What grinds my gears

For many decades many conservative Christians, especially in the United States, have maintained that there's a conspiracy to teach kids to become homosexual. The so-called "gay agenda". Homosexual activists and lobbyists would go to schools and normalize homosexuality and "convert" kids into homosexuality. For decades I laughed at these paranoid conspiracy theories alongside everybody else. I'm not laughing as hard anymore. It turns out that, at least currently, those people were right. Or at least have become so. They might have been right for the wrong reasons, but they were right nevertheless. Even a lunatic can sometimes hit the nail in the head, even if by sheer accident. More and more schools all around the world, in the UK, in Ireland, in Australia, and in increasing amounts other countries, are starting to teach kids, even very young ones (primary school and even preschool) what can be quite accurately be described as a "gay agenda"...

If there's one thing that becomes clear in so-called "First Amendment Audit" videos (where people, especially in the United States, simply go to public spaces to film and see if security guards and police officers respect their First Amendment rights to do so) is that a good portion of people are afraid of people with cameras. Note that I didn't write just "cameras", but "people with cameras". Which is the big irony here. Nowadays there are security cameras pretty much everywhere. In most cities you can't walk any major street, or be in any public building, without there being at least half dozen cameras filming all the time. Yet people never complain about that. But have a person filming with a camera, and people get uncomfortable and uneasy. Sometimes they get really confrontational and aggressive. A good majority of people have the misconception that you need people's permission to film them in public, that it's illegal to do s...

No, that's not hyperbole, or an exaggeration. I seriously recommend reading these two articles thoroughly: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-animals-petas-open-secret_us_59e78243e4b0e60c4aa36711 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html?guccounter=1 And, as pointed out by the articles, this is not just some fringe individuals, or some fringe faction within the organization, disowned by the organization at large. No, the mass extermination of pets is a core goal of the PETA organization, and they will resort to lying and kidnapping of pets to do it, while publicly pretending to oppose the killing of animals. The members of PETA are absolutely psychotic. For example consider this testimony from an ex-employee, given in the article above: I did witness [PETA] bring back a pit bull to the Norfolk location. This pit bull was wagging its tail, jumping (an obvious friendly dog; not feral) while receiving praise, treats...

The funny thing about statistics is that they can be highly misleading, especially when sample sizes are too small and the statistics are detached from their wider context. There is perhaps no better example of this than the Concorde. It used to be, statistically speaking, the safest passenger plane type in the world, with zero accidents. Then overnight, it became the least safe passenger type in the world (and by a rather wide margin at that). Because of one single accident. The thing is, aviation safety statistics are usually determined by seeing how many accidents a particular plane type has suffered in relation to the total mileage flown by that airplane type. (The idea here is, of course, that if a particular airplane type has flown, in total, let's say, ten million miles, and has suffered ten accidents, it would be unfair to consider it as unsafe as another airplane type that has also suffered ten accidents, but only flown one hundred thousand miles in total.) While ot...

The recent debacle of the false narrative created around an incident involving some school students and Native Americans is a perfect example of how dangerous the current regressive leftist ideology is. Hundreds and hundreds of people, most of them adults, many of them celebrities or otherwise influential people, rushed to Twitter, Facebook and other online social media websites to incite violence against those students. These are not just indirect veiled threats, but direct calls to action. To physically beat them, to enact a school shooting, to burn the school down. Not just to physically beat them, but in some cases to literally murder these kids. This would be wrong even if the narrative were 100% correct. It only makes it a thousand times worse that those students are actually completely innocent, and the narrative is completely false. Those students didn't do anything wrong. They did not seek the Native Americans (it was the other way around), they did not harass them,...

There was an incident recently that has been causing, once again, an outrage online. This is what actually happened, as seen in a 2-hour stream: A student group of a Catholic school in the United States, members of some kind of conservative student club, were hanging out at a public place, waiting for some kind of transport to arrive. Many of the students were wearing MAGA hats. Near to them there was a group of Christian ultra-religious black people, some kind of street preachers, completely unrelated to the school or the students, apparently preaching to these students about their view of the Bible. The preachers and the students were engaged in discussion about their religious views. At points these street preachers were expressing deeply anti-homosexual religious views, while the students were (perhaps ironically) countering their points (with things like "gays are human too"). At some point, something 1-2 hours into the stream, out of nowhere there appeared a group...

Some months ago two Mexican men were exiting a public restroom in Philadelphia, when they got attacked by a mob of about a dozen white people. The mob harassed them, shouted racial slurs at them, and physically assaulted them, punching, kicking and macing them. After the attack, the two victims were taken to a hospital to be checked. One would think that the mainstream media would be all over this. Two people of Mexican descent were physically assaulted by a mob of white people who shouted racial slurs at them. What a perfect example of the rampant racism in the United States! This goes beyond acceptable, and something must be done about this! Surely this would make headlines, and TV coverage would be non-stop for weeks? Yet... nothing. Not a peep. The majority of the mainstream media kept completely silent about it. About the only news agencies who reported on this were a local newspaper and Fox News (which is notoriously conservative). How is this possible? This would be the ab...

I have a friend who plays the game Splatoon 2 quite a lot on the Nintendo Switch. This is an online multiplayer game, and one feature of this game is that people can draw a picture on their profile. This picture will be shown if you look at that player's profile in the game, and also in the sort of "lobby" of the game when you approach the character of that player. This should immediately ring alarm bells in anybody, and it's quite strange that Nintendo decided to include such a feature. Players can draw whatever they want there, and stopping abuse only causes a lot of moderation work for Nintendo. Why would they willingly make their own life harder, and potentially upset people? But I digress. Needless to say, while some people go through the trouble of drawing sometimes quite intricate pictures, most of the time this picture box is used for short messages. The vast majority of these messages that I have seen while my friend is playing the game are rather innocu...

Suppose you are in charge of a huge world-wide brand that creates products for a rather specific target demographic, for example women. Let's say your company manufactures and sells female hygiene products, for instance. Obviously you would want as much positive brand recognition for your product as possible. When creating an advertising campaign, you want people in general, but especially your target demographic, your potential customers, to get as much a positive feeling of the product and your brand as possible, because this will incentivize them to buy your product when they see it on the store shelf. Thus you commission an advertisement campaign from an advertisement company, or some branch of your company that creates such things. However, what they come up with is something truly mind-boggling: It's a two-minute long video targeted at women telling them how women are vindictive backstabbers and slanderous gossipers, and how all this starts in high school, where girls...

Since even before the modern VR headsets became available in March of 2016 (when all we had was the prototype Oculus Rift development kits), but especially since Valve and HTC started advertising their version of the headset as pretty much "room-scale" only (with most of the advertisement and promotional material never even showing sit-down gameplay, not even briefly in passing), giving many people the impression that VR is limited to a standing-up experience, people have been envisioning and predicting "omnidirectional treadmills" as a form of control. A normal treadmill only allows movement in one direction, but special treadmill technology can allow the surface to move in two directions at the same time, allowing for a person to walk on the treadmill facing any direction. A true 360-degree treadmill. (It's hard to imagine how this could work in practice, but quite clever solutions have been developed to allow this.) Normal "room-scale" gameplay ...

For years and years YouTube and other online websites have been full of criticism of the regressive regressive social justice feminist ideology, and how it's trying to create a totalitarian system where the justice system and the principle of due process is completely bypassed, and any accusation made by a woman against a man results in an automatic sentence, no questions asked. In most of the world this has so far been just theoretical. Something that they want, but haven't yet succeeded in doing. Most of the world. I did not use that word accidentally. That's because this exact situation has been the case in Spain since 2004, when a new government passed absolutely and incredibly draconian laws to combat "gender violence". These laws are literally and without exaggeration so draconian that even the Chinese and North Korean governments would be ashamed of doing it. In Spain, a woman has to simply call the police and accuse her spouse of maltreatment, and t...

During 2018, especially the latter half of it, people with the "wrong" political opinions have found themselves as the target of persecution by internet service providers, domain name services, crowd funding websites, payment processors and credit card companies. Big corporations, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, Paypal and so on, have been banning people for political reasons. In many cases, when enough details have been dug up, it all comes down to two corporations: Mastercard and Visa. These two corporations have achieved a de facto monopoly status in the entire world. Almost every single company, especially in the United States, is dependent on either Mastercard or Visa, or even both. Those two corporations pretty much own pretty much every single other company (if not de jure , at least de facto .) If either company tells another company to, for example, ban some website or individual person, the latter company has no option but to comply. This has been d...

Recently video game journalists got a really juicy piece of story: The top ranks of professional Overwatch players are very heavily male-dominated. A rare female player started raising the ranks, and was accepted into one of the top teams, but the other teams as well as the Overwatch community started harassing her online, claiming that she was just a fake and so on, to such an extent that she had to quit. Oooh wow! This is so juicy! A clear case of misogyny in the gaming community! Journalists get to write the word "gamergate" a couple of dozen times once again! What an orgastic feeling for these journalists. All of their activism has been vindicated! Well, it quite soon turned out that she was indeed a fake. While "Ellie" was indeed a real person (not named like that), it wasn't her who was actually playing, but it was one or more of the top pro players doing it in her name. When some people who knew about the ruse leaked the information, the people respon...

It's a bit hilarious, and at some level sad, to see YouTube videos of people going to left-wing protests and interviewing people. There are surprisingly many examples where a person in the protest is asked what or who they are protesting, and they don't even know. At all! For example, the only thing they know is that they are protesting some upcoming speaker, but in some cases they can't even name who this speaker is. Likewise in many cases they might be able to give the name of the person they are protesting, but when asked a more specific question, like "what has he said that you disagree with?" they get completely stumped, unable to give any concrete answer. (Some will just give a generic blanket answer rather than anything concrete. A few will admit that they can't give any example.) There are also many cases where the interviewer asks a person carrying a sign what the sign says, and this person needs to take the sign down and actually read what it say...

When I have commented online that no, European countries are not socialist, they are in fact capitalist (most of them engaging in welfare capitalism), some people have responded that no, in fact what they have is "mixed economy". In other words, partially capitalist, partially socialist. Is that the case? It all boils down to how you want to define the terms "capitalism" and "socialism". The problem I see with this claim (according to conversations I have had) is that these people seem to only accept absolutely extremist definitions of those words. To them, "capitalism", true such, is pretty much in essence a synonym for anarcho-capitalism. In other words, private corporations literally own every single penny, dime and cent of the capital and economy, and have 100% free range to engage in any form of commercial activity they want, with literally zero interference from the government, and zero taxation. Moreover, the government literally ow...

I read a relatively positive review of the game The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories , and I bought it from Steam during the Christmas sale. The gameplay mechanics looked interesting. The review did have a few vague mentions about something perhaps related to identity politics, but it was so much in passing that I didn't really pay all that much attention to it. I suppose this post technically speaking contains a few spoilers about the game, but I don't really care. The very first thing the game does is to greet you with a screen that says: "This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are." Hmm... ok. Nothing too suspicious yet. I suppose this could mean anything. Maybe the game is about werewolves or vampires or something, and that sentiment is referring to that? The game begins with a cutscene of two women, who are clearly in a romantic relationship, traveling to an island. Hmm... ok. I suppose there's not...

4chan is an online message board that has gained an enormous amount of popularity among diverse groups of people as a platform for communication, exchange of ideas, and social activism (both online and in real life). One of the major reasons for this is that people can post there completely anonymously, and are thus uninhibited and free to express any ideas they want. You could see it as either the ultimate form of anarchy, or the ultimate form of free speech. 4chan has been the original cradle for countless memes that have become immensely popular, as well as the starting point of many activist groups (such as Anonymous) in their quest to fight against corrupt organizations (such as the Church of Scientology). One activity... maybe we could call it "game", that the users of 4chan have been engaging in recent years is trolling the regressive leftist mainstream media. What they will do is to come up with the most asinine, crazy, and quite obviously humorous and non-serious...

To preface this list of misconceptions about free speech, let me categorize the notion of "free speech" into two categories: There's the legal aspect of free speech, which deals with what the government can and cannot do to a citizen due to that person's speech. In general, this means that the government can not punish someone for expressing their opinion, with a quite narrow set of exceptions (defamation, demonstrable incitement to physical violence or crime, etc.) Then there's the philosophical sociopolitical aspect of free speech. With this I refer to the principle of right to free speech, the respect that we ought to have to this fundamental and inalienable right. This doesn't mean we have to listen to every opinion, or agree with every opinion, or avoid presenting our criticism of that opinion (in fact, very much the contrary). However, this does mean that we respect people's right to free speech in that we don't actively try to stop peopl...