What grinds my gears

Whenever there is discussion about the burqa, all such discussion is immediately shut down with people putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "choice" and "religious freedom" and refusing to hear anything else. However, the fact is that a Muslim woman wearing a burqa is not a personal choice. It may oftentimes (especially in the west) be masqueraded as a personal choice, but in practice it's not. In Islamic religion and culture, the burqa is a symbol of submission to Islam and Allah, and a sign of purity and modesty. Moreover, not wearing a burqa is in many Islamic cultures a sign that the woman is a prostitute, or at the very least not chaste. In the most totalitarian Islamic countries a woman not wearing a burqa in public leads to punishment. Even in more liberal Islamic countries it's usually taken as a sign of the woman not being chaste, in other words a "slut", if not outright a prostitute. In many of these countries women wh...

I find chess engines, and how they have advanced in just the last ten years, really fascinating. In 1997 the chess computer Deep Blue gained a lot of notoriety for being the first computer to beat a world-reigning chess master, Garry Kasparov , in a tournament of several games with long time controls. (More specifically, 6 games were played, and the score was 3½–2½ in favor of the computer.) Since then, however, chess engines have advanced in major leaps. Note that Deep Blue was a dedicated computer for the sole purpose of playing chess. It could calculate approximately 200 million nodes (ie. chess positions) per second. Modern top chess engines will run on a regular PC, and their calculation speed on such a PC, even when using eg. 4 cores, is less than 10 million nodes per second, only a small fraction of what Deep Blue was capable of. Yet these modern chess engines, running on a regular PC, are significantly stronger than Deep Blue was, and would easily beat it (and even th...

When it comes to political stances, all kinds of words and terms are thrown around, and it can get a bit confusing. There is left, right, conservative, liberal, authoritarian, progressive... Two terms in particular are often confused and thought as interchangeable. Namely, "liberal" and "progressive". And both are often considered synonyms with "left-wing" (or "left-leaning".) In other words, if your political stance is left-leaning, you are thus a liberal and a progressive. However, that is not the case. "Liberal" is not a synonym for "left-leaning". Rather, it's the opposite of "authoritarian". It's on an independent axis compared to the left-right categorization. A simplistic but illustrative way of depicting this is with the following "political compass" graph: Depending on your political opinions and stances, you can locate yourself basically anywhere on that two-dimensional graph. W...

So there's this incident where a student, of middle-eastern descent, in a Texas high school made a "homemade" clock, put it into a briefcase, and then got arrested because they thought it was a bomb. When one reads the headlines version of the story, one very easily gets the impression that this is an electronics genius who built an electronic clock from scratch, then went to his school to show it off, and then got arrested mainly because of prejudice and racism (a muslim brings a briefcase with a clock to school, it must be a bomb!) This story got so much attention that even the president of the United States made supporting comments, and this kid was soon offered scholarships to the most prestigious universities of the country. However, when you actually dig deeper, the story is a bit different. Firstly, was calling the police to arrest him overreaction? Definitely. Americans especially, but in increasing amounts westerners in general, are scared shitless of ter...

The rape culture in our society (not the imagined feminist "rape culture", but the actual rape culture ) has now gone to such ridiculous extremes that some colleges are encouraging their students to use a smartphone app to make affirmative consent "contracts" before sex. Yes, we are finally going this far. The feminist fear of "rape" has gone to this extreme. But putting that aside, something particular stands out in that article: But Jasmin Enriquez, 23, who was date-raped as a student at Pennsylvania State University, branded sex contracts ‘pure evil’, saying: ‘They are nothing more than stunts and money-generating schemes which distract from the real issue which is education. We need to educate students of both sexes. Informed consent is an ongoing, shifting process which cannot be encapsulated in a contract. A contract fails to safeguard a woman who might change her mind after signing it.’ Firstly, notice that it doesn't say "person...

There's a recent new meme called "meninism" making the rounds. "Meninism" is a parody of feminism. It is to feminism what "pastafarianism" is to religion. It's not an actual thing; it's a joke, a parody. It's a parody of feminism (kind of like "what if men acted like radical feminists?" thing). It's deliberately over-the-top, and nobody is seriously a "meninist" (any more than anybody is seriously a "pastafarian".) The funniest thing about it is, however, that many feminists do not understand that it's just an over-the-top parody, and believe that it's an actual real thing, an actual movement. They take it seriously, and attack and ridicule it, as if it were a real movement, a real sociopolitical philosophy held by some men. The vast majority of religious people understand that "pastafarianism" and the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" are not a real thing, but just a parody of ...

There is a video making the rounds because of the astonishingly stereotyping, and sometimes even nonsensical, questions being presented: BuzzFeed's " 24 Questions Black People Have For White People ". It has gained some notoriety due to how obnoxious and nonsensical it is. But, I'm a white person, so I suppose these questions are directed to me. So I'll answer: #1: "Why do you always make such horrible decisions in horror movies? It's not cool to split up." WTF? I'm not in a horror movie. And what exactly does this have to do with me being white? This question is absolutely nonsensical. As for fictional characters in horror movies making dumb decisions, it's because of the script. The scriptwriter decided to write them like that. Usually to cause conflict, tension and drama. But what exactly does this have to do with being white? Are you saying that no black fictional character has ever made any "horrible decision" in a ho...