What grinds my gears

Yale University has published the results of a research that seems very unusual in this day and age, in the current political climate. (I suppose it's a bit comforting to see that at least some universities are still not completely and absolutely invaded by social justice ideologues.) This study seems to indicate that white American liberals tend to have more racial prejudices and patronizing attitudes towards black people and other minorities than American conservatives. More precisely, the project studied what kind of speech and vocabulary white people tend to use when addressing black people and other minorities, versus when addressing other white people. The study includes speeches made by politicians (eg. presidential candidates), as well as a separate study made for the project using random people. As the report above says, "white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act ...

When it comes to game consoles, Nintendo has always and traditionally been extremely "family friendly", starting all the way back from the NES and SNES eras. (One of the most famous examples of this is Nintendo's requirement that the first Mortal Kombat port for the SNES had its blood and most gruesome finishers removed or changed. Nintendo only relented with Mortal Kombat II, allowing it to be published uncensored.) Of course there has always been a distinct lack of overly sexual content for the Nintendo platforms (although there are some examples). In contrast, the other two major players, ie. the Sony and Microsoft consoles, have always been seen as the more "hardcore" gaming platforms, where almost anything goes. However, for some reason it appears that Sony and Nintendo are pretty much reversing their policies. Recently Sony announced that they will start demanding censorship of PlayStation games with overtly sexual content, especially when it comes t...

If you make a search for something like "most racist ads", you'll find tons of YouTube video compilations and webpages of advertisements which are supposedly "racist", even though clearly the "racism" is unintentional. There are tons and tons of examples, but one in particular comes to mind, given how clearly non-racist it is, with the "racism" being attached to it artificially by moral busybodies: A magazine ad, selling something I don't remember right now, but had something to do about the speed of some kind of technology, had a woman office worker standing, and a bunch of sprinters on the side in the typical ready-to-go position. What was the "problem"? Well, the woman happened to have light skin, while the sprinters were all black (in fact, if I remember correctly, just the same person copy-pasted over and over). And the ready-to-go position made it look like they were bowing to the woman. Quite clearly the sprinters wer...

Suppose that someone sends an illegal package through the postal services, or through a courier service, to someone. Such as a package containing illegal material (such as drugs), or something dangerous such as a bomb. When such a crime is being dealt with, nobody even thinks about suing the post office for facilitating this crime. Or suppose that someone makes a phone call in order to organize some criminal activity, such as organizing a terrorist attack, or purchasing illegal substances. Once again, nobody even thinks that the phone company should be sued for facilitating such illegal activity. This principle is sometimes called a "safe harbor principle", or "safe harbor status". This means that if a company offers a service that allows people to communicate in one way or another with each other, the company will not be held responsible for any criminal activity that some people might engage in, as long as the company remains neutral, and collaborates with the...

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become more and more commonplace, usually as an addition to, and in some cases even as a complete replacement to the more traditional mechanical Hard Disc Drives (HDDs). The advantage of SSDs is that there are zero moving parts (it's all electronics, with no mechanical parts, pretty much in essence a memory stick turned up-to-eleven), and seek times are many orders of magnitude higher than with traditional mechanical HDDs (because, essentially, there is no seeking time). HDDs have a mechanical reader head which physically moves inside the device along the surface of the discs, reading the data. This causes a (relatively) long time in physically moving this mechanical "arm" from one place to another. Curiously, when reading sequential data (ie. data that exists in the HDD as one single consecutive block), HDDs aren't usually significantly (or even any) slower than SSDs. However, since data can very rarely be read sequentially, and ins...

On December of last year I wrote about how the popular YouTuber and debunker of viral video hoaxes Captain Disillusion apparently broke a decade-long silence about his political views and appeared to be at the very least a sympathizer of the regressive leftist social justice ideology. In other words, as the meme was back then (although it seems to have fallen a bit out of use), he has chosen the metaphorical "blue pill" of the political spectrum. In a live presentation he gave at Skepticon Australia 2017, he went on a completely unnecessary and superfluous attack against prominent famous anti-SJWs, calling them "assholes" (to what appeared to be a rather agreeing audience). Back then I hoped it doesn't become a pattern for him. While he hasn't exactly become a YouTube activist, unfortunately it appears that it has become a pattern, at least when it comes to his live presentations at conferences. Recently he gave a live presentation at the Blender Confe...

The crusade of the big Silicon Valley tech corporations against the alternative anti-establishment pro-free-speech platforms continues, and is only gaining traction. This time, the free speech alternative to YouTube, BitChute, is on the chopping block. PayPal has now cut ties and banned BitChute from their services. BitChute will no longer be able to perform any transactions through PayPal. And what was the reason given by PayPal for this ban? Nothing. No reason given whatsoever. PayPal simply banned them, without even giving any reason or rationale. Of course we all know what the reason is: BitChute is for free speech and against censorship. BitChute does not conform to the Party line, the regressive leftist Silicon Valley orthodoxy. BitChute is not part of the establishment. But above all else, and once again, BitChute does not censor free speech. For some reason the year 2018 is the beginning of an internet war. A war between huge leftist tech megacorporations, and smaller...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post, I can't understand why people hate furries so much (a topic I have actually written previous about as well.) By chance (or perhaps because Google's algorithms see what I write here), I stumbled across a video made by a furry who is leaving the community, explaining why, and what's wrong with that community. I think it's worth watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDa9w_XoP7Y

Just like social justice warriors, also extreme leftist "multiculturalist" politicians have in recent years become more and more open and blatant about their policies and intentions. They aren't afraid of stating outright, directly and openly to millions of viewers things like, for example, "native people will become a minority in the larger cities, and that's a good thing". Or that the government's policy is one of "dehomogenization" (meaning that they want the population of the country to become significantly less uniformly white). More and more European countries have in recent years taken a very aggressive policy of mass immigration. While in the past the amount of immigrants and "refugees" could be counted in the thousands, in the past few years we can literally count them in the millions. Germany has been on the forefront of this trend, with over 2 million immigrants during the past few years, but Germany is not alone in this....

When we think about a person having two very different personalities, we often think of mental problems like multiple personality disorder, or bipolar disorder. However, in many cases I don't think there needs to be anything wrong with the person. It's just that their personality is, for some reason, such that they behave very differently in different situations, their attitude is very different, so much so that they almost feel like different people. When I was at university, I had a professor of English (who himself was Irish, if I remember correctly), who was very much like that. I don't think he had any sort of problem. He simply had this strange personality quirk. During class he was the most amicable and talkative person you can think of. He had tons of anecdotes to tell, and he constantly encouraged his students to speak and have conversations (it was, after all, an English class, for Finnish people). Overall, he seemed like a really nice, warm, friendly and amic...

Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, is a racist institution that engages in racial discrimination. The admission process to Harvard includes a test that contains verbal and math components, and is scored up to 1600 points. The minimum points required for an applicant depends on the race and sex of that applicant. I kid you not. For black, Hispanic and Native Americans this requirement is 1100 points. For white people, it's 1310 points. For Asian-American women, it's 1350 points. For Asian-American men, it's 1380 points. That's right. Harvard University is looking at people's race and sex, and making it harder for some people to be enrolled if they have been born into the wrong ones. They look at an applicant, look at how he or she looks like, and change the requirements depending on this outwards appearance. If the applicant looks Asian, then the requirements go up. If the applicant looks black or Hispanic, the requirements go d...

If you start paying attention to what "intersectional feminists", social justice activists, and in increasing numbers more and more corporations are saying, you'll probably start noticing that they are fond of using the word "equity" instead of the word "equality". (Likewise they may use the word "equitable" instead of the word "equal".) This is not a coincidence, nor is it just them trying to sound fancy and academic, nor is it just a buzzword. (Well, it is a buzzword, but not in the sense of being a completely meaningless word. It has a very concrete and deliberate meaning.) Because the average person doesn't know what "equity" really means, and may think it's just another way of saying "equality", they may be fooled into agreeing with a sentiment that uses that word (like "our company strives for equity for all people"). The actual meaning is a bit like surreptitiously sneaked in, withou...

It seems that as the regressive left is noticing how much influence they can have on big corporations censoring and shunning people they don't like in the internet, to the point of these corporations denying them internet services, banking services and so on, their activism on that front is only accelerating. Big name after big name, and website after website, whose politics and mission is for free speech and equal rights, are being targeted and shut down, one after another. If this continues as it is, it's only going to accelerate, and once all the big names and big websites are gone, they will not stop there. They will start targeting smaller and smaller people on the internet. They want total and absolute control, and they will not stop until they get it (and, as a side effect, and ironically, established the total monopoly of a handful of megacorporations on the internet, who will rule with an iron fist.) This blog is extremely small. Each post of mine gets an average o...