What grinds my gears

I highly recommend skimming through the New York Penal Law Article 240 . It's surprisingly free of "legalese" and it's actually quite an interesting read. Most prominently, consider how well sections 240.05 through 240.36 fit the actions of antifa, the BLM rioters, and other activists roaming the streets almost every day. The text of the vast majority of those sections reads like a highly accurate list of transgressions of those people. I could list examples of them here, but there are so many that fit to a T, that if I were to list them all here, I would just be replicating almost all of that page. Most states in the US have similar laws as well. Or consider, for example, the Federal law 18 U.S. Code §2385: Advocating overthrow of Government . Condensed quote: Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States [...] by force o

I'm not going to name the guy, but there's one particular youtuber I used to watch quite a lot years ago because his videos were quite well made and entertaining, and he made lots of good points. He was (well, still is) a skeptic, ie. someone who examines, criticizes, comments on, and sometimes makes fun of all kinds of quacks, charlatans, anti-scientific religious ideologies, the most ridiculous cult practices, and so on and so forth. He has been making YouTube videos for quite a long time, 9 years now. Examining his list of videos chronologically, especially when it comes to view counts, paints a rather interesting picture: His videos from 9 years ago, when he started his YouTube career, have an average number of views in the ballpark of about 20k to 30k apiece, with some individual videos breaking the 100k mark. As you scroll up the list, the average number of views starts steadily increasing. Videos he made 8 years ago already have about 40-50k views on average. 7-yea

Launch almost any program installed in your computer. What's the first thing that you notice? It may take at the very least a significant fraction of a second to show on screen. With some programs it may in fact take several seconds. And in some cases this may happen even for programs that are extremely simple and small. A few of them may in fact be so slow to start that they actually have loading screens. Yeah, loading screens for applications. Why do they take so long to launch, rather than appearing literally instantaneously on screen the millisecond you launch them? How about using them? Some programs may be really responsive and present no discernible lag between a keypress or mouse button click, and the action it's supposed to do. Yet others may present noticeable lag sometimes. In the worst cases it may be so bad that if you, for example, write test fast enough, the program will lag behind and not keep up with your typing. Clicking on a menu option that opens up a d

An (alleged) white nationalist makes a terrorist attack in New Zealand to a mosque, killing about 40 people, and the west goes absolutely crazy. Everybody politicizes it and plays the blaming game and demands all kinds of draconian measures to be taken to punish people who have absolutely nothing to do with the incident (ironically exactly what the terrorist was explicitly aiming for). Now, let me ask you a question: Do you know how many fatal terrorist attacks have been committed by Islamic terrorists, and how many people have been killed by them, in the past week (as of writing this)? Not the past year, or the past month. The past week. I bet you have absolutely no idea. Probably for all you know there hasn't been a single such attack, because basically no news source reports them. The reality, however, is rather shocking. Merely in the past week, ie. between 17th March and 24th March of 2019 there have been a total of 33 terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals, claiming the

Especially in the current political climate, if some kind of celebrity, even if it's just a minor celebrity related to a very particular field (such as voice acting, for example) gets accused of something that the regressive leftist social justice warriors don't like, and this gets traction among them, they will do everything in their power to ruin that person's entire life and career. And the scary thing is that it works. To achieve this, the social justice warriors will engage in a massive coordinated, planned and sustained harassment campaign against that person, blocking him (and it's most often, although not always, a him) from anything that he may ever do anywhere, especially if it's related to his profession or what he's famous for. If, for example, that person is due to attend some kind of conference related to his field of work (such as voice acting), the social justice mob will do everything they can to stop it from happening. It, obviously, st

It's actually scary how much the regressive extremist left has been indoctrinated into a (among many other things) culture of fear. They are being constantly bombarded by their own side with the most extreme alarmist, and for the most part completely fictitious, visions of the world and their surrounding society. In their world, almost all women experience sexual harassment and rape, almost all black people experience racism every single day and will be likely be killed by the police, and so on and so forth. When Donald Trump was elected the president of the United States many social justice warriors were making YouTube videos that were absolutely insane. I kid you not, many of them were acting like they were Jews during the Holocaust, and the SS were going to bang on their door at any moment. Many of them were literally crying in desperation, expressing their absolute anguish and hopelessness, telling how they were seriously thinking of killing themselves. Others made really s

The government of the United Kingdom is trying their hardest, and apparently succeeding, in delaying Brexit even further. Something that I, among others, have been predicting for years. I still think anybody who believes that Brexit will actually happen is naive to the extreme. (I'll freely admit I was wrong if it indeed does end up happening eventually. Won't be holding my breath, though.) Many people have been for years trying to argue that leaving the EU will be bad for the UK and its citizens. However, nobody I have seen has ever considered this: The United Kingdom, over the past 10 or 20 years, has become more and more of a police state. Not just allegorically speaking, but literally. The police has become bolder and bolder over the last years in enforcing regressive leftist moral standards, up to completely ridiculous extents. They are literally investigating people, and even putting them in jail cells, for the horrible crime of misgendering someone online. They are

For years the regressive left has been campaigning against what they consider online harassment. Anita Sarkeesian, for example, in that one infamous presentation at a UN meeting, described the online harassment problem as "not just what's legal and illegal, but the day-to-day grind, 'you're a liar', 'you suck' etc." In other words, tons and tons of people sending you negative messages eg. on social media. Of course, like always, social justice warriors love to take this concept to the extreme, and will define anything that upsets them as "harassment", even if it's just disagreement or criticism of what they are saying. You don't even need to threaten them, insult them, write anything derogatory, or anything like that. Simply being in disagreement is "harassment". But then, also like always, when they do that exact thing, it's suddenly ok. As an example, ever since the slanderous hit piece against PewDiePie writte

I wrote in an earlier blog post about a couple of differences I have noticed in typical SJW forums and anti-SJW forums, with the former engaging a lot more in cult-like psychological reinforcement (in the form of people ego-stroking other people who are writing things they consider good for the cause, showering them with thanks, praises and adulation, with no other constructive input), as well as virtue-signaling through verbal self-flagellation (ie. "confessing one's sins" and declaring how one is a very bad person, in this case mostly because of being white), two behaviors that you very rarely see in forums populated by the critical side. There are many other differences, of course. If you start reading these forums, or Twitter feeds, or Facebook walls, especially those who are social justice activists to extreme degree, you'll notice the sheer amount of calls to action to their readers. Their post history will be stock full of posts calling for people to "

Dissenter is a service and browser plugin created by Gab.com that allows people to comment on any web page, bypassing the censorship of the Silicon Valley tech giants. Obviously these tech giants, as well as the leftist media, are not happy about it, because they can't control the narrative. Very recently the New Zealand government started blocking Dissenter at the ISP level, apparently as a response to the recent terrorist attack. Even though neither Gab nor Dissenter had any connection whatsoever with the perpetrator. (The terrorist attack was livestreamed on Facebook, of all places. Naturally Facebook faced no repercussions of any kind for this, because it's one of the protected Silicon Valley tech giants.) Expect this kind of censorship and blocking to become more and more common. Very soon you might find yourself unable to connect to Gab, Dissenter, and a bunch of other online services that do not conform to the censorship standards of your country. The only way to

Some months ago I wrote about the implicit "agreement" between the 4chan forum and the mainstream media . The forum members keep coming up with the most ridiculous memes and claims imaginable, making absolutely ridiculous connections between random things and "white supremacy", in order to troll the mainstream media, and journalists not only embrace this trolling and react to it in all seriousness, but in fact do it gladly and willingly, with full awareness of what's going on. I wouldn't even say that 4chan is manipulating the mainstream media. "Manipulation" would imply deception, that the targets of the manipulation are completely unaware of what's actually going on and that they are being taken advantage of unwittingly. While this may be the case with some clueless journalists who have absolutely no idea what's actually going on, I'm certain that many of these journalists are fully aware that what 4chan is doing is just trolling t

Most of the migrants arriving en masse to Europe are being called "refugees", mostly in an attempt to gain sympathy from the native people and to pull at their heartstrings. "Refugees welcome!" goes the common adage. But the thing is: These "refugees" are not being treated as refugees. They are being treated as immigrants, which is rather different. The refugee status is inherently temporary. The original basic idea of a country taking refugees from another country is to provide these people with a temporary safe place to survive, until the life-threatening conflict in their country of origin is over and peace has been restored. It's in essence no different from a friend giving another friend a place to stay for a while, because of the life circumstances of that person (eg. if they have been evicted, or any other reason why this person is temporarily homeless). Friends help friends, but this solution is always temporary. The other person isn'

More and more movies nowadays are trying to pander to the social justice crowd. I have noticed that in some cases the people promoting these movies, as well as SJW journalists, are claiming that a particular such movie is somehow revolutionary in that it's the first one to do something. For example, when the recent Ocean's 8 movie came out, many people involved in its promotion claimed eg. in TV shows that it's the first heist movie with an all-female cast in the lead roles. Yet, 10 seconds of googling reveals that's not the case. There are several examples of previous such movies, such as the movie Set It Off . When the film Black Panther came out, they claimed it was the first movie starring a black superhero. Yet, once again, this is incorrect. The movie Blade already did that in 1998. (Maybe they'll claim it's the first Marvel superhero movie with a black protagonist? Except that Blade is a character from Marvel Comics. They can't get around it.)

Quite a long time ago, when I was in my early teens, I had a classmate who expressed what even then I understood to be a rather odd misconception about forces, in particular about gravitational forces. We had recently been taught about gravitation in class, and how, curiously, every single object exerts a gravitational pulling force onto every single other object (even though with everyday objects this force is staggeringly minuscule). We were one day outside, and he was commenting on this fact. We were looking at two hills, and he commented that (paraphrasing) "that hill is exerting gravitational force onto that other hill". He then expressed the really odd misconception: He thought that meant that the two hills were moving towards each other, even if it happened really, really slowly. Even back then I understood that didn't make any sense, and he was misunderstanding the whole concept. Just because two objects may be exerting a gravitational pulling force to each ot

The modern regressive leftist ideology is invading more and more aspects of western society by the day. This invasion takes multitude of forms, and social justice academics have for years been hard at work to invent new ways to make it happen. One tactic that has seen an almost scary amount of success is introducing the concept of "unconscious bias" into the public awareness, and to introduce "training" to make people aware of it and "better themselves" into all kind of institutions, corporations and workplaces. The whole "unconscious bias" thing is nothing but, essentially, a scam based on shoddy research (that even the researches themselves have pretty much disowned), like so many other such claims (such as the infamous "one in five" women experiencing sexual harassment, when the actual number is much, much lower than that, which even the original creators of that study admit and warn about). But social justice activists don't

Recently Epic Games wanted to challenge Valve's almost-monopoly on the PC digital video game store market, by releasing their own digital distribution system. Their main incentive for game developers is that they will take a much smaller cut from the sales than Valve does (if I remember correctly, Epic Games takes 5%, while Valve takes 30%). Healthy competition is certainly good for the consumers, and monopolies are bad for the consumers. Thus a competitor to Steam ought to be welcome. However, is the Epic Games Store better than, or even as good as Steam? Many gamers don't think so, and they have good reasons. For example: - It makes all games online-only. No internet connection? No game. Sorry. Can't play without an active internet connection. (We all know how well that feature was received with Microsoft announced it with the Xbox One.) - No regional pricing. The store does not support pricing games according to your region. (One of the countries that this affect

In recent years "progressive" leftist feminist ideology has been invading the arts, most prominently movies. More and more feminist-approved "women-empowering" "role models" with a feminist message are being artificially shoved into movies that don't really need them (and could actually potentially be quite good movies if it weren't for this kind of virtue-signaling feminist meddling). Many critics have observed one particular aspect of most (if not all) of these feminist-approved "female role models" characters in movies: Not only do they tend to be "Mary Sue" characters, but in fact they tend to be extremely and stereotypically masculine characters. If you start paying attention to these lead female characters, you'll notice how they seem to have been written as stereotypical male characters, just with a female actress portraying them. Almost invariably they are extremely stoic, showing little to no emotion other than

I have written previously about the SJW "oppression stack" . The regressive leftist social justice warriors divide people into groups based on things like sex, race and sexual orientation, treats people differently depending on which such group they belong to (completely regardless of personal achievements and merits) and gives different groups different amounts of rights, privileges and protections. This stack is extreme hierarchical, and the amount of power that people have is pretty much directly correlated to their position on the stack. This means that people higher on the stack are free to oppress, discriminate against and be prejudiced against anybody lower on the stack. Conversely, people lower on the stack are absolutely forbidden from doing so to people higher on the stack. Muslims are at the very top of this stack (with Muslim men being at the very top, and Muslim women slightly below them). White men are at the very bottom of the stack (with white women being ju

Quite a long time ago I lived in a particular rental apartment with my parents for a little while (I think it was for less than a year or so). I remember vividly one particular thing about that place, and it was a particular neighbor, which I think was directly upstairs from us, which could be heard quite well. I never saw who that neighbor was, I only ever heard her screaming. From the content and tone of what she screamed, it appeared to be a mother who, for whatever psychological reason, seemed to be on an everyday quest to destroy her child's (I got a strong impression of the child being her preteen son) self-worth and self-esteem, and to make his life as miserable as possible. Almost every day, all throughout the day, she would scream at her son, berating him in a really angry tone of voice, oftentimes even a rather condescending tone of voice. Of course I could not see the actual situation, but it seemed to me that she would yell at him for the most minor of things, and pe

If prior to the release and hype surrounding the Marvel Studios Captain Marvel movie, if you were to ask a random person "do you know the comic book character Captain Marvel?" the vast majority of people wouldn't have had any idea. Most people, even those who have almost never read a comic book in their lives, know Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Hulk and a couple of the other most famous comic book characters. Nowadays most of them also know of other prominent characters that have always been very big in the comic book world, but perhaps not in the public conscience, namely Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and some others that have starred in recent block-buster movies. However, you can bet that almost nobody had ever heard of "Captain Marvel", unless they are more hard-core Marvel Comics aficionados. Some may have heard of that character in another context: "You mean that Superman-like guy, who says something like 'Shazam'?" Nope, that

I think in this case one picture says more than a thousand words, so I made a picture (click on the image to get full version):

Sometimes I end up in some forum, discussion thread, twitter thread or other similar place where social justice warriors discuss some topic. I have noticed one particular prominent difference in the way that people discuss things in them. For example, if some SJW posts a relatively large and (at least outwardly) well-crafted piece of writing, eg. debunking something that the "opposition" claims, or other such topic, the responses to that post will quite often be full of what could be vulgarly called "dick sucking". Many SJWs will respond to it with comments like "thank you for doing this", "you are doing a great job", and other forms of ego stroking of the original writer, without actually contributing to the actual topic. These discussion threads often tend to be, again what can quite vulgarly be expressed as, "circle jerking", with people doing nothing more than praising what others are doing, and adulating them. I'm not sayin

Personally I'm not a huge fan of American conservatives, and therefore of the American Republican party. They are too corporatist, too pro-anarchocapitalist, too anti-welfare (opposing an universal welfare system like it were the most horrible thing in the world), too pro-gun, too anti-environmental, and overall way too much conspiracy theorists and anti-science. On the other hand, there are only two options in the United States, and the alternative is becoming much worse. The problem with the alternative, ie. the Democratic party, is that they are becoming more and more totalitarian by the day. Said party, and its representatives and presidents, used to be quite reasonable. For instance, since almost the beginning of time they wanted stronger border control, and more expeditious deportation of illegal immigrants, especially those who have committed a crime. For example, the previous president himself, Barack Obama, one of the most famous and recognized Democrat presidents in r

For a quite long time regressive leftist feminists have been complaining about how men dominate every aspect of society and how women are being oppressed and cannot compete with men at a level playfield. They talk about the "glass ceiling", and how all top positions are dominated by men, and how society benefits men and keeps women down. Thus they have for many years now advocated for special treatment for women, for enrollment and hiring quotas, and so on. They advocate for men to voluntarily "step down" from positions of power and give women their place (whether those women have actually earned that place or not, and whether she has the actual qualifications). One of the worst things that a man can do is to go and take a position of power away from a woman, and take her earnings away from her. For quite long critics of the regressive left have joked that if men want to keep "oppressing" women and take their places and all of their privileges, the only