What grinds my gears

This isn't a huge revelation or anything, as it's rather obvious and most people know it (well, suspect it, as it's rather obviously not an officially stated reason), but let's document it here anyway. One of the most visible and used features of YouTube, which allows interaction between content creators and their viewers, perhaps second only to the comment section, are the "like" and "dislike" buttons. These numbers are quite useful and telling because their magnitude and relative proportion tells something about how well the video has been received among the wider audience: If both numbers are very small, then it tells that either the video hasn't had many views overall, or that people aren't really all that interested in rating it. If one of the numbers is huge and the other only a small fraction of it, it tells that the video is either enormously liked or disliked. If both numbers are large and about equal, it speaks of a probably controv...

More and more medical professionals have been trying over the last decade or so to draw attention to the fact that, especially in western countries, the average testosterone levels and sperm count have dramatically decreased, especially since this seems to be a quite recent phenomenon (in the last 10 years alone both have dropped alarmingly fast). This is not a joking matter, nor is it inconsequential. It's an actual health problem. Especially low testosterone levels in men are linked to numerous health problems (which are much more numerous and serious than just lowered libido and physical effemination.) On top of that, these levels have dropped so dramatically that many of these professionals are already outright worried about the survival of humanity: If they keep dropping at the rate that they have been, it won't be long when fertility rates will plummet. No clear reasons for this sudden dramatic drop of both things have been definitely found, but some hypotheses have been ...

I have written in a previous blog post about how, especially when compared to the Constitution of the United States (which is the highest law of the land), the Finnish constitution is not worth even the paper it's printed on . Not only does the constitution itself provide the government exceptions to its own rules, for the government to do whatever they please, moreover the government and courts can do whatever they want even in those cases where no exceptions are granted, and there are usually no consequences of any kind. That post has examples, and there's also an example (of the government blatantly ignoring the freedom of assembly and association "guaranteed" by the constitution) here . Well, here's another example: Section 15 of the Constitution of Finland states (official translation): Section 15 - Protection of property The property of everyone is protected. Provisions on the expropriation of property, for public needs and against full compensation, are lai...

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe has always been one of the most popular works of fantasy, but its popularity sky-rocketed with the release of Peter Jackson's film trilogy in the early 2000's. After that, the franchise really became a humongously popular multi-billion-dollar property. Since the original trilogy several triple-A quality video games based on the LotR universe have been released to very good reception and accolades. The quality and popularity of the original trilogy and the subsequent well-received and acclaimed video games have kind of set the expectations of the entire franchise quite high. Given how absolutely profitable and valuable the franchise is, one would expect that the property owners wouldn't allow sub-par products to be created using their intellectual property. Thus, when recently a new game in the franchise was announced, expectations were quite high. This especially since the game was not just about some random unknown character...

I have written several times in this blog that the practice in the United States of police officers of automatically handcuffing everybody they are arresting has to stop because it's an inhumane form of torture. Considering "arresting someone" synonymous with "putting that someone in handcuffs" has to stop. Handcuffs should be a last resort and used only if absolutely necessary, ie. they should be in the same category as tasers and pepper spray. Cops don't go automatically tasing every single person they arrest "just in case". Yet they do put every single person in handcuffs as a matter of course. And it literally does not seem to matter who that person is or what that person's condition is. There are outright horrendous videos out there of them handcuffing very elderly people (80, even 90 years old) who have difficulty moving, have arthritis, etc, and are absolutely and 100% not dangerous nor a flight risk, literally because of their physical ...

Recently I watched a video about Australia yet again policing people's speech, in this instance a comedian who made edgy jokes about Australian aboriginals being summoned to a "human rights" tribunal to be judged for his sins. Out of curiosity I searched if Australia has a Constitution. I was curious about this because the United Kingdom does not (which might be a bit surprising), and Australia being a former colony is extremely similar to the UK in many ways (including nowadays by being a complete totalitarian police state where the police can literally assault you for no reason whatsoever and face no consequences. I'm not making that up.) I experienced two surprises when I made the search. The first, more minor surprise, was that Australia indeed has an official Constitution. The second, more fundamental surprise, related to its contents. You see, in the vast majority of constitutional countries the Constitution primarily establishes two things: The form of governme...

Far-leftist social justice warriors are constantly looking for that one thing that will give them the most power in society and enrage their own mobs the most into action, and these tools of outrage shift over time, as they go from fashionable topic to fashionable topic. As they move from one topic to another, they (usually) don't outright forget about the old topic, but it kind of loses its spotlight and isn't talked that much anymore. One of these past topics and causes of outrage in the recent past was sexism and the degradation of women, how they are oppressed and taken advantage of by men and so on and so forth. Of course that's still one of their pet subjects, but in the current "trans activism" phase it has kind of been shoved a bit to the sideline and it isn't talked that much anymore (especially when it comes into contradiction with their current favorite pet subject). But anyway, they do still agree that oppression, subjugation and degradation of wom...

Every member of Congress in the United States swears an official oath when they are elected. Among other things, and primarily, the person takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. After all, the Constitution regulates and limits what the Congress in particular, and the United States government in general, can and cannot do. Apparently this oath is completely empty and means absolutely nothing. Why? Because apparently there are no consequences of any kind if this oath is broken. In recent months several congress representatives of the Democratic Party have directly, unambiguously and blatantly advocated for egregious violations of the Constitution, especially the First Amendment. Some months ago several members of congress not only criticized and condemned Tucker Carlson for having published leaked footage of the January 6th so-called "insurrection" (the footage showing that the narrative about it just doesn't hold up), but outright called ...

The United States is colloquially divided into the "red states" and the "blue states", where the former are run by a majority Republican (ie. "right-wing") government and the latter by a majority Democrat (ie. "left-wing") government. The "bluest" of the states, ie. the most far-leftist ones, have in the past decade or so become essentially hellholes where crime, violence, drug abuse, homelessness and extreme lack of sanitation and hygiene on the streets have become completely rampant and uncontrollable, mainly due to the government refusing to punish criminals and remove homeless drug addicts from the streets. There are many parts of the biggest cities in these states that literally look like impoverished war-torn third-world countries (with streets full of garbage and filth, homeless people living on the streets, boarded up shops, destroyed building facades and so on). These same places looked like rich first-world neighborhoods a mer...

Since it seems that the insanity of the far left knows no bounds, the state of California seems to be completely seriously considering giving over 1 million dollars to every single black person in the state as "reparations". Of course there are extremely obvious problems with this, the main one being, naturally, where exactly that money is going to come from. It's estimated that these "reparations" would amount to over 600 billion dollars, which is double the annual budget of the entire state. That's the budget to run everything in the entire state. The state isn't going to just stop everything in order to give all black people money, so that 600 billion would be on top of the about 300 billion budget, meaning that the annual budget of the state would raise from about 300 billion to almost a trillion dollars. To my knowledge no politician who is driving this campaign has explained where that trillion dollars is going to come from. There are also quite ...

Economics is a quite complicated and nuanced subject, and the concept of "inflation" is likewise, but the simplest explanation of what it means is that the value of money (ie. its purchasing power) decreases when the total amount of money in circulation increases (ie. when more money is printed and put into circulation than previously), which in turn causes a natural raise in prices (which is caused by supply-and-demand: When people have more money to spend, the price of commodities will start raising accordingly.) As most dictionary definitions (still) put it, "inflation" in economics is (emphasis mine): a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency (opposed to deflation). In other words: The more money is printed (compared to the past), the less valuable the money becomes. What this means is that the government and the central banks in charge of printing m...

If a YouTube video contains copyrighted material, the copyright owner has several choices about what to do about it, such as just allowing it, demonetization, or taking the revenue from the video. They also have the option to just issue a copyright strike. A copyright strike is the most drastic of all the options: Not only will the video be completely removed from YouTube, but the channel will be permanently issued a strike, for its entirety of existence. What makes this very draconian is that if a channel gets three copyright strikes, the entire channel will be automatically deleted. Obviously this system exists to remove channels that do nothing but distribute copyrighted material. The main problem with this is that the system does not take anything else into account about the channel. A YouTube creator could literally produce and publish thousands videos over the span of 10 years, get a copyright strike on one video, get another strike on another video 4 years later, and then get a...

If you have watched so-called "First Amendment audit" videos, you will have probably noticed how often government employees don't like it when a private citizens brings a camera into a governmental building, such a postal office, a city hall or, especially, a court house. Quite often the person is demanded to stop filming or leave the building, and if he refuses, usually the police is called. If you pay attention you'll also notice that they never, ever charge the person for "filming inside a governmental building" or anything of the sort. It's always "trespassing", "disorderly conduct", or some other charge that has absolutely nothing to do with photography. Do you know why they never try to charge the person with a crime related to the photography itself? Because there exists no such law. There is no law in the United States that forbids photography and filming within the publicly accessible areas of governmental buildings (very muc...

For several years now the British police forces have been severely understaffed and overworked, so much so that in many of the largest British cities if you call the police because your car or your home was burglarized, chances are that the police will not even show up. Only a microscopic fraction of all burglaries and other crimes of similar and even higher severity (such as rape) are ever solved by the police. In many cities the situation has become so bad that burglary is pretty much de facto legal because there are no consequences (in the vast, vast majority of cases the police will not even show up, much less investigate). Yet, somehow, the British police still has the manpower to harass thousands and thousands of people every year for things they say online and elsewhere. And we really are talking about literal harassment here, not just figuratively or as an exaggeration: The police showing up to the home of someone who did nothing illegal, merely posted something "insensit...