What grinds my gears

I often compare, even consider, the modern progressive feminist social justice ideology to be a religion. It might not be a theistic religion, but it has most of the hallmarks. Like many religions, it's guilt-based (you are sinful by nature, even if you think you are not), and it has its quasi-supernatural beliefs (like the " whiteness " aura that the undesirables have and which has quasi-supernatural properties) and great unseen enemies (the "patriarchy"). There's one curious difference to most other religions, though. Look at various religious people talking about their religion . They talk about how much it brings them joy, and happiness, and fulfillment, and positiveness. And that video is just the tip of the iceberg. In general deeply religious people tend to have personal anecdotes about how unhappy they were before, how many problems they had in life, many of them even going the deep end, and how their chosen religion saved them, how it turned th...

This topic is in essence pertinent only to the United States, and thus you might be asking that why I, not a citizen, but an European, care and why I spend so much time writing blog posts about American politics. Well, I wish I could simply ignore what happens in America, but unfortunately it's not that simple. The United States has an incredible amount of power to influence the rest of the world. And I'm not only talking about the American government and their political decisions, but about all major ideological movements within the country with a very sizeable following and loud voice. It just tends to be that what becomes popular in America tends to want to become popular in Europe (often starting with the United Kingdom) and the rest of the world. If there's some ideological movement happening, like, in Japan, or China, or India, or Brazil, that seldom has any kind of influence or impact anywhere else (except perhaps some neighboring countries that share a close cultura...

There are many videos out there of "chi" "masters" (scare quotes intentional) who defeat assailants without even touching them, just by gesturing at them. Of course these videos invariably show them doing it to their own students. There are also many videos showing them doing it to third-parties, and a few where it's an actual (organized) fight between the "chi" "master" and some actual martial artist. Not very surprisingly, the "chi" always somehow fails to work in these more real situations. (One particular example is quite striking, where such a "master" has a fight with a mixed martial artist, and gets seriously hurt immediately at the start of the fight.) Rather obviously, all these "chi powers" are complete bollocks. But the interesting question I'm tackling here is whether these "masters" themselves are fully aware of this, and are just swindling people, or whether they are actually themse...

If you have been reading this blog, you'll know how greatly disappointed and disillusioned I am about how VR turned out to be. (If you don't want to wade through miles of text where I rant about it, here's a super-condensed summary (you'll have to read the blog posts for the actual arguments and reasoning): Enormously expensive, way out of my budget range. Abysmal game support: virtually zero support in any existing games, almost zero support in new games of existing genres. Room-scale VR cripples game mechanics and gameplay, it's physically straining and unfeasible for any actual gameplay, and I doubt it has a real future. I highly doubt many big-budget 50-hour triple-A games will ever be made for room-scale VR.) But what about PSVR? PSVR seems to lack many/most of the problems I have seen in VR: It's significantly cheaper (although still a bit on the expensive side), it's focused on sit-down VR, and at least at this point it appears that there wil...

Apparently, it seems, this is a "racist stereotype": What's so racist about it, you might ask? Very good question. The fact is that I have absolutely no idea, and it seems that nobody can explain it to me either. It's a black man eating fried chicken. A couple of years ago I heard, for the first time in my entire life, on some YouTube video or something, an allusion to this being somehow an extremely racist stereotype, or something. I had never before heard of anything like this. I asked how exactly is it racist. I got no clear answers. To this day it remains a complete mystery to me. Apparently only Americans know why it's somehow "racist", even though, apparently, they are incapable of clearly explaining why. It just is. Somehow. I have asked this several times over the years, and to this day I haven't got a single clear explanation, or any explanations at all. I don't even know if there is some context within which it's allegedly ...

The then-United States Senator Ted Stevens, in a speech made in 2006 criticizing an amendment to a bill on internet neutrality, made the analogy that the internet "is a series of tubes" (that can be clogged when too much data is sent.) Of course I'm 100% pro net neutrality, and I fervently oppose any laws, in any country, that would undermine it. However, that analogy got a ton of ridicule and mockery, and I really can't understand why. It might not be the most technical analogy in existence, but I don't see what's wrong with it. Internet transmissions have an upper limit to how much data they can transmit. It's called bandwidth. And the data being transmitted is, in fact, on some cases being compared to the flow of a liquid. Heck, there's a reason why it's called "video streaming ", for instance. The analogy might not be flawless, but it isn't all that far off either. If you try to put too much stuff to go through a series of t...

For some reason the term "capitalism" has a really negative connotation in our modern world (although this actually goes way back, several decades in fact, maybe even a century). Not very surprisingly especially the modern regressive leftist social justice ideology hates and opposes capitalism with a passion, and would want to tear it completely down (and replace it with, usually, communism, or some other kind of Marxist system.) The very word "capitalism" immediately gives people the mental image of fat corporate magnates in old-fashioned suits smoking a cigar (bonus points for an old-fashioned monocle), running huge megacorporations that exploit poor third-world countries, exploit consumers, tear forests down and pollute like there is no tomorrow. The thing is, what people, especially the social justice warriors, oppose is not capitalism, but corporatism. Uncontrolled capitalism can lead to corporatism, but they are in no way synonymous. Capitalism is define...