only has he not given any description of what he would consider valid proof, but more egregiously, Kent Hovind himself is the only and sole judge of whether your proof is valid or not. Thus, it's a very easy and safe "challenge" to give: He can simply reject all proofs given to him (usually just by saying "that's not evolution") and he doesn't have to pay. Because he is the only and sole judge, he is the only person who decides whether he has to pay or not....