What grinds my gears

In a previous blog post about classical liberalism I mentioned the concepts of "positive rights" and "negative rights". What are they? Regardless of their misleading names, they do not stand for something like "good rights" and "bad rights". In this context "negative" means a right that forbids others (especially the government) from doing something to you ("do not do this"), while a "positive" right compels others (usually the government) to do something ("do this"). A negative right compels inactivity. A positive right compels activity. Freedom of speech is the quintessential example of a "negative right". This is because it forbids/stops others (primarily the government) from doing something to you, who has this right. More particularly, it forbids the government from punishing, deterring or silencing you because of your expression of opinion. This is not a "positive right" bec...

On the 16th of March of 2020 the Finnish government announced their plans to declare a state of emergency in the country due to the coronavirus pandemic, and use the Emergency Powers Act to enact a relatively strict lockdown on the country: Borders closed, schools closed, public gatherings larger than 10 people banned, no needless loitering at public places, etc. These measures require approval by the Finnish Parliament. They got completely unanimous approval (with the exception of one minor act relating to hospital staff working requirements that was shot down by the Constitutional advisory board). Every single party gave unanimous approval for enacting these measures, including the Finns Party, which is the opposition party in parliament. Not only was this a historic event in Finland because this was the first time in Finnish history that the Emergency Powers Act was used in peace time, but also because the entire parliament was rather unusually 100% unanimous about such an impor...

In my previous blog post I mentioned how Chinese authorities tried to censor the nature of the COVID-19 disease during the initial stages, before finally reversing their policies and informing the world about it. China then proceeded to implement very strict lockdown and quarantine measures in order to stop the spread of the disease. A great swindle followed. What am I talking about? The vast majority of the rest of the world seems to live under the illusion that while the Chinese government at first botched its response to the epidemic, censoring people and not reacting quickly enough, they then recanted their bad attitudes and proceeded to become more open and take decisive action to stop the epidemic. They are, in fact, painting themselves as somewhat of heroes of the world, being on the frontlines in the fight against this pandemic. And many people are, in fact, talking positively about China's actions. They talk about how effective the lockdown measures have been in sto...

I remember reading a long time ago, maybe in the 80's or 90's, an article about a then-Soviet citizen who had an illness (might have been heart-related, I don't remember anymore) so severe that it required a surgical operation that was too complicated for Soviet doctors, so he was quite exceptionally and unusually allowed to be transported to the United States to be operated. Both the patient and his close family who traveled with him were very surprised at the drastically different attitude of the American doctors. That's because said doctors constantly kept them up-to-date with everything they were doing, and constantly informed them of what was happening and explained every procedure they were going to perform, and explained to them the nature of the illness in great detail. They were constantly updating them on the patient's condition and upcoming plans and procedures. They were surprised by this because they had lived their whole lives in a country were doc...

Many countries, especially in Europe, are at this moment experiencing what happens when suddenly there are thousands, even tens of thousands of sick people in need of medical attention, and from the looks of it, it's probably going to get much worse than this, before it gets better. The healthcare systems of these countries are struggling to keep up. There's a lack of resources and personnel, and it's only getting worse. So yeah, let's open the borders and take millions of economic migrants all of a sudden. Surely our healthcare systems have the resources for managing all of them, when they get sick. I'm not even talking about this coronavirus pandemic in particular. Just people getting sick for whatever reasons. Take a million immigrants all of a sudden, and a good portion of them will be, and will get, sick for various reasons. How are you going to cope with all of them? On another tangent, many people are pointing out the irony of more and more countries ti...

There's a viral video circulating of Joe Biden being confronted by some worker at one of his political rallies, asking him why he wants to ban guns, and Biden responding with "you are full of shit". At one particular point in the middle of this confrontation a female aide of Biden tries to defuse the situation by saying to the worker "ok, thank you for..." before being interrupted by Biden, who says to her, and I kid you not, "shush!" Imagine if it had been Donald Trump who had done this in a similar situation. You would not hear the end of it. All the major anti-Trump news channels, CNN, MSNBC etc, would go for literally days talking about nothing else than this incident. Twitter would explode, with Twitter feminists doing nothing more than to write angry tweets about the incident. The word "misogynist" would probably, and without exaggeration, be written over a million times in total. This incident would be constantly, constantly , b...

Whenever I watch a YouTube video made by an American conservative criticizing the social justice ideology or the Democrats (which often greatly overlap), almost invariably there will be conservatives in the comment section disparaging and demonizing "liberalism". In fact, there even is a particular conservative YouTuber whose main slogan and catchphrase is "liberalism is a disease, we are the cure". This author in particular tends to go into long rants against "liberals" and "liberalism", instead of talking about Democrats or "the left" (which would be more accurate), but he's by far not the only American conservative creator who talks about "liberalism" in such a manner. I always shake my head at these videos, and the comment section of such videos. American conservatives are liberals! In particular, they are classical liberals, to a tee. I sometimes write a comment in these videos, or respond to other people's...

Consider that during the current year, as of writing this (ie. we are a bit over 2 months into the year), according to statistics there have been approximately: 92 thousand deaths caused by the seasonal flu 320 thousand deaths caused by HIV/AIDS 186 thousand deaths caused by malaria 1.5 million deaths caused by cancer 8 million abortions 204 thousand suicides 475 thousand deaths caused by alcohol 951 thousand deaths caused by smoking 256 thousand deaths caused by traffic accidents 4 thousand deaths caused by the coronavirus Yet it's the coronavirus that has effectively halted the world, caused widespread panic, put several countries in lockdown, plummeted stocks, and driven several companies to the brink of bankruptcy. Yes, the coronavirus has the potential to become exponentially infectious and cause exponentially more deaths than it has so far. However, even in the worst possible scenario (it becomes as widespread as highly contagious diseases like influenza), it w...

Modern Communists, who are gaining more and more traction, visibility and power, are constantly repeating the mantra that Communism is about giving the power back to the working class. The working class owns everything equally, and makes all the decisions, and the government exists solely to coordinate this power and enact these decisions. This is a complete lie (like so many other things about the Communist ideology). We have a perfect example of Communism in real life, from a very recent past: The Soviet Union. Soviet Russia, for as long as it existed, implemented full-on Communism. It was not the kind of half-baked Communism like eg. in China, but full-on 100% pure Communism, from top to bottom. I have for quite long been thinking about making a really long blog post describing in detail the economic and social system of the Communist Soviet Russia, but I have never got around of doing it. I will describe some relevant key points about it here, as it pertains to this. The ...

If one has only become aware of the current regressive leftist "intersectional" feminist multiculturalist ideology in recent years, one easily gets the impression that it's a relatively recent fad. That going back 10 or 20 years it was almost non-existent, until it suddenly gained a lot of traction. In many countries, such as the Nordic Countries, the history of modern multiculturalism is a bit older than that, though. It traces it roots all the way back to the early 1980's, and started gaining a lot of mainstream traction already in the 1990's (only speeding up from there). A big part of this multiculturalist movement has always been social engineering. The activists and advocates trying to make multiculturalism an integral and inseparable part of society and culture, and any criticism and opposition to be highly vilified and demonized. Already in the 1990's the narrative, often repeated in newspaper opinion pieces, TV and other publications, was that i...

Telemarketing is one of the most infamous banes of owning a phone. In other words, those unsolicited calls from companies trying to sell you something. In Finland this is done mainly by the biggest telephone and internet service providers. They usually are surprisingly nice and generally do not resort to any sort of dirty tactics. If you just say at the beginning of the call that you are not interested, they usually just politely say that that's fine, they say some polite farewell, and end the call there. I suppose that because these are some of the biggest companies in Finland, they have a reputation to maintain, and they don't really need to be aggressive about it, and thus the telemarketers are instructed to be polite and immediately back off if the person is not interested. Not all telemarketers are that polite and mindful, though. Especially with smaller companies, which are often subsidiaries of some foreign company, they can be much more persistent. Rather than simpl...

I have been for decades a huge fan of Japanese-style RPG games, and have been playing them since the 90's. All four first Dragon Quest games are some of my all-time favorites (the quality increasing with each installment), and to this day I enjoy most of them. In fact, I recently finished Dragon Quest XI on the Nintendo Switch, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. (I even endured the sheer amount of mindless level-grinding required for the absolutely insane and unfair final boss in the true ending, just because the game was so addictive.) Such games seem to be quite a rarity nowadays, although absolute gems sometimes pop up. Octopath Traveler is not only one of the best JRPGs in recent years, but arguably of all time, including the classics of the 80's and 90's. Not surprisingly I was also a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series. I have played all the entries in the main series, with the exception of XI, XII and XIV (mostly because two of them are MMORPGs, which I have zero inte...

The modern social justice ideology is extraordinarily toxic, and poisons every aspect of society, due to the army of activists that have successfully invaded everything. One thing I really hate about it is how it affects me personally as well. How it poisons my mind. I'm not referring here to it being convincing, and how I am starting to seriously consider the claims that the ideology is making. In fact, I'm referring to the exact opposite . By being so ubiquitous, so obnoxious, so in-your-face, so aggressive and insulting, so deliberately provocative, I can't help but to be pushed away from everything that the ideology promotes. Sometimes in not so constructive ways. Ironically, I feel like the social justice ideology is not only radicalizing its followers, but also its opponents, including me. Radicalizing them in the opposite end of the spectrum. No matter how much I try to combat it, I just can't help the instinctive feelings I get. What am I talking abou...

Just a mere 5 or so years ago, even more recently, regressive leftist social justice warriors had really strong opinions like "homosexuality is not a choice", as well as advocating for "safe spaces" for women where men have no business entering. I still remember vividly (and in fact if I searched a bit I could even link to youtube videos) SJWs having slogans like "homosexuality is not a choice, your bigotry is", and also massive protests in university campuses demanding for "safe spaces" for minorities and for women. Yet, today, just a few years later, if you go to a SJW-infested university campus and loudly proclaim that "homosexuality is not a choice", that homosexuality is something you are born as, not something you choose, not something you can just switch on and off at will, that will be considered "hate speech" and you will be considered a bigot (and you'll be lucky if the worst consequence you get is verbal ha...

The current coronavirus (officially SARS-CoV-2) epidemic is certainly making the news, and paralyzing the world. In Wuhan and several surrounding areas streets are empty and desolated, construction sites abandoned, office buildings empty, and there's almost nobody on the streets. In many places in the rest of the world traveling has been discouraged and even restricted, and millions of dollars are being spent in testing and quarantining people. Stock markets are plummeting, and it is expected for prices (especially electronics) to soar in the near future. But is this a bit of an over-reaction? Should this be put into perspective? Consider that at the moment of writing this (3rd of March 2020) there have been about 3120 deaths caused by the coronavirus. Now consider that during the past two months, ie. during this year alone, an estimated 83 thousand people have died of the seasonal flu. (This is nothing abnormal. Every year about 500-600 thousand people die of the seasonal flu...

I have written about this very subject before in this blog, but I think it deserves repeating. I hate being so pessimistic, but I just don't see a future for our current free western society. Our rights and freedoms are being eroded and taken away at an ever-increasing rate, and pretty much everybody in charge is doing their hardest to destroy free western democracies as quickly as possible. This is not going to last. The current freedoms and rights are going to end, and I fear they are going to end pretty soon. Neo-Marxist social justice ideologues have succeeded in invading almost all universities in the western world, and as I have been saying many, many times, the people who control the universities will eventually control the entire society. Our progress, advances, rights and freedoms started from universities, and they are also going to end with the same universities. Universities in most western countries have become indoctrination and training camps for social justice ide...

As might have become apparent from many of my blog posts, I'm what has become in some circles known as a "free speech absolutist" (which is a very "centrist" / "classical liberal" position). This means that, among other things: The right to free speech is universal: It applies to everybody equally, regardless of who they are. Everybody has the same right to free speech regardless of anything. Free speech is an inalienable right: This means that it cannot be revoked under any circumstance, no matter what. It doesn't matter what you do, you retain your right to free speech. You may commit the most heinous crimes against humanity that can ever be imagined, but that doesn't affect one iota your fundamental right to free speech. The right to free speech is unconditional: It does not depend on anything. It does not depend on who you are, it does not depend on what your status or condition is, it does not depend on what you do, or have done, it do...