What grinds my gears

I don't have a Twitter account (never have), and I pretty much never read anything there, unless once in a blue moon someone directly links to a particular tweet. Recently I followed such a link and I got curious about something. The tweet was about some technical computer software thing, completely unrelated to politics or anything, and it had like a couple dozen of replies. I got the idea of checking the twitter feeds of different people who had responded to that twitter post, just to see what the average twitter topics are from people interested in such technical matters. I deliberately avoided all twitter feeds of people with pronouns in their bios (when you hover the twitter handle of someone it shows as a tooltip a short bio of that person, and it has become a form of activism and virtue-signaling to put one's "preferred pronouns" there), or anything in the bio that would indicate any sort of political activism. I clicked only on the twitter handles of people wh...

Recently the state of Texas sued several other states for electoral fraud. The Supreme Court of the United States dismissed the lawsuit with a two-sentence statement which essentially said "it's not the business of the SCOTUS what the states do, it's up to their court systems". Several Republican senators and Donald Trump likewise sued several states for voting irregularities, and lawsuit after lawsuit is being dismissed by the different courts of appeal. Note that a dismissal by a court is not a judgment. It's not a statement that "fraud did not happen, the accused are innocent." When a case is dismissed like this, no jurists were heard, no evidence was presented in court, no arguments nor counter-arguments were given, there were no witnesses nor testimonies. Nothing. It's 100% the judge on his own volition dismissing the entire lawsuit before a single piece of evidence or a single testimony is presented, based on the judge's own opinion. In the...

Let me make it absolutely clear that I'm 100% not any sort of "anti-vaccer". Vaccines are the most efficient and one of the safest forms of preventing viral diseases, and the science on this is extremely reliable. Many years ago I went on a holiday with some friends to China and Thailand. It was recommended to get a Hepatitis-A vaccine prior to that because those areas were potentially risky. I took the vaccine without hesitation. A couple of years ago my tetanus vaccination was expiring, so I went on the very day that was marked for the renewal to take the vaccine. (Even though all indications show that the beneficial effects of a tetanus vaccine last for much longer than 10 years, I nevertheless went to take the booster on the exact 10th year anniversary of the previous one, just so that I don't forget. Incidentally, recently the health officials here have updated the recommendation to be every 20 years. Anyway.) This doesn't mean, however, that every single vac...

I recently got the game Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War , and was a bit surprised by something that happens near the start of the game. You are presented, essentially, with a character creation screen. Or more precisely a character profile screen. It is presented as a governmental personnel file about your character, with several fields such as name, gender, background and so on, which you fill out. Interestingly, you can leave almost everything blank, in which case it will be marked as "classified", which is a nice touch. Almost everything. There's one field that's mandatory. You have to select a value for it or you won't be able to proceed. You would never guess in a million years what that field is. I don't think you would even guess it based on the title of this blog post. It's skin color. From the about dozen of fields in this fictional personnel file, you can leave everything blank (ie. "classified"), except skin color. It offers somethin...

The far-leftist social justice ideology dictates that people's self-proclaimed preferred pronouns should be respected and used, even when this announced preferred pronoun seems to be blatantly against the biological sex of the person, even if the pronoun doesn't linguistically fit at all (such as using a plural pronoun to refer to a single person), and even if this pronoun is a completely made-up nonsense word. They argue that this is the polite thing to do, the respectful thing to do. The problem is what happens if you don't use these pronouns when referring to someone. They want consequences bestowed upon you. They will attack you, harass you, defame you, smear you and, in some countries, even the police may make a visit to intimidate and harass you. That's where these "preferred pronouns" stop being a form of politeness and become compelled speech . The fundamental right to free speech does not only mean that you are free to express your opinions without p...

The World Chess Federation, FIDE, is the largest international chess organization in the world that acts as the main governing body of international chess competition. FIDE defines the rules of chess, and the rules of chess competitions (at least those sanctioned by the organization). It also grants titles to strong players and maintains Elo ratings for literally millions of players. With such an enormous organization, supervising such huge amounts of people, and organizing and ruling over such enormous amount of tournaments and competitions, it's pretty much a miracle that it hasn't yet been completely invaded by social justice ideologues and turned into a quasi-fascist tyrannical oppressive regime. And that's my prediction of today: It's only a matter of time. Many lengthy feminist articles and opinion pieces have already been written by prominent people and published in prominent online publications, read by millions of people, on the subject of "women and chess...

In November of 2019 I wrote a blog post about how the world-famous actress Emma Watson had recently said in interviews that she was living alone, "self-partnered" , and how the feminist bloggers praised her for that decision (with a "you go, girl!" kind of attitude). In that post I argued that since people are not happy living alone for long periods of time, it won't take long for her to end her "self-partnership". I gave her a year at most. I just remembered that prediction right now and decided to check if I was right. Well, what do you know, it took her but a few months, if even that, before she found a boyfriend, one Leo Robinton . Apparently they have been dating since at least the end of 2019. Render me unsurprised.

The world-famous actress (and political activist) Whoopi Goldberg recently embarrassed herself in an episode of The View , a talk show broadcasted by ABC, by expressing this opinion about Jill Biden, the wife of Joe Biden: "I'm hoping Doctor Jill becomes a Surgeon General, Joe Biden's wife, because she's a hell of a doctor. She's an amazing doctor." The problem? Jill Biden is not a Doctor of Medicine (even though Whoopi clearly thought so). She doesn't even have a PhD (the highest academic doctorate degree that can be achieved). She's a Doctor of Education, which has absolutely nothing to do with medicine (and therefore she would not be qualified in any way to become a Surgeon General.) When the other participants in the show told her that she isn't an MD, she admitted her ignorance of what kind of doctorate she actually has. The most telling thing about this little incident is how Whoopi Goldberg praised Jill Biden as "a hell of a doctor...

I have written many times in the past that the great irony of the modern social justice ideology, what it has transmogrified into in the past decade or so, is that it just can't help but unwittingly be a white supremacist ideology, without its advocates even noticing, realizing or understanding it. For example, one Thomas Smith, a social justice activist, in a debate with Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin, argued that if everybody is given the same opportunities and freedoms, white people will naturally raise to all the top positions , and that the only way to stop that from happening is to put hurdles in the way of white people and restrict their freedoms. He just couldn't comprehend why Carl called him a white supremacist with a guilty conscience. The United States congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a speech to the Congress, blamed white people for climate change . Implying that without white people there would be no climate change. She clearly didn't unde...

I am quite a fan of watching so-called "First Amendment audit" videos on YouTube. These are videos of people, mostly in the United States, going around to public places with cameras to film whatever they want and see if their First Amendment right to do so is respected by security guards, the police, government officials and workers, and people in general. Quite often the police will be called, and in most cases nothing particular will happen other than, mostly, the police asking questions and demanding to see ID (with some really commendable exceptions by more well-informed police officers), the amount of insistence varying a lot. While it's quite rare, in the worst case scenarios the photographer will be detained and sometimes even arrested, even though he did absolutely nothing wrong. In some of these cases the person's Fourth Amendment right (ie. protection against unreasonable searches and seizures) will be infringed, with the police officers searching and going ...

When Trump was running for president in 2016, the far-leftist propaganda machine was predicting that he would start World War 3, or at least start wars. Like with so many of their predictions, quite ironically the exact opposite happened: In fact, Trump was the first President of the United States since Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) who did not start a single war. (He "inherited" a few wars from Obama, but Trump ended them, he didn't start them.) In a previous blog post I predicted what will happen if Biden becomes the president . Many political commentators (on YouTube and elsewhere) have also made their predictions, and one rather particular thing is something that I would like to append to mine too: It's highly probable that Biden's (and eventually Harris's) administration will start the wars in the Middle East once again. There's a reason why military grade arms manufacturers are (once again ironically) supporting Biden, not Trump. Wars are highly profitabl...

xkcd is one of the longest-running still active webcomics in existence, first created in 2005 and having published content very regularly for these 15 years. I was quite an avid follower since almost the beginning, probably since there were just about one or two hundred comic strips uploaded (as of writing this there are 2391). Many of the comic strips are funny, insightful, sometimes even quite nerdy (requiring a lot of knowledge about a particular field to understand), and sometimes really memetic (it has been really popular to use images or entire strips from xkcd in all kinds of places elsewhere, due to how memetic, funny or fitting they are for a particular subject). However, some years ago I kind of got a bit tired of following the comic, so I would usually just check it from time to time and read all the new issues that had appeared. Sometimes months would go by without me checking it. Eventually I kind of just forgot about the whole webcomic, and haven't checked it for like...

Anybody can create a Twitter account. However, Twitter has a "verified account" system which is used primarily to assure visitors of the legitimacy of an account. For example, if an account appears to be of a famous person, like a famous actor or singer, or from a famous or prominent institution like a company or a brand, the "verified account" blue checkmark signifies that the account is actually of the real person or institution, not just some faker. Individual people who are not celebrities can also get their account verified, ie. a blue checkmark, but the requirements for this are strict and extensive . Among other things, they must have used Twitter actively for at least six months prior to applying, must have a verified email and phone number, they must have complied with the rules of the site, they do not post content that harasses, shame or insults any individual group, have a notable number of followers, and some other characteristic that makes them in some...

The YouTuber and math popularizer Matt Parker , and his recent activism for social-engineering the use of the word "they" as the English gender-neutral pronoun, has become quite a pet peeve of mine, almost an obsession, but this is my blog, so who cares. You can read all my posts about him, in chronological order, here , here and here , but here's a really short recap: Matt Parker, of Numberphile fame on YouTube and a quite popular personality especially among the viewers of that channel, has recently started littering his videos with an overabundance of use of the pronoun "they" when referring to a single person, even when there's zero ambiguity about who the person is or was (such as Albert Einstein), or even if the person is someone he personally knows and is his friend. Not only that, but he goes so far as to use that pronoun more than would be necessary (ie. instead of saying eg. " Mark thought about it and then came up with an idea " he wi...

When you think about it, it's actually incredible how widespread anti-Trump sentiments were all around the world, even before he became the president of the United States, four years ago (as of writing this). Pretty much everywhere, at least in the western world, people somehow just "knew" that Trump was a "racist" and that he would start the persecution of minorities and immigrants, and probably start World War 3. Based on literally zero evidence. This only became so much worse when he was eventually elected. It became so bad that when Trump was planning state visits to other countries, many people, sometimes even very high-ranking officials and politicians, were demanding that the country ban Trump from entering  (the United Kingdom being perhaps the best example of this). Almost invariably there were massive anti-Trump demonstrations and protests in these countries. Based on literally zero evidence. Mind you, much of this was before the American regressive ...

Suppose that two football teams are playing a football tournament against each other, let's call them Team L and Team R. While at first both teams play relatively cleanly, Team L starts breaking the rules and cheating more and more as the tournament goes on. First it's subtle, but when they can get away with it again and again, they become more and more emboldened and blatant about it, and more and more aggressive about it. They start carrying the ball with their hands, they start throwing things at the members of the other team, they start pushing and even hitting members of the other team, and they blatantly disregard pretty much all the rules of football and sportsmanship. They start making goal after goal with blatant cheating and breaking of the rules. Team R, rather obviously, complains to the referee about this, but he does nothing. "What cheating? I don't see any cheating." Team R try to complain to the tournament organizers, and they do nothing. In a norm...

The far left, especially but not exclusively in the United States, has for four years now kept repeating the same fabricated claims about Trump, how he's a racist, how he has eroded the rights of minorities, how he has put immigrants in cages, how he is a white supremacist and so on and so forth. No amount of evidence against those claims is enough for them. They have kept making those claims over and over, for four years, with no stop in sight. And it's not just some random people on Twitter doing that. It's major news corporations, politicians, Wikipedia, and so on and so forth. If they have been so bold and so unashamed as keeping making these false claims while Trump has been the president, how much easier it will be in the near future? My bet is that not only will they keep making all these false claims over and over, but they will start inventing new ones. They will start inventing things that Trump allegedly did or said, no need for any evidence. Mass media will star...

One common prediction about what will happen if Biden gets elected as the President of the United States is that the far-left will take it as a sign that it's open season to persecute republicans, and they will start a purge, in government, in society, and everywhere. Well, that was a quite easy prediction to make. The far-leftist bigots just can't wait to start the purge and the persecution, even before the election result has been confirmed. Take Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for example. She doesn't just want Trump to be held accountable for his "crimes", but for everybody who supported him to be publicly exposed and held in a list. That didn't take long. This is exactly what socialist regimes do when they get power: They start punishing the opposition. This is exactly what a totalitarian communist-socialist takeover looks like. They want a purge. They want a complete takeover. They want to create a single-party totalitarian state. And the masked fascist terro...

In addition to some other institutions, most famously the United States military forces had for really long a semi-official "don't ask, don't tell" policy, meaning that if you are a homosexual that's fine, nobody's going to ask, nobody's going to discriminate, but it's better if you just keep it to yourself as well. What you don't know can't hurt you and, more relevantly in this case, what nobody knows can't hurt you. There will be no prejudice nor differential treatment (positive or negative) if nobody knows you are "different". Famously, this policy was officially ended recently. Apparently the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was considered oppressive, I suppose? But I have to ask: What's wrong with it? I'm asking 100% seriously. Why is it wrong to have such a "don't ask, don't tell" policy? Why would people want to go around telling other people, unprompted, that they are homosexual? W...

I wrote earlier a blog post envisioning the (realistically) absolutely best-case scenario, and also (somewhat pessimistically) the worst-case scenario of what happens if Biden wins this presidential election. The truth might turn out to be somewhere in between, perhaps with some details leaning more towards the best case, and others veering towards the worst case. If I had to predict what would actually happen, realistically, then perhaps something like this: Firstly, after Trump stops being the President, the American far-left will do its hardest to destroy his life, partially as some kind of revenge, partially to make an example of him and send a message. The very first form of this will be a boatload of SLAPP suits (ie. lawsuits intended to abuse the legal system to intimidate, hurt or attack a persona non grata .) The left is already talking about this, and it's their full plan already. It's pretty much a certainty that this will happen, the only question is how many lawsu...

I wrote a blog post on June of last year about how I used to quite avidly follow the YouTube channel of a lawyer who uses the nickname LegalEagle, because many of his videos very extremely entertaining and didactic at the same time (I learned quite a lot of interesting tidbits about legal practice from those videos) when, all of a sudden, out of the complete blue, he just decided to go full-on far-leftist social justice ideologue. (He might have been very sympathetic to the ideology for years, but up to that point he had, to my knowledge, always left it out of his videos and stayed off of that topic.) On 8th of June of 2019 he uploaded a video about a particular deleted scene in the Captain Marvel movie where the titular hero outright steals the motorbike of a dude who was being a bit of an asshole towards her. Not only did LegalEagle defend her actions, but moreover he proceeded to accuse people (ie. men) who criticize that scene of "mansplaining" and sexism. At no point ...

The Lutheran Church of Finland, which is the official State Church, has been for quite many years an official sponsor of the Helsinki Pride parade. Let that sink in for a moment. A Christian Church that has existed since the 16th century sponsors and promotes homosexuality and homosexual displays. This is not just question of "love the sinner, hate the sin". This is not a question of the Lutheran Church saying "while we don't condone homosexuality, such people should nevertheless be respected as fellow human beings and treated equally." This is them endorsing and literally sponsoring homosexuality and homosexual relationships and their acceptance in society. This is them saying, effectively, "homosexuality is ok in our books, and not only there's nothing wrong with it but we are actually promoting and monetarily sponsoring it." And if you still think that maybe they are just trying to say "homosexuals should not be discriminated against and t...

It's quite telling, and actually scary, how deep the political indoctrination and activism has become when one of the oldest and most reputable dictionaries in the world, Merriam-Webster, established in 1828, starts printing outright and direct lies for the purposes of political activism and social engineering. In the definition of the word "preference" said dictionary now says: The term preference as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to. This was added like a few days ago, and it's a direct and complete lie. Nobody, and I mean literally nobody , not even the most radical social justice ideologues and activists, considered the expression "sexual preference" as offensive. In fact, people have pointed out numerous examples of that very expression being used by far-left people, activists, politicians and press, just a few weeks ag...

Some polls suggest that Joe Biden is ahead in popularity. And as we saw four years ago, polls are always completely accurate. However, let's assume that Biden does indeed end up winning the elections and becomes the President of the United States. What happens then, realistically speaking? I'll predict the best possible case scenario, the almost worst possible case, and the absolutely worst possible. Best possible scenario: The regressive left becomes completely insufferable, both in social media and in real life, for a month or two, before forgetting about it and moving to something else, to bickering about something else that's "racist" and "transphobic". In other words, after a few months they become the pre-Trump regressive left, continuing their ever-increasing campaign to take over all of society by invading everything. Likewise the leftist mainstream media will spend a month or two vilifying Trump and painting him as the worst person who has ever ...

Almost three years ago I wrote a rather pessimistic and cynical post about how the fight against the regressive left and the invasion of the totalitarian fascistic social justice ideology is most probably a lost cause and pretty useless. Not much has changed, really. The regressive leftist social justice ideology is invading more and more of western society, and not much has been achieved in terms of stopping them, or even slowing them down. I wrote back then that one of the main reasons for this is that the opposition, the anti-SJWs, are independent individualist free-thinkers who do not have a herd mentality nor a mob mentality, and thus trying to organize them into a long-term large-scale movement is like trying to herd cats. While it's good that people do not have a herd mentality and that they are independent free-thinkers who feel free to disagree with each other and present their dissenting opinions, the sad thing is that, indeed, it's pretty impossible to organize the...