What grinds my gears

Perhaps due to the terminology being used in political discourse, with "left-wing" politics, and "right-wing" politics (which as far as I know originates from English parliament, where the government representatives would sit on one side of the room, on the left of the speaker, while the opposition would sit on the opposite side, on the right of the speaker, or was it the other way around...), which is often visually depicted as a line from left to right, the term "centrist" has been concocted for those who do not adhere to either of the two extremes. Perhaps because of this one-dimensional picture, with the "centrists" being on the center of the line, equally apart from the two extremes, it's often thought that "centrists" are either people who are undecided, or who are for compromises, for "listening to both sides", for appeasement between the two extremes. People who don't really have strong stances and opinions o...

One of the most conflicting feelings that people like me can ever get is when extremist multiculturalist social justice activists become the victims of horrendous violence perpetrated by the very people they so much idolize. This is because one part of my brain wants to feel glee, and gloat about it, to say "you get what you deserve". Another, the more rational and moral part of my brain tells me that it's absolutely despicable and immoral to feel glee about someone getting seriously hurt or even killed. I know it's wrong to gloat about someone getting gruesome violence committed against them, but it's extremely hard to not feel a bit of it, no matter how immoral it may be. Just a few days ago (as of writing this), a Finnish woman was brutally murdered in her own home. While the police is still investigating the crime, the main suspect is her boyfriend. As you might guess, this woman was a very open and vocal social justice activist, who was very active both...

As I have written in a previous blog post , the concept of "communism" (as well as "socialism") should be deemed as abhorrent as, if not even more abhorrent than "nazism". Whenever you hear somebody saying "I am a communist", in all seriousness and with conviction, that should give you an equally strong sense of antipathy and disgust as when you hear somebody saying "I am a nazi", in all seriousness and conviction. During the entire history of communism, no matter which country we are talking about, they have been as bad as and even worse than nazis ever were. Communism is, without a shred of exaggeration, the political ideology that has massacred most people in peace time for political purposes in the entire history of humanity, and by a long shot. Communism is a completely abhorrent ideology. It's absolutely disgusting murderous ideology that devalues human life and human value. It should be despised and shunned as much as nazis...

I have been a semi-regular viewer of speedruns for many, many years, and one of my all-time favorite games to watch speedruns of has been for quite a long time The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time . For quite many years it appeared that 17 minutes is the lower limit of how fast the game can be completed (with the world record being just a couple of seconds below it, and having been so for quite some time). However, very recently a new exploit was found that has allowed sub-12 minutes completion of the game using a completely different strategy and exploits. I wrote recently a blog post about why I didn't find this exciting in the least , even though I have been a huge fan of OoT speedrunning for several years. Knowing more details about the particular techniques used for this new route hasn't changed my opinion. Here I'll list all the reasons why I don't really like this new any% speedrun route, from the least objectionable to the most objectionable (all in my per...

Recently in an online forum somebody linked to a Tweet thread where somebody discussed a potential copyright infringement against a friend of mine (also frequenting that forum). It was about the use of some screenshots of some videos that this friend had made. The tweet in question linked to my friend's website, to the content where the material from which the screenshots were taken from. Anyway, the details of that are not really relevant here. The thing is, my friend's personal web page is full of all kinds of things, mostly related to programming, hobby projects and also contains a sort of personal diary and some opinion pieces on diverse subjects. One of the people participating in that Twitter discussion thread dug up the titles of a couple of these opinion pieces (somewhere entirely elsewhere inside the website than the original point of the discussion) where he presented some criticism of the Islamic religion, and posted a screenshot of these article titles. In thi...

World War I was one of the largest and most devastating wars of all human history. The reasons for it were really complicated, and a complete mess, with allied nations being dragged into the war because of their alliances and whatnot. However, the central pundit of the whole conflict, the major villain, was Germany, with a couple of essentially vassal states being dragged into the conflict by their alliances with Germany. Eventually the Allied Powers were finally able to defeat Germany in 1918, and as a result its empire was split and all of Germany's colonies were transferred to other countries or gained independence. Germany was devastated by the war, yet it took it but a mere 20 years for it to raise from the ashes again, and start yet another world war, even bigger and more devastating this time, almost destroying Europe in the process. Once again the allied forces were once again able to defeat Germany in 1945, again at a great cost. This time the allied forces weren...

The problem of pollution and especially CO2 emissions has become quite a big thing, and more and more countries and activists are trying to find solutions to it. The thing is, many of the proposed and even implemented solutions are often ineffective, very costly (in relation to their effectiveness and energy production), and sometimes even harmful to the environment and even human health. And, ironically, so far none of these implemented solutions has done almost anything to reduce emissions. Germany is, perhaps, the European (perhaps even worldwide) pinnacle of moving to renewable energy production: Something like less than 5% of the electricity used in Germany comes from nuclear power plants (and Germany's plan is to reduce it to 0% in the next decade or so), and something like 80% comes from renewable energy sources, such as wind energy. Ironically, the CO2 emissions of Germany have only gone up year after year, not down. Germany is producing more CO2 than ever before. Movi...

I have been a long-time follower of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrunning, as I find the speedruns of that game, especially the main any% category, to be particularly interesting and enthralling. In terms of longevity and popularity, Ocarina of Time is a veteran, one of the big ones. It has been actively speedrun for a couple of decades, and it has been one of the most popular ones. The history of glitch discoveries in the game is long, rich and interesting, with the any% world record times being brought down year after year. The first speedruns were well over an hour long, but due to glitch discoveries these were brought down to below 20 minutes. For quite many years 18 minutes was considered to be the lower limit of what can be achieved, and there seemed to be no way to get any lower. Then a new way of performing a particular glitch was discovered, which brought down this theoretical lower limit by an entire minute, the holy grail now being the 17 minutes mark, which for...

If there's one thing that the radical left, which has been gaining immense sociopolitical power in the past decade, as made quite clear is that there's no limit to how extreme they are willing to go in their views and opinions, no matter how outrageous they may have sounded just a mere few years earlier. The pattern is always the same: They start with more minor and mostly non-controversial claims, and when society starts listening to them, they get more and more emboldened and start taking those claims more and more towards the ridiculous extreme. That's how they have gone, for example, from a simple "we shouldn't make fun of fat people" to "being obese is healthy and has no health risks", and from a simple "people should not be discriminated against due to their sexual orientation" to "as an indisputable scientific fact, biological sex does not exist". There are, of course, many steps between those two extremes. Many of thes...

One thing that I see time and again that makes me sigh in exasperation is when someone makes a post or comment about some record low temperature at some place and accompanies it with a snarky comment about climate change. You know, as if it were evidence against climate change. This always makes me facepalm because it's something that the climate science predicts will happen more and more often, not something that goes against their predictions. This is essentially using a correct prediction of climate science and trying to use it against that very climate science. Climate science predicts that as global average temperature goes up, climate extremes will get accentuated more and more. In other words, dry areas will become drier, rainy areas will become rainier, hot areas will see record-high heat waves, and very cold areas will see record low temperatures, time and again. Thus, when a particularly cold area of the world, like many parts of Siberia, sees an all-time record...

As I have written before, "social liberalism" is a rather unfortunately named political system because people (sometimes deliberately) confuse it with "socialism", even though it's a completely different thing. Likewise many terms related to it use the word "social" for one thing or another, making the unfortunate and unjustified connection to socialism. Confusing "social liberalism" with "socialism" is like confusing the the word "community" with "communism". All these terms can be useful in political discourse, however, so it's hard to avoid them. But what you can do is use alternatives, synonyms , that do not include the word "social" in them, if you really want to avoid confusion and the wrong connotations. So, for example, rather than saying "social security" or "social safety net", use the term "welfare" instead. Likewise, instead of "social program...

If you watch any amount of YouTube videos, you'll quickly notice sponsored videos. In other words, your favorite youtuber gives something like a 30-second spiel about some (usually software) product at the beginning of the video, as a sponsor to that video. Most often such advertised products are games, VPN services and, sometimes, PC hardware products. These companies and developers simply send emails to these youtubers offering to pay them money to have a 30-second spiel at the beginning of a given amount of videos. Many of these youtubers accept it because it's easy money. A new form of scam, or hacking, has been developed recently targeting precisely this kind of youtuber. The scam works by the hacker/hackers sending a youtuber an email that looks a lot like a legitimate sponsorship deal, exactly like the common ones. With one crucial difference: They ask the youtuber for a short review of, typically, a VPN program. What's so strange about this? The fact that s...

About a decade ago there was a case in Sweden, near the Finnish border, where three men and several women of the same family were jailed for physical assault, attempted murder, and several instances of harassment and other such crimes. (The longest sentence that one of the men got was 10 years. Which knowing the lax laws in Sweden ought to tell how serious the crimes were. In Sweden, in terms of severity of punishment, that's essentially equivalent to life in prison in the US.) The thing is, this was only the culmination of a pattern of behavior from that family that had been going on for almost a decade. For as long as that family had been living in a small rural community, they had engaged in extremely severe harassment of their neighbors, to completely criminal extents. They would daily shout and scream insults at their neighbors, calling them (especially the women) all the names in the book, for literally hours on end. They would throw rocks at their neighbors' houses and...

I'm not an AMD fan per se (neither the CPU nor the GPU in my PC are from AMD), but I am a great admirer of that company, and really grateful that it exists, as their strong and fair market competition benefits consumers quite a lot. I think that without AMD the current consumer personal computer electronics market would be much worse (and expensive) today than it is. AMD is a company that's fighting a market war on two different fronts, against two absolute giants, namely Intel and Nvidia. They have been the major competitor on both the CPU and GPU markets since the late 90's. While they have had their ups and downs, sometimes getting ahead, sometimes falling far behind, for the most part AMD has been kind of an underdog, always trying to catch up, and sometimes even arguably surpassing (at least in terms of hardware prowess) the two giants. But the market share of both Intel and Nvidia have always felt rock-solid and unshakeable. But I have to really commend and admi...

Medical studies have shown a somewhat worrying trend especially in the richest western countries of the average testosterone levels in men dropping below what's considered normal over the last few decades. This is not just a laughing matter, or a matter of "oh noes, men are less masculine!" It's actually a health problem. As with almost everything else, too much or too little of a particular bodily function can have health consequences, as well as all kinds of other consequences. Both too much testosterone production as well as too little can have negative health effects on men, and the average levels especially in the west are approaching those "too little" levels. I am in no way a medical expert, nor have I done any research on what kind of medical research has been done and published, but it is my understanding that for the most part the reasons behind this are unclear. I would like to present a serious hypothesis. This is 100% my personal guess, of...

Recently the Advertising Standards Authority of the United Kingdom banned a television advertisement for a computer manufacturer because of eight complaints they received about it. Not eight thousands. Or eight hundred. Eight complaints. (Isn't it curious how a mere eight people can cause what I'm sure is tens of thousands of pounds of losses to a company just by filing some complaints?) The ad was banned, according to the ASA, because it "presents gender stereotypes in a way that was likely to cause harm." So what exactly appears in the ad, that may potentially "cause" harm by perpetuating gender stereotypes? Did the ad, for example, depict women as incompetent when using computers, and needing the help of men to fix something? No. Did the ad show or say something about men being good with computers and technically proficient, and/or the opposite for women? No. Did the ad, in fact, show any women at all, or refer to women (or men) in any way, ...

A speedrunner who participated in the current (as of writing this) Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon, running a Final Fantasy game, was banned by the GDQ organizers for 18 months. Why? Did he say something inappropriate during his run, or otherwise behave in an inappropriate manner? No. Did he say something or did he behave inappropriately during the event otherwise, towards other people, or on social media, or something like that? No. Did he do anything at all during the event, on stream, off-stream, or anywhere, that would have justified this ban? No. He didn't do absolutely anything during the even that would have elicited this. So why was he banned? Because at one point in the past he made one single tweet where he expressed support for the economic policies of some political party in Spain. Regressive leftists don't like this political party, and call it "far-right". (I have absolutely no idea what the policies of this party are, but if SJWs ...

I have written previously how the previously-neutral (and maybe even a bit conservative) snopes.com website, which has for several decades now been dedicated to investigating and reporting the veracity of urban legends and other similar stories, seems to have contracted Trump Derangement Syndrome and is now mainly a pro-Democrat anti-Republican anti-Trump website, doing very little of what they were originally known for, and concentrating mostly on one-sided biased politics. However, they have in fact gone beyond that. Snopes.com is not anymore only a platform that expresses and promotes political opinions. It's an activist organization. The main difference between just expressing your opinion (and, at the very most, trying to influence the opinions of your audience) and being an activist is whether your activities go beyond just your own platform where you publish your opinions. In other words, when you start actively reaching for other entities, like other people, institut...

I have noticed that in recent years there has formed a kind of... maybe the word "strange" is too strong of a word to describe it, but curious "counter-culture" to the anti-SJW movement (which is kind of a "counter-culture" itself). People who say that they "used to be anti-SJWs" but now they are not. If you ever encounter a YouTube video of such a person, especially if he has a lot of subscribers, discussing that exact thing, you'll invariably find tons and tons of people in the comment section saying the same thing. One mildly frustrating thing about these people is that it's hard to pinpoint exactly what their opinion is on things. Where do they actually stand politically? They never seem to exactly say what they disagree with anti-SJWs and what their own opinions are. They also seem rather absolutist in their "anti-anti-SJW" opinion. There seems to be no "they are right on some things, but I disagree with others....

If you don't follow certain YouTube channels or certain forums or people in social media (or if you are reading this years from now), you might not know what "The New Guy" meme, that started in the very beginning of 2020, is about. You can find a detailed explanation at Know Your Meme . Since it's explained there, I'm not going to repeat all that here, other than that it started when somebody on social media commented on and drew attention to this comic strip, made by somebody else likewise on social media: Detached from everything else, the purpose and message of this comic strip is very unclear. At face value it may seem to be some kind of parody, satire or criticism of modern feminist social justice ideology, which is often extremely callous, unempathetic and vicious. It appears, at face value, that the woman in the comic strip is the asshole villain, some kind of feminist social justice activist, and the man is shown as your average joe. If it is such a...

The United Kingdom, the promised land of leftist progressiveness (only surpassed by Sweden, although the UK has tried their hardest in recent years to catch up), has created over the past few years all kinds of recruitment ads for the police forces and the military that are absolute cringe. Where the military recruitment ads of other countries, like China or the United States, give a picture of bravery, duty, honor, loyalty, courage in the face of danger, and fighting for the safety of one's country and fellow citizens, these British ads have a rather different message. Like "it's ok to cry" (literal quote), it's ok to be emotional, it's ok to be weak. And, of course, they are an orgastic regressive dream of inclusivity and progressiveness, about how these positions are open for all people of all backgrounds and faiths. Many of these resemble more advertisements for a therapist than for the police forces or the military. One particular recruitment ad is rath...

"Trolling" is a neologism invented in the internet era, originally mainly to describe people who deliberately instigated online flamewars for their own amusement and self-gratification they get from getting a huge amount of reaction and responses to their activity. Large-scale online discussion forum flamewars were extremely common especially in the 90's and early 2000's, often because of lack of any moderation and arbitration in completely free-for-all anything-goes usenet groups and other forms of online discussion forums. These flamewars often consisted of discussion threads that could span literally tens of thousands of messages by hundreds of people, with usually just a handful of pathological instigators and another handful of responders too stubborn to stop responding, with hundreds of other forum visitors dragged in for a while. "Trolls" were people who liked to start and/or add fuel to the flamewar, often maliciously and purposefully, just to ge...

I wrote in a previous blog post how the feminist activist Thomas Smith was accused by the youtuber Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin of being "a white supremacist with a guilty conscience". This was because the former was saying, essentially, that if everybody is given maximum freedom and equal opportunities, then white men would naturally raise to the top and get all the positions of power (and therefore the only way to stop that from happening is to discriminate against white men and put restrictions and hurdles in their way). Which is just pure white supremacist talk: Given everything else being equal, white men would naturally gain all the top positions, over everybody else. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently gave a speech in the United States congress, when she was interviewing some witness, where she blamed climate change on white people (and argued that non-white people were the ones who suffered the most from it). She doesn't understand what she's ...

Two members of the United States Marine Corps, both of Mexican descent, are exiting a public restroom, when they are confronted by a mob of white people who start harassing them, insulting them, throwing racist slurs at them, and even physically assaulting them to the point that they need to be checked into a hospital. One would think that both the mainstream media and the regressive leftist Twitter mob would be all over this, demanding immediate and harsh action, and using this as a stellar example of racism and violence against minorities. One would think that the mainstream media would make story after story for weeks, and talk about it for years, and for politicians and elected officials to make public statements strongly condemning this action and demanding for solutions to this rampant problem of violent racism. Yet... nothing. Not a peep. The Twitter mob is completely silent about it. The mainstream media is completely silent about it except for a small local newspaper and F...