What grinds my gears

Perhaps due to the terminology being used in political discourse, with "left-wing" politics, and "right-wing" politics (which as far as I know originates from English parliament, where the government representatives would sit on one side of the room, on the left of the speaker, while the opposition would sit on the opposite side, on the right of the speaker, or was it the other way around...), which is often visually depicted as a line from left to right, the term "centrist" has been concocted for those who do not adhere to either of the two extremes. Perhaps because of this one-dimensional picture, with the "centrists" being on the center of the line, equally apart from the two extremes, it's often thought that "centrists" are either people who are undecided, or who are for compromises, for "listening to both sides", for appeasement between the two extremes. People who don't really have strong stances and opinions o...

One of the most conflicting feelings that people like me can ever get is when extremist multiculturalist social justice activists become the victims of horrendous violence perpetrated by the very people they so much idolize. This is because one part of my brain wants to feel glee, and gloat about it, to say "you get what you deserve". Another, the more rational and moral part of my brain tells me that it's absolutely despicable and immoral to feel glee about someone getting seriously hurt or even killed. I know it's wrong to gloat about someone getting gruesome violence committed against them, but it's extremely hard to not feel a bit of it, no matter how immoral it may be. Just a few days ago (as of writing this), a Finnish woman was brutally murdered in her own home. While the police is still investigating the crime, the main suspect is her boyfriend. As you might guess, this woman was a very open and vocal social justice activist, who was very active both...

As I have written in a previous blog post , the concept of "communism" (as well as "socialism") should be deemed as abhorrent as, if not even more abhorrent than "nazism". Whenever you hear somebody saying "I am a communist", in all seriousness and with conviction, that should give you an equally strong sense of antipathy and disgust as when you hear somebody saying "I am a nazi", in all seriousness and conviction. During the entire history of communism, no matter which country we are talking about, they have been as bad as and even worse than nazis ever were. Communism is, without a shred of exaggeration, the political ideology that has massacred most people in peace time for political purposes in the entire history of humanity, and by a long shot. Communism is a completely abhorrent ideology. It's absolutely disgusting murderous ideology that devalues human life and human value. It should be despised and shunned as much as nazis...

I have been a semi-regular viewer of speedruns for many, many years, and one of my all-time favorite games to watch speedruns of has been for quite a long time The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time . For quite many years it appeared that 17 minutes is the lower limit of how fast the game can be completed (with the world record being just a couple of seconds below it, and having been so for quite some time). However, very recently a new exploit was found that has allowed sub-12 minutes completion of the game using a completely different strategy and exploits. I wrote recently a blog post about why I didn't find this exciting in the least , even though I have been a huge fan of OoT speedrunning for several years. Knowing more details about the particular techniques used for this new route hasn't changed my opinion. Here I'll list all the reasons why I don't really like this new any% speedrun route, from the least objectionable to the most objectionable (all in my per...

Recently in an online forum somebody linked to a Tweet thread where somebody discussed a potential copyright infringement against a friend of mine (also frequenting that forum). It was about the use of some screenshots of some videos that this friend had made. The tweet in question linked to my friend's website, to the content where the material from which the screenshots were taken from. Anyway, the details of that are not really relevant here. The thing is, my friend's personal web page is full of all kinds of things, mostly related to programming, hobby projects and also contains a sort of personal diary and some opinion pieces on diverse subjects. One of the people participating in that Twitter discussion thread dug up the titles of a couple of these opinion pieces (somewhere entirely elsewhere inside the website than the original point of the discussion) where he presented some criticism of the Islamic religion, and posted a screenshot of these article titles. In thi...

World War I was one of the largest and most devastating wars of all human history. The reasons for it were really complicated, and a complete mess, with allied nations being dragged into the war because of their alliances and whatnot. However, the central pundit of the whole conflict, the major villain, was Germany, with a couple of essentially vassal states being dragged into the conflict by their alliances with Germany. Eventually the Allied Powers were finally able to defeat Germany in 1918, and as a result its empire was split and all of Germany's colonies were transferred to other countries or gained independence. Germany was devastated by the war, yet it took it but a mere 20 years for it to raise from the ashes again, and start yet another world war, even bigger and more devastating this time, almost destroying Europe in the process. Once again the allied forces were once again able to defeat Germany in 1945, again at a great cost. This time the allied forces weren...

The problem of pollution and especially CO2 emissions has become quite a big thing, and more and more countries and activists are trying to find solutions to it. The thing is, many of the proposed and even implemented solutions are often ineffective, very costly (in relation to their effectiveness and energy production), and sometimes even harmful to the environment and even human health. And, ironically, so far none of these implemented solutions has done almost anything to reduce emissions. Germany is, perhaps, the European (perhaps even worldwide) pinnacle of moving to renewable energy production: Something like less than 5% of the electricity used in Germany comes from nuclear power plants (and Germany's plan is to reduce it to 0% in the next decade or so), and something like 80% comes from renewable energy sources, such as wind energy. Ironically, the CO2 emissions of Germany have only gone up year after year, not down. Germany is producing more CO2 than ever before. Movi...