What grinds my gears

It is a well-known and well-recognized phenomenon that when a person gets older, time seems to pass much quicker. Meaning that, for instance, a year feels much shorter than it did when one was young. As a young kid, a year felt like an extraordinarily long period of time. Things that happened a year earlier feel like they happened a really, really long ago, and that tons and tons of things have happened since those times. However, the older you get, the more "compressed" time starts feeling. As a 10-year-old, things that happened a year earlier feel like really distant, having happened a really, really long time ago. As a 40-year-old, however, things that happened a year earlier feel like they just happened a bit ago. In fact, even longer periods of time don't feel that long. Even when fully realizing the exact amount of time that has passed, one still can't get rid of that feeling that they happened "not so long ago". One thing I have noticed this p...

Need I even say more? Source .

For a few years now some feminists have created this complete nontroversy about what they call "the pink tax" where, they claim, women's products are more expensive than men's products, which, they say, ends up costing women thousands of dollars more per year than men. Like "women's razors" are more expensive than "men's razors" and so on. Firstly, and most obviously, this a completely and absolutely asinine thing to complain about and try to make it into a controversy. Why? Because nobody is forcing you to buy the more expensive product . For fuck's sake. Why does this even have to be stated? It's a free country. Buy whatever product you want. There is no law that says you have to purchase the more expensive "women's" version of the product. They always talk as if they were somehow forced to buy the more expensive product. Secondly, and more damningly, whenever you see a video of theirs about this subject, they ar...

People have all kinds of misconceptions about what is and isn't "socialism". Many people even have these misconceptions about their own country . I have seen, for example in the comment section of YouTube videos dealing with socialism vs. capitalism, countless people from all around the world, such as Europe, Canada, South Korea, etc. saying that their country is "partially socialist". The reason for this is something I already commented in a previous blog post : People confuse "social services" (in all of their forms) with "socialism". Just because the word "social" is used in both concepts doesn't make them related. Socialism is a form of government where the state owns all means of production of the country. All the industry, all the corporations, all commerce. There are no private corporations, and there is no private ownership of the means of production. The economy is owned and run by the state. (In socialism people ...

According to polls, approximately 85 to 90 percent of Americans consider themselves Christian. Approximately 80% of Americans think that the Bible is either directly the words of God, or inspired by God. Yet surprisingly few of these people actually own a Bible, or has ever read one. Even fewer know almost anything of what the Bible says, apart from a very cursory knowledge of a few passages taught at Sunday school. You could make up vaguely biblical-sounding passages, which aren't actually in the book (or anything even close), fake passages that anybody with even a modicum of knowledge of the book would quickly recognize as fake, and ask random people, who think of themselves as Christians, if these are passages from the Bible, and many would probably say yes. (Conversely, there are many passages that are in the Bible, but which many of these people would probably guess are not, if the question is posed as "which of these passages are from the Bible and which are made up...

Since to most people from outside the United States (including myself) it's easy to confuse the terms "Democratic Party" and "Republican Party", here's a quick reminder of what they are: The "Democratic Party" is the one on the "left" of the political spectrum (in the American sense), espousing social liberalism and progressivism. Their latest presidential candidate was Hillary Clinton. The "Republican Party" is the one on the "right" of the political spectrum, espousing conservatism and classical liberalism. Their latest presidential candidate was Donald Trump. Democrats, at large, strive for many things that are easy to agree with (depending, of course, on your personal views), especially from outside the country, such as environmentalism, stricter gun control, free universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, taxing corporations more heavily, and so on. Republicans, however, on average tend to espouse id...

What does it look like if you film somebody putting on sunscreen, using an UV camera (iow. a camera with a filter that only lets UV light pass, and translates it to visible shades of gray)? It looks like this: And what does that look like? So I'm calling it now: If SJWs get hold of this, they will start hollering about "blackface", and demand that white people stop using sunscreen. It wouldn't even be the most idiotic and asinine thing they have ever said.

So a couple of days ago one of the biggest political meetings happened, when Trump met Putin in Helsinki for some dialogue. Trump's message was quite clear: He wants to improve international relationships, not only with Russia, but with all countries. He wants to mend fences. He prefers diplomacy over conflict. He wants points of disagreement and grievance among nations to be discussed and solved diplomatically. He prefers amicable cooperation between nations. He wants deals that benefit every involved party. Who could disagree with this sentiment? Well, this is Donald Trump we are talking about. If it had been for example Barack Obama, everybody would be lauding his message and his diplomatic work. But this isn't Obama. This is Trump, so of course it must be a horrible crime against humanity. And, of course, the regressive left doesn't like it. Apparently now cooperating and improving international relationships with Russia is treason. Because of course it is. Wh...

I have noticed a trend in the modern widespread social justice ideology: The escalation and radicalization of ideas, and the dropping of pretenses and excuses. You don't have to go many years to the past to see that the most common sentiment expressed by social justice warriors was "we don't hate men", even when it was quite clear that they did. Nowadays it has become more and more common that they openly, blatantly and unashamedly just say that they do. All pretenses have been dropped. In the recent past they kept saying that all they want is equality, and that they support people's rights, such as freedom of speech, even when they clearly didn't. Nowadays it's becoming more and more common for them to just be open about it, and outright state that they don't want, and oppose, freedom of speech, and that they don't want equality (they want "equity", and they explicitly define it as being different from equality. "Equity" ...

Social justice warriors love to either take an existing word with a negative connotation (such as "racism"), or invent completely new made-up words (such as "mansplaining"), and then just change their original meaning to serve their narrative, and use them as generic insults and accusations with little to no meaning, diluting them into meaning essentially nothing. I have previously written how they did this to the word "mansplaining" . Here I'll deal with the word "gaslighting". In principle, "gaslighting" is a kind of psychological trick where one person convinces another person to doubt their own memory or experience about something. The first person plants the seeds of doubt into the second person's mind, to make them doubt their memory on something. Did it really happen like you remember? Are you absolutely sure you remember it correctly? Other people did not witness the event in the same way as you. Perhaps you are just...

Some years ago here in Finland, in the city I live in, there was a case of arson against a pizzeria owned by African immigrants. Three people (all native Finns, unrelated to the pizzeria) living in that same building died. The media at large, and several politicians, quickly condemned this atrocity, and demanded stern measures against this kind of racist xenophobic crimes. Back then many critics noted that all of these people were really jumping the gun. The police had published no information about the investigation or any suspects. The media furor was still quite great. To them, this was a clear-cut case of racism in Finland. The perfect incident. A week or two later the police announced their findings: It turned out that the arson was committed by the two sons of the owner of the pizzeria, apparently in some kind of insurance fraud attempt. The narrative of the media changed quite radically. Suddenly all the outrage and the sensationalism was gone. But did they apologize for h...

Some social media websites, such as Facebook, allow you to, and sometimes even openly suggest that you enter as much information about yourself as possible, such as where you work, which city you live in, what different schools you have been in, your relationship status, who your friends are, your age, sex, and so on and so forth. Sites like Facebook have an extraordinary amount of details that can be entered into your profile. In theory, and principally, sites like Facebook use this information to make friend suggestions. If it notices that somebody else is the same age as you, lived in the same places, went to the same schools as you and so on, the site may suggest that this person might be an acquaintance of yours, and offer a chance of classifying that person as a friend at the website. These sites oftentimes make it very enticing and tempting to enter all this info. However, before you do any of that, stop for a second to think: Do you really want to enter all this informati...

Check out this article: Robert Duncan McNeill Explains Why He Won’t Be Directing ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2 Let me quote the interesting parts: The last few years, there’s been a seismic shift in terms of the priorities toward female and diverse directors. That reality now has meant that what used to be normal, which was a lot of white guys, to be quite honest, has changed. [...] But, to answer your question, Discovery does a limited number of episodes and a priority there is to get female and diverse directors, so there are fewer opportunities for people like me, which is a great thing. Let me extract that one part to really emphasize it: there are fewer opportunities for people like me, which is a great thing. I'm speechless. I don't think I even need to say anything.

Some people argue that all recreational drugs should be legalized and regulated. All of them. Not just just cannabis, but every single one of them, including cocaine, heroine... the whole bunch. The argument goes that the situation with drugs is like with alcohol: When alcohol was prohibited in many countries, it caused an explosion of crime and violence because of all the illegal production and trafficking of alcohol. When alcohol was once again legalized and regulated, most of that crime disappeared (being pretty much restricted to the few moonshiners, who seldom commit any more serious crimes, as well as people trying to evade taxes by bringing alcohol surreptitiously from outside the the country.) The same situation, says the argument, would happen with drugs: If all of them were legalized, and could just be purchased from shops, like alcohol is, all that crime would go away. No illicit production, no drug trafficking, no violent criminal drug cartels... As an additional bonus,...

Traditionally and historically (at least in the past 100 years or so), a socio-political "conservative" was someone who had a strong stance towards retaining (or going back to) traditional societal norms and values, generally of very prudish nature. Conservatives often acted as self-appointed "moral police" of society, protesting, acting against, and introducing legislation against anything that they considered immoral, lewd, or detrimental to society (especially the youth). They were very much pro-censorship, and banning anything that they deemed inappropriate or dangerous. They had very traditional, strict, and usually very religious views on romantic relationships and marriage, and wanted to exert great amount of control over people's sex life (eg. sex before or outside marriage is fornication and adultery, and if not illegal, it either should be, or at the very least it should be very shunned and frowned upon.) Quite often, conservative people promoted str...

Theresa May, the current Prime Minister (as of writing this at least) of the United Kingdom, was a "remainer" (ie. she did not want the UK to leave the EU) before she became Prime Minister. When the Brexit poll results were settled, at first she seemed to go along with it quite nicely, giving strong motivational speeches about how the United Kingdom will respect the voice of the people, and how the country will be stronger than ever, and has nothing to worry about. That was either a facade, or she somehow changed her mind, because in the subsequent years she seemed to reverse her policies pretty much completely. Rather than taking a firm decisive stance on Brexit and quickly make it a reality, as she had promised in her initial speeches, the excuses and the endless delays started appearing instead. Delay after delay after delay. The narrative changed quickly from a "hard Brexit" into a "soft" one... to be done in two years... or four... or six... or so...

As I have commented in a past blog post, the 2016 presidential election of the United States was really important. Not because Trump would be the best president in existence, but because the election result was a hit in the collective faces of the leftist media. The media thought that it controls the narrative and it decides the results of elections. (It's hilarious to watch compilation videos where news outlets were giving completely made-up figures like 98% chances that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and opinion pieces on how Trump's defeat would be unprecedented in the history of the country, and would be an enormous blow to the conservative party. The faces of these reporters is worth watching when the reality of things started dawning on them. It's priceless.) So no, the media doesn't elect presidents. The people elect presidents. Unfortunately the leftist media, and the left, didn't learn anything from this. Instead, an absolutely insane Trump derangement...

Nowadays, to the average consumer there seems to be little to no difference between a TV and a computer display monitor. They look the same, they use the same technologies, they use the same resolutions and refresh rates, they have HDMI input... The only difference seems to be physical size. When computer display monitors, even 4k ones, have typical diagonal sizes of about 24-32 inches, TVs tend to have diagonal sizes of 40, 50 and even more inches. If you are purchasing a new display primarily for gaming, even (or especially) if it's console gaming, which kind of display should you purchase? After all, a huge 50-inch 4k TV sounds enormously cooler for gaming, especially for console gaming, than some tiny 27-inch 4k display. And with the prices of both types of display coming down by the month, the TVs aren't necessarily even any more expensive than the computer displays. (Indeed, you can already find both decent 4k TVs and decent 4k monitors in the ballpark of 500€, sometime...

If you happen to be a long-time reader of this blog, you might have noticed that I occasionally write about speedruns. I'm quite an avid viewer, especially when it comes to certain games. You might also have noticed that I have a strong aversion towards certain speedrunning techniques which I'm not very fond of, as I think they go against the spirit of what speedrunning should be about. The spirit of speedrunning is playing a game from beginning to end as fast as possible, showing extraordinary playing skill that only very few people have attained. Big emphasis on the word "playing", in both cases I used it there. Once the speedrun starts using techniques that are not part of actually playing the game, that's when I start growing a distaste. The more removed from actual in-game gameplay a technique is, ie. the more of a non-gameplay "metafeature" something is, and the more heavily it influences the game, the more I dislike it. Some of them might be t...

There seems to be a lot of confusion, especially among American leftist millenials, what the term "socialism" means. Particularly, there seems to be a rather widespread misconception among them that most western-European countries are socialist. The confusion might stem from the fact that the word "social" has so many different meanings and uses when it comes to how a country is run. For example, that word is used in terms like "social security", "social services", "social safety net", and so on. Thus, they think, that if a country has a very prominent social safety net, eg. in the form of free public healthcare and free social services for those in need, that makes the country "socialist". But that's not what "socialism" means. Socialism is, in fact, very closely related to communism. One could say that "socialism is a slightly lighter version of communism." Like with communism, the main aspect of ...

Fueled by the Trump Derangement Syndrome, especially in the United States a larger and larger movement, which in that country is even starting to take hold of more and more of the Democratic Party (ie. the "liberal party", ie. from the two majority political parties the one on the "left" side of the political spectrum), has formed that not only wants unrestricted immigration and stopping all deportations, but in fact actively wants to go so far as to remove the entire concept of the country having borders, and the country existing at all. This is no exaggeration or wild interpretation. This is directly and exactly what they are saying. All of these people are extreme xenophiles. They just love immigrants (non-white ones, of course, because all white people are evil.) To them mass immigration is pretty much essentially their religion. They can't stop gushing about it. It seems that all these people live in some kind of fantasy world where they think that if i...

I commented in a previous blog post how user interfaces experienced a period of becoming fancier and fancier during the 90's and well into the 2000's but then, for some reason, everybody started going into the exact opposite direction. To a ridiculous extreme. Consider, for example, the window decorations in Windows 7 vs. Windows 10: The latter removes pretty much all usability features, such as lines that delineate button edges and separate different logical sections. All distinguishing colors have also been removed. Button symbols have been changed into 1-pixel-wide lines. MacOS X isn't faring much better. Compare the upper left corner of Finder from a much earlier version of the operating system to the newest one: While colors have not been completely removed (which by this point I wouldn't even be surprised if they did), they have been severely muted. Everything looks flat, and lines delineating different elements have been almost completely faded awa...

"Anti-fascists", or "antifa", has gained a lot of traction in the past year and a half, not only in the United States but pretty much everywhere else in the western world, mostly thanks to the strange psychological phenomenon that's informally called "Trump Derangement Syndrome". In a way, antifa is very similar to feminism, in that it has essentially hijacked and appropriated a past movement, and tries to ride on its fame in order to enact policies that are rather different. In the case of feminism, modern feminism tries to ride on the so-called "first-wave" and "second-wave" feminist movements, which fought for women's suffrage and equal rights, but are now trying to enact policies that often go contrary to fundamental human rights. In the same way, "antifa" is trying to ride on the fame of the resistance movements that opposed Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and other fascist dictators of the past. Like fe...

As told by Aftonbladet , and recounted by Sputnik News , a bath house in Sweden tried an inclusive day, where anybody could use any locker room they wanted. A couple of relevant quotes from the article: A feminist LGBT initiative of introducing a "Queer Day" at a Malmö bathhouse, allowing visitors themselves to choose between men's or women's locker rooms hasn't quite attained the sought-after effect. Instead, it has resulted in an influx of men staring at naked women's bodies, a backlash the initiators have attributed to "patriarchy." "They were everywhere, in the showers, in the restrooms, in the locker rooms and on the bathing bridges. The place was teeming with men, and not by transgender ones judging by what I could see. The whole thing felt incredibly unpleasant. I did not know what it looked like on the men's side, though," Jeanette Larsson described her visit to the daily newspaper Aftonbladet. Need I even comment an...