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 ...