What grinds my gears

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...