What grinds my gears

Most people who have never tried translating text from one language to another think that it's a rather trivial thing to do. They are very wrong. Having translated some things between English and Finnish I have really gained an appreciation for the difficulty that this entails. Translating, especially when we are talking about things like TV shows, is also a very thankless job. For example people who translate anime from Japanese to English sometimes get a lot of flack because they are "butchering" the work by needlessly localizing things rather than being faithful to the original. But the thing is, it's not always that simple. Some time ago I was thinking about adding English subtitles to a comedy sketch video by Spede Pasanen (" seteliautomaatti "). What I thought would be an easy job resulted to be more difficult than what I imagined. Take for instance this exchange: "No, mihis the meinaatte mennä?" "No, kun sattu tää solmiokin, niin...

Let's take the classical trope of the "damsel in distress": A woman gets kidnapped, and a man has to rescue her. Is this trope sexist? "Of course!", says the feminist. It reinforces the notion of women as being weak and fragile, incapable of defending themselves, and having to rely on a man to help them. Does this reflect the actual, real world, on average? That doesn't even matter. Works of art should be used as tools to change people's attitudes, not reflecting reality. But never mind that. Let's just grant that the original trope is sexist. How about the gender-reversed version? In other words, a man gets kidnapped and a woman has to rescue him. Is that sexist? Of course it is. But not in the opposite direction. In the same direction. You see, this panders to male sexual fantasy. This has undertones of SM and dominatrix fantasies. The woman is nothing more than a tool to excite the man's imagination. What if both the kidnapping vict...

People always complain how Hollywood produces nothing more than mindless action flicks for the masses. They are dumb, they have no subtlety, they have no depth... just mindless action for 90 minutes. Then they decided to make the new Godzilla movie better. Rather than just 2 hours of mindless action, it would be subtler. It would build suspense and intrigue, it would hint rather than show, it would have a deeper plot... In other words, it would be smarter than your average action-packed mindless action flick. And of course people complain. There is no pleasing them. If they make a mindless action flick, they complain. If they make a smarter and subtler action flick, they complain. Nothing is ever good. They complained that the 1998 Godzilla film was too stupid. Now they complain that the 2014 Godzilla film is not stupid enough. I think that it's the people who are stupid here. Personally I love the new Godzilla movie precisely because of its subtlety. They could have gone...

Some time ago it was estimated that in the UK over half of the population belonged to some minority that had special legal protection from discrimination. In other words, quite ironically, there exists a minority of people (ie. under 50% of the population) in the UK that enjoys no special legal protection from discrimination. In other words, it's the only unprotected minority. The only "acceptable target". I don't know if the "unprotected" (which usually means "white males") are the minority in other western countries, but the condition of being an "acceptable target" is something that's not much discussed, at least in any other way than to belittle them. In the modern ultra-politically-correct world there is one group of people that does not enjoy any form of special protection against being offended: White males. They are being constantly insulted by society, and this is somehow considered acceptable, and the norm. In fact, ma...