What grinds my gears

Barely a week can go by without yet another corporation announcing, essentially, that they will fully embrace social justice ideology, identity politics and discrimination in hiring. Corporation after corporation is announcing how they are planning to change their policies, how they will enact "anti-bias training" (which seems to be a really popular buzzword these days), how they are hiring "diversity officers" (that's not a satirical moniker; it's the actual term they are using; yes, "diversity officer", implying some kind of position of authority) and so on. Buzzwords like "diversity", "equity", "inclusive", etc. will be thrown freely and abundantly. Note that it's "equity", not "equality". There's a difference. Even the social justice ideology has started making that difference. They used to claim they want equality, but they have pretty much stopped doing that, because they have stopp...

I have been watching quite many "First Amendment Audit" videos lately (and I might make a more elaborate blog post about them some time), and I have noticed that many people have rather distinctive misconceptions about the legality of public photography. Since these videos are all made in the United States, these misconceptions seem to be most prevalent there, but they may well be quite common in many other countries as well. Here are the three most common misconceptions I have noticed: 1) "It's illegal to photograph/film somebody in a public place without their permission." Many people in these videos outright state things like "you don't have my permission to film me, what you are doing is illegal". This seems to be a very widely held belief. Yet, they are completely mistaken. There is no expectation of privacy in public, and it's completely legal to film anything you can see from a public space, including people. You don't need to ...

In general, racism is prejudice, antipathy, dislike, hostility or acts of discrimination against people based primarily on their race. Social justice warriors are quite happy with that definition when it comes to racism (or alleged racism) by white people against non-white people. However, if the racism is against white people, suddenly goalposts are moved, and additional requirements are imposed (which aren't in the first case). In order to be "actual" racism, to be "truly" racist, not only do you have to engage in prejudice or discrimination, but you have to be in a position of power in society, else it doesn't count. It somehow doesn't count if only the thinking, the attitude, is prejudiced, if you can't act upon it. (But, of course, only when the attitude is in this direction, ie. against white people, not the reverse.) Well, how about the biggest news corporation in the United Kingdom, which is government-funded? Is that "being in power...

On April of this year I made the prediction that after Trump's presidency is over, and none of the things that the regressive left is fear-mongering about him come to fruition (he did not establish a totalitarian regime, he did not mass-murder people, he did not create concentration camps for immigrants, he did not start World War 3...), they will not admit having been wrong about Trump. Instead, they will double-down on their claims and maintain that they were right, but it was precisely their activism that stopped Trump from enacting all those things, somehow. I would like to amend that prediction a bit further: In addition to the above, for years and years after Trump's presidency the regressive left will invent all kinds of lies about things that Trump allegedly did, even though he never did them. These will be either complete fabrications, or complete exaggerations of things he actually did. These lies and fabrications will go even further than what they are doing n...

Xenophobia, in general, is a generic distrust of foreigners, especially people from countries and cultures that are very different from one's own. In the modern social justice vocabulary xenophobia is just yet another aspect of "racism", and they will happily call anybody who shows xenophobia as a "racist". However, they are not actually the same thing. Racism is prejudice, distrust, hostility or discrimination based on race, on the ethnicity of people. It's when someone sees, for example, a black person as exactly that, a black person, and has strong prejudices against that person precisely because he's black. It doesn't matter if that person has been born in the same country, lived all of his life in the same country, and even has fully adopted the culture of the country, acting exactly as everybody else. The prejudice is not based on that person being of a foreign culture, but based on on that person's race. Xenophobia, on the other hand...

Internet Explorer was the first web browser developed by Microsoft, starting in 1995, for their Windows 95 operating system. Over its first decade or so of existence, it became extremely infamous for being really low-quality, being quite loose with the HTML and HTTP standards of the time, and breaking tons of things. Its infamy became worsened by the fact that due to it being bundled with all versions of Windows, and the default browser in them, millions and millions of people used it as their default and only browser. Especially in these early years of the WWW and HTML, the incompatibilities and custom behavior that Internet Explorer had compared to other more compliant browsers caused endless headaches for web servers and web page creators and administrators. (Some things were so bad that a misconfigured web server would in some cases still show correctly in Internet Explorer because it played so fast and loose with HTTP and HTML, while browsers that were more compliant would show th...

When I was going to university (in the late 90's) here in Finland, I had a friend there who was almost hilariously xenophilic. (Of course back then I didn't think much of it, or even knew the concept, but in retrospect it's a bit hilarious.) He quite often gushed about transfer students, for some reason. In fact, he quite quickly (during his first or second year, don't remember exactly anymore) volunteered as a tutor for transfer students. He loved to hang out with them, especially ones from South America and the southest European countries. (Back in the 90's Arabic and African transfer students were pretty much non-existent here, but I'm certain that if there had been any, he would have been in love with them as well.) Worker's Day is something of a deal in Finland, but it has for some reason become a huge deal in Finnish universities, where it's not only a day, but a longish period of time of all kinds of special activities. Among many, many other ...

For good or bad, the internet and its services have become essential public services. It has pretty much effectively joined the more traditional essential public services like roads, public transportation, mail, the telephone, radio, television and bank services. An email account is nowadays almost as essential as a real-world postal address. Communication with other people has moved in large to online services (for good or bad). While it's theoretically possible to live perfectly fine without any sort of internet connection, nowadays it's so inconvenient and so limiting that it can be justly considered an essential public service. Imagine if private corporations had the power to stop somebody from having access to these essential public services, for any reason the corporations wanted. Imagine, for instance, that corporations didn't like the political views of a private citizen, and proceeded to harass said citizen by denying him access to public transportation, telephon...

In the video game Madden 19 you can create a custom player. When you select a skin color, the game then provides a number of possible faces for that particular skin color. If you select the whitest skin color, how many face options are available? Six: If you select the darkest skin color, how many face options are available? Forty-six: I'm not saying anything. I just found it curious.

Many PC gamers argue that there are literally no redeeming qualities to game consoles compared to PCs, and that consoles are nothing more than greedy money-grabbing schemes, offering sheeple extremely limited single-purpose computer hardware, compared to a gaming PC which can be used for pretty much anything that a computer can do, with no drawbacks whatsoever. However, I would argue that there are some real advantages to game consoles. And I'm not here talking about artificially imposed "advantages" such as console exclusive games, but actual general advantages. If it says anything, I presented this list (in a condensed form) in the comment section of a YouTube video that made fun of "console peasants" and made those anti-console arguments above, and the author of the video responded to my comment. However, his response was just a general blanket dismissal. He did not respond to any of my points, nor present any counter-arguments. So here are the points t...

One would think that great budgets would help make great movies, and small budgets not so much. After all, if the budget is too small, it can severely hamper the possibility of implementing the vision that the writer or the director had. This is often the case with so-called B-movies. Lousy scenery and props, poor lighting, horrendous post-production and editing... Quite often it ends up as a direct-to-home-video product and forgotten by history. But sometimes a great movie is made regardless of a laughably low budget. The Evil Dead , The Blair Witch Project , and Paranormal Activity are three of the most famous examples (hmm, there seems to be a common pattern here.) Sometimes, however, a movie becomes better due to the changes that are needed due to budget constraints. If the budget had been larger and the movie done as originally envisioned and planned, it would have ostensibly been worse. This seems counter-intuitive. It's easy to understand that a great movie could ...

By far the vast majority of American conservatives almost religiously oppose universal healthcare, as if it were the most horrible thing that could ever happen. I don't really understand why. There seem to be as many explanations as there are conservatives. However, there is one common thing, a misconception, that I have noticed with many of them: They seem to think that universal tax-paid healthcare is somehow mutually exclusive with private medical practice. They seem to think that if the country adopts universal healthcare, private doctors would go out of job and would not be available, and the quality of medicine would go down the drain. I really can't understand where this notion is coming from. I'm not aware of any country where there is universal healthcare and private medical practice is banned. (Perhaps there might be some such country, especially among the semi-communist ones, but I'm not aware of a single one, especially among the traditional European-sty...

Apparently there's this social justice feminist who is a failure at being a comedian regardless of trying her best, so she made this attempt at proving that this is because of the sexism of the audience, by disguising herself as a man. There are significantly more male comedians than female ones, and in general, on average, male comedians are considered funnier than female ones (with exceptions, of course). I honestly don't know why this is, and I don't know if there exists any psychological studies into this. Is it perhaps something related to human evolution or something? Who knows. But of course to social justice warriors this needs no explanation because the reason is clear. It's the same reason as for every single thing where men and women are different: In other words, because of patriarchy and sexism. Thus she wanted to prove this is so by disguising herself as a man and going to a comedy club. To prove that the exact same jokes would be more well received ...

There is a recent controversy surrounding a reviewer for IGN who got fired because he blatantly plagiarized his review of a game from a YouTube reviewer, who had published his video a couple of weeks prior. This got me thinking about one event that happened back many years ago when I was working as a teaching assistant at the university here (I worked for many years as a teaching assistant for many courses during my time there and some years after graduating.) I was reading through and evaluating submissions by students of some kind of essay assignment (I don't remember any specifics about the subject anymore), when one of these essays seemed a bit strange to me. It just didn't feel like any of the other essays I had been reading so far. The wording was, in a way, perhaps too advanced, and there was a kind of bad flow between paragraphs. I got the feeling, or hunch, that most of these paragraphs were directly copy-pasted from somewhere else, and simply slapped together with...

In my predictions for the near future, part 5 post, I wrote this: "Companies will be forced by legislation to have "diversity officers", perhaps even assigned by the government itself. The exclusive role of these "diversity officers" is to make sure that the regressive leftist agenda is being enforced within the company, and that enough people with given external characteristics are being hired. They will enforce speech codes, and codes of conduct, and they will be tasked to enforce these codes by issuing warnings and fines, and even having the power to fire people, backed by the government, because of breaching such codes. They will have zero interest in the success of the company itself, and their sole purpose is to enforce hiring quotas and codes of conduct." Well, while this has yet to be fulfilled (at least as a government-mandated thing), we now already have a precursor to the above: Male, pale and stale university professors to be giv...

Dante "Tex" Gill was a real-life gangster and organized crime kingpin, who was rather extraordinary in that she was actually a woman who disguised herself as a man, in order to get more respect. Almost sounds like a fairy tale, but apparently was a real event. Certainly could make for a good movie. And that's exactly what some writers and producers thought. This would be quite a big-budget movie, with world-renowned actors. The leading role would be given to none other than Scarlett Johansson, one of the most famous and popular actresses in the world. Enter the social justice mob to kill the movie in its tracks, with identity politics and insane troll logic. You see, in the social justice ideology a woman pretending to be a man is "transgender". Because of course she is. No need for any medical procedures or anything. You are what you say you are, period, no questions asked. If you are a woman who says she's a man, then you are a man, period. And becau...

I once saw a video named something like "10 things black people should stop doing". It was made by a black woman, and it was entirely light-hearted (not like political or anything). One of the points she made was that black people (I presume mostly in America) always pronounce the word "ask" as "ax" (or "axe", however you want to write that pronunciation), and they really need to stop doing that. I had never paid attention to this, but after seeing that video I have started doing so, when watching YouTube videos. It doesn't happen quite often, especially with just random people on the street (rather than eg. TV show hosts or actors), since it's not such a common word to use in these situations, but from the three times so far I have stumbled across it, in every one of the three cases they did indeed pronounce it "axe", clearly and unambiguously. Quite an inconsequential thing, but curious. I wonder why that is. Update (...

The latest controversy regarding violence perpetrated by the regressive left is the case of a somewhat popular YouTuber, who is a heavy critic of the regressive left, being physically assaulted at Gencon by a social justice warrior because of his politics. The perpetrator has been identified, and the YouTuber is fully intending to sue him for assault. The perpetrator is one of those "punch a nazi" guy, who will physically assault popular people who disagree with his politics. This is by far not an isolated case. The thing is, this YouTuber, while not a small guy by any means, is clearly not the fittest person in existence, and was completely unable to defend himself. He was very lucky in that there were other people present who intervened, and helped him escape the assault. The perpetrator was clearly not content with just hitting him once, but was hitting him repeatedly, and his clear intent was to keep doing it. Only the intervention of bystanders stopped the situation ...

For decades an urban legend has been circulating the internet, which claims that NASA had a problem with ballpoint pens: They need gravity to work properly, and wouldn't do so in a weightless environment. Therefore NASA spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money to develop a "space pen", a ballpoint pen that would work in space. When the Russian space agency heard of this, they mocked NASA because Russia had a much cheaper solution: They just used pencils. As always with these urban legends, millions of people believe them, yet they are not true. In this particular case, it's a mix of distorted facts and fiction. For starters, both NASA and the Russians used pencils during the first years of space exploration (a fact that in itself just destroys the urban legend). The problem with them is that the graphite in the pencils tends to fly off, which is especially a problem in a weightless environment. It could become a real problem if the graphite head broke, sendin...

More and more universities, especially in the United States, but also in increasing manner in other countries, have "social justice" courses. There is no academic purpose to these courses. They don't teach anything useful in terms of the future professions of the students. Their only purpose is to indoctrinate. What are the most extreme (and becoming more and more common) things taught in these university courses? Here are some examples. Note that these are not exaggerations, or simply unfounded claims made by critics. All of these are things for which there is direct video evidence, which you can find eg. on YouTube. * All white people are racist. All of them. Every single one of them. Even white people who have been actively working towards becoming better people are still racist. They cannot help it. No matter what they do, and how much the work towards combating it, or how many amends they make, they will still be racist. It's in their very DNA to be racis...

Check this article: MOGA Creative Director Explains Their No White Models Policy How else can one describe discrimination against people based on their race other than racism? There is no other word to describe this. Also notice the subtitle: "This policy is essentially turning the tables and switching the power balance in favor of minorities." Notice how it's not about equality. It has been for years completely clear that they don't want equality. For a long time they claimed they do, but for quite some years now they have pretty much stopped saying that, and are unashamedly stating outright that they don't want equality. Instead, they want to "turn the tables". Just consider how nonsensical and unjust that is. It's nonsensical and unjust even if we considered, for the sake of argument, that their premise is correct that white people are the "oppressors" and non-white people are the "oppressed". They don't want t...