What grinds my gears

I recently purchased the Final Fantasy VII Remake (even though I previously thought I wouldn't ). It's actually better than I thought it would be (I'm still not very fond of the battle system, but it's nevertheless passable). There's one section of the game that's rather... flamboyant. I have previously written about other games where quite obviously modern social justice ideology has been shoved in, as a form of political activism. (Perhaps the most egregious and obvious example is Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus .) But how about this one? 1. Why it could ostensibly be This is not really any sort of major spoiler (unless you really are a purist who doesn't want to know anything about a game before playing it (I empathize because I myself am largely like that)) so it shouldn't be very spoilerific for me to describe this in detail. There's one section of the game where you need to infiltrate the mansion of an organized crime boss in order to rescue...

The Capitol riot that happened on January 6th of 2021 was arguably the biggest jackpot and lottery win that the far-left could have dreamed of, given that it has advanced their agenda and goals probably quite literally by years, perhaps even a decade, in one fell swoop. The now-far-left-extremist Democratic Party of the United States has in a mere month put forward motions and programs that they would have probably not dared to do in years if they hadn't this excuse. One of the most prominent features of taking advantage of this event is the outright lies about it, direct or by omission, that immediately became popular in the press and all kinds of activists and activist groups. Perhaps the biggest distortions about the event, which you still see all the time (and will probably see for years to come), is the claim that five people were killed during the riot. In fact, recently the Southern Poverty Law Center went even further than that and tweeted that five people were murdered ...

I have written several blog posts about why fighting the left is most probably a lost cause , mostly because the anti-SJWs, the "skeptics", do not succumb to the same dirty tactics as the left and want to play by the rules and do things by the book, and have gentlemanly discussions. While that may be commendable, it's not a winning strategy. While you may retain your honor and honesty, you are still going under the jackboot, and your honor means absolutely nothing. An honorable defeat is still a defeat. You won't suffer any less because you retained your dignity and honor. I also commented on how the January 6th riot on the Capitol is not the correct way to "play dirty" against the far-left. Rather than achieving anything it only made things a hundred times worse. It only gave them a boatload of political ammunition to advance their totalitarian regime by a country mile at one fell swoop. Their plans advanced probably by several years, even a decade, than...

I have written many, many times about the blatant and egregious political bias of Wikipedia (for example here ). A bias that, for some inexplicable reason, nobody seems to care about, not even the loudest and most active anti-SJWs (who will make several videos a week, even several videos a day, about the tiniest of things that the far-left has done... yet do not care nor will ever comment on the heavily left-biased politics of Wikipedia, for reasons that I will never understand.) Anyway. there are many, many good examples of this bias, but a good recent one is comparing the Wikipedia pages of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Rather unsurprisingly, the Donald Trump page is nothing but an extensive smearing campaign, an endless list of minutia that can be used to attack him politically. Heck, there are separate dedicated pages dedicated solely to smear him and nothing else (such as "veracity of statements by Donald Trump"). Now go to the Joe Biden Wikipedia page and try to find one,...

In most of the United States schools have been closed or severely restricted for almost a year now, and almost all education has moved to be done remotely, with the children staying at home. The media has started noticing a curious phenomenon happening during this time: The number of first-time ADHD diagnoses in the United States during the past year has increased by over 60% compared to normal, which is a huge amount. How is this possible? Does the pandemic cause ADHD? Does not being able to go to school, and instead having to attend remote classes from home, cause ADHD? Or could it perhaps be that, maybe, just maybe, it's the parents, who can't stand their unruly kids, taking them to the doctor to have them diagnosed with ADHD, and the doctors being way too eager to do so, so that the parents can drug their kids into becoming docile? Could it perhaps be that parents have been so accustomed for years to have peace and silence at home during school hours, and now for a year the...

I wrote in a previous blog post how the far-leftist "social justice" ideology appears to, at some level, have this very strange concept (I assume even without them consciously realizing it) that the riches in free western countries just somehow exist on their own, independently of people or what they do, like all these riches just somehow magically sprouted from the ground, like a cornucopia or fountain of wealth, and that what people do doesn't have anything to do with it. Thus, likewise, they seem to have this strange attitude that it doesn't really matter if people work for a living or not, that working only affects their personal life and well-being, not that of anybody else. A bit like a "job" is merely a way to get a slightly larger share of that wealth that's emanating from the ground, and thus someone losing that job would have no effect on anything other than that person himself and his personal life. Nobody else would be affected. Likewise the...

A mere 10 years ago far-leftist extremists, mainly at university campuses, restricted their actions to blocking your path, disrupting events they didn't like with loud noises, and pulling fire alarms. As the university staff became more and more leftist and more and more radicalized, and thus not only allowed but in fact encouraged this kind of activism, the activist students quite quickly became bolder and bolder. Quite soon their "blocking your path" became increasingly passive-aggressive, and then increasingly outright violent. They stopped trying to disrupt events by merely making noise on the outside and started storming the stage, completely shutting down the event (while the university security personnel simply watched from the sidelines doing nothing, because the university staff had explicitly commanded them not to intervene). Quite quickly this escalated to outright violence, rioting, vandalism, destruction of property and arson, merely because a persona non gr...

As of writing this, many places in the state of Texas are experiencing a very rare climate of well-below-zero temperatures and copious amounts of snow, to the point that a state of emergency has been declared in many places and the supply of water and electricity has been compromised in many households, to the point of it being an outright emergency. While perhaps not completely unprecedented, this is extraordinarily rare in Texas, which is at the south border of the country and known for its hot climate. Rather obviously American conservatives are taking this as evidence against global warming, as if this were some kind of proof against it. Once again, they just can't bother even trying to understand what global warming means and what the climatological model predicts. That's because, ironically, these types of extreme weather conditions at unusual places in the world are things that the global warming model predicts will happen, more and more frequently (and with more and m...

There are many patterns that repeat again and again when in the past a country has been free (at least relatively so) and then a political party arose that made it a totalitarian fascistic hellhole. These same patterns have repeated over and over, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in North Korea, in China, and in the countless totalitarian dictatorships of Central and South America, Africa and Asia. It almost always starts with the vilification and demonization of a large group of people. Via massive propaganda this group of people is made absolutely despicable, horrendous and vile, the enemy of the country, subhuman scum that must be eradicated from society. All the other people not belonging to this group are riled up, via the massive propaganda campaign, against this one group of people, via lies, distortions and massive amounts of slander, to the point that this group of people is universally hated by almost everybody else in the country not belonging to that group. Rather natural...

In the first farcical impeachment of Donald Trump by the kangaroo court that the House of Commons has become, 100% of Republican senators in the trial proper in the Senate voted not guilty. In the second, even more farcical impeachment, seven Republican senators voted guilty, even though it's absolutely clear to everybody that this is nothing more than political persecution, a baseless witch hunt by a political party that has been set on removing Trump from office for the entirety of the four years he was there. But why? Why would these seven Republican senators vote guilty? Of course I have no way of knowing their actual motivation or thinking, but I can guess. This is my hypothesis: They voted guilty because they are scared. Plain and simple. They have seen what the United States government has become: The House of Representatives and the Senate, the legislative branch, has become majority far-leftist Democrat. The executive branch of the government, including the White House and...

During the second impeachment farce against Donald Trump, his lawyers brought up quite many good points not only about the dishonest tactics of the Democratic Party, but the impeachment system itself. For example in this video . The lawyer points out how there's no due process in the impeachment hearings. More particularly he uses this to point out how little time they have had to come up with a response to the evidence presented by the Democrats against Trump. In court trial movies it's a common trope that either the prosecutor or the defendant's lawyer will present some kind of surprise evidence against the other party that nobody knew of beforehand, often in a very dramatic manner. In reality this is just complete fiction. Court trials in the United States do not work like this, and this would never be accepted by the judge. All evidence that will be presented in a hearing must be registered in advance, both to the judge and the opposing legal team, and reasonable time ...

You might think that I'm going to argue that "Black History Month" is racist because it separates people by race and elevates one particular race into prominence over all others, and attributes the contribution of some people, who happened to have a particular skin pigmentation, to all people who share a similar skin pigmentation, as if these contributions were thanks to all black people. While there is something of that, it's not actually the argument I'm presenting here. The idea of a "Black History Month" is racist because it considers all black people to be the same , all of them as part of the same group. There's like a billion black people in this world (without exaggeration), from different parts of the world, from different countries, cultures, religions, backgrounds. Very different cultures and backgrounds, with very different cultural history that have nothing to do with each other. Many of these cultures are so different and opposite ...

Finland has a somewhat similar system of "separation of powers" as the United States. The highest governmental authority in the country is the Parliament, which consists of 200 elected representatives. No law can be passed without the Parliament's agreement and majority vote. (This also includes enacting exceptional emergency laws which are not part of the normal function of government and which may temporarily reduce some citizen rights. The Covid-19 lockdowns are by far the most prominent example of this. It required the approval of the Parliament, which approved it unamimously.) This is kind of the legislative branch of the government. Then there's the Cabinet, which is kind of the "executive branch", which consists of the Prime Minister and various ministers elected into several offices of the government. (It's not completely clear to me whether the President officially belongs to the Cabinet or not.) Its role is to enact and enforce the laws passed ...

The so-called "feminist" movement that has been going on for over a hundred years in most of western countries can be, and has often been, divided into three periods, or "waves". The "first wave" of feminism fought for women's suffrage (ie. right to vote) and overall that all laws be the same for men and women, without discrimination nor special treatment. The "second wave" feminism fought for the "sexual liberation" of women, and to change the traditional roles of women. The "third wave" feminism is the current neo-Marxist anti-capitalist fascist totalitarian ideology that has taken over 99% of academia and science, 99% of the press, and at least 90% of giant megacorporations, is extraordinarily racist, is coaching children into going to life-destroying surgery and drugs, and will physically assault you if you disagree with them or use the wrong words (and, in a few countries already, the police may come knocking on your ...

Consider these screenshots: You may be forgiven for thinking that they are taken from some kind of pornographic website or streaming service. However, as the title of this post already revealed, they are all actually from twitch.tv. "Hmm", you might perhaps think, "the one on the upper right corner doesn't look so bad. How do you know what it's about? Maybe she's just talking about video games, or makeup, or whatever." It so happened that when I went to her stream she was talking about sex toys, and in her twitch bio she describes herself as an "e-girl". And I didn't take these screenshots in the span of several days. They were taken in the span of about 10 minutes, simply browsing the "just chatting" category of streams on twitch. And yes, all of the screenshots are taken from their live streams, not just like from some promotional photos or something. Don't get me wrong. The content itself is fine. Those women have 100% the ...

When it comes to Christianity, there are countless secular atheists/agnostics (not going to go into whether those are actually different things because that's not relevant here) who are just your regular everyday people, who have not researched nor studied philosophy, skepticism and theology, may have a rather self-assured and even arrogant attitude towards Christianity and Christians, and are convinced that they could have a discussion with any Christian and have no problem in dismantling all their arguments. But then, one day, they may encounter a Christian apologist who has studied and rehearsed all the argumentative tricks in the book in defense of Christianity and in opposition to secular philosophy and secular science, and the apologist just decimates the atheist, who has never encountered the claims, allegations and argument that the apologist is barraging him with. The skeptic may be caught by surprise, by argument he has never heard of and doesn't know the answer or r...

On October of last year I wrote about LegalEagle , a lawyer youtuber who used to make very interesting and didactic videos about depictions of the legal process in entertainment, but who at some point towards the end of 2019 or early 2020 for some reason contracted a really bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, after which his channel has become more and more of an anti-Trump propaganda channel (dragging the entire channel down the drain). As the election approached he became more and more obsessed with Trump, and his videos started being more and more propaganda-ridden. Has he gotten better now that Trump is out of office and there's a new president? Astonishingly, no. In fact, the exact opposite! This man has become absolutely insane. Obsessed. I wrote in that previous blog post how during the previous 6 months (prior to October of 2020) he had uploaded about 40 videos, from which about 25 were about Trump or political events closely related to him. As of writing this, February...

Technology is advancing at a pace that we never thought possible just a mere ten years ago, especially in the area of artificial intelligence. Indeed, AI development has advanced more in the past mere 10 years than was ever thought possible prior to that, achieving feats that nobody thought possible, at least not this fast. Some people have pondered if there's an actual danger in all this technology. Sure, technology helps humanity a great deal in many ways, but there can also be a downside to it. There may be dangers to it. For example, technology has already advanced pretty much to the point where it's possible to create so-called "deep fakes", in other words, fake videos and voice recordings of people that are so convincing that they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. While there may still be some techniques and technologies to distinguish between fake AI-created footage and real footage, this gap is being closed very fast, and we may well very soon ...

After the second World War, during this relatively peaceful (especially historically speaking) era that has lasted for over half a century, most of the western world (especially the rich countries) have become more and more secular, and less and less religious, by the decade. Most of Europe has been in the forefront of this spread of secularism, with many European countries relatively quickly (by the 1980's or so) becoming some of the most secular countries in the world, with the number of self-proclaimed religious people (most usually Christians) becoming unprecedentedly low, like 20% or even less of the population. It may well be that in times of peace and prosperity people tend to become less and less religious on each new generation, possibly precisely because of the peace time, as people do not have to live in fear nor feel the need to seek help and comfort in some superior being. The United States has been lagging behind by quite many decades, but there, too, has secularism b...

When Biden was running for president, in an interview on ABC News, he was asked a question about raising taxes and whether there would be any delays on it (after he becomes president). Biden's response was: "No, well, I gotta get the votes. I gotta get the votes. That's why, you know... The one thing I have, I have the strange notion: We are a democracy. Some of my Republican friends and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say 'well, if you can't get the votes, by executive order you're gonna do something!' Things you can't do by executive order unless you are a dictator. We are a democracy. We need consensus." Unusually for Biden, he's relatively clear here in his response. I think it's quite unambiguous that he's saying here that no, he will not just ram his tax increases via a presidential executive order, because the country is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and thus he will wait for the votes (with which I understand ...

It's funny, or scary (depending on your point of view), how the far-leftist social justice warriors in the United States predicted that if Trump becomes president, the country would become a police state with troops marching the streets and kicking down doors. Many such snowflakes made teary-eyed somber videos where they talked and looked like Jews in Nazi Germany waiting for the state police to kick down their doors at any moment to take them to concentration camps. Nothing of that happened, rather obviously. However, what do you see right at this exact moment, as of writing this blog post, in the capital city of the United States, Washington DC, if you go there? What do you know, tens of thousands of military troops patrolling the city, fences with bar wires everywhere, and the entire city looking like a totalitarian dystopia of the likes of former East Germany or North Korea. The troops were deployed there for the inauguration of Biden. If you thought they would just leave after...