What grinds my gears

I have been frequenting a particular gaming real-time discussion forum for several years now, and there are a couple particular people in that place that kind of stand out from the rest. One of them very often explicitly uses "she" to refer to herself (assuming that she actually is a "she"), and frequently mentions her "wife". During the several years I have been there, she has been the only person I have ever seen to mention their spouse or partner in any way, shape or form, or to use pronouns referring to themselves. Moreover, multiple times has she mentioned how she's taking "meds" for a particular mental illness. And this completely out of the blue, without being prompted in any way, or it being mentioned to excuse or explain some kind of odd behavior or incapability of doing something. Perhaps even more egregiously, she has several times mentioned illnesses of her "wife", which starts crossing the boundary between mere egoism ...

Many American conservatives, at least the devout Christian ones (which probably 99% or more of American conservatives are), often like to tout how the modern American society and culture, and in fact the entirety of the western society and culture, is based on centuries of "Judeo-Christian values". In other words, that modern western society, its moral values, its justice system, its customs and traditions, are largely based on Judaism and Christianity, and their morality, justice system and traditions. (This is the main reason why some American conservatives claim that the United States is "a Christian country".) But is this actually true? Well, consider for example one of the fundamental pillars of society: Matrimony and the family unit, which American conservatives at large keep in very high regard, and consider one of the most important aspects of American society, one of its founding pillars. It might come as a surprise to many, but nowhere in the Bible, not in...

One of the main talking points of modern socialists/communists is that capitalism exploits and abuses the working class, takes advantage of it, sucks it dry, builds up riches on their work while paying them pitiable amounts of their hard-earned money. Essentially not much better than slave labor. This is nothing but projection, pure and simple. Consider what the situation was in the Soviet Union, which was pretty much the epitome of a Communist country, where Communism was implemented in its purest form, with pretty much no compromises. In the Soviet Union the government assigned you a job, with you having little to no choice about the matter, and you were obliged to do that job lest you be punished. Your personal preferences, abilities, choices or even physical capabilities usually had little to no effect on where you were assigned to do work and what kind of work. (At most, if you were literally unable to do a particular kind of work, eg. because of being paralyzed from the waist dow...

Economic inflation has been quite a lot in the news lately, especially in the United States, because of the unprecedented high inflation rates, which started skyrocketing in the beginning of 2022 and reached 9.1% in June of that year, after which it started slowly declining. The Biden administration has, rather obviously, been denying responsibility and the gravity of the situation ever since, to this day. And, rather egregiously, have been patting themselves on the back and boasting how they got the inflation to come back down, as if that was a great accomplishment. (This even though inflation in the country has been steady at about 3.5%, which is still very high, especially compared to the pre-2022 times, when it was less than 2%, which is the economically healthy amount.) Many people (even those who don't really care about politics and would just want to live their lives in peace) have been wondering that if inflation is supposed to have come down, how come the price of commodit...

Once again a case of a western woman being gang-raped (although in this case not killed) in a poorer country is making the rounds in social media, youtube and so on. In this case it happened in India. This got me thinking about something I have noticed. Having watched numerous travel videos, where a youtuber travels (usually alone) to different parts of the world, I have noticed a particular... peculiarity of the culture in India (or, at least in some parts of it; after all, it's a huge country with a very wide variety of local cultures.) A rather unsavory peculiarity. I have seen this in several such travel videos, and in a couple of them the youtuber has directly commented on it. And that is that if a clearly westerner (ie. white) person arrives at some city in India, especially if alone, it appears to be extremely common for some local people, especially young adult men, to start following him or her. Oftentimes someone might start talking to him, perhaps trying to sell him some...

Since at least the 1980's and becoming stronger and stronger during the 90's and beyond, a very far-leftist doctrine of "multiculturalism" has been extremely aggressively pushed onto most European and many other western countries via an absolutely massive decades-long social engineering campaign, using the mainstream media and all possible venues. The primary main goal of this doctrine of "multiculturalism" is, for some reason that I honestly cannot fully comprehend, to bring as many foreign people from non-European countries into Europe. Millions and millions of them. As many as possible. And not just any random non-European, but people that look as different from Europeans as possible, and who come from cultures that are as different and incompatible as possible. The more different, the better. Having witnessed this importing of foreign cultures into western countries for several decades now, and the effects that it has, I have myself become more and more ...

The internet and all the technology surrounding it (such as smartphones) has brought a lot of innovations and good things, and arguably accelerated progress in technological, scientific and medical fields, as well as many others, in addition to allowing people to get information and education millions of times more easily than just a mere 40 years ago. However, there's also of course the dark side of the internet, which may have a devastating effect on the human population, especially where the internet is readily available. And I'm not here referring to all the illegal stuff (while that, obviously, is very bad, it's not really the harbinger of death of modern society.) One of the absolute main problems with the internet is how easily and readily accessible hard-core pornography is. And I'm not being a puritan here. The problem is that it's about as easily available to young children as it is to anybody else, and there's very little that can be done about it. Th...

Perhaps not so much anymore to this day, but especially some years ago there was this minor craze of taking old discarded ship cargo containers (ie. those enormous metallic elongated-box-shaped containers used by cargo ships to transport stuff) and building small "pod-type" domiciles out of them. The notion was one of recycling, of course: Rather than just throw these old unused cargo containers away to rust and rot, why not reuse them for something useful, like building an inhabitable small cabin out of one? Not only does this recycling give a sense of being ecological, but the idea of living in a small comfy, somewhat rustic domicile, while at the same time saving the environment, can feel appealing. There are many problems with this, though. For starters, cargo containers are made out of steel, and steel is not a very polluting substance. It's not toxic, it does not release toxins when in nature, and it has only very minimal if any impact on the environment. Sure, it m...

When Donald Trump announced that he was running for President of the United States some time in 2015, the political zeitgeist of the country appeared to be just right for the far left in the country, including the Democratic Party, to go absolutely bonkers and choose him as the "designated Hitler" of the time. When you think about it, on the face of it there was absolutely no reason for that. Trump was just a random conservative businessman with no particular history of anything that would have justified the absolutely massive smearing campaign that he quickly became the target of. He had not committed any notorious crimes, or engaged in any notorious objectionable practices, nor was he in any way notorious for being a "racist" or anything like that. He was just a relatively unremarkable multi-billionaire conservative business man turned politician, not dissimilar to the hundreds and hundreds of other billionaires the world. He did not have any kind of notorious his...

I find it seriously worrying when even some medical doctors don't seem to have any problem with veganism, and seem to think and talk about it as if it were equally healthy (if not even healthier) as any other diet. There are tons of misconceptions and outright lies that people have about veganism, which devout vegans are happy to to parrot. For example, there's this conception that a vegan diet is somehow "natural" and healthy for us, and the way that nature "intended" us to eat. There may also be an implication (and some vegans might even make the claim outright) that many cultures in the past survived purely on a vegan diet. This is absolutely untrue. Not a single civilization in the entire history of humanity has engaged in and survived on a purely vegan diet. Veganism is, in fact, a very modern invention. (In contrast, and somewhat ironically, there are many civilizations, especially indigenous ones, that have survived for centuries with an almost 100% c...

The modern far left, especially in the United States, is both a cult of victimhood, and a cult of fear (both of which, obviously, go hand-in-hand, and are closely related.) One prominent way in which the latter can be seen is that their major political tactic is demonizing their opposition (which in the United States means the conservatives and the Republican Party, of course) and making their own side as scared and fearful of them as possible, using all the scaremongering tactics in the book. One tactic that they love to use is petty name-calling. They will take a word with a very negative connotation, and just keep throwing it at the people that they hate, over and over, day after day, year after year, trying to make it true via sheer repetition. They literally do not care what those words mean, they only care about the negative connotation that they have, and how much it scares their own side. Currently, and for the past several years, their pet insults are "Nazi" and even...

When questioned why it's so important to use people's "preferred pronouns", the far leftists will argue that it's about "respect". You see, it's very offensive and hurtful to use the "wrong" pronouns when referring to someone. We should be respectful and think about their feelings. It can cause a huge crippling trauma if you don't use the correct pronouns, you see. How do we know that all this "respect" argument is complete bullshit, it's just an excuse, and enforcing "preferred pronouns" has absolutely nothing to do with "respect"? By the fact that whenever a convicted rapist claims that he's actually a "woman" (in order to get to women's prisons, where they will have an easier time and less likely to be beaten up by other prisoners), the far-leftists will still be adamant about respecting his "preferred pronouns", and will cancel and assault you if you use the wrong ones. W...

When the sequel to the highly acclaimed PlayStation 3 game The Last of Us was in development, controversy arose because of the comments made by a disgruntled employee of the company, claiming that, among other things, the script of the game was heavily SJW-influenced. Trailers of the game also made people suspicious because of, among other things, a character who appeared to be a transsexual, at least in how she looks and behaves in the trailers (and in the game proper). The developer company, Naughty Dog, denied that the character was transsexual (and, to be fair, there really isn't anything in the game that would indicate her to be), but as far as I remember didn't make many comments about how much "progressive" "inclusive" far-leftist politics had been shoved into the game. Was this all a huge exaggeration and misinterpretation, and is the developer company innocent of trying to shove leftist politics into the game and thus down the throat of the players...