Not that I’m remotely as funny as George Carlin, or that this list is funny at all. But he had many complaints and grievances, and today I would also like to complain about some stuff.

This post contains spoilers for a lot of things. I won’t hide spoilers, but I will say the name of the thing before giving the spoiler.

When people in their 30s or 40s (or even 20s) say they’re “living through my third once-in-a-lifetime recession.” Who told you they were once in a lifetime? This kind of thing has been happening about once per decade since the invention of money.

When a judge refers to a courtroom as “my court.” You’re not the dictator, you’re an administrator. You should be serving the people, not the other way around.

Furthermore: the powerful have a moral duty to be polite to those over whom they have power, but the powerless have no corresponding duty. It’s nice when defendants are polite to judges, but politeness is supererogatory, and they are morally entitled to be as rude to judges as they want. Holding people in contempt of court for being rude to judges is a fake crime that was invented by petty power-hungry judges. If you hold power over someone’s life, and that person is rude to you, you are morally obligated not to retaliate.

Relatedly: When someone with a PhD insists on being called “doctor”. I thought the point of getting a PhD was to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Thank you for informing me that the actual reason is so you can act like you’re better than everyone else.

When a movie character falls off a ledge or something and is holding on by one hand, while their other hand dangles at their side. Just reach up and grab it with your other hand!

I tested this on a pull-up bar and I found that my left hand can only support my bodyweight for a few seconds, but if I’m holding the bar with one hand, it’s very easy to reach up and grab it with my other hand. In movies, apparently the former is pretty easy and the latter is impossible.

(Relatedly: When a movie character is dangling off a ledge with one hand and holding another person with their other hand, and basically bicep curls the second person to safety. There are only maybe 20 people in the world who can one-armed bicep curl the bodyweight of another person, and they’re all 300+-pound hulking gorilla men, not handsome skinny movie stars.)

Here’s a video testing this trope:

Here’s another video testing this trope, in which the testers successfully rescue themselves, but (1) they are both professional climbers, and (2) they are using two arms instead of one.

While we’re on strength-related pet peeves: When a movie character is trying to push a heavy object overhead and they struggle to squat it up, and then struggle to push it up with their arms. Your legs can lift about 3 times as much weight as your arms. If you can just barely squat it up, there’s no way you can push it overhead. And if you struggle to push it up with your arms, then squatting it up will be easy.

This scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming comes to mind. In this particular case, my headcanon is that the spider bite made Peter’s arms get disproportionately stronger.

(Am I inconsistent for complaining about inaccurate displays of upper body strength, but defending two people using the same keyboard? Maybe. These are my grievances and I’m allowed to gripe about whatever I want.)

When people refer to works of fiction as “truth” (as in, “it shows deep truths about the human condition”). The absolute chutzpah of some people to refer to something as “truth” when it is completely made up and everyone knows it.

Notice how no one ever talks about physics or chemistry as “conveying universal truths”? There’s a direct inverse relationship between how often people describe something that way and how much truth it actually conveys.

A highly advanced alien race with allegedly far better ethics than humans, who make most of the same ethical reasoning errors as humans. One theme you see sometimes: the aliens are considering wiping out humanity for being too unethical, but then decide not to because they see some people being good. If the aliens are so morally advanced, why are they still doing collective punishment? Humans (at least some of us) figured this one out 2600 years ago (“the child will not be punished for the parent’s sins”, Ezekiel 18:20).

When someone’s heart stops and people say “they were dead for 2 minutes.” Heartbeat is a commonly-used proxy for death, but it’s not the same thing as death. If your heart stops and restarts, then you weren’t dead.

Referring to an athlete in a light weight class as the GOAT. The only reason that athlete wins competitions is because heavyweights aren’t allowed to compete against them. If they would lose to a mediocre heavyweight, how can you reasonably call them the GOAT?

The saying “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.” Yes it does mean exactly that. What else could it possibly mean? “Sure, you’re free to criticize Stalin, but you’re not free to not get sent to Siberia.”

In a movie when two people are talking, and one of them walks away and says something quietly but the other person can still hear them somehow.

This scene from Shazam! comes to mind:

When people use xkcd’s Ten Thousand comic in a condescending way.

The whole point of the comic is that you shouldn’t be condescending toward people who don’t know things, but the comic ended up just giving people a whole new way of being condescending.

If you call someone “one of today’s lucky ten thousand”, you’re not explicitly shaming them, but you’re still emphasizing that they didn’t know something and you did. If someone doesn’t know something, better to simply tell them without bringing extra attention to the fact that they didn’t know it.

“Compared to the earth, you’re just a tiny speck.” Something being a “speck” is a fact about your perception, not reality—you look like a speck compared to the earth because human eyes aren’t sufficiently high-resolution to see yourself in a picture of the earth. But you’re exactly as big as you feel like you are, and the earth is far bigger. Reality has way, way more detail than we can fit in our brains.

Or, “[Problem] is so massive that individuals can’t make a difference.” You can’t make a difference that you can perceive at the macro level, but that’s a fact about your perception, not about reality. You can make a difference, but your perception isn’t good enough to be able to see the difference you’re making.

“Time and again, countless studies have proven X” [no citations given]. This usually means X is false.

The saying, “by far one of the best.” How can something be by far one of the best? Either it’s better than everything else by a wide margin, or it’s not.

When academics invent jargon for a concept that already has a commonly-used word, and also redefine the commonly-used word to be incompatible with the normal definition, and then tell normal people that they’re wrong for using the original definition.

• Some people claim that strawberries and raspberries are not berries, while bananas and eggplants are berries. Since ancient times, people have understood what berries are, and you can tell because they have “berry” in the name: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry. Then some people decided that actually that’s not what “berry” means, it’s actually a fruit produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Nope, that’s not a berry, the word “berry” is already being used to describe blueberries and strawberries and whatnot. Find a new word for your thing.
• Nate Soares has complained about “the definitional gymnastics required to believe that dolphins aren’t fish”, and even about berries in particular.

• I’ve heard people say “trees don’t exist.” What are these people smoking?? I know trees exist because I can see some outside my window right now. What they mean to say is “trees do not share a common ancestor that isn’t also shared by non-trees”, which is not remotely the same thing as trees not existing.

  This would be like someone saying “clothes don’t exist”, and when you press them on it, it turns out what they mean is that clothes can’t be uniquely distinguished by material, because there are things made of cotton that aren’t clothing.

• For normal people, an implication is when you make a statement that suggests something is true without necessarily logically entailing it. For linguists, this is called an implicature. And for linguists, the word “implication” can only refer to a scenario where your statement logically entails something. An implication by the common-sense definition is necessarily not an implication by the linguistic definition. This is dumb and linguists should use better terminology.

  I understand the need to distinguish between two different definitions of “implication”, but why would you take the more common definition and give it a new word, and redefine “implication” to only refer to the less common definition? Would have been much better to make the technical terms be, say, “implication” and “entailment” rather than “implicature” and “implication”. Or even “implicature” and “entailment” to avoid any ambiguity, and then let us normal people say “implication” whenever we want.

  (My computer’s spellcheck says “implicature” is not a word. My computer vindicates me.)

The phrase “quarter century.” You’re trying too hard to make 25 years sound like a long time.

People don’t realize how long ago 2024 was—an entire centicentury has passed!

When stories don’t understand how big planets are. Some examples:

• In Dragon Ball Z, characters shoot massive energy blasts that are visible from space and look to be over a thousand miles across, but when zoomed in to the characters’ perspective, they only cover a few miles at most.
• The Death Star is powerful enough to destroy a planet, and the Second Death Star—which is canonically more powerful—can destroy a single starship at a time. It should be able to trivially destroy the entire rebel fleet in one shot, in the same way that a strongman who can deadlift a car should also be able to pick up a piece of lint. Except that’s not even a good analogy because the size difference between a fleet of ships and a planet is far greater than the difference between lint and a car.
• Also from Star Wars: Darth Vader says, “The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force.” But no force user ever does anything remotely on the scale of destroying a planet. I cannot emphasize enough how big a planet is, and how trivial Jedi powers are compared to the ability to destroy a planet.
• Superman can rotate a planet by pushing on it, and he can also get into a fistfight. If he’s strong enough to rotate a planet, then one of his punches should superheat the atmosphere, leaving a massive crater and creating a shockwave that propagates around the earth and destroys everything on the surface.

This is a form of scope insensitivity: any amount of force greater than about 100 tons gets treated as basically infinite, and is interchangeable with any other amount of force that’s also greater than 100 tons.

(I picked 100 tons as a reference point because, according to Marvel canon, The Hulk can lift “over 100 tons”, even though we’ve seen him perform feats that require, I don’t know, twelve orders of magnitude more force than that?)

I would once again like to reiterate that planets are absurdly large. Any comparison I could make will fail to capture how large planets are.

(Graham’s number, however, is somewhat larger.)

When the “bad” characters make a decision that’s good ex ante, and the heroes oppose the decision, and then it turns out badly, thus “proving” the heroes right.

• In Daredevil season 3, when the heroes oppose the plan to let Fisk live in a (government-owned) hotel in exchange for him exposing tons of organized crime, which was clearly a great idea ex ante and the heroes opposed because they just hate Fisk, except then it turned out Fisk had a secret bunker underneath the hotel and was secretly controlling everything, which the heroes did not know but their position turned out to be correct by sheer coincidence.
• In Doom (2016), Samuel Hayden was harvesting energy from Hell, and Doomguy was not a fan of that decision. Hayden was correct ex ante that a perfect and unlimited energy source is extremely valuable and worth pursuing. Everything would have been fine if Olivia Pierce hadn’t started a demonic cult and intentionally opened a portal to Hell.
• In the Warhammer 40K book Horus Rising, the space marine Saul Tarvitz used all his team’s explosive charges to blow up a single tree because (1) the xenos were using the tree to kill his men and (2) he didn’t want to dishonor his comrades by letting their corpses sit there. This was an understandable but debatable decision. His commander Eidolon chastised him for wasting all their charges, which is a fair criticism. Then, because Tarvitz is a protagonist and Eidolon is an antagonist, it turned out that destroying the trees inexplicably cleared up the weather and let more dropships come in. It turned out to be a magical tree and blowing it up solved all of their problems, but Tarvitz had no way of knowing that in advance.

But sometimes this trope gets subverted, and I always enjoy that. An example from Attack on Titan season 1: Eren, the unreasonable hothead, wants to turn into a titan and fight the female titan. The reasonable members of Levi squad advise against it and convince him not to, but then almost all of them get killed by the female titan because Eren isn’t there to help. Even in retrospect, it’s genuinely unclear who was right. This event becomes more layered by how it influences Eren’s motivations later on—without giving away too much, it made him feel like he can’t rely on other people and he needs to do things for himself.

Stories that retcon human technology as coming from aliens.

For example, in Transformers (2007) and Independence Day, much of 20th century technology was reverse-engineered from studying crashed aliens. Humans are fully capable of inventing stuff on our own, thank you very much!

(The real-life version of this trope is people who think aliens built the pyramids.)

Any news article with a title of the form “Thing Quietly Happens.” It’s not quiet if it’s the subject of a news article.

When people write reviews as “the good, the bad, and the ugly”. In the context of a review, “ugly” is just another word for “bad”. There’s no point in having two different sections that mean the same thing. Just because that was the title of a famous movie doesn’t mean it’s a good way to make a list.

“Smart” characters who are only smart because they have the magical ability to know things that they couldn’t possibly know. But, you see, they figured it out based on zero evidence, because they’re so smart.

In BBC’s Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes makes inferences based on insufficient data but always turns out to be right because the writers decided he is. In this Pete Holmes sketch, Sherlock makes the same deductions as he did in BBC’s version, but he’s wrong every time.

When a story sets up an interesting moral dilemma by giving the antagonist a sympathetic motivation but then they ruin it by having the antagonist act like a jerk to make sure you know they’re the bad guy.

• In Across the Spider-Verse, Miguel starts out as an antagonist who’s making some pretty good points actually, but then he starts acting blatantly evil in a way that’s not consistent with his earlier characterization.
• In the Star Wars expanded universe, Count Dooku has a compelling backstory in which he rightly has many grievances about how the Galactic Republic government is run; he vies for independence and gets support from the many states that have been mistreated by the Republic. But then to make sure there’s no ambiguity about who the good guys are, he constantly commits war crimes and basically tortures people for fun.

Subversions of this trope are often really fun to watch: when the writers set up a person as the villain, but you can also 100% see where they’re coming from and they make some good points. A few examples that come to mind are Ozymandias, Thanos¹, and Francis Hummel (the villain in The Rock).

When people lament how everything is centralized on the same four social media platforms, and nobody has their own website anymore. I have a website! You could be reading it! (In fact, you’re probably reading it right now.)

When RPGs railroad you into making an immoral decision and then get all philosophical, like, “Who’s the real villain here? Really makes you think.” No, you FORCED me to do the unethical thing. I would’ve behaved ethically if you’d let me.

When people use the term “bodybuilder” to mean “extremely strong person”.

Bodybuilding is not a strength sport. You don’t perform well in bodybuilding by being strong; you perform well by having big muscles. Bodybuilders happen to be pretty strong—much stronger than the average person—but not as strong as people who specifically train for strength, like strongmen or powerlifters or sumo wrestlers.

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best deadlift was 322 kg (710 lb). The world record deadlift is somewhere between 460.4 kg (1,015 lb) and 510 kg (1,124 lb) depending on what rules you go by. Arnold was strong for a normal person but he’d come dead last in a world-class powerlifting or strongman competition.

When you ask someone a question about an uncertain subject where their credence interval is narrower than yours, and they respond with “I don’t know.”

Let me give an example:

Alice lives in San Francisco. Bob is visiting SF from England and needs to drive to Sacramento for a conference.

Bob: “How long does it take to drive to Sacramento?”

Alice: “I don’t know.”

Alice, you have more information about this than Bob. You have at least a vague sense of where Sacramento is, and Bob doesn’t, so you have the ability to help him out here. Is it 30 minutes? 2 hours? 6 hours?

Hedgehog answers for complex as-yet-unexplained phenomena.

Two examples I see a lot: we don’t really know why animals sleep, and we don’t really know why humans evolved to be so much smarter than other animals. I’m pretty sure these sorts of complex phenomena don’t have a single explanation and it bugs me when people propose a single thing as the sole reason. “Humans evolved intelligence to win arguments”; “humans evolved intelligence to get better at lying and detecting lies”; “humans evolved intelligence to better figure out how to track animal migration patterns.” Intelligence is useful for many things; there is no single reason why it evolved.

When a movie performs poorly in the box office and people accuse it of being a money laundering scheme.

I’m not saying money-losing films aren’t ever some sort of scheme. Maybe they are.[1] But the scheme definitely isn’t money laundering. Money laundering is when you funnel illegally-earned income into a legitimate business, which makes your income look HIGHER, not LOWER. It’s impossible to launder money by REDUCING your income.

[1] The Producers was about a money-losing film scheme. The way the scheme worked is they got investors to provide funding in return for a percentage of profits, and then intentionally made the worst movie possible so they wouldn’t have to pay investors back.

Hollywood accounting is when you inflate your costs to make your profit look smaller than it really is, to avoid paying taxes. Which is, first of all, the opposite of money laundering (money laundering is when you pay more taxes on purpose). And second of all, even if you’re doing Hollywood accounting, you still want your revenue to be as high as possible. You don’t want a box office bomb.

The phrase “lowest common denominator.”

It should actually be “greatest common denominator”, but perhaps it’s confusing to have the word “greatest” in a phrase that identifies a quantity as being small. I would accept simply “common denominator”.

When someone writes a 500+-word comment but uses uncommon/non-standard abbreviations.

You probably spent half a hour writing that comment. Was it really that important to save the 5 seconds it would have taken to write out the full words?

When people don’t understand the difference between something being allowed and being government-mandated.

For example: “The United States doesn’t have parental leave.” Yes it does! Companies are fully allowed to offer parental leave! The US just doesn’t have government-mandated parental leave.

The phrase “demand exceeds supply.”

What people mean by this is something like, “Consumers want more of a good, but it’s too expensive.” Which is another way of saying, “If the price were lower, people would buy more of it.”

Which is true for pretty much everything ever? Demand is downward-sloping. So this statement doesn’t convey any useful information.

And my #1 pet peeve:

Describing someone in the past as “prescient” for observing a trend that was already happening at the time.

Examples:

• I saw this tweet described as prescient: The most well-known (alleged) widespread Wall Street fraud was in 2007. This tweet is from 2015. Being 8 years behind isn’t prescient.

  (For posterity, this is a Bernie Sanders tweet made on 2015-11-14 saying “Wall street plays by the rules? Who are we kidding? The business model of Wall Street is fraud.”)

• 1984 and Brave New World are often described this way.
  • Orwell’s “we have always been at war with Eastasia” was inspired by real-life events, probably (I don’t know for sure). The first time I noticed this phenomenon in real life is in 2020 when the party line instantly flipped from “don’t wear a mask, masks don’t work” to “you have to wear a mask in public, this has always been the rule and we never said anything different”. But I’m sure this was far from the first time it happened.

• https://xkcd.com/1289/ “prescient” about AI art:

  Yes, I’m sure AI art was the first time in history that this comic was ever relevant.

• SNL’s “Enchilada” sketch is “prescient” because it was making fun of newscasters over-pronouncing foreign words, which they did at the time and still do.
• SMBC’s Both Sides sketch which makes fun of (a) creationists/woo and (b) news shows that present creationists/woo as equally credible. People in the comments say it’s more relevant than ever, seemingly forgetting that creationism used to be a real thing that people took seriously, and now they mostly don’t, so it’s actually less relevant than ever.
• Lonely Island was “way ahead of its time” for the song “When Will The Bass Drop?” (2014), which was making fun of a trend that had already been happening for 5+ years at that point.
• “Trump, unfortunately, has decreased PEPFAR funding” written in mid-2024, described as “prescient” for predicting that he would decrease funding again in 2025 after being re-elected. Extrapolating a historical trend is not prescient. In fact, the original commenter never even predicted he would further decrease funding; they just observed that he had already done so.

• Seen in a YouTube comment on a clip from Malcolm in the Middle: “Malcom [sic] was ahead of its time just like walker Texas ranger you don’t see diverse storylines like this anymore now everything is forced”

  How could it have been ahead of its time if you don’t see shows like it anymore?

“Ahead of its time” is another thing a lot of people get wrong. The Sopranos was the first TV show of its kind, but it wasn’t ahead of its time—contemporaries appreciated it, and it inspired many shows that aired soon after. It was right on time.

Posted on Nov 29, 2025

Notes