What grinds my gears

The modern feminist social justice narrative is that there is "systemic" sexism and racism in our western society, and that's one of the things that they are fighting to correct. What do they mean by that word, "systemic"? They mean that sexism and/or racism is not just something that some individual people engage in, but that our very society is inherently sexist and racist, inherently biased to favor one gender over the other, or one race over the others. But these claims always end up being really vague and without proper evidence. At what level, exactly, is this sexism and racism entrenched in our society? At the legal level? Are there laws that favor one gender over the other, or one race over the others? Most certainly not. Not only is equal treatment a core principle written in most, if not all, constitutions of all countries that have a constitution, but moreover almost invariably there exist laws that forbid and punish unequal treatment based on...

Modern progressive feminist social justice has all the hallmarks of a religious cult. And like all religious cults, it has its share of quasi-supernatural notions and ideas. One of these is "privilege". This is like the original sin of Catholicism: If you are white, you have "privilege" for that sole reason. It's innate, and it stains you like a sin. It doesn't matter if you are completely broke, with literally zero money or property, living in a cardboard box under a bridge, dressed in rags, having to loot garbage cans in back alleys to find some thrown-away food to survive, and have been in this situation for decades, you are still "privileged" for the sole reason that your skin is white. (At the same time a multi-millionaire world-famous highly successful actor or businessman, with a humongous mansion and his own private jet, is "oppressed" if his skin happens to be darker.) A related (and quite racist) concept is that of "whi...

There is a quite common notion that the media at large, especially movies, TV series and video games, very often convey a very stereotypical notion of masculinity, ie. the message is that men are tough and stoic, and show no emotion, and they especially don't cry, and if some man cries, it's a sign of weakness, and shameful, and unmanly. I would posit, however, that this is just a myth. One of those myths that has somehow formed, and that most people believe, even though nobody can cite examples or point to actual cases. It's just commonly believed to be true... mostly because everybody else believes it to be true, and nothing else. After all, from the hundreds of thousands, even millions of movies, TV series and video games out there, can you name even one that conveys the above message? One single example from the millions? There certainly exist a few such works where somebody expresses that sentiment, ie. castigates somebody for crying or showing emotional weakne...

I wrote previously a blog post about the " SJW privilege stack ", where I presented the phenomenon that feminist social justice warriors divide people into groups and give more or less privileges and protection to those people depending on which group they belong to. People higher on the stack can take advantage of, discriminate against, bully, harass and sometimes even commit violence and even murder against people lower on the stack, and the feminist SJWs will hurry to defend the perpetrators. Of course people lower on the stack cannot do that to people higher on the stack. I posited that white men are at the very bottom of the barrel. The sub-human scum that has no rights and everybody else can discriminate against and do anything they want to them, and feminists will defend the perpetrator. I was, however, slightly incorrect on this. White men are not, in fact at the very bottom. There is one group that's even lower: Jews. That's right. To feminist social ju...

I have noticed a strange, and strangely common, trend with many "top X something" videos on YouTube. In particular, where that "something" refers to events for which there exist video footage: Rather than showing said video footage, instead they just present a slideshow of still images, while some dude tells you about the events. Oftentimes those images aren't even from event being described, but something else entirely. I have watched by now like a dozen or so videos. For example, there was one named "10 epic summer olympic fails". Olympics is one of the most televised events in history, so obviously there exist video footage of most or all of such "fails". But the video instead just showed a slideshow of still images (often not even from said events), while some bloke narrated. This seems to be becoming more and more common. Show, don't tell! I'm not interested in hearing about it. I'm interested in seeing it! These vide...

The role of an encyclopedia is to simply cite facts, and do so in a tone that is as neutral as possible. Encyclopedias should not have biases (especially not political biases) or agendas, and they should most definitely not engage in propaganda. They should simply document dry facts, with sources, and that's it. Moreover, encyclopedias are not newspapers or magazines: They shouldn't contain opinion pieces, or the opinions of the author's, or take stances. So, what happens when an encyclopedia is editable by anybody, with no central authority or editorial staff, and it becomes immensely popular, the most read encyclopedia in the entire world? Well, quite inevitably, even with seemingly high standards of quality, many groups of people will try to use it for their own agendas, to use it for propaganda, trying to circumvent the rules of neutrality and standards by using faux-neutrality. Now tell me if these are neutral, dry, fact-based, unbiased, non-propagandist articles w...

The new Suicide Squad movie has received criticism for being sexist. Because of course it is. After all, everything is sexist (and racist, and homophobic). We are, literally, reaching a point where every single thing will cause an enormous backlash from social justice warriors. It's pretty much automatic: If something is popular enough, the social justice warriors will be there to either attack it, or try to appropriate it. We are reaching a point where nothing of any significance can be done without a mob of online SJWs attacking it. They have learned that if they make noise, people will listen to them; articles will be written about them, and producers will hurry to placate to them. It's essentially attention-seeking: Cry out loudly, and people will hurry to placate to your every whim. How long will this last? When will we reach the tipping point where society will finally say that enough is enough? That this is getting completely ridiculous. When will we, as a society, ...

I have been writing blog post after blog post about how disappointed I am in VR, and how much it sucks. I don't seem to get enough of it, and just let it be. You  might ask why. The reason is pretty simple: This often happens when I'm really, really excited about something, anxiously waiting for it, or actively participating in it, and then it turns out to be a complete let-down, a complete disappointment. In other words, when my utter excitement turns into utter disappointment. It can be amazingly frustrating. When plans for the Oculus Rift were first announced over three years ago, it really picked my curiosity. I was slightly skeptical at first because I didn't know back then how exactly the technology would work, and how it would be possible. However, once I learned the technical details of how a VR headset works, and especially after I got to try the first Oculus Rift Development Kit, I got really excited about VR. The DK1 is, of course, extremely primitive compa...

I created this blog to vent steam, and to rant about things, sometimes seriously, sometimes just for the fun of it. However, during the years I have kind of been using this as my generic blog, and found myself from time to time writing posts that are not rants nor complaints, but just random interesting things, most often about video games and technology. I have usually prepended such posts with "this isn't something that grinds my gears", and wondered several times if I should just create a new blog for these neutral and positive posts. Well, I finally got around doing that. You can find the introductory blog post here . I copied most of my neutral and positive blog posts there, so don't be surprised by the repetition. There are already a few new posts, though.

One thing I have always loved about modern Linux distros is how laughably easy it is to install any program or library available for said distro. As an example, suppose I want to write some C++ code and want to use gcc (or more precisely g++) to compile it. Suppose it's not already installed in the system. What to do? Well, it's pretty simple. Just write "apt-get install g++" in a terminal, and that's it (at least in most linux distros; others have similar package managers, eg. zypper.) But maybe it needs a bunch of other programs and libraries that are not installed in the system? You don't need to worry because it automatically checks all these dependencies and will also install anything that g++ needs to work. But perhaps you don't like writing commands on a terminal, and instead would like a more graphical solution? Again, not a problem, in most distros. For example in OpenSuse you just launch the graphical package manager, write "g++" ...

There's yet again a feminist article at buzzfeed making the rounds, called " How Much of a Feminist Are You? " with 50 claims that allegedly help answering that question. I'm not interested in any kind of score or results, but I'll respond to the claims verbally here, just for the fun of it. 1: I would be willing to give up some of my salary if I had to, so that equal pay in my workplace could be a reality. Absolutely not. Every person ought to be paid based on merit, not based on their genitals. 2: I believe that men and women should be equal. Equal in what? This question is too non-specific to answer.     3: I can’t help but be bothered when a song includes misogynistic lyrics, even when I otherwise like the song. Knowing the broad feminist definition of "misogynist", I have to answer in the negative.   4: ...