What grinds my gears

I wrote earlier about the absolutely asinine fact that, in the United States, if the police invades your home in pursuit of a suspect, and causes tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to your property, it's all on you. They will not pay you a single penny. Also, even if your property was insured, insurance companies will usually not pay either. Law enforcement can just cause hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your property, at no fault of your own in any way, and you will be the one who has to pay. Nobody will help you. You just lost all that property, and there's nothing you can do about it. Ok, but what happens if cops damage your property by accident? For example, if they are involved in a car accident that's 100% their fault. Well, what do you know, apparently in this case it's also 100% on you. They will claim immunity, they will not pay you a single penny, and your insurance company will not pay you anything either, citing the c...

I have written about this very subject several times before, but it just never ceases to amaze and amuse me when I see it again and again. I was watching a so-called "First Amendment auditing" video, when a Karen drove to the auditors and angrily declared to them that "you cannot record minors without their consent." What makes this kind of thing the most amusing, and interesting, is that the exact same Karen quite clearly has no concern whatsoever about the myriads of cameras that are attached to walls, ceilings, poles and cars, even when she has absolutely no idea where that footage is going. If I could, I would really and honestly want to question her about this. Why does she think it's acceptable and permissible to "record minors" with cameras that are attached to walls and even private cars (which she quite clearly seems to accept because she quite clearly isn't getting a hissy-fit about those), while strongly opposing it if the camera is bein...

A good portion of the modern western far-left strongly believes in the mythical Maxist-Communism. They argue that the fruit of the labor of the workers belongs to the workers themselves, not to greedy rich obese monocle-wearing moustache-twirling suspender-snapping capitalist CEOs who shamelessly and greedily exploit the workers to get even richer while giving the workers themselves an absolute pittance. The CEOs are swimming in money, while the exploited workers have to live with minimum wage. The most radical of these ideologues advocate for a workers' revolt in every company, a complete takeover, where the rich CEOs are kicked out and the workers steal the company for themselves (regardless of who actually invested, built and created the company and, thus, legally owns it). I'm not even exaggerating. (They might not literally use the word "steal" because it has a negative connotation, but it's effectively what they are saying.) The thing is: They talk the talk,...

The YouTube channel Visual Venture recently published a video summarizing the preliminary findings and evidence of what is happening to current children when they have been allowed to have unrestricted screen time with tablets and other "smart" devices: How Internet Brain Rot Destroyed Gen Alpha . These preliminary studies have shown that this amount of unrestricted use of such devices not only stunts the psychological development of children, but literally stunts the physical development of the brain. It's highly likely that if this physical stunting is allowed to continue for long enough, the brain will never fully develop and the person will be mentally stunted for life. The external symptoms of this developmental deficiency are numerous, and include things like extreme restlessness (when not using the devices), extreme prolonged temper tantrums (a three-hour flight where such a toddler was having a continuous extreme temper tantrum during the entire flight is shown),...

The American left, in their endless quest to undermine and destroy western civilization, especially in the United States, among the literally thousands and thousands of tactics they have come up to try to do this, have strongly pushed the idea of respecting the rights of American indigenous people to their ancestral lands and, at the most radical, returning it to them. This entire idea has many, many problems with it. One of the major problems is defining, exactly, which part of the land belonged to which tribe and why, or whether it belonged to any tribe at all. When European settlers inhabited the North American continent (sometimes warring with and replacing the indigenous people, sometimes just settling on a completely uninhabited part of the continent) there were somewhere around 5-10 million people in the entirety of North America, by rough estimates. That's about the population of Switzerland. The continent was extremely sparsely populated and there were vast expanses of w...

The American left (and by extension, more and more of their ideological "offspring" in other countries) has been indoctrinating their followers, particularly starting from university students, for the past 15 or so years not just into political activism, but violent political activism. Physical violence, both towards people and property, has been completely normalized among the leftist political side in the United States. Physically assaulting political opponents and dissidents, even to the point of sending them to the hospital or even worse, has become completely normalized and extremely prevalent. Acts of physical violence, harassment and threats of violence have become completely normalized. Violence against property has become completely normalized. During the last 15 years the American far left has caused literally tens of billions of dollars in property damage, both to private and public property. They have committed acts of vandalism, destruction, arson and sabotage ...

Someone posted on Reddit this: Like always, American leftists just can't understand what their critics mean when they say things that they "don't want politics in my games". When people say they "don't want politics", that's just a shorthand for them not wanting modern real-world political activism in their games. Just because a game may contain something that's inherently political or the result of politics doesn't necessarily mean the game itself is modern-day political activism. To understand what types of content they are talking about, there are key points that need to be considered: Does the game contain modern-day controversial political topics? What is (quite clearly) the motivation behind adding those topics to the game? Is the game (quite clearly) trying to influence the player's political views, notions, opinions, thinking and behavior with respect to modern ongoing politics? If the answer is "yes", then it's po...

I recently watched a video about a full-on American "sovereign citizen" who got stopped by traffic cops and who went through the typical sovcit script (the "moorish citizen" variant of it, to be more precise). Rather unusually, in this case when the cops threatened to take her out of the car by force she started the car and drove away, leading to a hot pursuit, which ended up relatively quickly thanks to a car stopping device that one of the police cars had. Unsurprisingly, when the car had been stopped, the cops proceeded with what appears to be standard operating procedure and pointed their guns at the car while screaming at her like insane asylum lunatics, and when she exited the car they went through the standard rehearsal of having her walk backwards away from the car and so on and so forth. Stopping and arresting her was, rather obviously, the completely right thing to do in this case, as she had very egregiously broken several major laws and was an actual dan...

The infamous game Assassin's Creed Shadows has been marred with controversy for something like half a year now, before it has even been published. Ubisoft already delayed its publication twice, pushing it back by 3-4 months (for very vaguely stated reasons). However now, as of writing this, it's about to be finally officially published. Just for the fun of it, I'm going to predict how its sales will go. This is likely to be quite wrong, but who cares. Maybe I'll get it spot-on. My prediction is that regardless of all the controversy, it will at least recoup its production costs, give or take a few million dollars one way or the other. This means selling something like 5-10 million copies worldwide over the course of the first year or so. In other words, it won't be an enormous success, but it won't be a catastrophic failure either (of the sort of Concord.) The game has been marred with controversy since it was announced, up until it's about to be launched. A...

To any flat-earther who might possibly be reading this, I have a set of challenges for you. Even if you are unable to actually research and give accurate answers, at least think about them for a while. That's all I ask. 1. How do scientist predict eclipses? Scientists can predict both solar and lunar eclipses literally to the second (exactly when it will start, when it will end, and what exact path the shadow will take), literally decades in advance. And they are not using some kind of super-secret methods and formulas for this: It's all open and public information and data. How do they do that? Especially, how are they able to predict the eclipses with that incredible level of accuracy literally decades in advance? Also: The data, models and formulas they are using are based on a strictly globe-Earth heliocentric model, and you can corroborate this by yourself if you want. Please explain how it could possibly apply to a flat Earth model. 2. How do scientist coordinate in the...

This video shows bodycam footage of some guy who called the police because, allegedly, someone had poked his son with his hand. When security camera footage was reviewed by the cops, it turns out that the man was just mistaken, and that person had never touched the boy in any way, so it's all just a big nothingburger. What's peculiar about this is how the man talks to the cops. This reveals a particular type of personality that many people have probably encountered (if they aren't like that themselves). I myself have encountered this kind of person a few times. And that's the type of personality that when he gets upset about something, he gets a kind of obsession about it, and just feels the compulsive need to keep ranting about it over and over and over, well beyond what's reasonable, well beyond having made his opinions clear already, for no discernible reason or goal. Indeed, in the bodycam footage the guy just goes on and on and on about the incident, saying th...

American "sovereign citizenship" is a full-on conspiracy theory in the United States (and lately in a few other countries). I have a more detailed description of this here . Needless to say, these people are completely deluded and delusional. They have swallowed an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that makes them believe they don't need to follow laws, especially any traffic laws, and they believe that their sovcit rhetoric is actually a kind of "secret code" that law enforcement officers and judges secretly understand and obey. The deeper someone has gotten into the sovcit conspiracy theory, the more strongly they believe that when they use these secret code words, expressions and sentences, they can game the system and get away with not having to follow the law. They believe that they have gotten into the huge secret conspiracy behind the government of the country, and can play it to their advantage. They often get stopped and sometimes arrested and put on...

I have written several times in this blog about how the modern far left, especially in the United States (but to an ever increasing extent in many other countries as well) is a bona fide cult, and how it exhibits almost every single characteristic of a cult, one of them being behavioral control. One example of such a blog post here . Behavioral control, both in religious and non-religious cults, often starts with small things, and this is no exception. These small things tend to be stuff that outsiders will find strange and even ridiculous, things that people in normal society do not do. The perfect example of this, as mentioned in that other blog post, is the "finger snapping" and later "jazz hands" replacing clapping, particularly among American far-lefist cultists. At face value that example, while laughable and ridiculous, might feel small, inconsequential and innocent enough. However, it has an underlying reason behind it. And what distinguishes it from other s...

I sometimes watch a Twitch channel that broadcasts live Grand Sumo events. When there is no Grand Sumo tournament ongoing, the channel may broadcast stuff about Japanese culture, as well as some Pokemon gameplay. Twitch supports channels having descriptive tags. Here are the tags for this particular channel: One of those tags is not like the others, and sticks out like a sore thumb. And not just because it's the only tag written in all-caps. The channel has literally nothing to do with any "ADHD" topics. Nothing. The streamer might mention briefly something about it if asked in the chat. That's literally the only situation where it gets mentioned. So why exactly is that tag there? What purpose does it serve? It literally tells nothing about the channel and its contents. And, as you might have guessed, the streamer exhibits absolutely no symptoms whatsoever about any kind of mental issues. Nothing. He speaks completely normally, commentates on the sumo events complete...

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm will recommend me some video with just a few (and sometimes even no) views, sometimes even when the content has very little to do with what I usually watch. Well, kudos to the YouTube developers for trying to help small creators get more views, I suppose. Sometimes I check these YouTube channels, and a few times I have encountered channels that I find rather incomprehensible, in a rather peculiar way. You see, there are YouTube channels in existence where the author uploads several videos per week, and has been doing so for numerous years (and thus the channel having several hundreds if not even several thousands of videos), where the overall quality of the videos seems relatively good (good picture and sound quality, ie. relatively good camera and sound equipment, interesting background, in most cases the author's living room or similar), but where each video has an abysmally low number of views. I kid you not, nor am I exaggerating in any way, but ...

YouTube has had for some years now some kind of AI automoderation of comments, where it will automatically remove comments that, I assume, are deemed "breaking community guidelines" or otherwise inappropriate. Having some kind of automated moderation system kind of makes sense given that people probably write literally and without exaggeration millions of comments every single day. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is millions of comments every hour. The automoderation system has many, many problems, though. For starters, the user is not notified in any way, shape or form if his or her comment was automatically removed. The comment just disappears silently. The only way you can see if your comment has been autoremoved is to reload the page, or try to edit your own comment (in which case it will give an error message when you try to submit the edited message). At no point do you get any notification or any indication that this has been done; you can only find ou...

Neil Druckmann is the studio head of the game developer company Naughty Dog, the company that developed some of the best-known best-received video games such as The Last of Us and the Uncharted series. While the company leadership has probably always been left-leaning, they never tried to inject modern politics into their games, which no doubt helped creating some of the most memorable and well-received games in history. Well, up to about 2012 give or take (with the original The Last of Us game possibly being the last of their games that was spared far-leftist messaging. Unfortunately its expansion pack published just a year later was already full-on far-leftist SJW slop, so... sigh.) Recently Neil Druckmann gave an interview about their upcoming game Intergalactic . In that interview he comments a bit about The Last of Us Part 2 : Druckmann: "And we spent, like, years just coming up with a timeline, and it's dealing with... it's funny, like, I joke about this with the ...

One of the funniest protest speeches I have ever seen was made by some US federal worker at one of the nine billion pathetic anti-DOGE protests recently. She says (using that ear-shattering whiny as-annoying-as-possible voice that's so typical of karens): "When you wake up or you are on your weekend and you get the 'Fork In The Road' message, 'hey, what the hell did you do, you lazy federal worker, this week?' How frightening is it that someone on X, the owner of X, speaks to you directly to say 'what did you do last week at work?' and if you don't answer, I'm going to fire you." The lack of self-awareness is just astonishing and hilarious. She is very directly and unambiguously saying "how dare this private citizen ask me, a federal worker, what I have been doing, and holding me accountable for my work? He even dares to speak to me directly!!!" Yeah, how dare the puny citizens question the mighty Federal Workers and ask what they...

I consider myself quite a conservative, and I watch a lot of videos by the popular American conservative activist Matt Walsh, and I agree with a lot of things he says. However, as a critically thinking person I do not agree with everything he says. Matt Walsh, like so many American conservatives, is heavily biased by his American-style Christian beliefs. He holds many ideas and concepts that are very common among American conservative Christians, which are either dubious, exaggerated, or just outright untrue. In his latest video uploaded to YouTube (as of writing this) he says: "And that's because the men who came up with the ideas that lie at the foundations of our government were all Christians. They were Christian ideas. Human rights is a Christian idea. It makes no sense, actually. Human rights make no sense outside of a Christian world view." You are incorrect, Matt Walsh. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States and, especially, the Bil...

There are primarily two types of ads that you'll encounter on YouTube (at least if you don't use an ad-blocker): The video-interruping ads inserted by YouTube itself, and the sponsored segments that many youtubers have in their videos. The former as just YouTube having made deals with advertisement companies and interrupting video streaming with dynamic ads, which content the author of the video has no control over (and which varies by country and over time). The latter are deals that the youtubers themselves do with companies in order to have a sponsored advertisement section in the video itself. Many people have noticed a rather peculiar difference between these types of ads: The ads inserted by YouTube itself are usually of big-name companies, are are usually not much different than what you would see on television. These are usually known big international companies, like car manufacturers, travel agencies, beauty product manufacturers and so on and so forth. Sometimes they...

When it comes to politics, in principle it would be a good thing to listen to arguments from all sides so that one doesn't end up in an echo chamber where one only reads stuff that supports one's own political view. After all, it's good to challenge one's views from time to time. However, at least when it comes to the American left, at some point it just becomes a completely moot point. The American left just lies, and lies, and lies, and lies, endlessly. It seems like they can't even open their mouths without lies pouring out. Lying appears to be second nature to them. Every single claim that they make about their political opponents is an exaggeration, a distortion, or a complete fabrication summoned out of thin air. Pretty much every single claim that they make about the Republicans is just an outright lie. There's example after example after example. Just listen to what they are saying about eg. Elon Musk: Every single thing, all of it, is just a lie, and th...

For over 20 years Google Search was arguably the best web search engine around. Prior to it, and for several years alongside it, other search engines gave poorer results, were much slower, and usually gave you pages full of ads and/or other extraneous stuff, making the pages look extremely busy and full of visual noise, as well as heavy for web browsers and computers of the time. In contrast, Google Search was like a breath of fresh air: When you went to google.com you got an absolutely minimalistic page with just a logo, a search bar, a couple of buttons, and some tiny links to more info about the site at the bottom, and that's it. An extremely lightweight page (both in terms of loading and browser rendering times, as well as in terms of visual noise). And it was incredibly fast, and mostly gave really good relevant results. Google Search continued to be the best, lightest and fastest search engine around, with its minimalistic design and fast and high-quality results, for about 2...

In the United States some people engage in so-called "First Amendment auditing", where they go to public places and public buildings with cameras in order to see if their right to film in public is respected by people, security guards, governmental workers and officials, and police officers. Sometimes random people, and in a few cases even governmental workers, get all riled up about it, and start accosting the guy with the camera. And in the vast, vast majority of cases it's not like the auditor shoved his camera in someone's face, or put it against the window of a private home, or shoved it over the counter of a public office in order to film a computer screen, or anything of the sort. Most often the auditor was just either standing still or just strolling around calmly, without approaching anybody, without bothering anybody, and oftentimes even without targeting anybody particular with his camera. Some people just ask the guy what he's doing, for whatever reaso...

In many countries some stores put up the infamous rainbow flag on the front window. They say it's there to signal that they are "inclusive" and "welcoming" and a "safe place" for all people. The irony is that actually it signals the exact opposite. Do you know what signals a store being truly and genuinely inclusive and welcoming of everybody? Not putting any sort of political symbolism anywhere. That's what. Not having any sort of political messaging signals "we literally do not care who you are, what you think, what goes inside your head, what you do, who you choose to be with, who you support, what your political views are, who you vote for. Everybody is welcome equally without question. Everybody is a welcome customer. We do not discriminate against anybody. This is just a shop, you are a customer, we sell you stuff, that's it. We literally do not care about any politics or anything."  In contrast, having the rainbow flag promine...

The new favorite enemy of the American far left is now Elon Musk. They are now protesting him 24/7, non-stop, all over the country, engaging in vandalism and destruction of property (while in many places, obviously, the police does absolutely nothing to stop them or arrest them, because American cops are cowards.) And what exactly has Elon Musk done to deserve all this hatred and all these protests? Nothing. Absolutely and literally nothing. Just like with Trump, they have conjured a dictator out of thin air. Every single claim that they are making about Musk that's eliciting these protests is something that he has demonstrably not done. Every single one. They are lying through their teeth, and they have just once again invented this imaginary boogie man out of thin cloth. And why are they inventing all these lies? Because Musk is leading reducing governmental spending and corruption. That's it. That's the only reason. And the mentally retarded mindless drones just believe ...

The LinusTechTips subreddit moderators recently banned someone for expressing the opinion that discrimination against white people is equally bad as discrimination against anybody else, that everyone should be treated equally, and that all racism is bad. Apparently saying this "violates this community's rules". This entire idea that's so incredibly pervasive among the modern far left that racial discrimination against white people is somehow justified, as some insanely twisted way of "balancing things out", is nothing more than them being unwittingly white supremacists. They truly and honestly think that if everybody is actually treated equally and given maximal freedom, that if white people were treated completely the same and are completely free to do the same things as everybody else without any sort of discrimination against them, without any sort of impediments and impairments put in their way, then white people will naturally raise to the top and contr...

One of the main problems with the European Union is that it is, essentially, a "bait-and-switch" entity: It was originally sold as a purely economic union, and a lot of countries voted to join this economic union, only for it to grant itself extremely authoritarian legislative powers over its member countries, effectively becoming a federal government rather than being just a paneuropean economic agreement. This is not exaggeration. For example in Finland, when joining the EU was being promoted to the citizens, the politicians, journalists and other people influencing the decision were very explicitly and directly claiming that it was merely just an economic union with extremely little or even no legislative power, and that the full sovereignty of the country was in no way in jeopardy, and that the EU would have no say in the local laws of the country. And Finland is by far not the only example of this. In several countries the EU membership was up to citizen vote, and the ci...

There's a quite big irony with regards to the United States: It's one of the very few countries in this world where you can actually refuse to ID to the police unless they suspect you of a crime (that they can articulate). This is a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The irony comes from the fact that, at the same time, the United States is one of the very few free democratic countries in this world where the police is constantly demanding your ID for the most minor of interactions, even when they don't have the legal right to make such a demand. (Indeed, in most other free countries, especially in Europe, the police very rarely demands your ID when they interact with you, even when the country in question is a full-on "stop-and-ID state", ie. the law gives police the right to demand your ID for whatever reason they want, in any situation they want, no reason need given. They would have the legal right to demand it, yet they...