What grinds my gears

You know the old saying that if a lie is repeated enough times, it becomes the truth? Well, it seems to me that the concept of the mythical "wage gap" appears to be such a thing. The "wage gap" seems to be one of the core tenets of feminism, especially in the United States (but naturally it has been creeping into other countries over the years as well). It's the claim that women are, on average, paid less for the exact same job than men. In the United States in particular, the exact number of "77 cents for each men's dollar" is repeated like a mantra. This concept has been repeated so much, and is so pervasive, that almost everybody believes it without question. Even the president of the United States himself believes it and has commented on it in his speeches. Since that "77 cents" figure is supposed to be an average, and since demonstrably there are many companies that do not have that policy, that should mean that there are compa...

I'm not going to write about gamergate per se. Rather, I'm going to write about Wikipedia's attitude towards it. The article " gamergate controversy " used to start for a rather long time with the sentence: "GamerGate refers to a 2014 video game culture controversy regarding video game journalism, journalistic ethics, and misogyny; the name derives from the Watergate Scandal, and was promulgated as a hashtag on Twitter." While this is a rather simplistic description, it's relatively reasonable and unbiased. This old version also mentioned the death threats attributed to the movement only once and in passing. The current version of the article, however, has a rather different tone. Now it starts with the sentence: "Gamergate is a controversy regarding sexism in video game culture." That's it. And the rest of the introductory paragraphs are not any better. The part about ethics in videogame journalism is only mentioned in passing, a...

One very common characteristic of social justice warriors is that they throw namecalling at their opposition completely regardless of what those words actually mean or whether the word is accurate in the situation, just as generic insults. The intent is to be as condescending, hurtful and offensive as possible, while still maintaining the illusion of having the moral high ground. Thus the actual meaning of words do not matter, only the feelings they convey. These words can be very effective in the place of more "mundane" insults. For example, rather than calling your opponent an "idiot" or an "asshole", call them a "misogynist". You immediately give an air of intellectual superiority instead of vulgarity, and the word can actually be even more insulting and hurtful than those other more vulgar ones. It doesn't really matter whether the other person actually is a misogynist or not. You can maintain your moral high ground while calling your...

"... but I will defend to the death your right to say it" – Evelyn Beatrice Hall This is, I posit, one of the core tenets of a free democratic society, and I subscribe to this principle almost religiously. (Granted, I might be too much of a coward to literally sacrifice my life to defend someone's free speech, but I do fully subscribe to the sentiment in the metaphorical sense.) At places like YouTube you encounter all kinds of people with all kinds of opinions, some of which are outright abhorrent. I have had, for example, a neonazi respond to a YouTube comment thread I started, spewing the most vile and bigoted hate speech against jews, and admiration of Adolf Hitler. This angered me quite a lot, but I still did not remove that comment or even marked it as "spam" even though I could have. I responded to this person with pretty much the above sentiment (although using significantly harsher words.) In other words, I expressed how utterly sick his opinions...

During the past decade or two, so-called "reality-TV" shows have proliferated like rabbits. Almost any subject you can think of, there has probably been at least an attempt at a reality-TV show about it. The thing is, reality-TV shows are successful when there's interesting drama and conflict. Nobody wants to watch boring everyday life where nothing special happens. The problem? Well, most real people live "boring" lives without drama and conflict. How to fix this problem? Create drama and conflict. In most reality-TV shows the people are genuine alright, ie. they are who they claim to be, not eg. paid actors playing a character. However, what you see happening on the show is very rarely completely genuine. The people making the show will often try to cause drama and conflict between the participants, often very obnoxiously. And of course everything that happens is exaggerated in post-production through clever editing tricks (such as things that two people ...

I have written about this subject in my "old blog", but it never hurts to write an updated version with updated misconceptions. People have all kinds of misconceptions about copyright, such as the following. "It's not illegal to use it if I don't do it for money." Whether you are making money from the copyrighted material doesn't matter, it's still copyright infringement, and you could be sued. (The only difference there may be is that the crime might be considered more severe if you made money out of it. However, even if you didn't make any money out of it, you could still be sued for quite a lot.) "'Let's play' videos do not break copyright." Actually they do. Most video games contain sound tracks, and unless you play with the audio muted, you are infringing copyright on that ground alone. The graphic assets of the video game are also copyrighted, so using them so extensively in your video could also be seen as ...

This is one of the stupidest comments against vaccines that I have ever seen: "I have never been vaccinated, and I'm completely healthy." The sheer stupidity of this idea is worth a facepalm. Firstly, and needless to say, a sample size of one is not sufficient to draw any conclusions. Secondly, there's this thing called "herd immunity", which means that an unvaccinated person has little chance of contracting a disease when everybody else in their community is vaccinated, for the obvious reason that if nobody is a disease carrier, they can't get it from anybody. Thus the fact that an unvaccinated person has never contracted the disease only means that the vast majority of the other people are vaccinated, not that vaccines are useless. And even then, most diseases don't exhibit a 100% infection rate. In other words, even very virulent diseases don't necessarily contract every single person. If among some community 95% of people have contr...