What grinds my gears

In the era of widespread and widely available Internet, which has become so ubiquitous that for many people it has become pretty much an essential service (just like roads, postal services, hospitals, schools, etc), giant tech megacorporations have become pretty much quasi-governmental in nature. These corporations may not own physical land that they control and in which large amounts of people live, but they pretty much effectively own a sort of "virtual" land where people pretty much effectively live in a social sense. With literally billions of users, each of the online platforms owned by these megacorporations is pretty much effectively the size of a very large country (very few real countries have over a billion citizens). While almost none of these platforms is essential for (almost) anybody's life and livelihood, for millions and millions, even billions, of people they have become such an integral part of their social life that it's pretty much as if they were ...

There's a famous quote, first written by George Santayana in 1905, that says: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is often paraphrased as "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." This is exactly what's happening in western countries at this moment. The extreme prejudice and hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany didn't happen out of the blue, organically. (There might have existed some amount of anti-semitism in the area before the Nazi regime, but it certainly was nowhere near as bad.) It was the result of a massive widespread prolonged propaganda campaign. You can still find photos of the fliers, posters and newspaper articles, and recordings of the speeches. The message was all-too familiar: Jews control the highest position of financial power in the world. Jews are greedy and oppressive, and they take advantage of you, the common person. They exploit you, they oppress you, they take advantage of you, ...

Consider this actual real quote, talking about Ben Shapiro: "If there's another Holocaust, if they start rounding up the Jews again, I hope Ben gets gassed first." This, in context, was said in seriousness, as the person's own opinion, not that person eg. quoting someone else, or in some kind of context like "there are people out there who say things like 'if there's another Holocaust (etc)'". The person saying his own opinion on the subject matter, talking about Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is a Jewish man (and quite openly so). Was that sentiment expressed by some kind of right-wing extremist neo-Nazi Hitler-loving anti-semitic white supremacist? No, it was said by one Ethan Klein. Ethan Klein is a very long-time YouTube gamer and entertainer with a quite sizeable amount of subscribers (which makes him a YouTube celebrity), who has during the last few years swung extremely hard to the upper left corner of the political spectrum chart. This even tho...

"Gender non-binary" is one of the many pet buzzwords of the far left. They designate themselves with that moniker and flaunt it around like it were some kind of badge of honor. But what does it even mean? I have never heard a clear definition or explanation. It cannot refer to biological sex. No matter what goes inside your brain, no matter what words come out of your mouth, no matter what you claim (and demand others at gunpoint to accept and affirm), no matter how you behave (either naturally or as an act), that does not change your biology. It doesn't change your DNA, it doesn't change your chromosomes, it doesn't change your organs, and what kind of organs those chromosomes have produced. Your words and your thoughts have zero effect on your physical body. Sometimes they will say that they are "gender non-binary" because they "don't conform to a particular gender role". That still doesn't really say anything. In fact, I have never h...

There has been a lot of talk among the American far left about police reform. I actually agree that the American police is in dire need of a reform. However, I disagree with many of the details. These are the things that I strongly believe the American police should stop doing: Stop putting officer safety above the safety of innocent people. Yes, I'm primarily referring to the Robb Elementary school shooting (where fully armored police twiddled their thumbs in the hallway of the school for a whopping 70 minutes instead of stopping the shooter, because of "officer safety"), but that case is by far not the only one. Your primary duty as a police officer is to protect those who can't protect themselves and stop the bad guys. If you can't do that, then don't become a police officer. Stop standing by on the sidelines just watching as mobs of people egregiously break the law (such as looting, arson, property damage, assault, harassment, blocking traffic, etc.) righ...