What grinds my gears

I wrote in a previous blog post about how "gender non-binary" is such a fuzzy, vague and meaningless term, and based on completely arbitrary and undefined concepts, that it actually doesn't mean anything. Any concrete meaning that can be attributed to it is so vague that it could just as well be applied to all people, and thus it doesn't distinguish anybody from anybody else, and thus it's not any sort of categorization, and thus it doesn't really have any significant meaning. Recently I expressed this same opinion in a forum, and some leftist objected to that claim, ie. that it doesn't mean anything, and gave a definition: "A gender identity that's neither male nor female." To this I responded: "Ok, so please define 'male gender identity' and a 'female gender identity'." Instead of answering she (I'm assuming she was a she, as she sounded a lot like a she) started arguing that I asked what the definition of ...

When Trump was elected President of the United States, the vast majority of the American mainstream media, which happens to be far-leftist, engaged in a literal non-stop smearing campaign against him. Every single day, without fail, for the entirety of the 4 years of presidency, plus months and months afterwards. Most of the major mainstream media pundits (CNN and MSNBC on the forefront) did not miss a single day of the entire presidency without spending literally hours on a massive smearing campaign. Among the literally hundreds and hundreds of things they came up with in order to attack him, one particularly childish and ridiculous tactics they used was to try to put his mental abilities into question (in the desperate hope that he would be removed from office because of being too mentally incompetent). And they tried to cling to every little thing they could. In one video clip Trump was drinking from a water bottle, and according to them the way he was doing it was somehow indicativ...

A good portion, perhaps even the majority, perhaps even the overwhelming majority of American conservatives, and people elsewhere in the world who align more or less to the same political principles, hate Japanese cartoons, ie. anime. Most of them seem unable to give any rational reasonable explanation or reason why they hate it so much, and some of them say that it's "evil" and depraved and corrupts children. Which sounds like the most stereotypically conservative thing one could say about anything. Is this all complete hogwash and just your typical "get off my lawn!" "in my youth everything was better" conservative old fart talk, or is there any aspect to this antipathy and these claims that might actually have some rational basis in reality? It's certainly true that claiming that all anime is depraved just because there are some individual anime movies and series that are (quite arguably) depraved is as silly as claiming that all live-action mo...

I don't consider the term "free speech absolutist" to mean "someone who thinks that everything that can be said should be legal and allowed, without exception." Rather, I think means someone who has maximal free speech principle (ie. not "everything", but "as much as reasonably possible") and, most importantly, is extremely consistent about it. In other words, a free speech absolutist is someone who thinks that free speech is universal and irrevocable . There are no exceptions, when it comes to the person, on whether free speech applies or not. No matter who a person is, or what he has done, or what he has said (even if what he has said has legitimately been highly illegal), he still as the exact same right to free speech as everybody else. No exceptions. No excuses. The right to free speech is not something you can remove from someone, not even someone who has abused that very right. Likewise I consider a free speech absolutist one who c...

It's a quite prominent fact that modern far-leftism is a deeply, deeply racist ideology to the core. It's not merely that they absolutely hate, loathe and are disgusted by white people. They are racist against pretty much all people. This takes many forms (such as, for example, the so-called "bigotry of low expectations": They think that eg. black people can't be assumed to be educated and intelligent, and thus they need special treatment, special privileges and favoritism eg. in hiring and enrollment. When writing about complex subjects to people they think are black, leftists will use much simpler language than if they think that the recipient is white, because apparently they subconsciosly think that black people don't understand big words. Heck, they think that black people don't even have IDs because they don't have access to the internet. I'm not even kidding.) One of these forms is subdividing people into groups based on their race, and cons...

During the 1990's and early 2000's the far left talked a lot about "equality". Everything was about "equality". However, if you have been paying attention you'll notice that they have pretty much stopped using that word almost completely. You don't hear them using that word anymore. Instead, they have replaced it with the buzzword neologism "equity". As I have written before , "equity" is pretty much the opposite of "equality". While "equality" is the principle of treating everybody the same way completely regardless of irrelevant physical characteristics like sex and race, "equity" is the opposite: It's about dividing people into groups based on such characteristics and treating people in these groups differently depending on the group, giving some people special treatment and privileges and discriminating against others. The amount and severity of the privileges and discrimination depending hea...

The far left has been for erasing all country borders since at least the 1940's (just listen to Charlie Chaplin's ending speech in the movie The Great Dictator from 1940. While 99% of that speech is very agreeable, there's shoved in that one part about erasing all country borders, as if that were somehow in line with the rest of the speech. I might make a separate blog post about that speech one day.) This narrative of opening and erasing country borders got a quite big boost in the 1980's and especially 1990's (no doubt because the generation that experienced the horrors of war was dying off, replaced by the younger generation that had not experienced anything of the sort). This was the time when some western countries (with Sweden and the UK on the forefront) started their crazy massive immigration campaigns. This campaign kind of plateaued off for a couple of decades until it absolutely exploded 2015, when the number of "refugees" and foreign nationals...

There's a great deal of irony in the fact that the Democratic Party of the United States is named like that, given how undemocratic and totalitarian they are. Consider that for four years this political party tried everything in their power to remove the democratically elected President of the United States from office, completely ignoring the will of the people, and for even longer they have made even more ferocious attempts at stopping him from running for President again. Mind you, this is a man who something like 50-100 million of American citizens would vote for. He is very popular among the people. But the Democratic Party does not care about the will of the people. They do not care that 50-100 million citizens would vote for him and want him re-elected as President. The Democratic Party wants to act as a gatekeeper and stop him from running for re-election, because they think that they know better than those tens of millions of people. The Democratic Party is quite literally...

I have written about this in the past , but I think it deserves reiterating. For some reason that I don't really understand in the United States "arresting someone" and "putting that someone in handcuffs" seems to be considered 100% synonyms. The former automatically and pretty much always implies the latter. When someone is arrested, that someone is put in handcuffs as a matter of course, like it were a verbal statement of "you are under arrest". And what's worse is that this custom is so deeply entrenched in the American culture that nobody considers it odd or wrong. However, the fact is that the practice is inhumane and barbaric, and should be put in the same category as tasers and pepper spray. In other words, to be used only in extreme need, if there's no other way. Even American police officers don't automatically pepper-spray and tase every single individual they arrest, "just in case" and for "officer safety". Wh...

Some time ago a school district in California banned the use of the word "chief" in job titles because, according to them, it's appopriating and disrespecting native Americans. Never mind that the word "chief" is in no way, shape or form from native American origin, nor was it invented to describe native American leaders. The word "chief" comes from Latin and came into English via French, and has been in use for centuries before anybody using that word even knew that native Americans even exist. Recently the University of Stanford published yet another list of banned words, to be removed from all their material, websites, documents, program code, and so on. Unsurprisingly among those words was "chief", using that exact same argument. Another word in the list is "brave", using the same argument: According to them that word was used to describe native Americans, and thus it's "cultural appropriation" to use it in any ot...

The United Kingdom, and England in particular, rather unsurprisingly has a very, very long history of royalty and monarchy. Regardless of what one thinks of monarchies in general and the English monarchy in particular, we can still examine the English culture in this respect and consider why Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife (at least as of writing this) are so universally hated in the UK. (I'm going to skip writing a summary of who they are and what their history is. You can find that easily online.) At worst the king or queen has been a tyrant and an oppressor. However, that's not the ideal role of royalty, nor has it been the case with even close to every king or queen of England. Ideally, the king or queen of the country is not only a ruler, but a leader, someone who represents the people, drives the interests of the people, protects the people. The ideal royal ruler is strong but kind and humble. The king doesn't elevate himself above everybody else, but acts...

It's becoming really tiresome to see prominent American conservatives (or people from other countries who very much align with the political ideology) swallow the climate change conspiracy theory that seems to go hand-in-hand with the political ideology. It's especially annoying when they keep repeating the same utterly stupid arguments. For example, every time that record low temperatures are measured somewhere, they immediately jump to "see? The whole climate change thing is a hoax!" Sigh! Why do they think we are seeing temperature record after record after record, at an increasing rate in recent years? Both temperature low and temperature high records. Seems that not a year passes by without a bunch of such records being broken somewhere. Well, duh. Because the climate is changing. That's why. That's exactly why we are seeing temperature records being broken at an ever-increasing rate. Both extremes are become more and more extreme by the year. This is not...

Charlie Kirk is an American conservative political commentator / activist who often gives speeches at conservative events and, sometimes, even in universities (when they rarely allow it to happen). I don't really like his style too much, because he's perhaps a bit too provocative and a loudmouth, but oftentimes he does makes quite good points. During this particular speech some Communist retards were trying to disrupt his presentation and heckle him. When he says "the best way to eliminate proverty..." one of these retards shouts "kill the rich!" Well, do you even need to know anything else about their ideology? Not tax the rich. Not rake away the property of the rich. Not even incarcerate the rich. No, outright "kill the rich". I don't think I need to know anything else. Communism is an atrocious heinous murderous ideology that belongs in the deepest pits of hell, alongside Nazism. My disdain for this ideology, and for the people who openly e...

For quite a long time it has been pretty universally, and especially in western countries, a widely adopted custom that if you go visit a foreign country, you do at least a modicum of research on the local customs, especially when it comes to things that the local culture considers offensive and disrespectful, and then you avoid doing such things when you are there, out of respect to that other country, especially if it's something small that's easily avoided or done. As an example, there are some countries where money is expected to be treated with a level of respect because it has the face of the head of state (eg. emperor) on it. Not only should you not mistreat money nor eg. drop it on the ground, but an especially disrespectful act would be to step on a bill that has fallen to the ground (even if you do it accidentally). This is because you would be stepping on the photo of the emperor, and thus showing a great deal of disrespect. Even if it's small things and customs ...

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about the inconsistency of the far-leftist social justice warrior ideology . They very vocally and ferociously defend or oppose particular things that happen to be fashionable in their ideology at any given moment. But they do not really care what those things are, nor do they care to retain any sort of consistency in their ideology. They may today ferociously defend one particular thing, and quite literally the next day defend the exact opposite position (and consider the previous position to be heinous, vile, fascist and worthy of shunning and physical assault). The underlying driving force is whatever gives them the most power in society. In that article I mentioned three particular examples. It wasn't even so long ago that they ferociously and furiously defended, especially in universities, "women-only spaces", spaces that are exclusive to women, "safe spaces" for them that men are not allowed to enter, because women...

I have written about this subject several times over the years, but it just keeps frustrating me because nothing has changed over the years. Wikipedia is one of the most influential online websites in the world. In terms of where people search for information it's very easily in the top 10, probably even the top 5 websites out there. And the vast, vast majority of people tend to consider it a reliable source of information. This means hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions of people, from all around the world, are getting information from Wikipedia. And, thus, are being influenced by whatever is written in Wikipedia. Thus Wikipedia has an extraordinarily high responsibility to be neutral and not try to push some kind of political agenda. Since at least 2014 or even earlier that has not been the case, however. Like with so many other major websites it was overtaken completely by far-leftist activists, and all editors critical of the far left were either expunged or i...

The modern far left in the western world lives in this imaginary lala-land where they think that they are fighting some kind of oppressive totalitarian "patriarchal" capitalistic "white-supremacist" regime that oppresses and exploits the weak and the minorities. In other words, they are roleplaying in all seriousness this "the weak raising against the powerful" narrative. And one of the most ironic, contradictory and self-defeating ways in which they are doing this fighting is by trying to severely limit and restrict freedom of speech. Not only do they want an ever-increasing amount of restrictions to it, and an ever-increasing amount of words, sentences, opinions and ideas added to the list of banned speech, they also want harsher and harsher punishments for anybody who breaches these restrictions and limits by expressing the "wrong" opinions. What's so ironic, contradictory and self-defeating about this? The fact that freedom of speech is a...

In order to answer this question we have to consider why romance is such a common and ubiquitous plot device in so many pieces of entertainment media, and has always been, for thousands of years, in all forms of fiction, including mythology, literature, theater, paintings, sculptures and, more recently, comics, radio plays, film and TV series. Romantic relationships between fictional characters in such pieces of fiction can range all the way from just some very short unimportant scenes, to being the main plot of the entire work. The entire conflict in the piece of fiction may be centered around a romantic relationship. The reason for this is, of course, because love and romance is such an important and fundamental part of human life and human existence, and it's such a complex and interesting topic and can create such strong feelings in people that works of fiction and entertainment explore the concept and can create very interesting narratives, conflicts and goals based on that al...

One argument you sometimes hear in the United States for allowing unrestricted unlimited illegal immigration is that white people (of course it only applies to white people, as always) are living in a "stolen land", land that they stole from the American native people. This argument makes absolutely no sense. If the lands were illegally invaded and stolen by white people, how is bringing even more people illegally into the land solve that problem? How is the land being stolen a justification for it? Shouldn't it, in fact, be the exact opposite? In other words, shouldn't they oppose illegal immigration because it's not their land to make decisions about? The sad thing is that even a few native Americans have been fooled and brainwashed into believing and repeating the argument. Obviously the left loves that because it's not just them presenting the argument. The argument gets a lot more weight behind it when it's a person of actual native American descent...

As the saying goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted". And sometimes one doesn't even have to be a fool in order to get scammed out of one's money. Some scams are really elaborate and deceitful, and masterfully fools even very smart and knowledgeable people into giving their money to strangers... only for them to run away with it, never to be seen again. Yet, sometimes even very simple scams can fool some people. Not necessarily "simple" as in consisting of just a few very simple and easy steps, but "simple" as in "so blatantly unusual and suspicious anybody with half a brain cell should start hesitating". It's actually sometimes incredible the lengths to which some people will go in order to get scammed. As demonstrated daily by many so-called scambaiters (eg. on YouTube and Twitch), there are many forms of scams that can be done purely via telephone calls. The scammer (most usually from the other side of the world) just calls p...

Many people, both within the UK and in other countries, even (and especially) people who are competent at things like economics, are pointing out how Brexit was such a bad idea and how it turned out to be pretty much a disaster for the country, how the economy of the country is in shambles and how the UK has got no benefit at all from having exited the European Union. They say that people who voted for Brexit didn't really know what they were really voting for, and what the consequences would be. One thing that they don't seem to consider is whether the current post-Brexit economic situation of the UK was caused directly and solely because of leaving the EU, or whether, possibly, the economy of the country has been pretty much sabotaged by the government of the country. That might sound like just a conspiracy theory, but I believe there may be some merit in that idea. For starters, when the UK made the final decision to leave the EU, they had a whopping four years of time to ...

In the last decade the western world has become completely insane and is on a quest to destroy itself by bringing as many foreign nationals into the countries as possible. For the longest time this happened by taking in foreign nationals by mostly legal means. In the last five or so years, however, this has by far been surpassed by people entering the countries illegally... and the countries just accepting them and not immediately deporting them, completely ignoring their own immigration laws and fundamental sovereignty as independent nations. The far left, which pretty much seeks the destruction of the western world like this, insists that these invaders not be called "illegal immigrants". I actually agree with that sentiment. However, I do so for a very different reason. I agree with the sentiment because of that word, "immigrant". Just because you enter another country doesn't make you an "immigrant". If I go on vacation to another country, or go on...

Recently the celebrity Jennifer Lopez got married, and took her husband's last name. Unsurprisingly the feminists and the leftists (there's a huge overlap between these two groups, but they are not always exactly identical) took issue on this, and started bitching and moaning about it. And not just some random nobodies on social media, but major newspapers like The New York Times. They lament the fact that she's "undermining feminism" by engaging in this old tradition of "the patriarchy". This just goes to show how feminism is not about liberating women, about allowing women to make their own life decisions as they wish. Women must not be free to do what they want, they have to be activists for the cause and must never do things that go against The Message. The fact is that feminism has never been about the liberation of women. Ok, perhaps so-called "first-wave feminism" (in the end of the 1800's and beginning of the 1900's) was partia...

Among all the craziness of the far left that has been happening over the past ten years, one of the strangest is the phenomenon, which has been happening especially in some parts of the United States, of stopping arresting and prosecution of many crimes, directly as part of the leftist political agenda. Not just as in "we don't have the resources, and we need to concentrate the resources on these more important things". Not even as in "we have to defund the police and thus we can't afford to prosecute these crimes". Just a direct and blatant "these crimes will not be prosecuted, and the perpetrators will not be arrested", completely independently of any "defunding or reforming the police". And we are not talking about some bizarre obscure crimes that have somehow got into criminal law a hundred years ago that have been completely obsolete for decades. We aren't even talking about really small misdemeanors like "loitering" o...

Ron DeSantis is the current governor of Florida (as of writing this), and he is quite notoriously and famously "based", ie. against current far-leftist totalitarianism and its excesses. Many conservatives have expressed the wish that it be him who runs for President of the United States in 2024 and wins, instead of Donald Trump. I actually wish the same thing, but probably not for the same reason as those American conservatives. You see, the American far left has spent over six years building a straw man out of Donald Trump, creating a horrendous dictatorial monster out of thin air, based on literally nothing. They engaged in the principle of "if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes the truth", and they succeeded by far and large. In fact, they succeeded so well that even most of the rest of the world (especially European countries) swallowed it to some degree or another. Even in Europe people kept repeating the same made-up claims about Trump, even though they...

There's a relatively rare neurological disorder that's commonly named "Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome". Regardless of its funny name, and weird symptoms, it's an actual serious condition. The brain of a person suffering from this syndrome tends to misinterpret the size of things that the person sees. Things may appear to be much larger or smaller than they really are. It's not really that the person sees them as larger or smaller, but the brain misinterprets them as such, perceives them as such, and it feels extremely real to the person. A housecat might seem to have the size of a tiger, which can be genuinely scary. The room in which the person is in might seem a lot larger or smaller than it really is (which is where the name of the syndrome comes from), which may cause a great deal of anxiety (as it may elicit strong feelings of claustrophobia). The person might perceive his or her own hands to be much smaller or much larger than they really are, which not on...

The raise of totalitarian extremist far-leftism has brought with itself an ever-increasing wave of censorship coming from ever higher and higher governmental authorities. In fact, in many European countries and even the European Union itself censorship is being actively discussed and proposed. The reason for this is quite clear: Totalitarianism cannot survive without censorship. It cannot survive without suppressing dissent and criticism. It cannot survive if it doesn't silence those who would speak against it. For quite many years the go-to excuse to justify censorship was to remove "hate speech" from online social media and other forums. Everything they didn't like was "hate speech", anything that criticized their policies and principles, pretty much regardless of what it was. Mind you, the notion of criminalizing and censoring "hate speech" (even if it wasn't described by those exact words) is not new in the post-World-War-2 Europe. There ha...