What grinds my gears

I have written before how, by this point, whenever the American left makes an outrageous claim about their political opposition, if you just assume it to be a lie, a fabrication or a complete distortion of facts, you'll most probably be right , without even needing to check. By this point it has become more or less just an intellectual challenge trying to figure out what the actual truth is behind the lie, if you really want to bother, just for the investigative challenge. One has to admit that sometimes their lies are pretty convincing, sound plausible, and can fool even conservatives, such as their narrative about the "transgenic mice" in that blog post above, or their narrative about Abrego Garcia . Well, here's another one: Recently a social media post has made the rounds that shows a video of ICE agents violently arresting a United States citizen. The video is being filmed by his wife, who is screaming and pleading with the ICE agents telling them that he's a...

Suppose you are a big known company with some really beloved and liked franchise, and one day you announce to the public that, like you have already done with other franchises of yours, you will be making a movie about this one as well. Then, some time later, when you have gone through the casting process, you announce who the actors are who will be taking on the main roles for the movie. Out of the blue, the twitter mob goes completely crazy and starts attacking you for your choice of actors. Why? Are they horrendous choices, with actors who look absolutely nothing like the characters they are supposed to depict? Or are they somehow actors who are known to be absolutely horrible people who have done something completely heinous and despicable? Nope. There's nothing wrong with the actors. They look really decent for the roles, and there's nothing objectionable about them. The massive backlash is because you didn't choose an actor proposed by some anonymous random nobody on ...

There's this YouTube channel (you can trivially find it it with the titles below if you really want) that appears to be one of the biggest and most successful channels on the entire platform: 14 million subscribers and, most astonishingly, every single of its several dozens of full-length videos has views in the millions. There are only two videos that have less than a million views (which are named like "Q&A #2" and "Q&A #3", something the channel owner probably learned her lesson about). From the rest well over half have views in the tens of millions. And the thing is, this is not some kind of high-production-value YouTube channel which content is being created by an entire large team of professionals, even if the channel is named or only references the author (think of the MrBeast channel, who has a professional team of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people behind him creating his videos.) This is an extremely low-budget channel genuinely run by a s...

Microsoft's Xbox team used to be absolutely huge, in the 5-digit amount of employees. Recently Microsoft announced that they will be significantly reducing, and firing something like 9 thousand people. Why?  I don't know. But I can well guess. Sure, Microsoft's Xbox team has probably been a huge money sink for a decade or two now. But why? Sure, their consoles are not the best-selling ones, and their games aren't the best-selling ones (and, ironically, over the last years they have killed more games than they have produced), but still... my guess is that that's not the sole nor even the main reason for the financial troubles. Do you know what I'm  guessing  is the main reason why the Xbox team has been so inefficient and such a huge money sink into which hundreds of millions of dollars are being thrown into, and only a small fraction is coming back? Well, over the past decade or so Microsoft has been very notoriously far-leftist, spouting all the far-leftist rhe...

I have written about this very subject several times before, but I just keep encountering the same misconception again and again, so I decided to write about it again. In the United States, in most if not all states, cops need "reasonable articulable suspicion" (ie. "RAS") of a crime before they can legally demand your ID, or arrest you for failure to provide it. This means that they need to be able to mention a particular crime by name, and their suspicion of you possibly having committed that crime needs to be reasonable, considering the circumstances. (This requirement and limitation is a direct consequence of the protections provided by the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.) However, many people (not just so-called "First Amendment auditors", but lot of other people as well) think that the "RAS" requirement extends to  detaining  people as well. They just keep repeating it over and over in their videos, when they have been deta...

One of the, perhaps in some ways, least "non-disagreeable" parts of the modern feminist social justice far-leftist "woke" western culture has been the emphasis on "consent". Which, of course, in the far-leftist world view means that women have all the power and men must be subservient slaves to whatever women say, quite particularly when she says "no". I think that this is once again a (perhaps slightly more minor) example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Yes, it's a good thing for a gentleman to respect women and not force them to do anything they don't want to do, nor be pushy. A gentleman is polite, friendly, shows good manners, and respects women. A true gentleman is someone that people (not just women, but people in general) find nice and a good person to hang around with, and that involves a lot of respect and taking into account other people's feelings and boundaries. However, like with so many thi...

Ok, perhaps if we count from "launch the game" to "uninstall the game" then perhaps technically not the least (as there have been ones I have uninstalled in under a minute), but from "start the gameplay proper within the game" to "uninstall the game": And that would be a record-breaking 0 seconds. Indeed, I didn't even get to the gameplay proper. Unless you count the character creation as "gameplay proper" (which I don't really.) I tried this game because it was a complimentary game on PlayStation Plus some months ago. The description seems to allude as this being some sort of online multiplayer Pokémon clone of sorts, where you are a kid who captures and tames creatures (named "Temtems" rather than "Pokémon"). When starting a new game, it starts with a character creation, before launching the gameplay proper. So far so good. However, instead of selecting "boy" or "girl", you have to selec...

It's always funny when a country wants to be environmentally friendly and safe, and then proceeds to do astonishingly stupid things that do the exact opposite of that goal. There is, for example, Australia, which has completely banned nuclear power plants. This even though Australia has a wealthy uranium mining industry that produces nuclear fuel for other countries (which means that it would be extraordinarily cheap for Australia to run nuclear power plants because they don't need to buy the fuel from other countries, as they are producing it themselves.) So if there are no nuclear power plants in Australia, how are they producing their electricity? With coal power plants, of course. What did you think? And a good portion of it is actually using so-called brown coal, which is even more polluting than black coal (because brown coal is more abundant in Australia). And, indeed, Australia is one of the biggest polluters and contributors of atmospheric CO2 in the world. Not to be l...

The term "conspiracy theory" has become extremely popular in the last decade or so, most often used as a dismissive term to discredit someone's claims: "That's just an unfounded conspiracy theory." The term quite literally means: A hypothesis that some entities, usually some people in power or with a lot of influence, or some organizations, are secretly conspiring among themselves in order to do something that the public would object to, or may even be outright illegal, or to hide some kind of facts from the public and give them a completely false or distorted narrative. Obviously, the key elements of a "conspiracy theory" is that it involves a "theory", in other words, an uncorroborated unproven hypothesis, and a "conspiracy", in other words two or more people or entities scheming secretly behind the scenes, agreeing among themselves to keep their (or some other) actions or facts hidden from the public. If such a conspiracy the...

I wrote earlier how Japan is already experiencing the first symptoms of "multiculturalism" and mass immigration, in other words, what many people sarcastically call "being culturally enriched." Well, here's a more comprehensive list of more symptoms to expect and look for. When you start seeing more and more of these symptoms in your society and everyday life, you know that your country has been infected by the far-leftist "multiculturalism" cancer: The amount of petty crimes and vandalism clearly increases: Broken and robbed vending machines, people being mugged, cars being broken into, people being harassed on the streets, and so on and so forth. Safety , particularly for women and children, degrades significantly: Where for decades and decades you could walk along city and town streets completely in peace without being bothered, with anything happening to you being astronomically unlikely, even if you are a young woman, in rapidly increasing manner...

Jason "Thor" Hall, who often goes by the online nickname "PirateSoftware", was quite popular and famous not only among the followers of his live streams, but also millions of casual YouTube viewers. Many of his videos on YouTube are about interesting facts and tidbits related, most often, to video game software development. His takes on many aspects of this field are really insightful, enlightening and interesting. He also often emphasizes how he worked at Blizzard Entertainment for seven years. He is also developing a video game of his own, which is available for early access on Steam. While he probably has never directly claimed it outright, most people got the impression from all of the above that not only is he a very competent programmer and game developer (probably even a "star programmer" of the likes of John Carmack), but he was also working in that role at Blizzard, and code he has written is likely found at least in World of Warcraft (a game he o...

Recently the Trump administration introduced to congress the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" which was primarily about tax cuts for several forms of income that affect mostly low-income workers, in other words, the poorest people in the country. In other words, a bill that benefits and helps the poor and the low-middle class the most, and has pretty much no effect on the rich. The bill was so much aligned with American leftist ideals that even the leftist pundits who are constantly attacking Trump for everything he does couldn't come up with any real reason why the bill was a bad thing. Instead, their only desperate line of attack is trying to claim that the bill isn't actually all that beneficial, or that it doesn't actually do what it claims to be doing. They can't object to the goals of the bill itself, so they are desperately trying to discredit it and gaslight people into thinking that "actually the bill isn't doing what it says it's doing...

But not because these "shorts" are really well edited. Actually, the  exact opposite . You see, after YouTube introduced their "shorts" feature (which is still absolutely horrendous and incomprehensible, and completely unnecessary and unneeded), many people have for some reason become enamored with it and uploaded millions and millions of videos in this format. One particular trend has raised its ugly head in later years (and at an ever-increasing rate) with these "shorts": People taking longer clips of something, like a movie, TV series, anime series or whatever, and then they themselves cutting bits and pieces off of them in order to make them much shorter (usually under a minute long). Sure, they might have good intentions at heart: Trying to retain the core essence of the scene in question, without cutting out anything important. Problem is: As a result of these constant micro-cuts (that oftentimes cut out just a second or two of the original), the end...

Many modern far-leftists, seeking for attention and acceptance, and following the popular trend, as classifying themselves as "non-binary". They carry that label like a badge of honor, like a medal that they carry around in order to get admiration and adulation from their peers. But that entire concept does not stand any scrutiny. What does it even mean? From the literally hundreds of different attempted definitions, perhaps the most common one is: "I don't identify as a man or a woman." My response to that is: So, what does it mean to "identify as a man"? I'm 100% serious with that question. What is that supposed to mean? Being "a man" is not something you "identify" yourself as: It's something you are. I don't "identify" myself as being a mammal: I  am  a mammal. I don't "identify" as being a human: I am  a human. Likewise I don't "identify" as a being a man: I am  a man. It's ...

(I have written a bit about this topic in a previous blog post, but allow me recapitulate, to keep this post independent.) In the early days of Unix and Unix-compatible operating systems there was a demand for a standardized graphical user interface system, and the "X windowing system", or just "X" as it was very commonly shortened, became that standard in 1984. Over the years X was updated, with the newest version being the most famous and most commonly used one, so much so that the shortened nickname for "X windowing system" became "X11", following the versioning. However, this version 11 was developed in 1987, and hasn't been updated since. It became stagnant. This became a problem particularly when a new Unix-like operating system started become immensely popular: Linux. Linux needed its own updated version of X11, both from the point of view of its technology as well as its usage license. This built-from-scratch new system was called X.o...

Japan is one of the safest, most peaceful, cleanest, and most high-trust societies in the entire world, where crime rates are extraordinarily low, streets are extremely clean and safe, and where respect, politeness and good manners are an integral core part of the culture into which every Japanese is grown into. Unsurprisingly, for quite a long time Japan has likewise had some of the strictest immigration policies in the world: The amount of people granted permanent residence in the country has been extremely small, and the requirements for it have been extremely strict. Even if you get work in Japan, it's still much more likely that you will be granted  temporary  residence (that needs to be renewed at regular intervals) than permanent one. However, in recent years the far-leftism cancer has infected some Japanese politicians who are set on opening Japan's borders and let millions of immigrants from Africa and the Middle-East in (to this day I still can't understand why pr...

I have been saying this for over a decade now in this blog: The source of all the sociopolitical problems that western countries are currently suffering, and which are tearing them down and continuing to do so until everything has been destroyed and replaced with Islam, is universities. Western universities in many countries, particularly the United States, have been completely overtaken by far-leftist radical activists. (This was most likely started by Soviet infiltration with the precise goal of destroying the west so that the Soviet Union could then take over. Ironically, the Soviet Union is long gone, but their plan is still going forward in full force, as there was nothing to stop it.) These universities have stopped being institutions of higher education and have become  bona fide  sociopolitical indoctrination camps, where students are indoctrinated into the ideology and radicalized. In most American universities students are constantly being bombarded with far-leftist ...

Many political commentators and other people have noticed certain patterns about most far-leftist protests in the United States, which indicate that there are bigger forces behind the scenes organizing, running and funding these protests, rather than them arising organically. There are many signs of this, for example: Most of these protestors are from other places, rather than being local. The smaller the city or town where such a protest happens, the clearer it becomes, as pretty much none of the protestors are known by the locals, and they are very clearly from other places. It's highly likely that they were transported there in an organized manner by someone, rather than them arriving by their own means using their own cars and their own money (or even if they did arrive with their own mode of transport, it's highly likely that their expenses were paid.) It's amply clear that the vast majority of the paraphernalia being brandished and used by the protestors were handed t...

The "Stop Killing Games" initiative has become very notable in that it's a grassroots movement started by one single random youtuber with the goal of making a petition to the EU parliament, which apparently (and hopefully) has got enough signatures that it will force said parliament to discuss and do something about it. It has been so notable that it even has got mainstream media coverage in several countries. People are celebrating that the one million signatures threshold has been passed, and they are acting as if this was some kind of victory. I myself am a bit more pessimistic than that. And that's because I know how politicians operate, and particularly how the criminal pundits in the EU operate, when it comes to the "rights" of giant megacorporations. I fear that even if a million of those signatures are legit, and thus the petition is forced to be discussed in the EU parliament, they will just discuss it for five minutes and then unceremoniously vote ...

From time to time you may read or hear of a news story, where a citizen was somehow mistreated by governmental officials or the police, the citizen sued and won the case, and got compensation (or, for example, was reinstated if the injustice was firing him from his position, or similar.) Likewise in many countries, very prominently in the United States, it's pretty much a daily occurrence that someone gets charged by the police, and the charges are then dropped and the case dismissed in court because of no legal basis to the charges. What you extremely rarely, if ever, hear in these situations is  legal consequences  to the government officials who committed the (often illegal) injustice towards the citizen. An overzealous far-leftist city council, or governmental institution, or state-funded school or university, or any of the other myriads of government-run or government-funded institutions, may for example fire an employee who they disagree with politically. If the firing w...

1) The so-called "modern audience" is not your customerbase. The "modern audience" is not the segment of the population that buys your game. Placating to the "modern audience" at the expense of gamers is only alienating the people who actually buy your games. 2) People buy and play video games as a form of escapism, to take a break from the stresses of real life. They don't play video games in order to be lectured about sociopolitics. They most particularly do not play video games in order to be lectured about far-leftist ideology. People see and don't like propaganda in their games. 3) People do not care one iota about being "represented" in video games. When people play, say, a Mario game, they don't think "I am Mario, this Mario character here represents me, he is me personified." When people play a Tomb Raider game they don't think "I am Lara Croft, she represents me." In fact, when it comes to games with e...

For a few decades now there has been a somewhat fringe but not absolutely insignificant movement that claims that raw food is somehow healthier, better and "more natural" than cooked food. The notion is that raw food is more nutritious and healthier, while cooking makes food less nutritious and even detrimental to one's health. This taps strongly on the so-called "naturalistic fallacy": In other words, the notion that things that are perceived as "more natural", less changed by artificial human actions, is better and healthier. Don't get me wrong, there is  some  validity to that notion when it comes to food, in the extreme opposite end of the spectrum: In other words, ultra-processed food is genuinely less healthy than less-processed food. This is a very known fact, and nutritionists and the medical community in general have been warning about this for decades now. Ultra-processed food tends to have less nutrients and more artificial additives (su...

Particularly in the United States, probably not a single day goes by without there being at a minimum a dozen protests by far-leftist radicals around the country, almost all of them breaking the law in on way or another (which law enforcement just ignores, obviously, because there's some kind of very strange two-tiered law enforcement system in the country.) And this has been going on for over 10 years now. It  might  be that during Biden's presidency there  might  have been a few days during those four years that there were no protests anywhere in the country, but even that's unlikely. The constant daily protesting has a rather unintended side-effect that the far-leftist protesters are completely oblivious to: When protests are a daily occurrence, it dilutes their effectiveness. For the longest time it used to be that protests were effective because of the amount of attention that they got. When they were unusual, people paid attention to them. They got press covera...

Religions, cults and radical ideologies oftentimes use deceitful subterfuge when conversing with people in order to try to trick them and perhaps convert them into the ideology. The tactic is: Rather than directly blurt out the doctrine they are trying to convince the other person of, they start with statements and questions that are easy to agree with, and which touch on beliefs of the ideology. So they will have a half-hour conversation with the person, constantly making easy-to-agree statements and asking subtly leading questions that most people will answer in a way that conforms to the ideology (at least superficially), and the conversation will slowly veer deeper and deeper into the topics of the ideology, slowly luring the person into it. After all if the person has been agreeing with everything for half an hour, and everything seems to be ideologically very comfortable and agreeable, and when one has built a sort of social connection with the other person, it's then natural...