What grinds my gears

Feminist answer: Because men are misogynists. Actual answer: Because men respect women. That answer might sound completely nonsensical at first, but let me explain. (Also, I'm not saying that there exist no men who don't want women in their playgroups because of very sexist reasons. Of course there are. However, I'd argue that those are a minority. In the majority of cases where this happens, the reason is rather different, which I'll explain below.) Think of it what you want, but on average men's psychology is different from women's. Men do not get easily offended, and are rather stoic. When men who are close friends are engaged in a hobby, they often like to trashtalk. This trashtalk may sometimes even sound highly offensive and insulting to an outsider. Some of it might even be technically speaking "sexist", even though the men aren't actually sexist in the least. That's just trashtalk. And that's just how men's brains work. ...

Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully congregate to express opinions and so on and so forth are some of the most fundamental core values of a modern free society, most often, in most countries, expressed in the most fundamental guiding document of the government, ie. the so-called "constitution". The constitution is an attempt to guide and limit the government in order to protect individual rights, freedoms and equality, and stop the government from trampling over and infringing its citizens' fundamental rights. There's a great irony in this, however. You see, dissemination of anti-constitutional ideologies, ie. ideologies that seek to limit or even annul the country's constitution itself, is, quite ironically, protected by the constitution. (It would indeed be quite contradictory and even hypocritical for a constitution to say, essentially, "all speech is protected, except anti-constitutional speech.") These basic free...

On the 18th of September 2015, ie. almost exactly two months ago (as of writing this blog post), I made a comment on Facebook about the European mass refugee immigration, and how Europe has finally lost its mind, pretty much opening its borders to anybody who just wants to come in. I predicted that within six months there will be the first terrorist attack by "refugees" (either actual refugees, or islamic terrorists pretending to be ones.) Well, it took only two months for my prediction to become true. To the surprise of nobody. (The exact time and place of the attack was of course unpredictable, but not the fact that a terrorist attack in the very near future is inevitable. And what do you know.) The attack didn't surprise me in the least. However, it does anger me quite a lot. I feel anger for the fact that people have to pay with their lives for this European madness. Citizens whose opinion on the subject of opening the borders was not asked. Citizens whose tax mon...

As I wrote in a previous blog post , modern "progressive" feminism is highly authoritarian, and seeks to control, censor, silence, ban and even criminalize dissenting opinion. It is, in fact, becoming more and more frequent for such social justice warriors to outright openly say that free speech is a bad thing, an antiquated concept, and that it should be limited. Many of them aren't even beating around the bush about it, but just outright state it. The frightening thing is that this exact branch of "progressive" feminism, the highly authoritarian and anti-constitutional kind, is extremely virulent, and extremely powerful. It is represented not only by regular citizens, but all the way to high-ranking officials, politicians, members of the press, university professors, and so on. And in an alarmingly increasing manner. Feminism, the wrong authoritarian kind, appropriates and invades everything. It's like Scientology: Infiltrate every major branch of our ...

Among many C++ programmers, there's an extremely strange aversion to using the std:: prefix for names in the standard library (which is why you see C++ code out there littered with the " using namespace std; " statement, and a complete avoidance of the std:: prefix.) There is a common sentiment among these people that the prefix makes the code more unreadable. This notion is extremely prevalent all the way from complete beginners to university professors teaching C++. Yet I have never seen an actual rational argument for this. It seems to me that these people are just repeating the notion simply because they were taught it, and everybody else is saying it. It's like a form of cargo-cult programming: Hating something for no good reason, simply because everybody else hates it too. And the thing is, many of these people will defend that notion vehemently, even aggressively. No matter what kind of logical counter-arguments you make, they won't budge. There is,...