What grinds my gears

Ten years ago the education board of the city of San Francisco had a brilliant idea on how to solve the apparent "racism" and "discrimination" problem that Asian and white students in middle and high schools were scoring significantly better in national math tests than black and hispanic students. You see, for the longest time, and like so many other cities and states in America, San Francisco middle schools also had a "gifted student program" in the form of, among other things, more advanced mathematics courses for mathematically gifted students. High-scoring middle school students could apply, among other things, for algebra classes (something that was normally taught in high school). The "problem" was that the vast majority of students in these more advanced math classes were Asian and white. And this "problem", of course, was in dire need for a solution. And what was the brilliant solution devised the San Francisco school board? If

Tucker Carlson is arguably by far the most famous news anchor in Fox News, by a large margin. Well, more precisely, was a news anchor in Fox News, because apparently he was "let go" for some reason, even though he was racking millions of viewers every time he appeared on TV. As far as I know he had by far the largest audience among all the news anchors in the company. Carlson was quite notorious for not being afraid of digging up and showing what he thought were the facts, and go against the government, politicians and huge megacorporations. In recent months his most notorious action was that he was the only journalist in the entire country who dared to report on and show leaked footage of the January 6th so-called "insurrection", showing that there was no "insurrection" at all, and that it was just a bunch of protesters walking peacefully inside the Capitol Building while escorted by police officers. Indeed, he was literally the only journalist in the e

A picture just entered my mind, which I am actually surprised has not yet happened (at least not in a way that would have caused people to notice), nor which I have even thought of before. There seems to be no limit to how much the far left, especially in the United States, absolutely hates and loathes white people, and blames them for racism and slavery, and is on an endless completely unreachable path to make white people make amends and pay reparations for all the harm their distant ancestors have done (regardless of whether an individual's ancestors have ever done anything to anybody, of course). There have already been for years absolutely cringe performances done by mental retards, where white people will eg. be on their knees, in chains, in front of black people, among many other equally cringeworthy displays of mental retardation. There's no reason to believe that there's a limit to how far they are willing to take this. So this is my prediction: At some point in th

A movement of "trad wives" ("traditional wives", referring to a very traditional historic conservative family structure with a stay-at-home mother and wife, with a husband who goes to work and sustains the family) has become somewhat popular in recent years, as a sort of small counter-culture to modern feminism and social justice ideology. Sometimes such a "trad wife" will post a picture or video in social media expressing a sentiment along the lines of that she wishes she could travel back in the time to the 1940's or 1950's, to experience the true American family culture of the time. Almost invariably some leftist will remark something alluding to she not understanding how horrendous the life of wives and women in general was in America at that time. Among so many other things, second-wave feminism (and obviously fully embraced by modern feminism) has succeeded in planting into the global consciousness the idea that in the kind of "golden er

If you have been following the anti-SJW anti-feminist anti-leftism YouTube scene for "only" the last 5 years or so, chances are that you have never even heard of The Amazing Atheist. Or if you are, only in passing. It's nowadays hard to believe that not only did he actually used to be one of the big names in the YouTube anti-SJW movement, but he was in fact one of the most notorious early pioneers of it, if not outright the first one. His first anti-feminist anti-SJW video (which is so early that the term "SJW" was probably not even yet coined at that point) is, possibly, the first such video on YouTube, or at least the first one with any notoriety (2.5 million views as of this moment): It's Only Sexist When Men Do It , published on July of 2011. It's hard to find any video critical of feminism or the far-left that's older than that (there may be, but even if there are, they probably don't have even close to that many views and that much popular

The Ebay marketplace is not used merely by individual people to sell their used stuff, but for a decade or two now it has been used by some companies to sell new and used products as well, probably because it's a cheaper alternative to other online shops like Amazon. You can find a lot of products, new and used, from companies, and it is a reasonable alternative. Of course scammers are always figuring out ways to deceive people into buying crap for much more money than it's actually worth, and to bypass any consumer safety guarantees that such online marketplaces have in order to protect consumers from such scams. One particular scam that seems to have been making the rounds on Ebay in particular is someone creating a profile and product pages that look like they belong to some actual company (rather than an individual) and then putting eg. prebuilt PCs on sale. These PCs are sold at a suspiciously cheap price taking into account their alleged hardware specifications. Most typi

Misleading or deceptive advertising is illegal in most countries. Or, if not outright illegal, at least widely considered ethically questionable, and typically receiving condemnation and warnings from governmental or quasi-governmental ethics organizations. Of course this doesn't mean that companies and marketers haven't figured out tons and tons of ways to do deceptive marketing that flies under the radar or otherwise gets mostly unnoticed and doesn't get enough paid-attention-to. One of these is the artificial and deceptive inflation of opening week movie ticket sales by movie producers. After all, the number of sold movie tickets during the first week (or even just the first weekend) of a movie release is a very significant metric used to determine how successful a movie is. And thus, by implication, how "good" the movie is supposed to be. It may well dissuade a lot of people to go watch the movie if they see that it ranks very high in the charts of sold first-

For at least 50 years now western feminism, among the million other things and agendas that it promotes, has been saying that "the Patriarchy" is also bad and harmful for men because this patriarchal society teaches men to be stoic, to not show emotion, to not cry. And this, according to these feminists, causes men to suffer inside, to become violent and suicidal. They have been pushing this notion so strongly that, like so many other similar notions (such as that being a "stay-at-home mother" is a horrible thing), the vast majority of people, even men, just believe it without question. Without question and without evidence, I may add. There is no evidence that men "opening up" and not being afraid to show emotion somehow reduces suicide rates, for example. Or violence. The whole notion being pushed is wrong on so many levels. For starters, the notion is that men are not naturally stoic, and that they are taught, even coerced, by society to be so. This is

For some reason one of the core features of American conservatism seems to be a very strong opposition to the concept of global warming and climate change (with a lot of variation on whether it exists at all, whether it exists but is in no way human-caused, whether is just normal and temporary, etc.) which has for over a decade now produced an enormous amount of conspiracy theories about the subject. It has become so utterly prevalent that you'll have a hard time finding a single American conservative who accepts what the scientists are claiming about global warming. In fact, it has become so ubiquitous that it has kind of started to rub off on most of the anti-leftist segment of the population as a whole, even in other countries. (While there are staunch vocal anti-leftists who have no problem with climate science, it's undeniable that the American conservative view on the subject has become more and more prevalent among them by the year.) There's nothing inherent in Ameri

Company after company and institution after institution, one by one, is starting to act as a loudspeaker for modern far-leftist propaganda. It may be because they just willingly want to do it on their own, or it may be because they have been infiltrated by brainwashed indoctrinated university cultists, or in some cases it may even be because they have been pressured and blackmailed by activist groups (which is, by the way, far more common than one would think), but whatever is the case, company after company is starting to spout the leftist propaganda. If you oppose the political propaganda and would prefer is companies that have nothing to do with politics would stay away from politics, for the longest time you could just boycott any company or product that engaged in this political propaganda. This is becoming exceedingly difficult by the day. There will come a point where you just physically cannot do that, as more and more companies will have been recruited for the propaganda machi

Suppose you own a second house or apartment which you aren't currently using (as you live somewhere else, or you are actually eg. a company or a bank or the like which can own homes), and one day you find out that someone has broken into it and just living there without permission. This is called "squatting": Living in a house or domicile without legal permission to do so, ie. permanent trespassing on someone else's property. (Sometimes this can be someone who was living there legally, eg. paying rent, but whose contract expired for example because rent has not been paid in months, or other reasons. Othertimes it's just people who saw an unoccupied home and broke in.) In a normal country you naturally call the police and they remove the criminals from the home and arrest them for trespassing and other crimes related to this incident. Apparently not so in the United States (or at least some states of it). There appears to be a very strange legal and law enforcemen

It is completely and 100% obvious to absolutely everybody that the bullshit charges against Donald Trump (as of writing this article) are purely a form of political persecution, an attempt at stopping Trump from running for president in the next elections, and to punish him for his "crimes" (which nobody seems to be able to articulate, other than him being a "dictator" and a "racist", according to the far left). It is such a clear abuse of the legal system for political persecution that they could just as well say it out loud. Everybody knows it, so they wouldn't be saying anything new. The left in the United States seems to have made a habit of this. For example many people who entered the Capitol Building on January 6th have been sentenced to long prison terms, often under very suspicious circumstances, while people who have actually and provably committed significantly more egregious crimes are not being prosecuted at all. Many people on the far lef

And now for something completely different. Over the decades that I have been playing video games my taste and attitude towards certain techniques and tropes commonly used in many games has changed quite a lot, especially compared to 20+ years ago. One quite significant such change is that during the last 10 or so years I have grown to absolutely hate games that have an extreme amount of cutscenes. The larger the ratio of cutscenes compared to actual gameplay, the more aggravating it is. Likewise the more that cutscenes interrupt your gameplay essentially without warning (and the more often this happens), the more annoying it is. While this is in no way exclusive to Japanese RPG games, it's most prevalent in them. In fact, it almost feels like an entire "genre" of JRPG games where there's so much emphasis on the story that gameplay almost feels like just a secondary ancillary feature. And this "genre" seems to nowadays encompass the majority of JRPGs. In th

A college student is walking down the street when suddenly two men approach him and ask him who he is. The student says his first name and the two men start being really pushy towards him and one of them gets behind the student, grabs him, and forcefully pulls his wallet from his pocket. The victim rightfully thinks that he's being mugged by some perps and starts running away, screaming for help. The two men start chasing him, tackle him to the ground, and one of them starts beating him with his fists very aggressively again and again. He gets beaten so badly that he ends up hospitalized afterwards with severe injuries. Several bystanders witness what's happening and they, too, think that someone is getting mugged and assaulted, and they phone the police and several of them start filming the events with their smartphones. When the police arrives, it turns out that the two perpetrators were actually law enforcement officers themselves, in plain clothes. The thing is, they never

In 2015 a 57-year-old man from India was visiting his son in the United States, and at one point, while he was taking a walk through a neighborhood where his son lived, someone called the police because there was a "suspicious black man walking around, looking into people's garages". Two police officers arrived on the scene and started interrogating him in a quite pushy manner, demanding his ID and his address. The situation was made complicated by the fact that the Indian man did not speak English almost at all, and couldn't understand and couldn't respond. This was happening in Alabama, which is not a stop-and-ID state. In other words, it's one of the (quite many) states where the police can only demand ID if they have a reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime. They cannot legally demand ID (and punish someone who refuses) if they cannot articulate a particular crime that they suspect the person of having done or in the commission of doing. This law, as

The far left is currently pushing, and has been pushing it for several years now, the claim that "gender affirmation surgery", ie. sex change surgery (ie. effectively castration) not only actually helps those with "gender dysphoria" but is by far the best and most effective treatment for it, so much so that it saves lives (because, they claim, it reduces suicide rates among those suffering from the condition). Unsurprisingly, this is nothing but politically motivated made-up propaganda. They cite numerous "studies" made on this subject, but if you actually go and read and research those studies you find out that they are all extremely lacking and flawed (such as using sample sizes that are way too small, timespans that are way too short, no controls, no double-blind or even blind experiments, and a quite obvious selection bias, among many other problems.) Many on the other side have seriously posited that sex-change surgery most probably actually makes thi