What grinds my gears

A South Korean minister recently announced the government's plan to increase the amount of immigration to the country by several orders of magnitude. The reason for this was stated very clearly: South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, only about 0.85 births per woman. (On average 2 births per woman are necessary to keep the population unchanged.) And, as seems to be the doctrine of the modern world, low birth rates are considered a huge catastrophe, essentially a death sentence to a country, and the only way to fix this huge problem is to bring into the country millions of foreign nationals from distant lands. Because, obviously, that is the only possible solution to that problem. And to pretty much any other problem facing a country. If South Korea really intends to do this, it's a huge mistake. Firstly, I don't buy at all this "low birth rates are a huge catastrophe" mentality, as I have written before . Local populations have always gone...

There's a big irony when it comes to the United States as compared to most other countries. You see, the United States is one of the very few countries where you don't need to present your ID to police even if demanded to do so, unless you are reasonably suspected of a crime. In fact, a few states go so far that you only need to present ID if you have been arrested , and no sooner. This is a direct consequence and interpretation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In other words, the United States is not a so-called stop-and-id country. In contrast, in the vast, vast majority of other countries (regardless of form of government) you are required by law to present ID if requested by a police officer, no matter what the circumstances, no reasons need given. In other words, the vast majority of other countries are so-called stop-and-id countries. So what's the irony? The irony is that the United States is one of the very few countries where the pol...

One of the bigger sociopolitical commentators on YouTube, who goes by the nickname hbomberguy , recently published a video about egregious blatant plagiarism by other big popular YouTube creators, named " Plagiarism and You(Tube) ". The video quickly exploded in popularity, garnering millions of views in less than a week. As of writing this, the video has over 11 million views, making it one of the hottest topics on YouTube in the past weeks. The video talks about, and provides clear evidence of, how several big-name YouTubers have sometimes and in some cases even routinely blatantly plagiarized other people's content (usually from online articles) in a manner that makes it look like it's their own original material, without giving proper (or sometimes any) credit to the original authors. Many wildly popular videos on YouTube, with millions of views, are such examples of blatant plagiarism. Many of these plagiarists are extremely popular and very liked among their aud...

At one point I binge-watched a big bunch of "the last days of (such-and-such celebrity)" YouTube videos, which are, actually, often quite interesting for some reason. I noticed one common theme in most of these early deaths, something that isn't actually any surprise to anybody, but which nevertheless people just tend to shrug off. And that's the amount of prescription and over-the-counter meds that these celebrities stuffed themselves copious amounts with, pretty much as a matter of course. While these drugs rarely directly have caused early deaths of these people, in many cases they were quite arguably contributing factors. This got me thinking how in many countries taking over-the-counter pills like candy has been normalized for decades (probably since all the way back to the 1950's, if not even earlier). Somehow we have, for a large part, become a world-wide culture where we tend to think of over-the-counter prescription-free meds as "safe", and man...

When it comes to the far left, it seems that they only know extremes. Whatever their idea or agenda is, they always have to take it to the absolute extreme, always and everywhere. Even things that might have started as minor details are usually taken to the completely insane extreme over the years. Let's take, for example, the question of people's "preferred pronouns" and the "problem" of people "misgendering" other people. In recent years they have taken these "crimes" so much to the extreme that in some countries you may even have the police come knocking your door if you "misgender" someone, or use the "wrong" pronoun. Some countries are already in the process of passing laws against it (if they haven't passed them already.) That's how far the campaign has already gone. More at the everyday street level, whenever you are dealing with far-leftist activists, if you dare to "misgender" someone or use ...

Japan is an extremely modern and technically advanced nation that's very peaceful and safe, with very low crime rates, and a very rich culture that goes back literally millenia, a culture of honor, respect and cooperation. Japanese people tend to be very polite, very well-behaved, hard-working and culturally honor-bound to do their best no matter what the task. The country is extremely rich in history and culture, while at the same time being also one of the richest countries in the world and on the forefront of technology and science. Not everything in Japanese society is perfect, though. And I'm not here talking about people overworking themselves almost to death, or the shut-ins (hikikomori), or any of the other such ancillary cultural phenomena. I'm talking about something much, much darker, and it relates to Japan's legal system. More particularly, to capital punishment. It's not only that capital punishment still exists in Japan (and not just as an obsolete hi...

Because of recent events in Israel (as of writing this), there have been many instances of harassment of Jewish people in other countries, especially in the United States. And not just on the streets of cities, some back alleys, some rundown poor crime-ridden neighborhoods. Such harassment has been happening in some of the most high-class prestigious places, like many university campuses, by university students. There have been several reports of this, such as for example Jewish university students being locked up in the university's library while a mob of people are banging on the doors and windows, aggressively shouting to them, and the Jewish students being too afraid to go out, and many other such instances. Note that most if not all of these Jewish students are not citizens of Israel nor have ever even visited the country. They have zero connections to either the Israeli government or even Israel itself. In other words, most of them have absolutely nothing to do with what'...

One of the key characteristics of the left (not with every single individual, of course, but on average) is their trust of authorities and the government. Leftists are always the ones who not only want to obey government mandates, but willfully try to make others obey those mandates as well. (Perhaps no better example of this was the covid-19 pandemic and the governmental restrictions and recommendations about it: The people who most furiously defended and enforced those mandates and recommendations were overwhelmingly leftists. And that's just one example.)   Conversely, one of the key characteristics of the conservative right, especially in the United States, is their distrust of authorities and the government. "Don't tread on me!" is one of their slogans. It's a message to the government: "Leave us alone." Where the left wants big authoritarian government, the right wants small government that interferes as little as possible and leaves people and bus...