What grinds my gears

The social justice narrative of "structural racism" has invaded pretty much all of the western world. Even the major news outlets of the least "socialjusticey" European countries (like Finland) are liberally throwing around that term as if it were a self-evident fact that it exists and is real. Politicians and elected representatives in many countries are throwing that term around and talking about it, and you see it more and more often everywhere. The claim is that the current western capitalist society has been built from the ground up over hundreds of years in such a manner that it favors white people and keeps non-white people oppressed. That not only does it perpetuate racist attitudes, prejudice and discrimination in people, but that the entire system, from the top down, works in a manner that benefits white people while keeping non-white people down and oppressed. The entire system, somehow, puts extra hurdles onto the path of non-white people that hinders th...

In 1996 California amended the Constitution of the state with a civil rights act that prohibits the state from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. It was modeled after the famous federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was one of the most fundamental cornerstones of American legislation that ended racial segregation, discrimination and "Jim Crow laws" and is one of the most important pieces of legislation in the entire history of the country. Recently the state legislators of California have made a proposition to repeal this act and remove it from from the California Constitution. Not amend it, rewrite it, clarify it, add things to it or remove parts of it. If the proposition passes, the entire amendment will be repealed and removed in its entirety, period. With nothing replacing it. What happened? Did racist deep south redneck ultraconservative confederates take over the California...

This is actually quite a complex question. The short answer would be, I suppose, "yes and no". Freedom of the press is one of the most fundamental core rights in any free constitutional democratic country and society, and for a good reason. The press (which in the context means all the news media, which traditionally consisted of newspapers but later expanded to radio, television and now obviously the internet) is an extraordinarily powerful entity in any country or society. The mainstream press essentially controls the flow of information over the country and beyond. Citizens have little resources to get information and news from elsewhere other by either word of mouth (which is extremely inefficient) or the press. Thus the press plays a crucial role in keeping the citizens informed on what is happening. The press is so crucial in the dissemination of information that controlling and restricting the press is one of the key elements in all totalitarian regimes and dictatorshi...

Some time ago I wrote about what will happen to video games if (and very probably when) the social justice ideology succeeds in taking over the entire game industry. How video games will start shoving their politics down your throat whether you want it or not. Well, it's already happening in other software. Recently the Discord developers decided that they will start preaching their social justice ideology to all of their millions of users, regardless of who they are and which country they are in. Notice that the "X" close button on the right is slightly grayed out? That's because it's disabled. That message cannot be dismissed. Clicking on that "X" button does nothing. (Sure, it might have been some kind of bug, but I have my doubts.) And notice the provocative language being used. But maybe this is just a one-time thing? Maybe they just notified every single one of their millions of users this once, and they aren't going to make this a recurring t...

One thing that the social justice ideology, often starting from university academia, is infamous for, it's taking existing words and changing their meaning. Most often these are words with extremely strong connotations and heavy meanings, and the changes are done to make them easier to throw around to accuse and insult people. Currently there are perhaps no two terms that are more popular among the social justice ideologues than "racism" and "white supremacy". The meaning of these words has been fuzzied and mangled, and they have become extremely malleable and vague. In many situations it can be hard to understand what they mean by those terms, as they don't seem to apply at all. In order to better understand what they are talking about, it helps to understand how they have redefined the words. For many decades (and for a large part in dictionaries and encyclopedias) these two terms have had the following meanings: "Racism": 1) Prejudice, discrimin...

Already three years ago I wondered in a blog post why the United States police does nothing when witnessing masked terrorists harassing and assaulting people, and committing all kinds of other serious crimes directly in front of the police. I also particularly wondered why the government, the majority-Republican government, does nothing to stop this police corruption. No investigations, no prosecutions, nothing. Many people, when pointed out to the criminal inaction of the police, will argue "it's the leftist city mayor, or state governor, or other leftist officials, who command the police not to intervene; it's not the police's fault". Ok, maybe it's the fault of a leftist city or state official. But that just raises the same question: Why isn't the government doing anything about it? I have not heard a single politician in congress demanding an investigation into this kind of corruption and failure to protect citizens by other government officials. (Ma...

The Last of Us 2 , by the game developer company Naughty Dog, is but just the latest highly controversial game because of the leftist identity politics (purposefully) shoved into the game as a form of political activism. All human characters in this kind of video game with ultra-realistic graphics is closely modeled after an actual human being, most often a professional actor and/or model. Side-by-side comparisons of many of the female characters in the game shows that these female characters have been noticeably "uglified" compared to their real-life counterparts. The main character is a lesbian, and there's an openly "transsexual" character in a main role as well, as well as many other references to identity politics. The higher-ups at Naughty Dog have made in interviews it very clear and unambiguous that this is not just an artistic choice, but that these things have been done to the game explicitly and deliberately for the purposes of identity politics, to p...

It's funny how for months people, most vocally those of an extreme leftist persuasion, were all about the dangers of the coronavirus, and how it's the worst thing in the world and how people who don't obey the lockdown restrictions should be punished and how they are the worst people... and how they have all but forgotten about it. Suddenly the coronavirus doesn't matter. Heck, there are even medical doctors making excuses about why the riots... I mean "protests" are more important than the pandemic. (Not surprisingly, all these doctors are heavily left-leaning.) Anyway, putting all that aside, I am interested in what will happen with the pandemic from a somewhat academic perspective. If social distancing and avoiding mass gatherings really are that important and effective in slowing down the spread of the pandemic, that ought to mean that in the next weeks and months there ought to be a huge raise in number of cases and deaths. If, however, mass gatherings ha...

A group of mostly-white mostly-middle-class rich kids in Seattle, Washington decided to take the opportunity that the current protests and riots provided them and engage in a bit of fantasy roleplaying and claim an about 6-8 block area in the middle of Capitol Hill and declare it an "autonomous zone" where the police and the government have no business entering. In other words, a no-go zone. By doing so they have probably broken at least a dozen federal and state laws (with illegal disruption of traffic being one of the mildest ones), on top of another dozen city ordinances, but apparently the city officials and law enforcement don't care and are allowing them to engage in their roleplaying. This "autonomous zone", and how it's run, is just absolutely hilarious. Why? Well, consider that these people are the exact same regressive leftist anarcho-communists that are protesting the police and are demanding the police to be defunded and dismantled. The people wh...

I recently wrote a post about what to expect in the future if (and quite possibly when) the extreme regressive left succeeds in taking over society completely, including all possible levels of government, law enforcement and all services. On a more immediate and slightly smaller scale, something that's already happening at an increasing speed, one consequence of the social justice ideology invading everything is that it has become less and less possible to just ignore it and escape it. For many decades it used to be that if you disliked a particular company for something they were doing, for example for becoming too political and trying to shove their politics onto their customers, you could simply boycott them, not purchase any of their products or services, and go to the competition. For many decades these companies used to be a fringe minority, and there were plenty of competing companies that didn't do that and were completely viable alternatives. However, we are very quic...

Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of the collectible card game Magic The Gathering , rather infamously recently banned several cards from their game and all their websites for being "racist". It's noteworthy that most of the banned cards had absolutely no racist connotations nor intent to them of any kind. For example, one of the banned cards simply has the card text "destroy all black creatures". Black in the game is one of the five colors of mana (black, blue, red, green and white), and all cards are either colorless, or one or more of these five colors. In the lore of the game the color of mana roughly corresponds to certain aspects of nature or personality (such as impulsiveness, lawfulness, technology, etc) but mostly it's just a gameplay-technical thing, where cards cost certain amount of certain color of mana. In this context "black creatures" simply mean those creature cards on the battlefield that have black mana symbols in their costs (...

I must say that the United States has one of the weirdest police forces, and police officers, in the entire world. I just can't figure them out. On one hand they are excessively totalitarian, regularly abuse their position of power, and do not even know (or care) about the laws they are allegedly enforcing. On the other hand they seem to be extremely weak, cowardly and unable to actually uphold the law and keep law and order. And, what's worse, they seem to be highly biased and selective on when they decide to perform their sworn duties that they were hired for, and when not. When it comes to that first aspect, it becomes quite evident when you watch so-called "first amendment audit" videos on YouTube (which I have done quite a lot). At many places in the United States the police seems to be deadly afraid of people with cameras. Even though the law clearly states, and this has been confirmed by courts numerous times, and government officials and workers, including pol...

As I, as well as countless others, have been saying for years, the regressive far left is winning the culture war, they are gaining ground every single day that passes, and there's no stopping them. Universities are pumping out brainwashed drones by the thousands, who are indoctrinating people in society (starting from very early age), and have been invading and co-opting group after group, organization after organization, company after company, and government after government. And their opposition is too weak, too disorganized, and too unable to do anything to stop this invasion of the entire society. The sad fact is that the extremist leftists are winning. The current riots, and the pandering that society is doing as a consequence, are but the latest signs of this. Buildings are burning, property is being damaged and looted, and statues are being torn down. And organization after organization and company after company is placating to these people. The current riots are a glimpse ...

To really understand how deeply academia and the scientific community has been thoroughly invaded and co-opted by the regressive leftist social justice ideology, consider this recent note from the editors of the magazine Nature : That's right, the western academia, including many academic journals, are going to "shut down" in order to "help eradicate anti-Black (with a capital B!) racism in academia and STEM" even though academia and STEM are already the most regressive leftist institutions in the entire world. The entire editorial is astonishing (and cringey) to read, and there are real gems in it, like this amazing piece of cognitive dissonance (emphasis mine): "Nature stands against all forms of racism . We also recognize that Nature is one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship" They stand against ALL forms of racism... and immediately in the next sentence they say "one of the white institutions t...

What I envision happening, if the upcoming US presidential election is won by the Democrat candidate, is pretty much exactly what the regressive leftists claimed would happen if Trump won the election four years go. They predicted that if Trump were to win, that would be taken as a signal by the "racist" conservatives that it's open season for attacking black people and minorities. That violent racist crimes would sky-rocket, that racists would start patrolling the streets beating up and killing any black people they see, that they would start burning their houses down, and the police and authorities would do very little to stop this, as the activity would be fully endorsed by Trump. Of course none of that happened, no matter how hardly the leftists wished and pretended it had. There was no wave of racist crimes, there were no patrols, there were no beatings and burning of homes, nothing. If anything, racist crimes might have gone down a notch. But of course the leftists ...

In the United States and the UK people are violently rioting on the streets, looting, setting buildings on fire, and assaulting people. In the UK they are destroying statues and other relics of British culture. In the US large groups of white people are virtue-signaling by bowing down to black people and asking them for forgiveness (even though not a single one of those white people has ever done anything to anybody). In many of the cities where these things are happening, the city officials are fully backing up the vandalism and destruction of cultural symbols. Hundreds and hundreds of megacorporations are supporting and endorsing the protests, riots and destruction. Protesters everywhere, especially in the US, are threatening to destroy everything. And society is placating to them. Officials are placating to them. Corporations are placating to them. This is a glimpse to the future of the western world. Like all zealots, the more power they get, the hungrier they'll get for more p...

The United Kingdom has arguably the most far-left morality police in the world. This is a country where if you call someone online with the wrong pronoun, the police will come knocking on your door to lecture you about your wrongthink and, in some cases, even to take to jail (there have been numerous famous cases). Over a thousand such "hate incidents" are investigated by the UK police every year. This is a country where the police constantly prides itself for being so "inclusive" and so "progressive", constantly virtue-signaling on social media and warning people that they will take all "hate incidents" seriously (even those aimed directly at the police), and who constantly parade in public their "diverse" and "inclusive" police officers from all kinds of cultures and religions. On a more positive note, this is one of the countries with the least amount of police brutality and police abuse in the world, especially against ...

For years, even decades now, quite many people have lamented the lack of a "gender-neutral (singular) pronoun" in the English language, and tried to make the word "they" be that word. After many decades of hard social engineering it appears that they are indeed slowly but surely succeeding in forcefully pushing it into common parlance and everyday speech. You just have to look a mere 5 to 10 years ago and almost nobody was using "they" as a "gender-neutral" singular pronoun, but nowadays you can see and hear instances of it almost constantly everywhere. This social engineering program has been so successful that even many people who are staunch and vocal opponents of "political correctness", social justice intersectional feminism and the extreme left, are starting to use it. Perhaps even without noticing. It has been so successful, in fact, that even major dictionaries, such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, are not only including the ...