What grinds my gears

I started watching the British TV series "Black Mirror" on Netflix, and noticed a curious abundance of black actors in the series. Most (if not all) episodes of the series take place in the UK, so the amount of black people in the series is quite disproportionate to the real demographics of the UK (even to this day, and especially in 2011, when the first season was made.) My problem is not with black people appearing in such a TV show. Of course leftists would never believe me, but I can genuinely say that I'm not some kind of racist who hates black people and doesn't want to see them in movies and TV. Heck, some of my all-time favorite actors are black (and that's because those particular actors are so charismatic and badass .) The problem is not the skin color of the actors, or even their abundance. Heck, I would be completely fine if the entire series had nothing but black actors and nobody else. The problem is that I know  why  there are so many black actors: ...

For some unfathomable reason the citizens of New York City elected one Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. What's peculiar about him, and the very reason why they voted for him, is that he is very openly and blatantly socialist and communist, preaching the virtues of socialism and collectivism , denigrating capitalism, and making all kinds of asinine promises, like free bus rides for everybody, "taxing the rich", lower rent, and so on. New Yorkers got bamboozled by him on many fronts, and some of the frauds were clear even before he got elected, as pointed out by many politicians and experts. Most prominently, he cannot raise taxes on the rich because he is a city mayor, and income tax is decided at the state level (by the New York State Senate in this case), not at the city level. He literally cannot raise those taxes. So that was just an outright lie from the get-go. So what did he do instead? Well, he increased taxes that the city  can  legally raise, and that would be cit...

I have been writing for over 15 years now how American universities are pumping out thousands and thousands of brainwashed drones who have been trained in political activism and who are going to get into all positions of power and take over every institution, every organization, every company, and enforce their insane political activism. Well, what do you know, we are already seeing the results of this, not only in the fact that almost all of the major corporations have been completely invaded (and thus are engaging in a massive amount of illegal racial discrimination), but there are brainwashed drones in all positions of power now, all the way up to the Senate, as well as several city mayors. One of their openly stated goals is "tax the rich". To raise the taxes for the richest people to egregious levels. They appear to live in this illusion that the richest people in the country are somehow stuck in their current place of living. As an example, the mayor of New York, who is...

Did you know that if you are a citizen of the UK and you have purchased anything on Valve's Steam platform, you are probably right at this moment suing Valve? Oh, you didn't know that? This is news to you? Nobody informed you or asked you? Well, turns out that UK laws are absolutely insane. Indeed, there's an ongoing class action lawsuit against Valve, and you are likely one of the litigants even though nobody asked you, or even told you about it. Is this, once again, the UK government being the tyrants that they have demonstrated again and again to be? Surprisingly, no. It's not the UK government. And this is what actually makes it ten times crazier: It's an individual person, named Vicki Shotbolt, who all by herself, as an individual person, has dragged you into a lawsuit against Valve, without asking you, without informing you, without anybody telling you. You can "opt out" of the lawsuit, because nobody has told you, you are likely not even know you ne...

Sometimes even smart people get bamboozled and misled by some conspiracy theories, and that's because those are often presented like outright scams: The people behind the creation of the conspiracy theory, if they are talented enough and know what they are doing, concoct this elaborate picture of something in a way that sounds extremely believable, if the subject matter is new to you. They essentially present a "here are all the facts, you decide" piece of work which has been carefully designed to sound competent, complete and reliable... while in fact it engages in an enormous amount of cherry-picking, selection bias, hiding evidence that contradicts the conspiracy theory (or sometimes even presenting said evidence but distorted in a manner that makes it appear to actually support the conspiracy theory), and outright fabricating "facts" that are not true. Almost nobody is immune to this any more than they are immune to scams in general. Even the smartest and sa...

As I have written before , some time ago Pope Leo XIV condemned the deportation of illegal immigrants from the United States, completely ignoring and disregarding the immigration laws of that country and its right to self-govern and, most importantly and hypocritically, completely ignoring what the Vatican does to people who try to illegally remain within that country. Indeed, the Vatican is an actual internationally officially recognized sovereign nation, an independent country of its own. Not symbolically, not some kind of "country in name only", but an actual literal officially recognized independent country. And the Pope is literally the sovereign, the monarch, of that country, officially, both in the national and international sense. Again, not symbolically, not some kind of "head of state in name only", but literally and officially. The Pope is as much the monarch of the Vatican as Charles III is the King of the United Kingdom, or Emmanuel Macron is the Presid...

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about the youtuber who goes by the nickname TL;DR (which officially expands to "Teal Deer") who many years ago was one of the biggest anti-leftist youtubers, with almost 200 thousand subscribers, and an average view count per video of about 100 thousand views. At some point, maybe about five-or-so years ago, he just decided that YouTube is a "censorious platform" (his own words) that deranks and delists anti-leftist videos, and as some sort of (quite empty) protest and knee-jerk reaction decided to private all of his YouTube videos and move to alternative (and much smaller) video sharing platforms. The huge irony is that, while he got about 100 thousand views per video on average on YouTube, in those alternative platforms he got an average of about 2 thousand views per video. In other words, he cut his own viewership by two orders of magnitude. For all intents and purposes he censored himself, and did it much more effectively tha...