What grinds my gears

A few weeks ago King Charles III of the United Kingdom made several speeches about Ramadan, and even organized events and banquets for Muslim dignitaries explicitly celebrating that festivity. Can you guess how many speeches he has given about Easter, even though such speeches have been a tradition for the British royalty for decades, perhaps even centuries? Zero. Not one single speech. Not even a social media post. Nothing. When it comes to the King of the United Kingdom, this is not just a small thing. He has advisors, he has family members, he has an entire staff organizing every single public appearance, every single speech, helping him with every single decision he makes, and who understand how important each public appearance is, and what kind of signals such public appearances and speeches give to the public and the world at large. Both the King himself and especially his staff are hyper-aware of the signals they are giving when he gives or does not give particular speeches for ...

For something like 20 years now the far left, most prominently in Europe, has been repeating the mantra "diversity is strength", over and over and over. They were saying it 20 years ago, they were saying it 10 years ago, and they are still saying it to this very day, over and over and over, at every possible opportunity. The thing is, and I'm not making this up, during these 20+ years I have never heard, not once, any of them even trying to explain  why  or  how . Not once. They just repeat the mantra as if it were a self-evident fact that doesn't need explanation. It just is, because it is, period. No explanations needed. Recently some Irish TV program interviewed a school teacher about how there are children from multiple nationalities in her class, and how many of them are struggling with even basic understanding of English, and how this requires extra resources to try to teach them to understand and speak English, and how this is a burden to the schooling system. ...

The United States is notable for an almost unique quirk of its (current) laws, which automatically grant citizenship to anybody who is born within the country. This completely regardless of the circumstances of the birth. Indeed, if for example, say, a pregnant Belgian woman just happens to be visiting the United States for a week as a tourist, and she happens to go into labor and give birth when there, the child will be automatically given US citizenship merely because of the location where the child was born, and no other reason.  And, indeed, the United States is probably the only country in the world that has this quirk (or, at a minimum, is one of the extremely few that do.) Pretty much no other country in the world has this, and citizenship is not granted automatically even if you are born in the country. This is the result of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdic...

Several free open-source projects are once again, as of writing this, virtue-signaling for the millionth time with some completely made-up bullshit event, like this: As if "trans" people were not already "visible" enough, given how much they have been pushed to the forefront everywhere by everybody in every single aspect of society. It's all nothing but empty virtue-signaling, political activism and social engineering. What they are saying there is also quite clearly completely made-up. KDE, and all the other open source projects out there, would be completely fine without the self-appointed "trans contributors". This is nothing but empty words placating to an agenda (not even to people, ultimately, but to the political agenda). Also it is extremely clear that the vast, vast majority of those alleged "trans contributors" are not actually transsexual. They just claim to be. A common response to that is "why would anybody lie about it?...

Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician who infamously recently got convicted for "incitement against a group of people" because she is a practicing Christian and she made public comments about homosexuality that are in accordance to conservative Christian beliefs. When I say that she is the victim of a political witch hunt, I'm being 100% serious. I'm not throwing that term lightly, I'm not blowing things out of proportion, I'm not exaggerating. This is because of the process how the conviction came to be. Firstly, after she had made those public comments, a complaint was made to the Finnish police about it. The police made the decision that what she said is fully within her right to free speech and that there is no reason to suspect any criminality, and thus they didn't even start a preliminary investigation (which is the first official step that the police performs when investigating a crime and deciding whether to prosecute.) However, the Prosecutor Gene...

The YouTube channel BantuCityDiaries, who I have mentioned before in another blog post , recently did something that has been  de facto  taboo and verboten in most of the rest of the world, particularly the western world: He want ahead and performed an IQ test in Nigeria to see if older reports on it are actually accurate or not. Turned out that his results match those old reports quite well, and it appears, according to this experiment, that at least in Nigeria the average IQ is extremely low (somewhere around 73, give or take.) Of course in the west this is a taboo subject and such studies must never be conducted and the results and the subject overall must never be discussed, and any results must be categorically denied, excused and rationalized, and cannot be taken at face value. If we approach these results without any prejudice, without any judgment, without any preconceptions, without jumping to any questionable conclusions, just taking them as they are, in a completel...

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 ...