What grinds my gears

I think that this article at xojane.com really demonstrates the problem with modern feminism: " 35 Practical Steps Men Can Take To Support Feminism ". I'm going to briefly comment on these "steps". (I'm not going to fully quote the text, to keep this shorter, and to avoid copyright issues. You can read the full text from that link.) 1. Do 50% (or more) of housework.  WTF do you mean "or more"? Really? I thought feminism is about equality. Besides, the amount of housework done by people is none of your business. It's their business. Spouses can agree on the amount of housework done by each, which may depend on things like how much other work each has to do. They can also agree on who wants to do what. (For example, if one spouse would want more housework to be done than the other, they ought to reach a compromise. If there's something that eg. the woman would want to be done and the man doesn't, then perhaps the woman should do wha...

Feminists just love to sensationalize the "wage gap". It's an enormous problem affecting the entire world, and needs to be fixed urgently. Well, let me propose a solution: Firstly, if too many women are applying for lower-paying jobs, we stop them and force them to take higher-paying jobs. For example, if too many women are applying for the position of pediatrician, then we put a limit to how many women can apply to it, and force the excess to apply for the position of surgeons, cardiologists, and so on. (Naturally they will have to study those degrees, but we can force them to do that as well.) Or if, for example, too many women are becoming hair stylists or kindergarten teachers, we put a limit on that, and force the excess to become construction workers, miners, electrical engineers, and so on. Of course this has to work in the other direction as well (else there will still be an imbalance.) In other words, if too many men are applying for the position of cardiac s...

I love polyphony in music, especially in singing. For example one of the main reasons why I love the song The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel is precisely the awesome polyphonic singing. Naturally I thus also like acapella groups and choirs, as they usually use polyphony ( an example .) It should logically follow, that I would like barbershop quartets . They are highly polished acapella groups that use polyphony to its maximum effect for singing. But somehow, I don't. And I have no idea why. I don't mean I hate it; it's quite ok. I'm just not crazy about it. I just somehow don't dig it as much. I don't know what it is; I just can't put my finger on what the problem is, but it just doesn't work, somehow. Perhaps the most irritating thing about this is precisely that I don't know why. My reason says that I should love it, but I just don't. What could possibly be the reason for this?

I am a native Finn, ie. a native Nordic, and thus basically as white as you could probably get. And I have been a long-time victim of racism in my youth. And I don't mean a victim of generic racist attitudes addressed to white people in general. I really mean racism addressed at me directly and personally. You see, when I was 7 my family moved to the Canary Islands, and we lived there for 12 years. This was back in the 80's. Obviously I got tanned pretty quickly, but as a Nordic parson, even at full tan I was significantly lighter-toned than the locals. And that was a constant subject of mockery, jokes, and in some cases even outright insults. This was, of course, more frequent at first than after a decade, but it never really fully stopped. There would always be some a-hole who would use it as a tool for mockery or insult. But not only was I mocked because of being drastically lighter-skinned, I did also several times experienced outright prejudice, even xenophobia, fo...

Examples of how feminism can actually be dangerous to women's health are piling up. I made previously a blog post about one example: Normalizing obesity. (Obesity increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and a bunch of other diseases. Yet a portion of modern feminism wants to make obesity something "normal" and not something that should be avoided and fixed.) Feminism also discourages women from taking precautions against being assaulted and raped (which, of course, have devastating effects both physically and psychologically.) The latest example is the "viagra for women", ie. flibanserin. The FDA rejected the drug twice because it has extremely poor efficacy in treating women with lowered sexual desire disorder, and has an alarmingly high rate of side-effects (with 75% of the test subjects reporting negative effects during treatment). These side-effects include things like low blood pressure, drowsiness, fatigue and fainting, among others. ...

This post spoils one of the winners of Britain's Got Talent , so I suppose that if you haven't seen them and want to watch them some time and not spoil the surprise for yourself, then you ought to skip this post. I have been watching Britain's Got Talent and America's Got Talent , and while they are really interesting shows, there's one thing that I find a bit disappointing. There are like three or four big-time singing TV contests. The "Got Talent" series is great in showing other kinds of talent than just singing. Thus it feels a bit extraneous to not only have singers in the "Got Talent" shows, but have them winning. There are tons of talent shows dedicated exclusively to singing; do we really need to dedicate time for them in the only big generic talent show? I don't mean that a musical, even singing, performance never fits. It can be really interesting and fitting entry if it does something special and unusual. In other words, the...

Usenet used to be ubiquitous in the 90's, and still well into the 2000's. It was the all-encompassing forum system before any other practical online forums even existed. While quite limited (you were pretty much limited to ascii text posts, with any binary attachments such as images being frowned upon), it was a very handy and useful way to have online conversations with people about a topic. And the best part of it was that the forums were very centralized. With this I don't mean that their physical location on a server was centralized (the exact opposite, in fact; all usenet news group content was distributed, shared and synchronized among thousands of usenet servers from all around the world). What I mean is that if you wanted to find discussion about a certain topic (like a programming language, or a hobby), there was usually one major newsgroup for it, so all conversations about that subject were centralized on one (or at most a few) newsgroups that anybody could fol...

Do you know what really grinds my gears, from personal experience? The constantly changing technologies in mobile platform development. So you want to develop for a mobile platform (like iOS). Thus you learn the best tools and APIs for the job, you get experience on them, and along the line, when implementing projects, you develop a series of well-crafted tightly designed helper libraries that make common tasks so much easier and faster. You become so good at it that you can implement a small project in a week. And then, a year or two later, you have to throw almost all of it to the trashcan. Those APIs and libraries will have become obsolete and antiquated, and not the best way of implementing those projects. Better services are provided, better APIs, better libraries, requirements change and expand, which can't be met with that old API... And thus 90% of those nifty helper libraries you made become useless, and you have to learn a completely new, different development envir...

(Not something that grinds my gears. Just something I find interesting.) You know how some people don't realize, for example, being color-blind until well into adulthood, usually because of some kind of test or other circumstance where they suddenly become aware that their vision isn't actually normal? Yes, it does happen. The same happens with just myopia as well. Surprisingly many people live years with a significant myopia without realizing it (and often only realize when they happen to take a vision test or similar.) It sounds unbelievable, but it does indeed happen. They have just got so used to it that they don't even realize something is not completely right about their vision. (Usually they then become painfully aware of it, especially if they have tried corrective glasses, as the difference is like day and night.) Oftentimes this happens with hidden talents too. That in itself doesn't sound that surprising, except perhaps with certain kinds of talent. Li...

I wrote in a previous post about the biggest problem with bullying: The bullies get away with it, and they know it. And that's why they do it. In many countries there have been massive anti-bullying campaigns, with millions and millions of dollars spent on them. There are appeals to emotions, there are awareness campaigns, there are education campaigns... and this has been going on for at least the past 30 years or even longer. Yet school bullying continues. Why? Because they get away with it, and they know it. That's the problem. There are no serious repercussions for bullying. They are underage, which means that they are untouchable, and we are too afraid to do anything to them. We are a culture that puts children in pedestals and consider them, essentially, gods. They are the holiest of holiest, and have absolute diplomatic immunity. No crime, no matter how horrendous it might be, has any severe consequences. They are our holy cows. We may bemoan what they are doing and...

The "uncanny valley" effect is a psychological phenomenon, where if you take objects that look more and more humanlike in their features (starting from something that doesn't resemble a human at all), using elements that are generally deemed as "cute" and pleasant to look at, there's a strange point at which the thing becomes highly disconcerting and repulsive. So a teddy bear may look cute, a doll resembling a small child may look even cuter... but the more "realistic" human features you keep adding to it, at some point, when it's getting closer and closer to looking indistinguishable from a human, it becomes really disconcerting. It just looks like there's something wrong. What was something cute and huggable suddenly becomes something that causes more or less a phobia. I have noticed, however, that there are some other things which are unrelated to that, but still may cause a sensation that's similar, and I'm wondering if the p...

For some reason many vegans are very dogmatic and religious about it. Many of them will outright distort, lie and fabricate claims, and will viciously attack critics with all the fallacies and tactics in the book. Like all other religious people who try to impose their dogma onto others, they will often try to masquerade their own principles behind good-sounding reasons, which are nevertheless just excuses. For example, one of the most common excuses is that they are vegan because of the mistreatment of farm animals. They will go on and on with sensationalistic stories and pictures of extremely poor treatment of farm animals. An appeal to emotions, essentially. But if that were the reason for their veganism, and if they are consistent about it, then surely they wouldn't have any problem in eating animal products that have been fairly and humanely produced? Will a vegan eat fish? No. Because of cows and chicken being mistreated somewhere. Will a vegan eat eggs that have be...

Copper is one of the abundant elements in the Earth's crust. Copper is also one of the most versatile and useful elements. Humanity has used copper during thousands of years very lavishly. Naturally during the past century copper has been extremely useful and used because of its electrical properties: It's a very good conductor of electricity and heat. As a conductor it's one of the best materials for all kinds of electricity transportation, as it incurs relatively low losses (unlike, for example, iron, which also has good conductivity, but incurs significantly higher losses when conducting electricity.) For this reason copper is the main material used for electrical wires, and all other sorts of electric conductors. (Copper is not the absolutely best material for this purpose, but its advantage is that it's cheap. There are better conductors, like silver and gold, but those are significantly more expensive.) However, copper is not used solely on electric wires and ...

One day I was talking with a friend about cheese, and I pondered if you could make cheese out of human milk, and what it would taste like. I bet that when you read that, you got an immediate feeling of aversion, even disgust, didn't you? But why? Don't get me wrong, I get the same feeling as well, and the thing is, I can't get rid of it no matter how much I think about it logically. (I'm not saying all people have this instinctive aversion, but most do.) Why do we have such a strong instinctive aversion towards human milk? Where is it coming from? This feeling is almost as strong as our instinctive aversion towards cannibalism. But what causes it? After all, babies drink that stuff all the time, and we think nothing of it. It's normal. It's healthy. We do not get any kind of feeling of aversion, or think about "cannibalism" in this context. So what exactly makes it different as an adult? Why the aversion and disgust? I often like to theorize ...

I have been playing video games for quite a long time (since the early 80's, in fact). I have never cared much about what kind of playable character or characters a game might have. Male, female, robot, dog, white, black, blue, neon... it doesn't make much of a difference. The important thing is the gameplay, the story, and the playability of the game. If the playable character is "empathizable" (I don't think there exists an actual word in English for this), all the better. If the character fits into the story well, all the better. Moreover, whether the playable character (or any character for that matter) in the game is, for example, a woman, or eastern Asian, or whatever, I don't think much of it. It can sometimes add some exoticism to the game (as in, for example, Mirror's Edge), but that's it. The current feminist barrage against video games during the last few years, however, is a bit changing this, and I think it's sad. You see, now wh...

Speedrunning of video games is a very interesting hobby to follow. Unassisted speedruns are often real shows of skill and expertise, and it can be real fun to watch a difficult game being completed in one tenth of the time (or even less) than a normal first-time playthrough, especially when doing so involves really skillful maneuvers that are very hard to pull off and require tons and tons of practice. It could perhaps be slightly compared to a skillful juggler, or parkour. Tool-assisted speedruns are interesting to watch because they depict, essentially, what it would look like if a superhuman perfect player played the game: A perfect playthrough as fast as possible with zero mistakes or inefficiencies. In both cases there's an important key concept involved: Playthrough. As in playing the game from beginning to end. Playing the game from beginning to end. Then they started discovering bugs, defects and glitches in various games that allowed them to skip parts, sometimes even...

" 'No boys allowed' day teaches girls about science and math " If you think that's just an isolated thing, it isn't. "Girls only" events where "boys/men are not allowed" are in fact becoming more and more popular by the year, in our modern feminist zeitgeist. These are obviously sexist to the core, and nobody cares (and even if somebody does, they are just dismissed as misogynists... never mind whether that makes any logical sense or not.) However, let's forget about that for a moment. Let's think about what the message is that they are sending to those girls. This is a very implicit message, and it is given completely inadvertently, but it is quite strongly there. And it's quite detrimental. One thing that one of the interviewed girls in the video says really digs into the crux of the problem: " I think it's a lot of fun because there is no competition. " That really reveals what these "girls only...

Just like " nationalism ", the word "capitalism" has a really negative connotation nowadays. I bet that when you read that word, you immediately got some negative feelings about it. The word "capitalism" immediately spawns thought of greedy and abusive huge megacorporations invading every market, screwing up both customers and competition, caring very little if at all about customers' rights, and which will go to any lengths necessary to make profit. They also elicit the mental image of these megacorporations going to foreign countries to abuse and deplete their natural resources and to employ cheap local labor in horrendous working conditions for a minimal salary. The word "capitalist" also spawns the thought of the greedy industrialist who abuses his workers, treating them almost like low-paid slaves. Both words also give mental pictures of huge wealth gaps between the extremely small rich majority, and the poor majority, many of them wh...

Presumption of innocence (ie. "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt") is one of the cornerstone of modern justice. It means that when a suspect is accused of a crime, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. In other words, it's the prosecution who has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. The reverse is what could be derogatorily called a "witch trial" (or perhaps "kangaroo court", although that refers more to a court system that disregards and perverts the law, rather than the law itself being perverted.) In other words, the accused is assumed to be guilty by default, and the burden of proof is on the defense to prove the innocence of the accused. If the defense fails to prove the innocence, then the default verdict is that of guilt. This presumption of guilt is all in itself a mockery of our modern justice system. However, it becomes even more egregious when the thing that has to be proven is intangible, ...

Social justice warriors are often mostly just annoying and obnoxious. Sometimes they, however, succeed in being more than just annoying. Sometimes they can get people fired from their jobs and shunned for life, for instance. However, there are also some things where modern social justice can be dangerous on a massive scale. One of them is the attempt to normalize obesity. There is a part of social justice activists that promote the strange idea that "ideal weight" is just a cultural artificial construct, and essentially just "fat shaming". They complain how the media portrays an "unrealistic" body image to people, by using skinny and fit people as this "ideal". These social justice warriors seem to think that there is no difference between people of different weights, and that idealizing one particular weight is artificial and detrimental. In other words: There's nothing wrong in being overweight. But the thing is, this isn't a body...

There was a big controversy recently when the pro wrestler Hulk Hogan apparently appeared in some kind of sex tape uttering the n-word a few times. Twenty years ago nobody would have given a flying fuck about it. (About his use of the n-word, that is. The sex tape might have been a different issue, but that's not the point.) Ten years ago he might have been slightly reprimanded by the WWE, and perhaps they would have given some kind of minor press release apologizing. Nowadays he not only gets fired from the WWE, but he gets retroactively erased completely from WWE history. He became essentially an unperson. Enough said. I don't think I even need to comment. What can I say? The entire world is becoming a totalitarian shithole. It just won't be "Big Brother" who will be watching.

While not immensely popular nor common, there are nevertheless quite many people out there who flat out claim that they are in direct communication with aliens from another star system or galaxy. I'm sure that a bit of googling will give many examples. The thing is, unlike with many other similar woo, this is something that could actually be proven with pretty much irrefutable proof... yet it just doesn't happen. (I wonder why.) Ok, the proof wouldn't be irrefutable of the "aliens" being exactly from where the person is claiming they are from, or any other characteristics that the person may have come up with to describe them. But it would be pretty much undeniable evidence of a non-human higher intelligence. These people always get very vague and wishy-washy messages about our destiny and future, and what we are doing to harm ourselves, and what we should be doing instead, and yada yada. Something that's extremely easy for anybody to come up with. Ho...

I find it rather curious, and perhaps a bit puzzling, that in terms of petty insults used by internet trolls, "autism" has pretty much replaced the older insult "retard" (which in itself pretty much replaced the even older "nerd" and "geek"). And yes, "autism", not "autistic". (Although the latter is also of course used, it seems that at least 90% of the appearances of the insult use the former form, even when it makes no sense grammatically, or even if the sentence needs to be phrased awkwardly for the word to fit. Somehow "autism" seems to feel even more offensive and provocative than "autistic", for some reason.) Or more specifically, the use of the word is not so much puzzling. Trolls will always use whichever terms are most offensive. It's the incredible widespread of the phenomenon that's a bit puzzling. It seems that no troll uses the older insults anymore, and almost every single one of t...

I have written about what I consider to be the actual "rape culture" of our modern western society here and here . I'd like to add a third form of this to the mix: This form of "rape culture" is that modern feminism has lowered the bar, the criteria, of what is considered "rape" more and more, and this has only been accelerating during the past few years. In other words, we have an actual "rape culture" in which more and more things are considered "rape", which oftentimes goes to completely ridiculous levels. We have also moved more and more away from technical definitions and physical evidence to subjective feelings. In other words, if the woman "feels" that she was "raped", then she was, completely regardless of what actually happened, and completely regardless of what the man was thinking, what his intent was, whether he crossed any lines, or whether there was any kind of coercion, forcing or manipulation...

Valve has in recent years launched a project that's effectively a "console-like" PC system. The entire system consists of a dedicated PC running SteamOS (which is a variant of Linux), a custom Steam controller (with very interesting technological innovations), and an optional streaming device. None of them is tied strictly to the others, so any component can be used on its own (if you eg. already own a gaming PC.) Especially the new Steam Controller is specifically designed to run on any PC (that can run Steam), and be extremely versatile and innovative. And from what people have reviewed, it looks extremely interesting. There is one aspect of this project, however, that's badly marring it: The "Steam Machine". Or rather, the options available. While the Steam Controller is funded and developed by Valve, and is fully their project (as far as I know), the "Steam Machines" are essentially just PC's by different manufacturers. Most of them may...