What grinds my gears

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the third movie in the sort of "Home Trilogy" of the MCU Spider-Man movies. If you have not seen the movie, I will not spoil almost any major detail about it (it's one of the kind of movies that's best to see without having been spoiled about its contents), except for the one described in this post (and even that I will try to keep at a minimum). From all the movies in this sort-of "trilogy", this is generally regarded as the best one. And, in fact, in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe it is considered one of the top movies (definitely on the top half, way above the average). I liked the movie, and it had very interesting ideas (which I won't spoil here), but it also left me with a slight bad taste in my mouth. A taste of disappointment. A taste of wasted potential. You see (spoilers spoilers), one of the villains appearing in the movie is the Green Goblin. Now, the Green Goblin is legendary in the comics, all the way since...

I happened to stumble across an essay named Terrorists Are Always Muslim but Never White . As you might have guessed, the essay has quite clearly been written by a far-leftist activist and grifter who, unsurprisingly and obviously, attributes the typical mental picture of a terrorist as being a Muslim to racism. Of course. Because there is no other possible explanation. But let's take the question seriously (or, rather, a question that could be extracted from that inflammatory essay): Why is it that when a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, he is called a "Muslim terrorist", but when a white person commits such an act, he's not called a "white terrorist" (even though the far left is trying their hardest to change that)? There are many reasons for this: "Muslim" is not a race. It's a religious denomination. "White" in this context is a race. Much unlike the far-leftists want to claim, the vast majority of people are not racists and th...

Some political commentators have said that protests are the Church of the left. Where Christians go to Church, leftists go to protests. This is quite an apt comparison. It's just a fact that whenever there's yet again a massive protest by the far left, the vast, vast majority of people were summoned there, they are in essence "hired protestors", they are there because they were called to be there, not because they actually care or even know the intricate details of what the protest is about. There are numerous examples of people going to interview people in such a protest and (when they actually get someone to talk, perhaps because that someone had not been successfully indoctrinated into not talking to "the enemy") these people are pretty much oblivious to what the protest is actually about. They might be able to tell the headline version of the reason, but that's it. Ask any details, and they usually have no idea. In one particularly funny video the ...

One of the surprise hits of the summer of 2023 was the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer , which is a biographical "historical drama" movie about the eponymous Robert Oppenheimer, who had a key role in developing the first nuclear weapons during the second world war. The film was released to public acclaim. It became, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the second highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (only behind the 2019 film Joker ) with a world-wide gross revenue of almost a billion dollars. It received universal acclaim both from critics and from the public, and a big bunch of accolades, including seven Oscars (including the most prestigious award of Best Picture), five Golden Globe Awards, and many others. I didn't see it in the movie theater, but because of the enormously positive reception (and especially because of no negative politically charged criticism), I went and purchased it on Blu-Ray, expecting to have an enjoyable and didactic viewing experience. I deep...

A police cruiser signals a citizen's car to stop. Allegedly one of the car's headlights isn't working and, on top of that, allegedly, it's speeding. The car stops at a gas station. When the cop gets to the car he demands a driver's license and when the 18-year-old teenage girl takes more than about 10 seconds to try to find it from the glove compartment, or wherever it was, the cop gets angry, opens the car's door and demands that she get out of the car. She asks repeatedly what she did but the cop, like is so common in the United States, is so ego-driven that he refuses to tell her before she gets out of the car and shows ID. And when she takes more than 10 seconds or so to get out of the car, the cop violently grabs her and slams her on the ground. You can see a video discussing this event here . This incident is just the perfect chain of events that demonstrates how corrupt many cops are in the United States: The cop is clearly extremely ego-driven, a "r...

I have been playing Elite Dangerous actively for about 2 years now. I really have to rant about two types of players that I truly, truly despise: Gankers and whiners. So-called "gankers" are a bane of most online multiplayer games that allow player-vs-player combat (in games where that's not the sole goal of the game, eg. "arena-style" first-person shooters. Although in certain types of even those games there can be what could be considered "gankers" as well.) These are players with extremely advanced end-game equipment or builds who will attack and kill weaker players, just for the sake of it. In Elite Dangerous, for instance, they will attack players, including much weaker players who have absolutely no way of defending themselves, and shoot them in the back while they are trying to flee. Their only and sole purpose is to ruin the game for other players. Nothing else. If the victim complains to the ganker that he had no way of defending himself and ...

Dear Japan. Your government is betraying you, and is on a very fast path of destroying your society, your culture, your country. It's not yet too late to stop it, but you have to do it NOW. You cannot wait 10 or 20 years, just watching it happen, until it's too late to do anything. Your government has either believed, or for one reason or another is actively pushing, the lie that diminishing birth rates are an impending catastrophe for the country, and that the only solution for this looming "disaster" is to import as many immigrants as possible into the country, mostly from poor countries. Millions and millions of immigrants. Do not believe these lies. Falling birth rates might have some relatively minor effects on the economy of the country, if it continues for long enough, but these effects are nowhere near catastrophic, and are always temporary. Your country, like most other countries, has had significantly worse economic catastrophes many times in the past, and...

I wrote in an earlier blog post how South Korea is making a HUGE mistake . What mistake? Believing the modern "falling birth rates and an aging population is a big impending catastrophe" and that unrestricted mass immigration from poor countries is the only solution to fix that "problem". Indeed, South Korea, one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world, with some of the lowest crime rates, drug use and poverty, is already planning on opening its borders to millions of immigrants from, you guessed it, the poorest countries in the world. Well, not to be left behind, it appears that Japan has swallowed the exact same lie about this being a "problem" and that the only solution is unrestricted immigration. Japan, too, is planning on increasing immigration by orders of magnitude, in order to fix this impending huge disaster looming in the future. Japan is genuinely one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world. Crime rates are astonishingly low...