What grinds my gears

I have written quite many blog posts about this particular subject, but here's a summary if you haven't read them: Matt Parker is a very popular math popularizer on YouTube (with over 1.2 million subscribers, which makes him one of the biggest if not the biggest youtuber of this kind). I have been following his channel for quite a long time (over ten years now) and have always been a big fan. It became quite a pet peeve of mine, however, when some time in the latter half of 2019 Matt started some kind of personal campaign of trying to make the "they" pronoun the universal "gender-neutral" third-person singular pronoun. I indeed checked when this change happened, and it was around that time: Prior to late 2019 he pretty much never used "they" to refer to a single person, and there are countless examples of him using "he" and "she" without any problems. Then, some time in late 2019 not only did he suddenly and completely change th...

Earlier I wrote a blog post about how " medical practice is full of unscientific beliefs ", where I noted that even though we tend to think of modern medicine as being this extremely strictly tested and controlled endeavor, a surprising amount of it is based on nothing but customs and beliefs rather than actual meticulous medical testing (and how there's example after example of medical practice that was popular for decades and decades being changed and obsoleted as further actual studies have shown them to be ineffective or even detrimental.) In a lot of cases it's hard to pin-point the exact source of this belief-based medicine (although enough digging through medical material would probably end up uncovering the original source of the myth). However, sometimes there's a very clear culprit, especially if we widen the subject to not just strict medical practice engaged by doctors, but to a wider notion of health practice engaged by authorities and the society as ...

Ubisoft's newest game (as of writing this), Assassin's Creed Shadows, has been marred with controversy for something like 4 or 5 months now, if not even longer. It was initially touted as depicting a historically accurate character, which on closer inspection turned out to be almost entirely a pure fabrication invented by a single person who made up the history of that character almost completely, which has caused controversy among many Japanese people, including historians and politicians. Not only that, but the game has been marred with even more culturally insensitive controversies in addition to that, so much so that even some Japanese officials have announced they will be looking more closely at the game. Something like three months ago Ubisoft announced that they would be delaying the release of the game by three or four months (no doubt costing them quite some millions of dollars more). Oh good, they would be fixing all these problems, removing or changing the historical...

So-called "short multiplication" is a method, an algorithm, that can be relatively easily used to multiply a multi-digit number by a single-digit number, using pen and paper (or even in your head, with enough practice). "Long multiplication" is a similar related algorithm that allows relatively easily to multiply two multi-digit numbers (no matter how many digits they may have), using pen and paper. It is, essentially, doing short multiplication of the multiplicand with each digit of the multiplier, and adding up the results. Long multiplication is a relatively simple and straightforward method, and its genius is that it scales up to large numbers extremely well: No matter how large the numbers to be multiplied are, the task doesn't become significantly more difficult. It will take longer, but it's not more difficult. If you need to multiply a 2-digit number by another 2-digit number, long multiplication is the easy way. If you need to multiply a 10-digit nu...

The YouTuber who goes by the nickname SciManDan is one of the biggest flat earth debunkers on YouTube (620K subscribers as of writing this), and thus quite famous among that crowd. As far as I understand, he is a physics teacher (I'm not sure at what grade), so he does have at least some scientific background (at least at the level that's required for such a teaching position). Most of the time he does a decently good job at debunking flat-earthers (and sometimes other conspiracy theorists). However, what I really don't like about him is that he sometimes makes the most egregious and obnoxious errors in his explanations. As an example, in a recent video he commented on this particular picture created by flatearthers:  He says: "The three people on the bottom photo are all very close together so their shadows would look the same. The three examples on the top photo are all really far apart, so perspective comes into play here." I facepalmed when he said that. It...

Photographs and video footage has been staged, doctored, manipulated and fabricated for almost as long as there has existed the technology to create photographs and video footage. Most often this has been done for entertainment purposes or to create genuine art. However, sometimes this has been done for nefarious purposes, to fabricate evidence, to make such footage appear to show something incriminating or damaging to someone or some group. One of the most famous early examples of this is the so-called Cottingley Fairies photographs from 1917, which were staged using paper picture cutouts. At the time these photos were so convincing that they even fooled the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The thing is, for literally a century this was something very non-trivial to do. It required skill, knowledge and a lot of work to create convincing fakes. Photographs, being just single still images, have always been easier to fake than live action footage, but even faking photographs has al...

Politicians, governmental representatives and law enforcement officials of Germany, this is my message to you: You are idiots, you are fat, you are stupid, you are tyrants, you are totalitarian fascists. Yes, that's right: You are totalitarian fascists. Germany is a fascist police state. If I lived in Germany, the police would be knocking on my door, confiscating all my electronics, dragging me to jail and giving me hefty fines that would ruin me, for saying the above. Which is exactly the proof: You are nothing but a tyrannical totalitarian fascist police state, and all your politicians are tyrants and fascists. When politicians cannot be criticized nor mocked, that's a clear sign of totalitarianism. You are not a free country. You are a totalitarian fascist country. You have learned absolutely nothing from your past.

The old adage, used in all kinds of businesses dealing with customers, "the client is always right", is often misunderstood. Rather obviously clients can be wrong, incorrect, mistaken or even just lying. The adage is not meant to say "always believe the clients, no matter what they say." What it is saying is that, in general, and whenever possible, you should deal with clients in such a way that they don't feel like they are in the wrong and being contradicted and corrected. In other words, a form of diplomacy: Don't be rude to a client, whenever possible don't contradict a client in a blunt manner. Instead, be tactful, approach the situation in a diplomatic manner. Soften the blow, so to speak. Don't directly say "you are wrong", or "that's not possible", or "that's incorrect". Instead, make the clients feel like what they are saying makes sense, and then negotiate with the client to veer the discussion towards...

Australia recently passed a law that criminalizes all "hate symbols" (the government, of course, giving itself the power to determine what's a "hate symbol" and what isn't), including the Nazi salute, with mandatory jail time. Margaret Brennan, the host of the CBS show "Face the Nation", recently argued on live broadcast that freedom of speech was the major contributing factor to the raise of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in Germany. (And she wasn't just making some kind of off-hand mention among other arguments. She was doing this explicitly and directly as an argument for why freedom of speech should be restricted.) These are just the tip of the iceberg. More and more countries over the last ten or so years have either seriously considered outlawing, or have gone and actually outlawed, "hate speech" and "hate symbols". Some countries, like the United Kingdom, have taken an astonishingly inclusive interpretation of what...

Historically, and for the longest time, the press had been one of the biggest and strongest tools of Freedom of Speech, one of the strongest assets that the citizens have had to keep those in power in check, ie. the government, the military, large megacorporations, and so on. Especially historically the press has always had an enormous amount of reach, as the vast majority of people read newspapers regularly and, later, watched the news on TV even more regularly, and thus the press has always had an enormous power to inform and influence the wider public. And, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, which is why most if not all members of the press are, at least theoretically, morally obligated to follow a widely agreed-upon set of journalistic ethics. These ethics delineate, among other things, the responsibilities of a journalist to try to seek and report the truth, to be impartial, to give everybody a fair chance of presenting their side, and to report as accuratel...

10-15 years ago, when the complete takeover of American universities by radical far-leftist activists was in full force (which was just a culmination of literally decades of more under-the-hood work by leftist professors and activists working at universities), one of their favorite talking points was that "one in five" women in universities experience sexual abuse of some kind. (And, unsurprisingly, this just got inflated more and more over the years as the takeover became more and more widespread, eventually becoming "one in four" and sometimes even "one in three", with literally no sources for any of these claims.) In reality the amount of sexual abuse in American universities is actually lower than in the rest of the population, and in the rest of the population is more like one in 35, or something like that. (Of course this is still admittedly way, way too large, but nevertheless, it's nowhere even near that "one in five" number.) The sou...

Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp" if he got elected in 2016. He was elected, and while he did many things, he didn't really do much in that regard. However, now that he was elected again in 2024 he has gone into full gear and has achieved in just a few weeks more than he achieved in the entirety of the four years of his previous presidency. Which is great, don't get me wrong. Finally someone is doing something. One of the many things that his administration is heavily planning to do is to declassify the governmental documents on several high-profile events, including the investigation and death of Epstein, as well as the documentation on the 9/11 attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, UFOs, JFK, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. On one hand this is absolutely great: Openness is always good. The people have the right to know. These are not huge state secrets that need to be kept secret for national security purposes (eg. the current location of military tr...

Most people tend to think that everything that's done in medicine, in medical practice, is the result of extremely rigorous testing using the scientific process. That nothing is allowed to be done in medicine that hasn't passed these rigorous requirements. That is, indeed, the case with many things in medicine, in most countries. Most if not all prescription drugs need to be approved by the highest authority in the country, and this approval is given only if the drug in question has passed some of the most rigorous testing procedures that exist in this world. The same is true for most medical devices. In fact, in many countries there are strict laws that regulate the use of such devices and drugs for medical purposes, or from any substance from being sold and advertised as "medicine" if it hasn't been tested appropriately. It is most probably for this reason that most people think that everything in medicine has gone through this rigorous testing. Sadly, this is ...

Wizards of the Coast, the current developer and publisher of the Dungeons&Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, has been "woke" for over ten years now, and they have introduced leftist ideology into their products at an ever increasing rate (going into high gear immediately following the infamous BLM riots in the United States). One of the most cringe ways in which they have shoved the modern far-leftist ideology into the game is by adding a "phobias" questionnaire to be used by game masters when creating character sheets, as well as the infamous and cringe "X cards". According to their most recent version of the game master's guidebook, these "X cards" must always be available, and any player can raise one at any moment, for any reason, without having to state the reason, and the current events happening in the game must be immediately stopped and skipped, without question, without the player having go give any reasons or explanations. (Th...

One of the biggest lies promoted by modern far-leftism, and this quite sadly and horrendously includes many doctors (especially in the United States), is that suicide rates are very high among "trans" people who are uncomfortable with their bodies, and that these suicide rates go way down after the sex change operation. This is such an obvious and blatant lie that it's astonishing that they have gall to just state it and repeat it over and over (in a very "Big Lie" manner). There has never, ever, in the history of humanity, been some kind of suicide epidemic among people who don't identify with their own sex. And, on the contrary, actual statistics show that suicide rates go up many-fold after the operation (something that the activists and doctors vehemently deny and dismiss, of course.) It shouldn't really even be necessary to explain why the suicide rates go up after the operations, but I'll do it anyway. For starters, a sex change operation is n...

The modern far-leftist cult is like a cancer: It just spreads and spreads, and infects everything. Sometimes it's actually incredible what it can infect. Organizations that one couldn't have imagined in a million years being possible to infect with the ideology, have been infected. Take the US military forces, for example. They have over a hundred years of history and customs, and is run by an extremely strict code and principles, by leaders who are mostly extremely strict old-fashioned men with very strong well-established strict rules and concepts. Just a mere ten years ago it would have been very hard to imagine the entire American military complex being infected by far-leftism. Yet, it was, and to a large extent it still is. Take the Catholic Church, the Vatican, and the Pope. An extremely religious ultra-conservative institution that has existed for well over a thousand years, run by extremely religious ultra-conservative people, who believe in extremely strict principles...

About 12 or 13 years ago (as of writing this blog post), when far-leftist "social justice" intersectional feminism was invading the atheist skeptic community in full force, a portion of said community came up with the idea of creating what they called the "Atheism+" movement. They wanted the atheist skeptic movement to be more than just about religion and religious beliefs, which is where that "plus" came into play. It would be "atheism plus feminism, atheism plus social justice, atheism plus equality" and so on and so forth. In other words, and more succinctly, atheism plus radical far-leftist activism. The main "Atheism+" group of the time created an independent blogging website (as blogs were still somewhat popular in the early 2010's) to coordinate their activities and give a platform for their members to express their views and opinions. They called it FreeThoughtBlogs. The primary "Atheism+" movement and, especially,...

The current far-leftist cult is set on chemically and literally surgically castrating as many young people as possible. What's really scary is that this cult has infiltrated much of the medical community especially in the United States and, sadly, in more and more other countries. And this does not mean merely that these medical doctors are facilitating these castration procedures, but as has been demonstrated numerous times, they are outright promoting and pushing for these operations. Several victims of these operations have come forward to describe how the doctors actively and very aggressively pushed their parents to agree to the operations, well before the victim had the life experience and knowledge to make an informed decision on his or her own. Many others have also testified how these hormone treatments and surgeries are being suggested as solutions to the most minor of issues. This isn't anything new, sadly. Quite infamously there was a period of time of several decad...

The British (notoriously leftist) publication Private Eye published this comic in a recent issue: It requires a special kind of skill to misunderstand words and terminology this badly (reminds me of how far-leftists routinely misinterpret and misunderstand what "color blindness" refers to, when dealing with social situations between people). Classical Liberalism, and thus also American Conservatism, as well as several other political traditions usually call for "small government" as opposed to "big government". It shouldn't be necessary to explain what's meant with those terms, but apparently it is. "Small government" does not refer to the number of representatives. The "size" of a government in this context refers to how much power and control the government has and exerts on citizens. In other words, it's talking about the "libertarian vs. totalitarian" axis: A "small" government is libertarian becaus...