What grinds my gears

This is another example of good intentions paving the road to hell. In the United States in particular, for decades and decades the United States Forest Service, as well as other such institutions, had organized an ever-more massive campaign to combat forest fires. Forest fires were a completely irredeemable natural disaster with no positive qualities of any kind, and all possible measures must be taken to prevent and combat them, at all costs. These campaigns worked in large part. And they had disastrous side effects. Highly ironically, all these preventive and extinguishing measures, rather than saving forests and their natural habitats and ecosystems, ended up pretty much destroying them. You might wonder how. Did these people inadvertently pollute the environment, poison it, or do something else that ended up destroying the ecosystems? No. It's nothing like that. The reason was, again highly ironically, the lack of forest fires. According to tree ring research, forest...

A country, or a state, is a sovereign autonomy when it completely self-governs, ie. it decides on its own rules and laws, and enforces these rules and laws, independently, and there is no external higher authority that could overrule or impose its own laws onto the country and its government. Sovereign autonomy is an extraordinarily important concept in world politics and international relationships, and is taken extremely seriously. For example, if the military forces of one sovereign country, without permission, cross the internationally recognized borders of another sovereign country and enter the region governed by that country, this will almost invariably cause a political incident. Even if it's just a military plane entering the airspace of another country, without permission nor announcement, by just a few hundred meters, for less than a minute, it will cause an incident. At a very minimum, the government of the country whose airspace was breached will contact the governme...

Feminist Frequency is the "non-profit" (legally speaking, at least) organization created by the infamous Anita Sarkeesian, who has become a millionaire by attacking video games and playing the victim. And man, does that organization love to e-beg. If you go to their website (which I'm not going to link to, because I don't want any extra traffic to them), as of writing this, you are greeted with a splash page begging for a donation. That's how on-your-face they are about it. The splash page doesn't even explain what the organization is about; it just begs for money. This is part of their "2nd annual feminist frequency spring campaign", a generic fundraising campaign for their activities. As is so typical with modern crowdfunding projects, they are offering milestone targets, ie. when the donations reach a certain amount of money, they will do something special for the donors. And, as is so common with scammy crowdfunding projects, these mileston...

YouTube demonetizes videos left and right, often for no rhyme or reason. (In fact, some people have tested what happens if they upload the exact same video on their respective channels, and have confirmed that sometimes one of them will get demonetized while the other doesn't, which goes to show that demonetization is not always about the content of the video itself, but something else.) Likewise YouTube seems to love penalizing channels for "community guideline violations", and distributes penalties like candy. Usually if a channel gets three such strikes, it's terminated automatically. Sometimes it's terminated sooner. YouTubers who experience this always seem to have the same issues with the system: Firstly, usually YouTube doesn't give the channel owner a chance to correct the problem before his channel gets taken down. There is no "you have 24 hours to remove the offending content or else" messages, or anything of the sort. Secondly, and...

On October of last year I wrote how Brexit is probably not going to happen . Even though the vote happened in 2016, the British politicians have come up with excuse after excuse, and delay after delay, to postpone it. The latest back then was that it was delayed up to 2021. I predicted that it wouldn't stop there, and the delays would just continue. Well, what do you know, Theresa May didn't even want to wait for the 2021 deadline, and is already now, in 2018, suggesting yet another delay, up to 2023 . Does anybody seriously believe anymore that it's going to stop there? I guarantee with 100% certainty that if Brexit hasn't been repealed in the next couple of years, they will just extend the delay even further. The only way that Brexit is going to happen is if the EU itself forcefully kicks the UK out, or if the EU completely collapses. (The latter is much more probable than the former, but might not happen very soon, yet.) Anybody who believes otherwise is just bei...

I wrote in a previous blog post how the modern regressive leftist social justice ideology is a supremacist movement that seeks to control every aspect of society and exert power over people and their behavior. If you start observing everything that they do, say and demand, the vast majority of it as about controlling people. Here are some examples of this: Quite many years ago somebody somewhere (I actually have no idea who or where) in the social justice circles came up with the idea that clapping can be "triggering" (zero evidence given, but obviously that doesn't matter), and instead social justice warriors should do finger snapping instead. As if that were somehow better. That's why you see them so often acting like morons doing that. From the outside it looks (and certainly is) completely ridiculous and retarded, but from the inside it makes sense: It's behavior control. People are being reprimanded for normal traditional behavior, and forced into a diffe...

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist who has been extremely critical of Islam, the islamization of the United Kingdom, and the policies of the government. Needless to say, since in the United Kingdom you can get arrested and fined or even jailed for merely criticizing immigration on social media, And Robinson's actions go well beyond just that, the state has for years engaged in the most astonishing persecution imaginable. For years he and his family has been constantly harassed by the police, often with zero cause. The police will regularly go to his home, and sometimes to the homes of his family members, to grill them, often even without any concrete reason to do so. He has been harassed by the police for simply dining at a restaurant with his family minding his own business, and driven out of town, again without any concrete reason. He is banned from being at many parts of London. He has been sent to jail several times, and deliberately put in the same block as convi...

In many countries all over Europe and America, but especially in the United States, there have been for two or three decades now a constant and ever-increasing push to encourage women to go to higher education institutions. Special programs and campaigns starting from grade schools, women-only scholarships, women-only courses and services... you name it. As time has passed, this has only escalated more and more, up to the point of outright gender discrimination by many institutions. Looking at all these programs and campaigns one easily gets the impression that women are still a minority in higher education and in people getting higher degrees. What none of these advocates ever make any noise about, however, are the actual numbers. In the United States, currently, about 52 percent of college students are women, and women earn about 25 percent more bachelor degrees than men. The push to get women into college has worked... but it's not stopping. Gender discrimination favoring wo...

As I wrote in a previous blog post , for years and years activists in the United States have promoted the use of police body cameras, the idea being, of course, that this way police officers will be caught and held responsible for any wrongdoing, abuse, discriminatory practices or crimes they commit while on duty, especially racially motivated crimes against black people. Ironically, rather than oppose this idea, most police officers in the country actually support the idea. To protect themselves! And now case after case is coming up of people claiming discrimination, abuse and misconduct from police officers, only for the body cam footage to show the accusations to be completely false and fabricated, and completely exonerate the officer (and land the accuser into trouble for false allegations and abuse of the legal system). The more widespread police body cameras are becoming, the more frequent these cases seem to be. Of course now the same people who promoted the adoption of body...

By its simplest possible definition, native advertising is producing an advert for a commercial product or service and publishing in a medium in such a manner that its form factor is very similar, or identical, to what the non-advertising content of that medium typically looks like. For example (and traditionally by far the most typical example), if the medium is a newspaper, the ad would look like a typical non-advertisement article or story that said newspaper is full of. At a quick glance it's impossible to tell the difference between a serious article and the ad. A more "honest" such advertisement will make in its content quite clear that it's not actually a news article but a product or service ad, which has just been formatted to look like all the other articles published in that newspaper. More devious and misleading examples will, however, be worded in such a way that they actually sound like a serious article, especially at first. The level of disclosure...

I have written previously how easy it's to steal people's ad revenue in YouTube , pretty much with complete impunity, and how YouTube helps big corporations steal people's intellectual property . Here's another way in which the YouTube copyright system is broken: Suppose you make a 15-minute video full of original content created by you, but also where, here and there, you use short clips from movies, TV series, music videos, or other type of content. These might be something like 2-3 second clips, and there might be 20 of them, from different completely unrelated shows. One of the corporations owning one of those original works may well copyright-strike your entire video, and take all of its ad revenue for itself. Yes, even though the video also contains material owned by other corporations, which may not be in any way affiliated with this one. So yes, because your 15-minute video, with 14-or-so minutes of completely original content, contains a 3-second clip o...

In the past ten or so years it has become more and more common for police officers in the United States to not only have dash cams recording every incident, but in an increasing manner also body cams, so the video footage will show exactly what the police is seeing, hearing and saying. There are many reasons why they are becoming more and more prevalent, but one of the reasons that many people, especially Americans, think is that this helps curtail abuse by the police, as police officers wearing these cameras will now be unable to lie in order to cover their abuse and criminal behavior. Ironically, many police officers actually welcome this, and wear body cameras happily. This is because, once again quite ironically, the body cameras actually help the police officers themselves against false accusations, rather than catching the police officer himself committing a crime or abuse. Example after example has surfaced where a police officer has been accused of abuse, racism, discrimi...

I have spent copious amounts of time and blog posts criticizing the regressive left and its totalitarian ideology. I suppose it's only fair that I sometimes present some criticism of right-wing (ie. "conservative") politics, especially when it comes to American conservatism. Because of the antics of the extreme left, especially in the United States, American conservatism has become more and more trendy. Essentially, the left is pushing "centrist" and mostly neutral people towards the right, towards the conservative side. After all, due to the madness that has infected the extreme left, and is spreading to all of society, in a twist of irony the political right, the conservatives, are now the side that are advocating for what the left was once known for: Human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, individualism, and so on. When one side of the political spectrum is saying "freedom of speech is conditional, we should ban,...

Consider online streaming services like YouTube and Twitch.tv. Not only can you watch an endless stream (pun intended) of video material from them, but in fact you can upload and stream your own content. All this for the low, low price of... absolutely nothing. These services do not charge you anything. Consider how incredible expensive a service like YouTube and Twitch.tv is. For example Google has an astonishing amount of expensive hardware all over the world, just in order to provide this service. Their server rooms are absolutely enormous. And the required internet bandwidth for the staggering amount of data needed for this amount of video streaming isn't exact cheap either (it's not like major internet service providers are going to give all this bandwidth to Google for free). Of course this isn't the only free service that big corporations are offering. Wikis, email services, blogging services (this very blog you are reading right now is completely free to use), r...

I wrote earlier a blog post about some simple arguments that can be presented to flat-earthers , especially if in person, and you have a "flat earth map" at hand. From those arguments, the one I called the "solstice argument" (ie. the one which would require the illumination pattern of the Sun to have an odd kidney-shape) can actually be presented without an actual map, if you approach it properly. I have recently been trying to have this conversation with YouTube flat-earthers. (Of course it's hard to know how many of them are just clever trolls or people parodying flat-earthers, Poe's Law is in full effect here, but perhaps some of them are the genuine things.) I'm doing it using the following approach: I start by writing a comment on the video that goes like this: "May I ask you a series of questions? I will start with one question, and follow it up with subsequent questions. I'm doing this so that we can make sure that we agree on ever...

New York City has become a bit of a laughing stock because they officially recognize 31 gender identities. This is not just a rumor, or some spurious fake news invented by someone: You can check it on their official website . The pamphlet repeats the modern social justice ideology point that gender is "assigned at birth", as if the doctors just decided on their own, at a whim, to assign gender to people, who are then stuck with it. No, gender is not "assigned at birth". It's assigned at conception. And not by people. By biology. By how cells and chromosomes interact with each other. What the doctor does at birth is an observation , not an assignment. And this observation is not completely unnecessary and inconsequential: Many health issues are different for boys and girls, because of their biological differences, and it's important to know this in order to better assess the source of some medical problems that may arise and need to be investigated and...

Touch-screen based smartphones are ubiquitous in the modern world, and can be really useful (especially since along the hardware technology also service providers have lowered their prices by orders of magnitude, making it affordable for anybody). When Apple, and soon after most other phone manufacturers opened up their platforms for digital distribution of apps and games, this caused an explosion in possibilities. The number of such programs available in the different smartphone stores can be counted in the hundreds of thousands, at minimum. This had another, perhaps at first a bit unforeseen consequence: Firstly, smartphone apps and games became extraordinarily cheap. The average purchase price for such a program very quickly dropped to the 1-2 dollar range (where in the desktop world a completely equivalent program would cost several tens of dollars, sometimes even hundreds). Developers started competing with each other with how cheap they would offer their products. The logical e...

Regressive leftist anti-Trump protests have become essentially a daily occurrence in the United States, and this has been going on, non-stop, for a year and a half. I don't know if it has been happening every single day for that entire timespan, but I wouldn't actually be surprised. One would think that these people would have better things to do than to roam the streets every single day, for years on end. That they would have actual lives to live, schools to attend, jobs to do, families to be with. A few weeks, maybe even a couple of months? Maybe. But a year and a half? And they don't seem to have any intention of stopping. They are, essentially, ruining their own lives fighting against windmills. One would think that by this point they would have got bored of it, especially since Trump hasn't turned the country into Nazi Germany v2, he hasn't established concentration camps, there is no mass deportation of dark-skinned people, and pretty much nothing of that...

California is arguably the most "progressive" state in the entirety of the United States. Not only is it the state that most loudly and prominently exalts the virtues of the social justice ideology, at all levels, but has also legislated more social justice laws than any other state. In fact, it has done more than that. Much more. More than even Sweden itself. For example, in order to combat the "stigma" surrounding HIV (I don't really understand why this is a "stigma" that needs to be combated, but that's how the social justice ideology in California works), deliberately and knowingly infecting people with HIV, without telling them, is not a felony anymore, just a misdemeanor. Moreover, deliberately and knowingly donating blood while HIV-positive, without telling about it, has been decriminalized. That's right. What pretty much effectively accounts to murdering someone by deliberately and surreptitiously infecting that person with a dead...

Most flat earthers (those that seemingly seriously believe in that) are just too lazy and, in most cases, too unwilling, to actually do anything to try to prove their assertions. They just make their claims, and they do nothing to corroborate them, or to check the counter-claims. For them it's enough to type furiously at a keyboard and make YouTube videos, and come up with all kinds of often hilarious arguments. But then there's this small minority of flat earthers who actually do try to prove their claims. Their problem? The ways they try to do it is usually as stupid as their arguments. Sometimes even dangerously so. At least dangerously to themselves. As in outright suicidal. And, as in the example below, completely unnecessary. In January of this year a man named "Mad" Mike Huges launched himself with a home-made rocket. He reached an altitude of a whopping 1800 feet. That's about 550 meters. He didn't get himself killed, but he was injured to s...

Many movies have different versions of them. Most typically there's the so-called "theatrical cut" (or "theatrical release"), and then some kind of "director's cut", or "extended cut", which is released later, usually on home video (and usually as an alternative to the original theatrical cut). A director's cut most typically (and in many cases most lazily) simply adds some scenes that were originally filmed but not included in the theatrical release version. These may include longer, extended scenes, or completely unseen scenes. More involved director's cuts may go far beyond that, replacing some scenes with alternative takes, re-ordering scenes, and sometimes even adding material to the movie created after the original release (such as new computer graphics or other effects). People often tend to think that the "director's cut" must be better than the original theatrical cut. The notion is that the original ...

The progressive social justice ideology is pushing really, really hard to indoctrinate children into that ideology from as early as possible. One big part of this program is, of course, sex education. It seeks to blur the lines between the sexes, and completely remove the notion of there being "boys" and "girls", "men", and "women". All those concepts must be removed from the newspeak language used around kindergarteners and schoolchildren. After all, we wouldn't want to inculcate gender stereotypes onto these blank slates that have no innate characteristics of their own, now would we? One good example of this new social justice program is the book named "What makes a baby". There are many telling signs that this is a social justice edition of "where do babies come from?" For starters, at no point in the entire book are the words "mother", "father" (in any of their forms), "boy", "gir...

It has become quite clear that the so-called "refugee crisis" in the EU isn't going to stop. On the contrary, it's only escalating more and more. The influx of migrants isn't stopping. European politicians are doing this deliberately, willfully, on purpose, for reasons only known to them. Nobody even pretends that this has anything to do with the Syrian war anymore, or that these so-called "refugees" are from Syria. (Maybe a few media outlets still keep up that pretense a bit, but from what I have seen, the majority of the media has stopped even pretending.) Everybody knows by this point that only a tiny fraction of these migrants are from Syria, and nobody cares. Most EU countries are affected, but some a lot more than others. A laughably small fraction of these migrants are getting any jobs, and are instead living at the expense of the government, ie. the taxpayers. It's rather obvious that this can't go on forever. At some point there will b...

The current feminist "intersectional" anti-racist multicultural ideology has somehow allowed a certain particular political ideology to, rather surreptitiously, gain a of foothold and traction, especially in some countries, and especially, among other places, in universities. Namely, Marxism. For very long, the word "capitalism" has been seen as an abhorrent monster. Whenever that word is uttered, it immediately gives people the mental picture of a fat old man wearing an old-fashioned tuxedo and a monocle, twirling is mustache, while leading an industrial corporation which exploits workers, poor people, and natural resources, paying them pitiful salaries while he swims in money. It gives the picture of expansive factories that emanate copious amounts of smoke into the air, and waste water into rivers, of forests being torn down and converted into wastelands. (Modern neo-Marxists ignore the fact that this mental image also describes very accurately eg. the Soviet U...

You have played several video games in a franchise, and they have been great. And a new game in the series is coming out, and the reviews are great! Or perhaps a known developer company is making a brand new game, and it's widely hyped and has tons of positive reviews. You can't wait to get to play it. So it finally comes out, and you purchase it, you start playing it and... hmm... while the beginning might have felt somewhat interesting, a few hours into the game it's just... a bit on the boring side. Ok, maybe it's just a temporary hiccup, and the game will become more interesting just around the corner. You keep playing for a few hours more and... it's just getting more and more boring, and perhaps even frustrating. You can't really understand what all those raving reviews were talking about. It might not be that the game outright sucks and is utter trash, but... it's just boring, or uninteresting, or frustrating... or all of the above. So much so that ...