What grinds my gears

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...

As I have written before , the amount of racial discrimination in large American tech companies is just astonishing. According to recent statistics that examined the top 500 tech companies in the United States, only 6% of all new hires were white people, even though they account for over 80% of the population. That's an absolutely egregious amount of discrimination based only and solely on people's race. It's precisely the kind of racial discrimination that's highly illegal even in the United States. Several leaks from IBM have showed that company being particularly egregious about this, as they engage in blatant and direct racial discrimination in hiring. Leaks have shown that the company withholds bonuses from executives who fail to meet race-based hiring quotas, and even fires people who refuse to discriminate in hiring based on race. There have also been other leaks about discriminatory practice and "DEI" indoctrination within the company.  Because of thes...

Consider this analogy: A tribe of a couple hundred people live in isolation, their level of technology being that of the Stone Age: They live in straw huts, every day they hunt and gather for survival, and that's it. Their most advanced technology is some wooden spear sharpened with a rock. The entire tribe regularly suffers from famine because there's so little to hunt and gather, and overall their living conditions are very poor. Then two of them put their heads together and start thinking about how they could make their own lives better. They start thinking, they start tinkering, they start developing, they start testing and experimenting. After years of this kind of work they start to slowly developing for themselves a farm where they cultivate plants and raise domesticated animals. They develop tools for this purpose, they develop better buildings and better infrastructure. It takes years and years, and it's a lot of work, but over time it starts paying off: Their cult...

Recently Destin Sandlin, the owner and author of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay (one of the biggest channels of its content category) made a video about the so-called "Johari Window" . Said "window" is a sort of classification about knowledge about oneself, as an individual person, about your personality traits, behavior, customs, beliefs, and other personal characteristics, divided into four categories: Things that you know about yourself which is also known to others. Nothing to hide here. Things that only you know about yourself, which you have never revealed to others, and which others have no way of knowing about you. Things that you don't know about yourself but which others do, as they can see things about you that you yourself don't even notice. In other words, personal characteristics that you are unaware of, but which others have noticed and can see. Things about yourself that you are unaware of and which nobody else knows or has noticed eithe...

For some reason for a couple of years now videos about "owning" video games pop up at semi-regular intervals. And, so far, I have not seen a single one that actually handles the subject correctly. It has become really tiresome to see authors, even those who should know better, talk about the ownership of video games and very explicitly and directly comparing it to ownership of physical objects. Indeed, just recently I saw once again such a video, where the author (who is the kind of educated person who should know better) explicitly made the stereotypical comparison with "imagine if you buy a hammer, and later the manufacturer comes to your home and takes it away." He also explicitly talked about how video games "have become" license-based (or at least attempted to, by the publishers), as if they had not been in the past and this were a new thing that the gaming industry is trying to introduce into the mix. Sigh. The sheer ignorance is so tiresome by this ...