What grinds my gears

Anita Sarkeesian is, possibly, the most successful professional victim in recent history. Perhaps human history. She has succeeded in making self-victimization a million-dollar industry. That's no hyperbole or exaggeration. So far she has been given well over a million dollars, possibly several million dollars, in donation money. If the flood of money ever shows any sign of slowing down, she only needs to make yet another sappy video where she cries about how much online harassment she has received, and the floodgates of cash start flowing again. And that's not even counting all the other money she has got (including, among many other things, her speaker fees of up to $20 thousand per event.) Anita Sarkeesian is, by all intents and purposes, a millionaire who has got her money by self-victimization. She is, possibly, the most successful professional victim in history. And now she's getting even more money by being the protagonist in a "documentary" about.....

The TV series The Simpsons is one of the most popular animated series of all times. One of its most prominent characteristics is that it often parodies society in all kinds of ways. And, of course, it's full of all kinds of stereotypes. There's the bumbling overweight dad, there's the unruly rascal, there's the incompetent donut-eating police chief, there's the greedy and utterly evil old businessman and factory owner, there's there's the drunkard friend, there's the aloof hippie bus driver... and so on and so forth. And, of course, there's the stereotypical Indian character. It's actually quite surprising that the social justice warriors haven't attacked the show years ago already, precisely because of this one character. Every other one of those dozens of stereotypes is ok, but this one is horrendous! It's racist! And do you know what's even worse about it? The voice actor is... white! Stop the presses! Luckily the creative...

Many scholars who have studied religious cults, how they operate, and how they make their members subservient and obedient to the cult, have came up with lists of techniques that most such cults use in order to achieve this. One such list is the so-called "BITE" model, which stands for "Behavior control", "Information control", "Thought control" and "Emotional control". I will go through this list here, so you can see how much it fits the modern social justice ideology and how they operate. I will add my own comments to some of these entries in parentheses. Behavior Control * Promote dependence and obedience * Modify behavior with rewards and punishments (Very much so, especially with any dissent being heavily shunned and punished. Speech is also heavily controlled with punishment.) * Dictate where and with whom you live (In many universities dorms segregated by race are being demanded.) * Restrict or control sexuality * ...

In the modern regressive leftist culture it shouldn't even come as a surprise that more and more athletic organizations are allowing "transgender" athletes to compete as their opposite gender, against other people of that gender. Thus we already have examples of male wrestlers competing in the women's league, against women, male weightlifters competing in the women's league, male rubgy/football players playing in a women's team, and so on and so forth. And almost invariably they are all winning by a landslide. The latest controversy is male marathon runners being allowed to run in the women's marathon. And especially in this last case (but also in many of those previous cases), get this: It's enough for these athletes to claim that they are women. They are "transgender" pretty much because they say so. The only requirement that, for instance, the marathon organizers in question are demanding is that they are "officially" reco...

Race baiting might become prevalent in the near future, especially in the United States, perhaps in some other "progressive" countries as well. Here I'm talking about the sort of race baiting where black people (and, possibly, Arabic people, maybe in some cases Hispanic people) will deliberately look for trouble and stir controversy, eg. by taunting people, acting obnoxiously or in a disruptive manner, or any other such manner, baiting for a response. Such as, for example, going to a cafeteria or restaurant and just sit there without buying anything, and see if they are asked to either buy something or leave. (Obviously this is a reference to the recent infamous case. The difference is that people will start doing it deliberately hoping for a reaction from the establishment, such as calling the police.) If just sitting there isn't enough, they will start making a ruckus, making demands, or otherwise act obnoxiously, fishing for a response from the workers or the ma...

When the Gamergate Wikipedia article was created about four years ago, it took but a few weeks for it to be harnessed as a completely ridiculous left-wing propaganda machine, which resembled more a page from Conservapedia than from Wikipedia. (Conservapedia is rather infamous for consisting mostly of really lengthy articles that consist of almost nothing else then tiny example after tiny example, in an endless list, of whatever the article is propagandize.) Has the situation become any better in these four years? Of course not. The article has constantly changed, and while it has become slightly more neutral than what it was at its absolute worst, that's only very slightly. It's still partisan and biased as fuck, and still looks like a Conservapedia page. No better example of that is, still, the sheer amount of the words "threat" and "harassment" that appear in the article. The former currently appears 77 times, and the latter 125 times. That's stil...

There are a lot of videos and web pages out there giving advise on how to behave if you are driving a car in the United States and get stopped by the police. This advise includes keeping your hands always visible on the steering wheel (even and especially while the police officer is walking towards your car), telling the police officer what you are going to do before doing it (such as "it's in my glove compartment, I'm going to reach it", or "it's in my jacket's inside pocket, I'm going to take it out"), not making any sudden moves that may look suspicious (ie. that could be seen by the police officer as you reaching for a hidden gun), and so on and so forth. In fact, police officers themselves often give this advise, and are appreciative if people follow this, for everybody's safety. The reason for this is, of course, the abundance of gun ownership. Police officers in the United States, especially at some places, are very wary of being att...

In recent years it has become a trend among regressive leftist video game journalists to choose some random video game and start relentlessly attacking it, often for the stupidest of reasons, sometimes with no apparent reason at all. The latest victim of this trend appears to be Ubisoft's latest entry in the Far Cry series. Article after article is being written by these journalists, attacking it for the silliest of reasons. For example one of the newest such articles criticizes the game for having a blank-slate silent protagonist. A staple of video games that has been used for many decades. If one were to skim through these articles, one could easily get the impression that this game somehow glorifies American gun-happy religious ultra-conservatism. But of course that's not the case. As somebody commented somewhere, this game "is apolitical as f***". It appears to me that what irks these regressive leftist journalists is that the game depicts American conservat...

I have been thinking lately that the working class is the least appreciated group of people in current western society. Especially those people who are working in the most physically stressing, and sometimes even dangerous jobs. These are the people who make society work. They build our homes, they build all the infrastructure, such as roads, railroads and bridges, they keep the sewers working, they keep electricity working, they keep public transport working... That house you are living in? These people built it, with their hard physical labor. The fact that you open your water faucet, and water comes pouring out, day after day, year after year? These people are the ones ensuring that keeps happening. The fact that you are using your computer or cellphone right at this moment, reading this? It's thanks to these people, who keep the electric current flowing into your home. The fact that you can drive or take the bus to get wherever you need to get? The fact that that road even ex...

Many people, especially (and of course) feminists, have this notion that historically men have had the right to vote for a long, long time, and that women getting the right to vote is, relative to that, a very recent development, and the result of a hard-fought battle. If you ever encounter a person thinking like that, ask that person when exactly men got the right to vote. I'm somewhat certain that he will get stumped. Voting is a democratic process, and democracies in general are quite a new thing. The funny thing is that this pretty common knowledge, ie. that for the vast majority of history governments were oligarchic and based on inherited royalty and nobility, not based on democracy. For the longest time nobody had the right to vote, especially not the peasants nor the working class, because there was no democratic voting process. Government was owned by nobility, not elected. The funny thing about this is that people seem to forget that they know this quite well. Even...

As I have commented many, many times, one of the major reasons why VR turned out to be an almost complete failure was the exorbitant prices of the headsets at launch. When the headset costs more than a pretty decent gaming PC, and more than a high-quality 4k display (heck, you could even get a pretty decent gaming PC and a quite good-quality lower-resolution display for cheaper than a Vive), and when its use is much, much more niche than either one of those, people aren't going to exactly rush to buy one. As I have commented previously, I can guarantee that if the VR headsets costed eg. like 200€ at launch, they would have seen significantly more success (perhaps an order of magnitude bigger, perhaps even more). I don't know nor care how that would have been possible, but it's what was needed. But since eg. the HTC Vive costed 900€ at launch, there was a snowball's chance in hell for it to become successful. So, HTC is publishing an upgraded version of the headset...

The "Bully Hunters" is this new silly idea a small group of female pro gamers have had recently of forming a group that will take reports from gamers (female ones, of course) about being bullied in an online game, and will then proceed to enter said game and "grief" that particular player (ie. gang up on him and essentially make his playing as difficult as possible). In other words, a sort of revenge-bullying. As many people have pointed out, this is one of the silliest ideas that anybody has came up in a long time, and if implemented, would be extraordinarily prone to abuse. (And that's not even going into the hypocrisy of fighting bullying with bullying.) After all, how exactly is this group of people going to distinguish between genuine and false reports? How are they going to make sure that when they receive a report, it's not just somebody either trolling them, or wanting to make them go after somebody that reporter wants to bully himself, second-hand...

Fifteen years ago the United States declared war against Iraq, because it wanted to remove its then-leader Saddam Hussein from power. Iraq fabricating and owning weapons of mass destruction was used as one of the excuses for this, with little to no evidence. Almost everybody opposed this war. There were massive protests, especially from the left, against this war. Not just in the United States, but all over Europe. I still remember public transport being delayed because of protest marches here in my city (in Finland). Very recently, the United States is attacking and is probably about to declare war on Syria, because it wants to remove Bashar al-Assad from power. Alleged chemical weapon attacks, allegedly by the Syrian government, are being used as an excuse for this, with little to no evidence. (There is no definitive evidence that any such attack has taken place at all, and isn't just a fabrication by Isis. And even if the attack did happen, there is a ton of evidence that it...

I might have already said this in a past blog post, but I wanted to make it its own separate, clearer prediction post, rather than it being buried inside some other one: The regressive left, especially in the United States, has been pounding on and on about how Donald Trump is a dictator, and how his "regime" is a totalitarian one, and how they have to fight against it by all means necessary. They had this narrative a year and a half ago, and they still maintain this narrative as strong as ever. If Donald Trump gets to the end of his presidential term (and, possibly, to the end of his next presidential term assuming he is re-elected), and when none of the fears of the regressive left, of the United States becoming a totalitarian fascist regime, come to fruition, they will not admit that they were wrong, and that Donald Trump wasn't, in fact, the dictator they claimed him to be. Instead, they will double down on these claims, and still maintain all those allegations....

Enrolling in some martial arts classes of certain styles can give a false impression of being actually a useful form of self-defense. Many such styles claim and give the appearance of being very practical down-to-earth styles, concentrating on what "actually works" rather than just flashy choreography and scripted moves. Yet, time and again, even people who have actively studied such disciplines for years and have achieved very high ranks, may get easily beaten up if they get into an actual street fight. Suddenly nothing of what they have learned seems to matter, none of the moves they have practiced countless hours seem to work, they never seem to get the opportunity to perform these highly-practiced moves (no matter how "practical" and "down-to-earth" they seemed to be), and the whole mess becomes just a mindless and ugly brawl that doesn't resemble in the slightest the training sessions, where the physically stronger and/or bigger/heavier guy prob...

Flat-earthism has in recent years become a kind of internet meme, with tons of people making fun of it, creating memes about it, and trolling about it. This is because it seems a very small minority of people, especially in the United States (where else?) honestly and literally believe that Earth is flat, and that there's a world-wide Satanic conspiracy to fool people into believing that it's a globe. (It's of course hard to tell from any single person whether they are trolling or whether they are true believers. Poe's Law is in full effect here. However, it seems that at least some people truly and honestly believe it.) If you ever encounter a flat Earth believer in real life, and especially if they happen to have a flat Earth map at hand, here are some arguments and questions you can present to them using that map, and also an additional bonus argument at the end. (You could of course also present these online, but I think these are much more effective in person, b...

One thing you notice is that, for some reason, there seems to be some kind of strange epidemic of attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Asperger Syndrome, and high-functioning autism, in the United States. For some reason these conditions seem much more prevalent there than in any other country in the world. Is this because medical diagnosis of these conditions is so much more advanced there than anywhere else? Or might it be, perhaps, that these things are over-diagnosed because American pharmaceutical megacorporations are pressuring medical doctors to diagnose these things, and prescribe treatment medication for them? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this isn't actually such a bold claim, and there's plenty of evidence that big pharma does pressure doctors into prescribing their drugs. Some children are more hyperactive than others. Children have tons and tons of energy, and they can run around all day without ge...

With the recent release of the move Ready Player One , social justice warrior journalists have, once again, taken the opportunity to demonize and vilify the Gamergate movement, even though it hasn't really been a thing for a couple of years now. Apparently there's some extremely tenuous connection between the two things. Or no connection at all, necessarily; they just love to beat the dead horse. It seems that they just can't get over it. They need to get pounding on it and use it as a weapon. If anything, that shows how effective the movement was. It shook them to the core, and they just can't get over it. One thing I have noticed is that the social justice warriors don't seem to have a good definition of what they think "Gamergate" was. If you ask a gamergater, the definition is relatively simple, straightforward, and unambiguous: It was a consumer revolt against corruption in gaming journalism, and against the anti-gamer sentiments prevalent in s...

More and more experts on the field of psychology, sociology and cultural behavior, as well as more and more experts on actual social media development, have been raising concerns that modern social media websites like Facebook and Twitter have not only on the youth ("millenials"), but society as a whole, especially in the near future. As I have commented in a past blog post, and as has been presented in many excellent interviews and speeches by experts, the modern social media is both extremely addictive and detrimental, especially to young people who are growing up. Social media, and the extreme easy access to it from anywhere you are (ie. using smartphones) is creating a generation of shallow people who are addicted to instant gratification and are unable to empathize and form deep social bonds. Humans require deep social bonds, a small circle of people who they know extremely well, can open up to, and have long, deep conversations with, in order to become balanced, p...

If you were to ask the average person how he would call a social environment where people are being respected, they feel comfortable, they can voice their opinions, and nobody is being rude or inconsiderate against each other nor upset each other, you would probably get a variety of answers. They could be things like "amicable", "friendly", "comfortable", "nice", "cozy", "warm", or a myriad of other such adjectives. I doubt, however, that the average person would use the word "safe". The word "safe" is usually used for environments where there could be some potential danger of physical harm. For example a steel factory, or a coal mine, or a construction site, could be seen as "unsafe" because of the physical hazards, which in the case of accidents could cause serious injury or even death, and talking about "safety" in these environments makes sense. The word "safe", or ...

The issue of "fake news" has seen much debate lately. Video compilation after video compilation is showing how literally, and without exaggeration, dozens of different American news networks are repeating on air the exact same scripts , word for word. There is no independent journalism and fact-checking of any kind. All these news networks are just blindly repeating the same stories, often word-for-word, without doing any research for themselves. The actual source of this script is usually undisclosed. Several journalists have been filmed by hidden cameras saying how stories are being fabricated simply for the ratings. Moreover, some journalists, whistleblowers, have outright come out and made public presentations about fabricated biased news stories being repeated by news networks, with zero fact-checking. Independent fact-checking by these few journalists has shown diverse sources for these fabricated stories, such as the CIA, or pharmaceutical megacorporations selling a...