What grinds my gears

This is an excellent article published by the Hoover Institution in 2011 discussing how the United States and the European Union have diverged in the recent past when it comes to freedom of speech, and specifically concerning laws restricting "hate speech". I recommend reading it. The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws While members of the European Union have been forced to enact ever-stricter laws limiting freedom of speech, the United States Supreme Court has time and again ruled any such laws to be unconstitutional, thus reinforcing the protections granted by the First Amendment. In today's Europe it's actually a bit hard to believe that the majority of western European countries actually used to be in agreement with the United States, that they used to oppose hate-speech laws. Laws that restrict freedom of speech are unconstitutional (in most countries that have a constitution), but that doesn't seem to stop them, perhaps because the Constitution means

For centuries, heck, millenia, for as long as there have been governmental elections of any kind (I'm sure since the times of the Roman Republic and even earlier), candidates have always tried to garner votes by promising things that benefit the people voting for them. Of course for as long as this has been so, also the cliché has existed of the lying politician: Politicians promise everything between the Heaven and Earth, yet very rarely keep their promises (or keep them to the extent that was promised). But anyway, for pretty much as long as there have been elections there have been electoral candidates who promise benefits for their voters. Things that the voters will find beneficial. One of the most common classical promises is, of course, the reduction of taxes (or, at the very least, the promise that taxes will not raise). Other classical promises seek to ensure and expand the freedoms and rights of the citizens, of the voters. Likewise the promises of protecting the ci

Perhaps unsurprisingly Google isn't above virtue-signaling with their "progressiveness" and wokeness. What can be a bit surprising is where they decide to do so. How idiotic they can be about it. Google finally launched their "Stadia" service, which is effectively a service where you can play video games remotely, running on Google's own servers (and thus the graphical quality is not dependent on your device). Not very surprisingly, that turned out to be quite a shitshow, but I'm not going into that now. What I find most hilarious about the whole thing is that part of the Stadia service is a custom game controller made by Google, and for whatever unfathomable reason Google could not resist the temptation to virtue-signal about it. You see, they are proud of the fact that their controller is "gender neutral", and thus, apparently, garners to people of all sexes. What the actual fuck is a "gender neutral" controller, and how ex

In one of those "fat acceptance" articles published at an online journal, some writer lists things that people should understand and stop doing when it comes to fat people. One of the points listed, which I see repeated over and over, is this: "Understand that diets don't work and are the evil child of capitalism and body-shaming culture. Over 95 percent of people who lose weight through dieting put the weight back on within five years. If diets worked, the diet industry would be financially unsustainable." This is the most idiotic thing I have read in a good while. It's no different from saying, for example: "Weightlifting doesn't work! When I stopped weightlifting I lost all that muscle mass in five years." Well, duh! Of course dieting works. It's even admitted in that very text: "they put the weight back" means that they lost the weight . So the dieting did work. Rather obviously if you stop dieting and go back to your o

I have written previously a blog post comparing the Constitution of the United States to that of Finland , and how in Finland the Constitution isn't actually a law, but more like a guiding principle for the government. A quite loose guiding principle that gets broken all the time by the lawmakers, the judicial system and the police, often with complete impunity. Sometimes the Constitution even gets amended to retroactively justify the unconstitutional decision of a judge (as mentioned in that blog post). Othertimes blatant breaches of the Constitution are just ignored without even a comment by the authorities who should be in charge of enforcing it. Recently I heard in the Finnish news that the police had raided the compounds of a "neonazi" group (that's notorious in all the Nordic Countries), and were investigated if they were in breach of a court order that they had received in the past forbidding them from organizing any activities and congregating for that purp

It's quite ironic that I wrote a blog post a mere ten days ago about why do people fall for (refund) scams . I almost fell for a scam just a few days ago myself. Goes to show that no matter how much one educates oneself about these things, and how smart one thinks one is about it, one can still fall for them, especially when acting too hastily and in eagerness. (Well, almost fall for them in this case, luckily.) I was recently browsing amazon.de for new graphics cards. I semi-regularly do this to see if there happens to be some kind of sale or bargain for them. I noticed that there seemed to be a quite awesome bargain for an EVGA RTX 2080 Super card: Just a mere 419€ (compared to their normal price of 800€+.) I did have immediately in mind the adage "if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is". However, I was lured into believing it by several factors: Firstly, this was Amazon, not some dubious Chinese website like AliExpress or Wish. Amazon is more rep

Gab.com gained a lot of notoriety for becoming the pro free speech alternative to Twitter, which would not ban nor punish people for expressing their opinions. It became a symbol of the counter-culture to the current regressive leftist Silicon Valley tech megacorporations that have been on a crusade to restrict free speech, and which liberally engage in censorship and pushing a political agenda, and banning people for their expression of opinion. Gab.com became so notorious for this that they found themselves on the receiving end of an absolutely massive attack and discrimination by these megacorporations. Internet Service Providers denied them their services, payment processors (such as PayPal) and credit card companies denied them their services, and all of the major social media platforms and their owner companies banned them, including Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google. Even Firefox and Chrome banned the Gab's "dissenter" app, even though it literally broke no r

Exciting news! Valve just announced a new Half-Life game!!! Yeehaw!!! ... oh, wait... Yeah, it isn't Half-Life 3, is it? Oh, it's called "Half-Life: Alyx". Hmmm... ok. Maybe it will be good? Oh, it's for VR. And exclusively for VR. Well, meh! A thousand times meh! Why? Well, knowing Valve's attitudes and approach at VR, I give it a 99% chance that it will suck. From the very beginning Valve has had this strange attitude that VR is only for so-called "room-scale" experiences, to the most extreme extents. In other words, standing-up only, no sitting down. Walking around the room, with a teleportation mechanic. No other form of movement. Valve has always been on the forefront of promoting the notion that if the camera moves in any other way than by following the headset's movements, and by teleportation, the user will die. So I predict you can forget about this actually being a fun game to play. It will be awkward to play, it will be s

I have complained about this in the recent past already , but it just frustrates me so much that I have to vent a bit more and write about it again. There are countless anti-SJW anti-PC anti-regressive-left critics and influencers out there, especially on YouTube who often make several videos a week, sometimes even several videos a day. Some of these people have hundreds of thousands, and even millions of subscribers on YouTube, Twitter and other platforms. Some of them are journalists, politicians and public figures with a lot of reach. Even the more unknown people among them may still have a very large following. Most of them are not very stringent and picky on what kind of stories they deal with. Especially some of them will often make videos about even the most minor of incidents, or articles, or opinion pieces written in some obscure journal that only a handful of people (often just a small inner circle of SJWs) actually read. They will often comment even on some casual opinio

There's a kind of maxim that's sometimes used to describe persecution of political dissidents in oppressive totalitarian regimes like that of Joseph Stalin, that goes something along the lines of "once the guilty party has been found, surely a crime can be found too (to convict them of)". And, indeed, in totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia, and many modern oppressive totalitarian regimes like that of China, political dissenters will be persecuted, jailed and even sentenced to death for the flimsiest of reasons. And this even by having at least the appearance of following the law of the land, and proper legal procedure. The thing is, it doesn't matter who the person is, you can always find some kind of crime to pin on that person, no matter how far-fetched it might be. If you keep digging enough on a person's history and life, you can always find something, especially if enough interpretation and distortions are applied. And if everything else fa

Historical revisionism is the act of distorting, fabricating and lying about some historical event or situation, most often with the purpose of driving some kind of agenda, such as a political or religious agenda. Known history about some event is deliberately attempted to be changed to paint something in a more positive or a more negative light, or to justify something, to do some social engineering, or to drive some other similar goal. Quite often historical revisionism is a form of propaganda. The more distant the historic event, the easier it is to distort it. After all, the more time has passed, usually the less documentation we have about the details of what happened. It's easy to do some historical revisionism about things that happened 2000 years ago, because we only have very limited information about that time in history. Conversely, the more recent the events in question, the more audacious (and often ridiculous) the historic revisionism is. Some of the most ridiculo

I happened to be listening to a radio broadcast when the news came up. One of the news pieces recounted how some minister, or whatever politician, had stated that free speech has diminished and is being restricted in Europe. Hmm, interesting... I thought. Are they really reporting the opinions of a more conservative politician who is against all this regressive leftism and its anti-free-speech campaign? However, as the news story progressed, that didn't seem to be the case. This minister had argued that free speech has diminished in Europe because there is so much anti-semitism and hate speech. Hmm, that's strange, I thought. A bit of a strange argument to make against the restriction of free speech. Was he really blaming anti-hate-speech laws on anti-semitism and hate speech? No. It turns out that he was not talking about anti-hate-speech laws. What he was saying is that the "anti-semitism" and "hate speech" itself is restricting free speech. As in,

Neonazis (actual bona fide neonazis, not what the regressive left calls "nazis", because they call everybody who doesn't agree with them that) love to try to whitewash the crimes against humanity done by Nazi Germany, mostly via hefty amounts of historical revisionism full of lies and distortion. The thing is, as I have noted in the past, neonazis and their opinions don't really matter, and are mostly inconsequential. That's because they hold no political power and have almost zero influence on anything in society. I actually oppose the censorship and criminalization of neonazis expressing their opinions. I'm a firm believer in universal freedom of speech for everybody, regardless of how heinous their opinions are. I wouldn't be able to in good conscience advocate for censorship of someone else's opinion while claiming that I should retain my freedom of speech. In this particular case, particularly, letting them have and expressing their opinions is

Scamming people out of their money via simple phone calls is a multi-billion dollar industry. It has become an artform, and there are literally thousands and thousands of scamming groups, the vast majority of them for some reason located in India (although they exist in many other countries as well). These modern scams are typically "tech support scams", "IRS scams" and "refund scams". While scamming people out of their money has existed for a very long time, often in the form of so-called "advance free scams" or "419 scams", the problem with these is that they tend to take a very long time, and net only moderate sums of money. Quite often advance fee scamming a person has to go on for literally weeks and even months, sucking the person out of quite small amounts of money (typically in the order of a few hundreds of dollars at a time), these more modern tech support and other similar scams have a much quicker turnout. Quite often the

The Emperor's New Clothes is a classical tale written by Hans Christian Andersen. In short, in a medieval kingdom a charlatan tries to sell the king a new outfit made of cloth that's so magical that it's invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The king, and everybody in court, can't see the cloth, of course, but is too afraid of saying anything lest they give the impression of being stupid. The king parades around town in his new "clothes", and every townperson is too afraid of saying anything, lest they be deemed stupid. Of course there are no clothes, and is all a ruse, and the king is just parading around naked. But everybody is too scared to say anything. This story would be charming and funny, if it weren't so cautionary, and applied so well to real life. Sweden, in particular, has suffered for many years an astonishingly massive and deep "emperor's new clothes" syndrome. As you might know, "anti-racism" and mu

Not in the long run, at least. For some reason certain sectors of the media have made something of a deal that the world-famous actress Emma Watson recently stated in an interview that not only is she single, not only does she live alone, but she in fact wants it to be so ("self-partnered" she says). Not surprisingly legions of feminist columnists and bloggers have jumped to her defense with a "you go girl!" attitude, claiming that a woman can actually be happy when living alone. These people do not understand how the human brain works. They delude themselves into believing that a person can live perfectly well and be completely happy living alone, in a life of solitude, with no companion. Yet, time and again we see people who suffer from the consequences of this. Women in their 30's and 40's who get depressed and desperate. Cat ladies who are neurotic and delusional. Men who become likewise depressed, disillusioned, and sometimes even suicidal or vi

For some reason Australia is among the governments that are ultra-progressive and ultra-woke. The latest symptom of this is that they are now introducing a new law that lying to a woman in order to get sex will be considered sexual assault, even if she fully consents to it based on that lie. It shouldn't be necessary to explain why such a law would be highly problematic. Rather obviously, in the vast majority of situations there is no proof of what was said, and therefore it becomes your typical "he says she says" situation, where eg. the woman claims that the guy lied, and the guy denies it. How can we know who is telling the truth? If the Australian justice system becomes as feminist as eg. that of Spain, it means that the woman will be believed by default. This is extraordinarily prone to abuse, especially since it's basically impossible to safeguard against such abuse. What stops vindictive women from abusing this law and simply claim that the guy lied? If

Suppose there's some kind of disaster, like a huge traffic accident, and several dozens of injured people are being brought into a hospital. Because the hospital might not have the necessary personnel to immediately attend to every single one of those people, they get prioritized according to the severity of their injuries. For example, a person who has three bone fractures and copious bleeding, requiring extremely urgent intervention, would be taken care of first, over someone who has simply a sprained ankle. Or suppose there is a series of fires at some residential area. The amount of fires is so extensive that there is no enough firefighting personnel and equipment to deal with all of them at the same time. Thus it only makes sense to prioritize: Take care of the biggest and most dangerous fires first, and move from there to the smaller less dangerous ones. And if there's a cat stuck on a tree branch, that might be taken care of once everything else is fine. Prioritizin

For some reason over just a mere year or two, the Democratic Party presidential candidates in the United States seem to have gone completely crazy, essentially trying to one-up each other in how extreme their goals and agenda are. While the two major political parties in the country have always been somewhat antagonistic towards each other, I don't think it has been very often that one of the parties has been so incredibly antagonistic towards the voting population of the other party. Normally political candidates would be smart in trying to appeal to as many people as possible, even people from the other side, so as to try to get as many votes as possible. But not anymore. Now it's the complete opposite. It seems that they are trying to antagonize people from the other side as much as possible. For some reason the social justice ideology makes people become extremely antagonistic. It changes people from trying to appeal to as many other people as possible into becoming ext