What grinds my gears

There's a video of an American conservative anti-abortion activist, a friend of Charlie Kirk, having conversations at a university campus about that subject, at the same time that the shooting happened. She gets a phone call telling her what happened. She is distraught and tells the students that are there that Charlie Kirk as just been shot. What was the very first immediate instinct and reaction of the leftist students that heard it? The very first thing that they immediately did when the heard the news? They laughed. All of them. The conservative activist got understandably angry and started yelling at them. How dare they not only laugh at someone's murder, but moreover at her friend's murder? What was the students' reaction now that they had a bit more time to think about the situation and hear her reaction to it? Were they perhaps apologetic, saying something like "sorry, that was insensitive, I don't know what came to me." Nope. As you might guess, t...

For some reason there has recently been a flood of videos on YouTube about some "experts" arguing against "the covid-19 vaccine", how utterly dangerous it is, and how it's a crime against humanity, some even outright comparing it to a genocide. I don't know why there has suddenly been a surge of such videos, but they are not only tiresome, they are also quite dangerous fear-mongering. For starters, all of these videos talk about THE "covid-19 vaccine". As if there was just one. Or at least just one single type of vaccine. Quite clearly these videos and these "experts" have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. There is no "the" covid-19 vaccine. There isn't one single such vaccine, or even one single such vaccine type. There are multiple ones, using different activation mechanisms. As Wikipedia lists: "Platforms developed in 2020 involved nucleic acid technologies (nucleoside-modified messenger RNA and DNA), n...

Even though the Unity game engine has been a huge competitor, it's still undeniable that Unreal Engine has been, by far, the most popular game engine for video games, particularly the big-budget ones. And its market share is only increasing by the year, as game studio after game studio is abandoning their own game engines (and sometimes even Unity) to move to Unreal Engine. Even game studios that have developed their own game engines for decades (such as CD Projekt RED, which has been using their own custom engine in most of their games, including Cyberpunk 2077) are one by one moving to Unreal Engine. The motivation is understandable, of course: Why spend enormous amounts of time, effort and money to develop, optimize and add new features to a custom game engine, when you can get all of that and much more from an existing one? Particularly one that doesn't even cost anything up front! (Indeed, Unreal Engine is free to use by anybody without an up front payment. It's only w...

In the United States (and I believe in a couple of other countries) there's a common practice that feels absolutely incomprehensible and preposterous to most other countries: And that's the phenomenon of delivery companies (and, I believe, even governmental postal services) leaving people's orders and packets near the front door of their home (usually on the porch, or even on the driveway if there's no porch). Yes, completely unattended, for any passerby to steal. Some such delivery companies might ring the bell to see if anybody is home, but others don't even do that. They just leave the package there and go away, without even notifying the residents. This is absolutely incomprehensible and, I believe, actually illegal in most countries: They are legally responsible for people's property until it has been picked up in person by the legal recipient. In most countries such packages need to be either picked up in person, delivered to the recipient in person, or lo...

As I have written many, many times in this blog, I consider myself a free speech absolutist : The fundamental right to free speech is both universal (ie. it applies to everybody regardless of anything) and inalienable (ie. it cannot be removed, restricted or punished regardless of who that person is or what he may have done), and I have always strongly subscribed to the sentiment written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who attributed it to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." And I have always had that attitude: I might disagree with many people, particularly with modern far-leftists, and sometimes I may even find their opinions absolutely repugnant, but I have always had the attitude of defending their fundamental  right  to express those opinions, freely and without punishment. If, for example, some far-leftist was banned from some platform for something heinous that he might have said, I was at least metaphorically ...

When Charlie Kirk was murdered at a speaking event, the immediate reaction by many far-leftists, particularly on certain social media platforms, was completely unsurprising but nothing less disgusting: Posting videos of themselves cheering and celebrating. In one particular example the women says something about knowing that cheering on someone getting murdered is wrong, but then proceeded to do it anyway, very visibly and very provocatively, completely on purpose. These people are literal psychopaths, and they are completely disgusting. They are some of the worst scum of this Earth, and I have so much disgust towards them that it literally makes me want to puke. But of course those are not the only "vultures" encircling Kirk's corpse. Also unsurprisingly, many leftists have taken the opportunity to piss, spit and trample on his grave, at least metaphorically speaking because he's not yet buried. They are making videos smearing him, insulting him, and making all kinds...

Charlie Kirk was a very strong believer in discussion. He believed in, and often expressed the sheer importance of people talking to each other. He believed that differences in opinions should be resolved via peaceful discussion and debate. He often compared the entirety of society to a married couple: What happens when a married couple stops talking to each other? What happens when they stop telling each other what they think and what they feel? What happens when the stop listening to each other? He was a strong believer in not just the universal inalienable right to free speech, but in giving everybody a voice. He didn't try to silence his political opposition. He didn't try to shut them off, or have them go away, or them experiencing negative consequences for their expression of opinion. He didn't try to "cancel" anybody, not even his fiercest opponents. On the contrary, he was always happy to have a civil discussion even with people who hated him and opposed e...

Nathan Oakley is one of the biggest flat-earth activists. He is quite notorious for being, arguably, by far the most obnoxious, smug and condescending of them all. His tone of voice, his manner of speaking, the way he expresses himself, and even his facial expressions all exude smugness and condescension. It's a very smug and hostile tone, and whenever someone doesn't agree with him, very often he resorts to just petty insults and his smugness turns into a very aggressive tone and words. Unsurprisingly, if he is in control of the conversation, eg. if it's happening during an online live stream and he has the capability of muting and kicking out the other person, he's more than happy to do that and he abuses that power very easily and often. Also unsurprisingly, when he isn't in control of the conversation, he always tries the next best alternative, ie. to control it by constantly interrupting and shouting over the other person. He is the epitome of the Dunning-Kruge...

In 2018 several European countries investigated whether so-called "loot boxes" in certain video games, especially ones that are purchased with real money, could be considered a form of gambling and thus would violate the gambling and lottery laws of those countries. The investigations arose primarily because of raising concerns that these "loot boxes" were potentially as addictive as other forms of gambling, especially for younger people, which is particularly bad when real money is involved in the purchase of these boxes. It was noted that they seemed to fulfill the definition of a "lottery" or "raffle" to an extent that falls under the definition and thus restrictions of the gambling/lottery laws: Each "box" is purchased with real money. The contents of the "box" are randomized rather than fixed. The customer does not see the contents of this randomized box prior to purchase. Some of the potential prizes that can be gotten f...

There are quite many YouTube channels that are dedicated to showing "sovereign citizens" being confronted (and often arrested) by cops (most often in traffic stops). One big problem I have seen with many of these channels is that they use the term "sovereign citizen" extremely loosely, slapping that term in the title of almost every single video completely regardless of whether the person depicted in the video presents any actual "sovereign citizen" talking points or not. At worst, that I have seen, is maybe half of the videos of one of these channels having "sovereign citizen" in the title, yet the person being confronted by cops and arrested very clearly does not believe in any of that nonsense. Indeed, it seems to me that these YouTube channels don't really care what the term actually means, and just slap it in the title of the video (and often use it while narrating or commenting in the video itself) almost automatically. They use the ter...

Of course there are multiple such videos, but I recently encountered this one , where a trans activist is interviewed and asked questions about the subject, and the video encapsulates perfectly what they believe and, particularly, how  dogmatically  they believe it even against all evidence of the contrary. For example, the trans activist presents the old tired claim that puberty blockers only "pause" puberty and their effects are fully reversible, that when the blockers are stopped, puberty then resumes and goes through its normal course. When presented with the fact that puberty does not somehow magically just get paused and then continue normally, and instead puberty always stops at about 18 or so regardless of any blockers, and that boys who have been on puberty blockers during all that time end up with a permanent micro-penis, she just denies it, all she has to say is: "They probably want that." (A bit irritatingly the interviewer doesn't press on that, ie....

There's a large segment of the human population that has, for the lack of a better term, an outright "phobia" towards math. Like all phobias, the severity varies a lot. Many of these people have no problems with most basic arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction and multiplication, and may even be quite adept at doing those things in their head (for example, summing up the result of throwing multiple dice). However, any mathematical subject that goes even  slightly  more advanced than the four (or even three!) basic arithmetic operators not only goes beyond their comprehension, but they have an outright aversion towards even trying to understand it. Even something as "advanced" as division, or understanding multiplication by negative numbers, might cause them problems (yes, that happens. I have witnessed it first-hand.) Not to talk about "rocket science" level of advanced mathematics, like elementary algebra! Then there are the more severe cases for ...

For many years now I have written about one of my pet peeves: How the popular math youtuber Matt Parker contracted a "they pronoun fetish" some time in late 2019 and has since then clearly had the mission of trying to force the pronoun "they" as a singular pronoun, by using, overusing and abusing it constantly, even to refer to people whose sex is absolutely unambiguous. (In one particularly egregious and funny video he was chatting with a historian. They were talking about a guy who lived a couple thousand years ago. The historian kept referring to the guy as "he" while, at the same time, Matt kept referring to him as "they". It was really cringe.) Of course, and unsurprisingly, Matt Parker is not the only "they pronoun activist" out there. There are many others, such as this particularly egregious example . However, I have found another big youtuber who beats hands down Matt in the use of the "they" pronoun to refer to one ...

I have written about this very subject several times, but I think it deserves repeating because the problem just continues year after year, with no end in sight. The fact is that Wikipedia is  heavily   politically biased . Wikipedia articles about people and subjects hated by the American far left have almost zero encyclopedic value (and this is not just petty badmouthing, it literally is so) and are nothing but endless lists of irrelevant minutia that act as resources for far-leftist activists to use. In these articles about people or things that the American far-leftists hate, copious amounts of article space, and even the table of contents, will be dedicated to listing irrelevant minor thing after irrelevant minor thing that can be used to attack that person or thing. Unsurprisingly source bias is likewise rampant, with absolutely ridiculously biased far-leftist sources being frequently used, while the vast majority of even major and credible right-wing sources are banned....

If there's one thing that's very hard to understand about American cops, it's sometimes their logic. It's often contradictory and circular. For example, there are several videos out there where cops arrest someone "for resisting arrest", which is completely asinine and so circular that it's hilarious. For example in one video they are arresting some young woman and her mother asks one of the cops why they are arresting her, and the cop just directly and unambiguously says "for resisting arrest". In another video about a different case a cop was asked during a deposition why he had arrested the suspect, and once again the cop directly and clearly answered "for resisting arrest". In most if not all of the United States cops can only demand your ID if they have a reasonable suspicion of a crime that they suspect you of doing, and they must be able to clearly articulate the crime by name (ie. it can't be a vague suspicion of some unspec...

For a couple of decades now, so-called "dropshipping" has been a plague of internet marketplaces, online stores and many websites selling merchandise. "Dropshipping" is the act of advertising and selling a product, often in a manner that deceptively makes it look and sound significantly better than it actually is, asking a hefty price for it, and then just ordering that product for a small fraction of the price on one of the Chinese online shops on behalf of the customer. For example: An online market listing, online shop, some website, or even sometimes a minor (or even major) celebrity, advertises a really cool new electronic gadget, like a new type of game console, or some kind of new type of smart watch, hyping it up and making it look like a really powerful machine with tons of features, and asks something like 200 USD for it. However, when you buy it, what arrives is some cheap Chinese knockoff product that's being sold in one of the Chinese online shops, ...

Recently, there was quite a controversy because in some high profile tennis match one of the players was handing his hat as gift to a young boy in the audience when, suddenly, some middle-aged man just snatched it and took it for himself. What was particularly egregious is that this man is a multi-millionaire CEO of some Polish company. This was quite literally a "stealing candy from a baby" moment. Or, in this particular case, a grown-ass super-rich man stealing a hat from a young boy, because of greed and nothing else. The tennis player was rather obviously outraged about this and later sought out the boy and gave him another identical hat. Unsurprisingly, the wider public was also outraged at the CEO's action, which was incredibly petty and heartless. Stealing the hat in that situation from  any  person would have been inappropriate (and perhaps even outright criminal), but doing it to a child is a hundred times worse. The fact that he is a multi-millionaire CEO of a c...

A piece of neo-communist propaganda is making the rounds: Unsurprisingly, many people just believe what it says without any criticism or any doubt, even though it's just a random picture created by a random anonymous person making random claims, providing absolutely no sources. (This is, in fact, a rather interesting psychological phenomenon: Why do so many people tend to believe such unsubstantiated claims made by completely anonymous faceless individuals who don't even cite any sources? Are people really this incapable of critical thinking and skepticism?) Also very unsurprisingly, those numbers are completely meaningless and are not even close to anything resembling the real world. Did the author of the picture just slap some random numbers on it from the top of is head, or did he actually do some calculations? Perhaps a bit surprisingly, whenever there are these types of claims (particularly when they are politically motivated), the numbers are often the result of  some  c...

I wrote a couple of years ago a blog post about why are uncontacted peoples still so primitive , where I give two (non-mutually exclusive) hypotheses to answer that question. Lately I have been thinking more generally about the vastly different developmental levels of different parts of the world, particularly before (mostly British, Spanish and Portuguese) imperialism, and later internationalism, spread the same level of technological and societal developmental level almost everywhere around the world. After all, consider that almost all if not the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the entirety of the American continent was still literally living in the stone age, with people living in straw and mud huts, hunting for their survival, with their most advanced weapons being spears and very primitive bows, at the same time as in Europe there were huge cities of even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, gigantic castles, massive gothic cathedrals, multi-storey buildings, paved roa...

For almost a century South Africa was not just one of the richest countries in Africa, but in fact one of the richest countries in the world. However, it had quite a bad problem: Apartheid. An astonishing strict separation between white and black people, at all levels of society, and where disparity between the living conditions of the two groups was off the charts. Apartheid was gradually ended, which in itself was a good thing. The problem was that it was, essentially, ended in the wrong way. Rather than starting over and building a new prosperous harmonious rich society that would keep the standards of living and economy of the country, black people have essentially taken over and are engaging in petty revenge against the "white oppressors" (which, of course, includes  all  white people the country regardless of what they may or may not have done.) South Africa has become a warning to Europe about what happens when the country is suddenly flooded with millions of hostile ...

As I have written earlier, Japan, one of the safest and most high-trust societies in the world, is in the early stages of going the path of "multicultural enrichment" and adopting the far-leftist cancer, and what that will entail in the future if they do . Since Japan is still not there and is only in the very early stages of making this mistake, they would still have time to reverse course and stop it from happening. Sadly, it appears that they are not going to do that. It appears that the Japanese government, regardless of all the protests by their own people, is set on continuing this self-destructive path of population replacement. They are already designating areas in the country where they will be importing massive amounts of African and Middle-Easter immigrants. At this moment they are fully set on continuing this madness, and apparently there's nothing that the Japanese people can do to stop it. It appears that it's going to happen no matter what. I feel sorr...

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about how some American companies, especially in the tech industry, had apparently started to awaken to the problem of "leeches" among their employees , and started to lay them off in large numbers. I call a "leech" in context someone, very typically a far-leftist college or university graduate (although that's not a requirement) who has spent her (most typically it's a she, although there are of course male examples) entire studying career learning about far-leftist ideology, doctrine and activism rather than learning something actually useful that could help them get a good job and career, and would contribute to society. From those people, the "leeches" are the ones who somehow manage to get a job at a company, typically a huge tech company with thousands of employees, perhaps via connections, perhaps by somehow managing to pass the job interview (which may be much easier if the interviewer is herself su...