What grinds my gears

And no, that's not just hyperbole or exaggeration. Many countries have implemented restrictions to stop the spread of Covid-19. In some countries these restrictions have been quite moderate, and as respectful of people's constitutional rights and freedoms as practically possible. In other countries the restrictions have been a lot stricter and more severe. The absolute cake, however, is probably taken by Australia, which has effectively become a fascist police state, where the police can do pretty much whatever they want with complete impunity, including outright murdering people, and other completely asinine and totalitarian fascist measures. For example, the government of an Australian town literally shot all the dogs in a shelter , apparently to stop people from other towns to come in to look to adopt one. A man in Brisbane with a heart problem was tackled down and cuffed by the police, causing him to have a heart attack . In an extremely disturbing video a police officer g...

I recently saw someone being interviewed on TV, who had written some kind of book about his sociopolitical theory about how "nostalgia" affects people's political opinions and voting preferences, especially towards conservatism. This author comments that in the modern world a lot of sociopolitical changes are happening extremely fast, and many people are uncomfortable with this rapid change in society, and how they long for the more familiar and safer near past, and thus they often tend to listen to the more conservative politicians who advocate for the strengths and benefits of older systems and customs, rather than embrace quick societal change. There was quite a critical tone against this kind of conservatism and resistance to (societal) change. A bit of the like of "they are just afraid of change". The implication seemed to be that all societal change is good and desirable, and that getting stuck in the past stifles and slows down societal progress, prolongi...

If you ask a far-leftist who calls himself a "socialist" what exactly "socialism" is (assuming he's somebody who's actually willing to have a conversation), he will say that socialism aims for the workers to own the company they work for and the products they produce, and to get their full share of the profits. That if a worker produces a product, that worker should own that product and get the full share of the profits from selling that product. That it's unfair that the bosses and higher-ups reap the majority of the benefits and profits, while the workers get essentially scraps. That's not actually what "socialism" means (in socialism the workers do not own the company, the state does; what they are actually talking about is more akin to "syndicalism", not "socialism"), but anyway, let's go with that definition for the sake of argument. Why doesn't it make sense? Suppose that I hire you to build me a PC, for me...

Mandatory primary education for all children is a relatively recent phenomenon in the world overall, and even in the modern western countries. In some countries it dates a couple of hundreds of years back, but on average it's primarily a phenomenon of the 20th century. The length of compulsory primary education has also increased over the decades. For example in Finland it used to be just 4 years, for quite a long time. (All further education was optional, and often with relatively strict requirements.) It was later increased to 9 years. (Surprisingly recently, in fact. In the 1970's.) One of the greatest benefits of compulsory primary education is the increase in the overall capability, productivity and quality of live of the entire population. When pretty much every single person can read, they are significantly better adapted to living and succeeding in modern society, where literacy is pretty much a vital necessity. Indeed, the almost explosive development of western coun...

I have written about this very subject many years ago, but the current world situation prompts me to recapitulate it once again. There is a quite strange psychological phenomenon, in some cases, where people have quite irrational attitudes towards the probability of themselves experiencing adverse health effects from a disease or from a vaccine against that disease. Let's say, hypothetically, that a particular highly contagious disease has about a 2% mortality rate. In other words, if you get the disease, there's about a 2% chance that you'll die from it. Then, let's say that there's a vaccine against that disease that pretty much effectively stops you from dying of it, but the vaccine itself has about a 0.002% of killing you. Many, many people would vehemently oppose getting the vaccine and prefer taking their 2% chance with the disease. It doesn't matter how well they are explained the odds, and how well they understand the odds, they still will refuse to tak...

Recently there was a small controversy related to a cosplay event and the winner of a cosplay contest. You see, this yearly cosplay event was explicitly created for so-called "people of color", where only "people of color" are welcome, and "white people" are not (well, at least by implication). The problem is that since this cosplay event is organized in the United States and it's open to the public, by law they cannot discriminate against anybody based on their skin color (not yet, at least), and thus they have to allow "white people" to enter and participate, no matter how annoying they find that. And no, this is not me (or someone else) just interpreting or reading between the lines. This is very clearly expressed in the tweets and other posts of people participating in the event, and even some people organizing it. They truly lament the fact that it's illegal for them to stop white people from participating in the event, because it...

Many people have been talking for quite a long while now about the very possibility of the fall of the so-called western world, the western countries, the western culture. The so-called "western world" is a somewhat vague and extremely loosely defined collection of so-called "western countries" (some of which do not physically reside on the western hemisphere). The concept is a lot more vague than the definition of many of the empires in the past, like the British Empire, or the Roman Empire (both of which had relatively clearly defined borders, land area and centralized government). However, it can still be argued that the so-called "western countries" do form a kind of "soft empire", as they share many defining aspects in common which shape how the countries are run and what kind of policies are enacted, and how they interact with each other. "Western" in this context refers, loosely, to the culture, politics, forms of government, eco...

Recently I read someone's comment online that was something along the lines of: "Biological science is now coming to the understanding that biological sex is not binary and that it's a spectrum." I wanted to reply with something like: Oh really? Has there been some new discoveries during the last ten or so years about human biology, human genetics, human physiology, that has revolutionized centuries of biological science? Did science in the last decade or so examine and measure human biology better than ever, with more accurate machines, and discover things that we hadn't discovered before? Things we hadn't seen before, and didn't realize were there? Did science find new things about the human body and human biology that were previously unknown? New functions? New chromosomes? New alleles? New organs? Or is it more likely that nothing particularly new has been discovered about the human body, and instead science has been more and more invaded, over the las...

A year ago I wrote a blog post about how different the Finnish and the American police forces are, when it comes to people blatantly breaking the law while "protesting". While for the most part the American police just stands on the sidelines watching it happening (which makes them complicit in those crimes that they are allowing to happen), the Finnish police actually upholds the law and arrests the criminals who are breaking it. It just keeps happening again and again. About a week ago a group of retards, of the "extinction rebellion" group, were blocking traffic in the Finnish capital. Most particularly they were blocking a tram track, which stopped trams from traveling. This in itself is extraordinarily retarded. Trams are some of the least polluting forms of public transport, and precisely the right direction if the aim is to reduce emissions. Yet these mental retards blocked trams from moving. Anyway, the police arrived and ordered the group to disperse. The ...

Relatively recently the far leftist zealots, once again, came up with yet again one of their zany antics and crazy ideas, and started promoting calling women "birthing people". According to them, the term "mother" is not neutral enough, and "birthing person" should be used instead. What makes this crazy idea different from most others is that this has gained some popularity even among high-ranking politicians (Democrats, of course) in the United States, who have seriously started using that term, "birthing person", instead of "mother" in official documents and legislation. There's a quite hilarious video where a Republican senator asks one of these Democrats, who was behind such a change in some official documents, to define "birthing person", and the Democrat just stumbles mid-sentence trying to define it, because he doesn't really know how to define it (probably so as to not offend anybody, I assume). The thing is, ...