What grinds my gears

Some time ago the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts , had installed a system called ShotSpotter , which is a series of directional microphones installed on building roofs, and computer systems able to detect if gunshots are being fired, and locate their position in the city, for rapid police response to possible shootings. Because the city in question is extremely leftist and, thus, filled with far-leftist activist zealots, those zealots came up with the conspiracy theory that this system could be used to spy on people and that it, somehow, puts black and brown people, trans people and so on in danger, and that it causes "overpolicing". Thus, they organized a protest against it at the city council, and one after another they argued that the system is dangerous, and that they don't need it for the community to be safe. The city placated to the zealots and removed the system. Two months later, on the 4th of July of 2026, a shooting happened, with the victim bleeding to death...

This argument is so asinine and so utterly silly that it feels like parody, or like a straw-man invented by anti-leftists (ie. something that some anti-leftists claim that pro-immigration leftists are saying even though they aren't). However, it's a real argument. And not just by some random anonymous twitter users, but actual elected politicians in the UK and some other countries. And the argument is: Without immigrants we wouldn't have exotic foods, like curry or falafel. And yes, those politicians are presenting that argument in all seriousness. It's not like they are lightening the mood with a joke, or doing a bit of self-parody or something like that. They are presenting it 100% seriously. It shouldn't even be necessary to explain why that's a completely asinine argument, but here we go anyway: Firstly, you don't need to import any immigrants in order to be able to eat foreign cuisine. This should be so utterly obvious that it shouldn't need to be e...

During the past 15-or-so years the United States has become astonishingly racist. And I truly mean it. Actual racism, actual racist discrimination by the establishment, by megacorporations, by large powerful institutions, by universities, by schools, everything. American universities have engaged in blatant and clear racial discrimination in admissions, even though for them it's actually illegal in the United States. For some reason the government has been very slow to react to it, even though it has been going on for at least 20 years. American corporations have also been engaging in clear and blatant racial discrimination for at least 15 years. According to recent statistics that examined the top 500 tech companies in the United States, only 6% of all new hires were white people, even though they account for over 80% of the population. This is not some kind of strange anomaly or coincidence, as it's very explicitly enforced by the higher-ups in these companies. For example, I...

Representative democracy is, by far, the best form of government that humanity has ever developed. While it may in a few cases fail to do so, in general it ensures that tyranny, dictatorships, oligarchies and oppressive regimes do not get in power, and that the rights and freedoms of people are maintained. The very concept of representative democracy, something that's clearly stated and enshrined into the Constitutions of many such countries, is that the government belongs to the people. While they are represented by a handful of elected representatives, ultimately the "ownership" and control of the government is in the hand of the people, who can choose by fair elections who will represent them in said government. If the current government is not doing what's best for the people and is becoming tyrannical and oppressive, the people can simply vote them out of the government at the next elections. (In general, at the most fundamental level, this system is enforced and...

(Note: Parts of this post are directly copied from another post, but I'm repeating it here because I wanted to create a succinct post about this subject that I can link to from other posts as a reference.) I have for quite a while now come to the serious conclusion that modern far-leftists are psychopaths. Actual  bona fide  psychopaths who are  incapable  of feeling true empathy. That's not a metaphor, or hyperbole, or an exaggeration, or just using the word as a random insult with no regard to what it actually means. I'm being 100% serious. If they had actual empathy, they would be at least bothered by over 40 million babies being murdered by their mothers and doctors every single year. Most of them are not. If they had actual empathy, they would not celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk . Even if they heavily opposed what he was saying, they would heavily condemn his murder. If they had actual empathy, they would not consider 50 million people on their own sid...

I wrote earlier about a completely delusional American far-leftist activist who fled Los Angeles and moved to Canada on a temporary visa, in order to flee "fascist" America... only to find out that Canada was not the socialist paradise that she assumed it to be, and found herself quickly running out of her life savings because Canada wasn't actually giving her free money and a free apartment (because she wasn't an actual refugee, she was just an American in the country with a 6-month visa.) The entire saga is completely hilarious because of how delusional she is (and how much of a "main character syndrome" she is clearly suffering from.) Of course she isn't the only one. In another example a "trans" guy who was living in San Francisco, of all places (again, one of the most far-leftist places in the entire country), fled the "persecution" he was experiencing. What kind of "persecution", you might ask? The fact that, apparent...

During Biden's administration there were literally  millions  of migrants moving from the South American continent to the United States, through Mexico, and Mexico did very little to stop them. They just opened their borders and allowed millions of South American migrants to pass through, to their northern border. The country didn't care. Not their problem. But now that Trump has quite effectively closed the border, Mexico has found itself in quite the pickle: While perhaps not as many, there are still massive amounts of migrants trying to enter Mexico from the south. Problem is: Now they are stuck in Mexico because the US is not letting them in. Thus, now it's Mexico that's becoming flooded with illegal migrants from the south. The flow through has been blocked, so they are amassing in Mexico itself. And with them, all the related problems have been skyrocketing in the country. Nowhere to house the millions of illegal migrants, increased governmental tax-funded spendin...

The YouTube channel Don't Walk, Run! Productions recently (as of writing this) published a video where the author comments on a socialist recruitment webinar , where a socialist activist tries to explain and exalt the virtues of socialism, to try to convince people and recruit them to that political ideology. Ironically, that speech is so scary that it made my anti-socialist convictions even stronger than ever before. Not that I needed any convincing that socialism is a very, very bad idea, but that speech made that fact even clearer and stronger. Consider what she says that the goals of her political party are in the United States: * Violent revolution. While she doesn't say it directly outright, she very clearly implies that the democratic voting process is not good enough and the only way to establish the American Socialist Utopia is to bypass it and engage in violent revolution, whether the majority of people want it or not. She speaks in lengths about this revolution, with...

I wrote before how the popular Veritasium YouTube channel has in later years started to suffer from what I call the "Numberphile syndrome" . In other words, an immensely popular channel with millions of subscribers and millions of views per video, which for many years was very interesting and published very interesting didactic videos, has in later years started producing videos that are longer and longer, more and more tedious, and containing way too much irrelevant detail and minutia, with explanations that are needlessly long and boring for things that wouldn't really have to be. His latest video, as of writing this, is no exception to that: (What a boring and unusual thumbnail for his channel. Although I'm sure that he will change it in the next days to something else entirely. Probably several times, as he always does. The title might also be changed, like he also most of the time does.) The video is almost 40 minutes long. For a subject matter that could very we...

Can you guess how many of the characters in the recent live-action version of Disney's Moana film were acted by actual native Polynesian people? All of them. Every single one of them. Can you guess how many of the characters in the recent The Odyssey film, by Christopher Nolan, were acted by actual native Greek people? Not one of them. None. On the contrary, there are several actors in the main cast that are absolutely not period-accurate nor faithful to the source material (and that's completely on purpose.) On top of that, the creators of the live-action Moana film went to excruciating length to represent Polynesian culture, traditions and aesthetics as accurately and faithfully as possible. In contrast, Christopher Nolan didn't give a flying fuck about being period-accurate... or accurate at all, regardless of the time period, to ancient Greece, as almost everything in the movie is not just completely anachronistic but outright fictitious, not corresponding to real ancie...

Ann Widdecombe was a very conservative and traditional British MP, who was recently murdered. Unsurprisingly the far-leftists hurried to social media to celebrate. Why? Because they are psychopaths . All of them. That's why. I have been repeating this over and over, and I will never, ever get tired of repeating it: Far-leftists are  literally  psychopaths. This is NOT hyperbole, this is NOT figure of speech, this is NOT exaggeration, this is NOT just a random insult with no regard to what the word actually means. I am being 100% serious, 100% literal. They are actual literal psychopaths. All of them. Every single one of them. And I'm done defending their rights . Whatever happens to those sick psychopaths, I literally could not care less. I don't give a flying fuck. I will never get tired of repeating this. 

Stealing other people's content to make a YouTube video, committing plagiarism and/or possibly copyright infringement? What's new? It has been a plague in YouTube since its very inception. Some of the plagiarism is actually surprisingly elaborate, with authors going to great lengths and putting effort into videos ... which are just almost direct copies of other people's videos. Othertimes it's just extremely lazy and sometimes even inadvertent copyright infringement, like those videos that do nothing but read some Reddit posts aloud (the authors probably not even realizing that technically speaking they are committing copyright infringement by doing that.) One rather similar form of  extremely  lazy content theft (and possibly copyright infringement) has become extremely popular in later years. This form of video content is nothing new, and has been going on for a decade or more. However, the  amount  of such videos has absolutely exploded in later years, particula...

One of the most fundamental cornerstones of a justice system, very much including and very prominently the American justice system, is that someone accused of a crime and being on trial because of it has the absolute legal and constitutional right to a defense, to present his case, to have legal representation if needed, and a fundamental part of this is that the accused needs to know exactly what he's being accused of and what the possible penalties for it are if he's found guilty. This is, in fact, one of the very first steps in court trial procedure: An initial plea hearing where the accused (and his lawyer if he has one) is informed of exactly what he's being accused of, what the possible penalties are, and for him to enter a plea ("guilty", "not guilty", "no contest"). Except... For some completely incomprehensible and insane reason judges are allowed to sign a so-called "protective order" that, get this, orders the court and all...

Perhaps not so much in other countries (as of yet), but especially in the United States more and more new college/university students who are actually competent are finding themselves in an unusually frustrating situation. You see, in the United States over the last 5+ years there has been an absolutely gigantic decrease in literacy and basic math skills among high school graduates. More and more college professors have been complaining that a big portion of freshmen don't even know the most basic arithmetic, such as how to add two two-digit numbers, even though this is something that even first-graders (as in, 7-year-olds) should know. Their literacy is also abysmal, and they just don't read anything besides social media, and their writing skills are likewise abysmal. So what's happening more and more in American colleges is that the few students who are actually studied, learned and smart, who actually do read and are proficient at math and writing, are being constantly a...

In the era of about 2010 to 2015, give or take, when the far-leftist political invasion of American universities was in full force ("invasion" not being a figure of speech, exaggeration or hyperbole, as in many campuses it was literally a physical takeover by activist students and professors, even up to including pretty much in essence taking university staff as hostage, not even making that up), the concept of "feminism" was being  extremely  aggressively being pushed onto society. Everybody was talking about and declaring themselves to be "feminists". Heads of state, such as Justin Trudeau, were openly and proudly declaring themselves to be "feminists", entire governments were declaring themselves to be "feminists" (such as the governments of Canada, Finland and several others), institution after institution, especially universities, were declaring themselves to be "feminist" (and not even just in the United States), and so ...

I have been ranting in this blog for quite many years about the sometimes really aggravating use of the pronoun "they" to refer to one single person, which has been very actively (and often aggressively) pushed by the modern far left for the past 15+ years. One particular pet peeve of mine is how the math popularizer famous youtuber Matt Parker started actively (and excessively) using it for that purpose some time in 2019, and has never really stopped (good example blog post here .) Because I like to be fair and academic, I would like to present here three different sides to this question, three different positions and arguments about it. 1. The modern leftist position It's very disrespectful and hurtful to just assume someone's gender, and with some people it could outright trigger a mental episode. Assuming that someone is a "he" or a "she" can be the wrong assumption to make and thus can be very hurtful, even psychologically violent, and thus on...

I have written about this exact subject before, so I'm just repeating the same ideas, but feel like I need to write about it once again because I just keep seeing the same thing again and again. There seems to be this strange psychological phenomenon, especially in the United States but also in many other parts of the world, where people are bothered by cameras filming them in public... but only if the camera is being held by a person. They might literally walk in full view of 20 fully and clearly visible conspicuous cameras attached to walls, ceilings and poles, and they pay no attention to it and are completely ok with it (even though in many cases they have absolutely no idea who those cameras belong to, or where that footage is going.) Moreover, they might walk across the front of cars with visible dash cameras inside them, and even modern "smart" cars with a dozen small cameras all around them... and not be bothered at all (even though, once again, they have no idea ...

Soviet-style Communism (which is no way better than any other totalitarian ideology such as Fascism or Nazism) has somehow gained a lot of foothold particularly in the United States as of late (possibly because of the actions of the KGB three-four decades ago .) Like with so many other things, some basic slogans of Soviet-style Communism are being blindly repeated by the brainwashed American leftist masses with next to zero understanding of what it actually means. One of the most prominent such slogans is, of course, that they "support the working class" and want to give the power back to the "working class", that they are fighting for the rights of that class, and want to take down the oligarchs and seize the means of production for the working class and yada yada yada. Their political parties (most prominently the DSA) also love to claim that the "working class" overwhelmingly supports them back, particularly the oppressed minorities who are, according t...

In my line of work I sometimes need to write technical or other types of documents. I was once tasked with writing what was essentially an explanation and tutorial on a particular task in a particular embedded system scenario using certain libraries, as I had been working on that and they wanted me to write a clear tutorial and specification of how it was done, for others employees who may need to work on the same or similar things. The document ended up being, if I remember correctly, about 30 to 40 pages long, and I took particular care to make it as clear and legible as possible, paying special attention to its layout. I added page breaks if needed to make sections, sub-sections, tables, lists and code samples be all contiguous on the same page if needed, or if eg. a code sample was so long that it necessarily needed to be on two pages, I made certain that the page changed at a clear logical place in the code (rather than being, for example, between an "if" line and its bo...

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and not only is he very openly and brazenly socialist, but he ran his campaign on very socialist promises, like promising free public transport and free food, and to "tax the rich". Unsurprisingly, when the actual reality of the economy of the state of New York hit, it turned out that creating his Socialist Utopia isn't actually as easy as he promised. He can't increase income tax (because that's decided at the state level, not at the city level, and the New York State Senate has clearly indicated that they have zero intent in raising income taxes), running free public transport actually requires money that the city doesn't have, and trying to build new state-owned Socialist grocery stores is not only enormously expensive but also very inefficient, and would be a constant money sink. (Such a construction project is also likely to last longer than his 4-year term as mayor. It assumes that he will be eternally re-ele...

Many critics of the modern far-left have coined the term "suicidal empathy" to describe what's happening particularly in Europe and many parts of the United States and Canada. And that's the obsession that far-leftists have about "multiculturalism" and bringing in as many people from distant foreign lands as possible (nothing is "too much" for them, no matter how many millions we are talking about), and extremely fiercely and rabidly defending this practice to the point that the problems, especially the crime statistics among immigrants, are routinely censored, hidden, diminished and denied, and anybody who would want to shed some light on the issue is demonized, attacked, vilified and harassed. Most of them go so far as to defend the immigrants even when they themselves are victims of that crime, even the most heinous forms of it (ie. sexual assault and rape). The fact is that Europe is committing societal suicide. In most countries the people in ...

I have written previously about the YouTube channel "Veritasium", which is one of those huge education channels with millions of subscribers and tens of millions of views per video, which publishes videos mostly related to educational content such as history, technology, science and other similar content. In that previous blog post I comment on how I lost brain cells because of the absolutely and utterly stupid comment the author made towards the beginning of one of his recent videos. I would like to write about something else I have noticed about the channel over the years, as I have noticed somewhat of a change in more and more of the videos in recent years. I call that phenomenon the "Numberphile syndrome". A term I came up with, but it refers to what happened to another enormously popular YouTube channel, "Numberphile". You see, the Numberphile channel, which is an education channel about mathematics, became enormously popular very quickly when it was...

A public swimming pool in the municipality of Porrentruy, Switzerland, recently banned all foreigners from entering due to the chronic massive amount of crime and unrest happening there year after year. Can you guess what happened  immediately  after the ban? Sexual assaults dropped to zero. Violent crimes dropped to zero. In fact,  all  crimes dropped to zero. Police incidents overall dropped to zero. Noise levels dropped near zero. Unruly behavior dropped to zero. The swimming pool area became  extremely  quiet, tranquil, peaceful and clean. And that was not because the place became desolate and abandoned. In fact, the exact opposite: Ticket sales surged, and the place became one of the most popular (and profitable) public swimming pools in the country, almost overnight. Let that be a lesson to all of Europe. Let it also be a lesson and warning to Japan and South Korea. Learn from the mistakes of other countries before you yourselves commit those same mis...

I wrote in 2019 how I got banned from editing Wikipedia even though I did not break any of their rules, and only and solely because they didn't like me pointing out their political bias. That blog post has full details of how this bias manifests. This is, of course, not an isolated case. The amount of people that the mob that administers Wikipedia is huge. Recently, however, they banned a rather high-profile person, and for the exact same reason: He wanted Wikipedia to be, once again, more politically neutral, like it was in the beginning. And who was this person who got banned? Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. That's right, a co-founder was banned from his own platform, for the huge sin that he wanted Wikipedia to become politically neutral. According to my experience, such bans are rarely if ever done by wide consensus among the administrators (very much unlike they always claim). Instead, there's plenty of evidence, and my case is an example of that (b...

There are myriads of stories of people recounting their experiences with unusual coworkers, sometimes extremely unpleasant ones. Here's mine. I work for a tech company that, besides doing its own research&development, provides consulting services for other companies (which is actually pretty common here, among most tech companies). "Providing consulting services" is just a fancier way of saying, essentially, "renting expert developers". (This is a service that's quite on demand. If a company can't find anybody with enough expertise to outright hire, they will seek such a developer from another company, even if it's more expensive. The advantage is that the "consultant" is almost guaranteed to be competent and an expert on the subject matter, and it's much simpler and easier for the company to temporarily "rent" him than to actually hire someone, which comes with a whole swamp of legal obligations here.) I was one time ...