What grinds my gears

One of the core principles of a free democratic constitutional country is that criticism of the government, of the people in charge, is a fundamental protected right. In fact, it is well established in most free democratic countries that criticism of the government (and the people running it) in particular has even more protections than things said to other people. The threshold at which someone could be prosecuted for saying something about a politician in government is generally much higher than when said about some other person. In other words, criticism of the government, and the people running it, is one of the core pillars of a free democratic constitutional society. In several countries the far left is quickly trying to change this. They are trying to remove your right to criticize them. In more and more countries politicians, pretty much solely far-leftist politicians, have been talking more and more about how "dangerous" it is to throw caustic criticism at a politic...

Since at least the 1990's a genre of television show that has been named "reality TV" has been wildly popular, only gaining popularity in the 2000's. The concept of "reality TV" can be hard to define exactly, but the key characteristics are that they are mostly unscripted and involve participants or contestants who are just everyday people rather than professional actors or other people who do TV content as a profession. The distinction from a "TV game show" (such as "Wheel of Fortune" or "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?") can sometimes be hard to define clearly, but the unscripted nature of the show is the key. (After all, even game shows are fully scripted even if the answers or actions by the contestants are not known in advance.) And, generally, "reality TV" shows try to depict something from real life, or the lives or (unscripted) actions of people in real-life settings, rather than it all being just a TV play or m...

Recently a comment made by an Ubisoft executive that "gamers need to get 'comfortable' not owning their games for subscriptions to take off" caused, once again, a lot of furor among gamers and gaming youtube channels. This is nothing new, of course. This always seems to be an extremely touchy subject among gamers. The idea that they would somehow "not own" the games they have purchased, and instead the game companies dictating how, when and if they can play those games. The funny (and ironic) thing about this is that nobody seems to be able to explain what "owning a game" even means. Seriously. I have asked many people online, who are outraged at such a preposterous proposition as uttered by that Ubisoft executive, what exactly they mean by "owning" a video game. Some of them never answer the question and instead go to unrelated tangents, being outraged about the idea of "subscription based" games, and companies being able to re...

I have written several blog posts about the rather incomprehensible obsession that almost every single police officer in the United States seems to have about demanding people's IDs, and being astonishingly insistent about it, often in situations where they don't have the legal right to do so. (The United States is one of the few countries in the world where the police actually needs a legal reason to demand people's ID, and can't demand it willy-nilly, just because they want to. This is a direct consequence of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.) Examples of previous blog posts about the subject include a cop threatening to arrest a suspected victim of an assault if he refuses to identify (and speaking to him like he's being suspected of some kind of crime), a cop mistaking a woman for a 10-year-old girl from behind and then handcuffing her when she refused to ID, for absolutely no suspicion of any crime , and another cop mistaking the cane of...

As I (and many others) predicted, once Trump's presidency ended he is now being thrown lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit in a 100% transparent attempt at trying to stop him from running for president again. (And then it's the leftists who are accusing their opposition of "election interfering"...) Among the dozen or so of them, perhaps the most ridiculous one is by the New York attorney general Letitia James. She's trying to sue Trump for some obscure "crime" of overvaluing some of his land property in New York. The lawsuit is ridiculous in many respects. For starters, as many, many legal experts and political commentators have pointed out, Trump hasn't actually overvalued anything. What James is doing is undervaluing those properties, by using some contrived artificial system, and then trying to claim that Trump is deliberately overvaluing them. But do you know what's even more ridiculous (and transparent) about this particular lawsuit? Trump...

Many news organizations as well as independent journalists and political commentators have noticed how dozens and dozens of the richest people in the west, especially the United States, have been building for themselves huge underground bunkers at remote isolated islands, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. There have already been rumors that these people, the CEOs of huge megacorporations and other rich people, are expecting what they are calling "the event", which assumedly is some kind of complete collapse of western civilization, probably ending in an absolutely massive amount of unrest, civil wars, and outright wars, with the death count probably in the millions. Well, to me this is not a surprise at all. I have myself been writing in this blog for almost 10 years now that the west is on the brink of economic and social collapse, just like so many vast civilizations of the past . No matter what we may want to think, these CEOs and super-rich people are not stupid...

In 2015 Buzzfeed published a video of a feminist playing Grand Theft Auto. At one point she retorts "I wrote a blog post a while ago about why I f***ing hate video games. They appeal to the male fantasy!" More recently that particular clip became a source of memes , where people would take that clip and then append some video game footage that was pretty much the exact opposite of that, or in other ways subverted or made fun of that notion in some manner. But I would like to seriously ask: Why is it a bad thing that some games "appeal to the male fantasy"? This is a completely serious question that I would like an answer to. Rather obviously not all video games do that, not even a majority of them. In fact, only a small fraction of all existing video games "appeal to the male fantasy." But even when taking only those games, why is it a bad thing? Why is it something to object to? Video games are a form of escapism and, most importantly, a form of enterta...

Over the decades, story after story after story has come out of misconduct and corruption among law enforcement and city officials in the United States, especially in smaller towns. Abusing their position of power for personal gain. Abusing the citizens in one way or another. Questionable behavior. Myriads of other forms of corruption. It almost seems like corruption is the norm. One of the reasons why this is so prevalent and it so rarely is rectified and punished is that the top brass of such towns is almost invariably in cahoots with each other. In fact, in almost every small town there's pretty much a trifecta, a sort of "junta", formed by the police chief/sheriff, the city mayor, and the judge (especially in towns so small that there's only one small courthouse with one judge). These three people are almost invariably drinking buddies, and they always, in every situation, look after each others' backs, and protect each other whenever there's even the slig...

Some anti-leftist political commentators are hoping for a slightly brighter future in 2024 and subsequent years because they see the wider public becoming more and more fed-up with far-leftist politics and propaganda, seeing what it causes and what consequences it has (such as several cities run by far-leftists having become essentially third-world country cities, with rampant crime, homelessness, drug abuse and extreme unsafety for normal citizens.) I am a bit more pessimistic than that. For over 10 years now the far left has not only been gaining ground in all aspects of society at astonishing speed, but they have become bolder and bolder by the year, and more and more indoctrinated, radical and violent by the year, and resorting to more and more extreme tactics (that would have been unthinkable a mere 10 years ago) by the year. There is absolutely no sign that they are going to stop, or even slowing down. I fear that their pace is only going to keep accelerating. They are going to b...

Regardless of what the multiculturalists and far-leftists have been loudly proclaiming for several decades, all cultures are not equal. Some cultures are genuinely and inherently more flawed and destructive than others. There are many countries and cultures where there's a deeply ingrained sense of honor, respect, good manners and duty, taught to children. The average parents constantly teach their children how to eg. behave in public, what to say, how to interact with people. If the child does something disrespectful to someone, the parents will admonish him or her. In all kinds of social interactions, the parents will be constantly teaching the child how to behave and what to say (like "say thanks to the lady" eg. at a store's checkout.) Children are constantly being taught life skills at home, and encouraged to study, do well in school, do their homework, do house chores, and so on. Many such countries instill a deep and strong sense of honor, duty and respect into...

One important skill for a politician is that of diplomacy. Not just diplomacy when dealing with other countries, important entities (such as big corporations) or other politicians, but quite importantly, diplomacy when it comes to one's own constituents, ie. people who voted for you and who you are representing in government. This is especially important when facing criticism and protest from your own constituents: To keep a good image, one should be respectful towards the people you are representing, and approach such criticism with seriousness and respect. Most politicians understand and know this skill of diplomacy towards one's own constituents. A few politicians might not, and instead just routine ignore such criticism and such protests, for example by simply walking away if presented with such in a live situation. That, in itself, is already disrespectful, but it's nothing compared to the kind of disrespect this blog post is about. And that's the smug disrespect t...

More and more studies are being published by the week about the absolutely devastating effects of smartphones and tables on human development because they are being given to younger and younger children in ever increasing amounts, and these children are more and more given completely unrestricted screentime. Smart devices have become the modern babysitters. Since about the 1980's television had been largely given this role by lazy busy parents, and this already had many negative side-effects. The redeeming quality of television, however, compared to modern smart devices, is that the content was strictly restricted, controlled and regulated, in most countries by law. Not that it was good even then to just use the television as a substitute babysitter, but at least when you put your child in front of the TV at certain hours of day, you at least had almost full certainty that they would not be exposed to particularly harmful content (because such content at those hours is outright ban...