What grinds my gears

When it comes to political opinions, in the modern world it's not easy to be a moderate centrist. You will be attacked by both extremes, and accused of being a member of the opposite extreme. Almost hilariously, I was accused of both being a regressive leftist social justice warrior, and a right-wing nutjob, in the comment section of the same YouTube video, on different comment threads. The video in question was a news piece about gang violence by recent immigrants in certain parts of Australia. Rooting for stronger enforcement of immigration laws and deportation of criminal non-citizens, while at the same time opposing the idea that guns are the magical solution to all problems, will get you labeled as both extreme left and extreme right, by the opposite extreme. You can't win. I feel that the question of the problem of climate change is another similar situation: Being a moderate rational centrist will get you labeled as an extremist by the opposite extreme. My position...

Recently I wrote about how Epic is getting away with their shady hostile takeover tactics on the PC video game digital distribution market , primarily because the vast majority of gamers don't know or care about it. This got me thinking that this is also one of the main reasons why social justice has successfully infiltrated all aspects of western society, with their draconian rules and Orwellian ideology. Some years ago a friend of mine posted on Facebook a link to a newspaper article talking about a plan to introduce full-on social justice teaching into Finnish schools. The whole shebang, no holds barred. Teachers and students would be forbidden from using the words "boy" and "girl" (which was used in the title of the article in question), they would be taught about "gender fluidity" and all that jazz, they would be taught about their own unearned privileges because of being white... The whole shebang. My reaction to that article was that of sh...

To, once again, make things absolutely clear right from the start, so that there's no confusion about my position: Yes, anthropogenic climate change is real, climatologists know what they are talking about, there is no conspiracy nor hoax, and it's an actual real problem that affects the entire world, and it could well have very bad consequences for all of us in the next 50-100 years or so, if its course is not changed. I trust actual scientists more than conspiracy theorists and politicians. The scientists know what they are talking about, and the scientific process makes sure that any sort of conspiracy or hoax is pretty much a physical impossibility. So yes, it is a real problem, and something should be done about it. However, now that's out of the way, let me tell you why these massive climate change protests in the west, and especially here in Finland, are absolutely idiotic. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, since we do indeed need to do something abou...

The modern feminist movement has been pounding so loudly and so strongly about how women are being oppressed in so many ways in modern society, including economically, that most people just believe it. After all, repeat a lie enough times, and it becomes the accepted truth. However, there are quite many things about women's economic contribution to society that they are completely unaware of, completely ignore, or outright deny, and don't want to talk about. And mind you, these are not just the allegations of some random MGTOW misogynist sexist chauvinist pigs on some random internet forums. These are the findings of serious academic studies made in several countries, published in peer-reviewed journals. Among other things: - In most countries the average fiscal contribution to society by women in terms of tax money is negative, while for men it's positive. Women pay less income tax than men. In other words, tax revenue from men is higher than that from women, and t...

I wrote in an earlier blog post why Epic Games is probably going to get away with their shady tactics . In short, for every gamer that is in the know of Epic's hostile takeover anti-consumer tactics, there's a thousand gamers who don't know or outright don't care. After all, why should they? They just want to play games, they don't want to stress about any stupid behind-the-scenes drama. The number of people who boycott Epic Store is absolutely minuscule compared to those who just want to get their games wherever they can get them. Well, it seems I was completely right. Recently Borderlands 3 joined the ranks of those games that caused a controversy by going Epic Store exclusive. It didn't matter. It still went to break all sales records of its developers, 2K Games, selling more than any of their previous games, and by a long shot. The sad truth is that Epic's tactics, no matter how dirty and anti-consumer, just work. People don't care what kind of ...

When it comes to the highest-end computer graphics hardware (both in terms of the video game industry as well as the GPU computation industry) Nvidia has enjoyed a pretty much de facto monopoly status for several years now. Their biggest and closest competitor, AMD, has been very fierce on the low and mid range tiers, both in price and quality, but when it comes to the top tier, Nvidia has been pretty much unchallenged, having all the top positions year after year. For many years AMD hasn't even tried to compete on these top positions, and concentrated mostly on the low and mid-end tiers. In theory, having a monopoly status in some industry is the absolute ideal for a corporation: Nobody is competing with you on that field, and therefore you can pretty much do whatever you want, if what you are producing has high demand. You aren't really competing in terms of price with anybody, and therefore you can make your products pretty much as expensive as you want. The only limitin...

Suppose you are on Steam browsing the list of newest releases, and you stumble across a game like Trials Rising, and think to yourself "hey, the previous games in this series were quite fun. I'll check this out." So you click on the link and go to the game's page, and what do you see? Oh, "Mixed" reviews. Less than stellar. This immediately gives you a warning that maybe the game isn't actually that good, or that there's some problem with it. You can then scroll down the page and actually read user reviews to see what the problem might be. Why are people giving it negative reviews? This may well be useful information affecting your purchase decision. Or suppose you are having some kind of problem with a game you are playing. Maybe it's a technical issue, or you are simply stuck, or there's some other kind of problem or question you want to ask about. Well, easy enough, you go to the game's page, click on the "discussions"...

Ever since Apple's iPhone made smartphones affordable and extraordinarily usable, with relatively large touchscreens, and opened it up for game developers to publish their games on the platform, and other cellphone manufacturers followed suit, and after a few years later developers discovered that the most profitable way to monetize these games is to make them "free to play" with in-game purchases, such monetization schemes have become a plague of video games, not only in smartphones but to an ever-increasing manner in console and even PC games. Nowadays we have even reached a point where full-priced triple-A games on the biggest platforms have in-game purchases, commercial DLC, loot boxes and gambling. In other words, developers are not anymore content with providing free games with in-app purchases. In increasing manners they are adding in-app purchases to full-priced commercial games. But who is to blame for this? There's a Finnish saying that roughly translat...

The social justice ideology wants to take over and control every aspect of society, and people. People's actions, people's opinions, people's thoughts. In a very Orwellian manner. One tool they use for this, directly from Orwell's literature, is controlling the language. They want to change the meaning of words, and they want to compel speech. You are only allowed to use certain words, certain words are banned, and certain words are mandatory to refer to certain things. Ultimately this is a form of control. When they can control your speech, that's a short step from controlling everything else. It makes you submissive and complacent. It makes you obey the ideology. It removes from you your ability to express what you want as you want. It limits your freedom. Thus, the logical counter-movement to this is to refuse to use their terminology. Don't use their "preferred pronouns", especially if those pronouns are not "he" or "she...

Let me start commenting on this recent controversy about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by talking about something else first. This is Malcolm Ray, an actor who is, among other things, working for Channel Awesome: This is Malcolm Ray wearing what one could call "whiteface", from the Nostalgia Critic episode about the Stephen King's The Shining TV miniseries: He is not simply acting the role of some famous white person or fictional character. He is participating in a light-hearted parody of a "stereotypical" white person (this is made quite explicitly clear in the video.) One could even say that he is, in a way, making fun of "stereotypically" white people. Not in a mean-spirited or antagonizing way, but nevertheless. Does anybody find this offensive? No. Do I find this offensive? No. It's just funny. It's comedy. It's a parody. Is it culturally insensitive? Not really. Nobody is outraged by this. This is Justin Tru...

Imagine that there is, let's say for example, a magazine about photography. This magazine reviews cameras, lenses and other products related to the hobby, publishes instructional articles and so on and so forth. Then one day this magazine hires a new journalist to write for them, but this journalist starts to trashtalk more and more about the target demographic of the magazine, ie. photography hobbyists. Not only does he start deriding and badmouthing these hobbyists online in social media, but in fact he also starts taking jabs at them in his articles which are published by the magazine. Surely the magazine's owners, or chief editor, or someone in charge would rather quickly call this journalist and ask him what the fuck he's doing, and tell him to stop lest he get fired. And if he doesn't stop, he's summarily fired from his job. Imagine the same for pretty much any publication dedicated to a particular hobby or other aspect of society, aimed at a certain demog...

As I have noted several times in this blog, Wikipedia is extremely politically biased towards the regressive left, and it's actively abused as a mouthpiece for leftist propaganda by biased editors. Politically charged articles, in particular those about people, groups or institutions that the regressive left considers their enemy, are nothing but a resource for political activism for the regressive left, to be used against those people or groups. They are nothing but endless lists of irrelevant minutia, meticulously collecting even the tiniest details that can be used against those people (blatantly breaking the Wikipedia rules about undue weight and political activism.) This is significant because like it or not, Wikipedia is widely used as some kind of reliable and serious source of information by people, by the media, by institutions, by corporations, and by all kinds of influences. And most people who read Wikipedia just believe what it says. But do you know what the scari...

As I wrote earlier here , my Wikipedia editor account was permanently banned because they did not like my posts about political bias at Wikipedia, and my suggestions to reduce it and make it more politically neutral. I made several appeal requests, using the proper channels, in a completely formal tone, and all of them were denied. I explained that the reason for the ban, and the removal of my user page, was a vague "not here to build an encyclopedia", which I argued was untrue, and too vague to be a bannable offense. Not a single one of the responses could site an actual bannable offense or breach of Wikipedia rules worthy of such a ban. The response to my first appeal was this: I'm sorry, but I cannot unblock you at this time I am declining your unblock request because it does not address the reason for your block, or because it is inadequate for other reasons. To be unblocked , you must convince the reviewing administrator(s) that The block is not necessa...

Consider this article published by The Verge: Gamergate comes to the classroom . An assistant professor claims in the article that when he started a class about "Games & Society", eleven "gamergate" members had "infiltrated" the class and were filming him with their phones. Does he, or the article, even define what "gamergate" is supposed to be? No. Does he provide any evidence, besides his own word, that this happened? No. Does he provide any evidence, or explain how exactly he knows that these people were part of "gamergate" (whatever he thinks that might mean)? No. My guess is that he is either making the whole thing up, or is exaggerating and greatly embellishing what happened. (It may well be that a couple of students didn't obey his reminder that using cellphones in class is forbidden. In his mind, or in his embellished story, these few students became eleven, and their use of their cellphones became them "f...

In the last few years live online streaming has become a huge industry. It can be extraordinarily profitable if you are talented and become popular enough. In fact, some streamers have literally become millionaires, by simply playing video games and broadcasting their gameplay live, or by doing other kinds of live streaming. The vast majority of streamers are, of course, not so successful. Sometimes, also, some streamers gain modest popularity... but then it kind of wanes and fades away: At first they gain popularity and a quite large amount of followers, then they reach a peak, and after a while they actually start losing followers and become less and less popular. There are myriads of reasons for this (other than the streamer just being untalented at it). One of these many reasons that I have noticed is a rather big mistake that these streamers make: They consider their audience to be their therapist. As cynical and harsh as it may sound, your audience are not your friends. Y...

Some black activists and social justice warriors in the United States have been for many years loudly advocating and demanding "reparations" for slavery. They have been pounding on it so loudly and for so long that now even some Democrat presidential candidates are promising them. I have to ask: "Reparations" for what, exactly? A government can pay reparations to another country or a group of people when it has directly caused them harm or loss of property. For example, if one country attacks another, and in doing so causes a significant amount of property and infrastructure damage, causing significant monetary loss to that country, it may be demanded to later compensate that other country for its losses, and to help with literal reparations (ie. rebuilding the infrastructure etc.) Reparations may also be in place if the attack caused significant loss of life, as a compensatory measure for the suffering and harm caused. If a government directly causes harm to ...

As a reminder for those who might not know what the "Democratic Party" in the United States is (because most people who don't live there easily get confused with these names and terms), it's the "left-wing" or "liberal" party of the two major ones (as opposed to the "Republican Party"). In the last presidential election Donald Trump was the Republican candidate and Hillary Clinton was the Democrat candidate. In the relatively recent past (from about the 1960's or so, up until a couple of years ago) this political party had relatively sane policies, which were by large exemplified by their last president (as of writing this), Barack Obama. On one hand they had rather "liberal" policies, such as wanting a more affordable universal healthcare system, more gun control and so on and so forth. On the other hand they also had relatively sane, what you could perhaps call "conservative", policies, such as strong border co...

One thing about people who have been radicalized into a dogmatic ideology, in all kinds of cults in general, and in the social justice cult in particular, is that these people tend to only think in absolute extremes, and can't accept anything else. The "listen&believe" mentality is one of these things. Many social justice warriors have taken this notion to its absolute and ridiculous extreme. When a woman, especially one who is herself a social justice warrior, or otherwise sympathetic or likeable from a social justice perspective, makes a rape accusation, that accusation becomes gospel. It becomes the absolute irrefutable truth. It's divine revelation, and there's absolutely nothing that would convince these people otherwise. Absolutely nothing . They can be given irrefutable proof that the abuse never happened and that she made it all up, and they will not believe it. The alleged victim herself could come out and directly tell them in their faces that...

For some context on the Epic Games Store debacle, read my two previous blog posts about it here and here . Epic Games has been trying to engage in a hostile takeover of the PC digital store market by essentially bribing game developers to publish exclusively on their platform. In many cases, especially when it comes to indie developers, this means that promised and even already-purchased Steam keys for the games are never delivered, and promises are broken. Epic Games is trying to create a monopoly status for themselves when it comes to all these games they are bribing the developers for. And they are most probably going to get away with it. It's very possible that they will become one of the largest digital stores on PC, no matter how much their storefront sucks and how many people they have to screw over. Why? Because the number of people who are in the know and deliberately boycott the Epic Games store can be counted in the thousands, while the number of other gamers that...

I don't know how often women, who have been fully indoctrinated into the social justice ideology, falsely accuse someone of having sexually molested or even raped them, but all evidence points to the fact that it does happen. As said, I have no idea how much it happens, but it's quite clear that it does happen. And it's not just like one or two cases in the entire world. It happens in significant numbers (but, once again, I have no idea how many cases there are in total; could be in the hundreds, could be in the tens of thousands, I have no idea.) From the clear cases I have seen, the pattern is almost always the same: The woman did have some kind of sexual relationship with the man she's accusing (in other words, quite rarely does a woman accuse some stranger, or some man she has never had sex with, although that might happen as well sometimes). Likewise in almost all these cases of (clearly proven) false accusations, the accusation is done at the very least weeks...

Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic Games, a company most famous and known for Unreal Engine, the biggest and most popular game engine, and the developer of games like Fortnite and the Gears of War series. Recently Epic Games has also become famous, or should I say infamous, for the Epic Store, which is their attempt at competing in the PC video game digital market. Why has it become infamous? Because they are attempting a hostile takeover of said market. They aren't just competing with Valve's Steam. They are trying to hurt Steam and forcefully cram themselves into the market and take the throne away from Valve. This is not just me saying it. This is Epic Games saying it (Tim Sweeney in particular). Direct competition isn't bad all in itself. In general competition is good for the consumers. Healthy and fair competition. However, that's not what Epic is doing. Instead, they are engaging in anti-consumer tactics to do so. Epic is throwing incredible amoun...

One would think that the prices of graphics cards would roughly correlate to their performance, age and features (especially now that hardware raytracing is the major new feature). In other words, as a new generation of graphics cards is published, which on average are faster than the previous-generation cards, and have more advanced features, one would think that the prices of the less-powerful previous-generation cards would start dropping (due to simple supply-and-demand marketing) while the new cards would be priced about the same or a bit higher than the previous-generation cards were when they were first published. This might have been the case in the past, but at least currently the pricing of Nvidia cards makes absolutely no sense to me. As of writing this, the Nvidia GTX 10 series is the "previous-gen", while the RTX 20 series is the "current-gen" cards. As always, the equivalent-numbered cards in the new generation are measurably (although not astonish...

Some time ago I wrote about how the regressive left is ruled by fear . I wrote then how in the UK there are, no joking, people who have become hard-core survivalists in preparation for Brexit. They have built reinforced bunkers in their basements with food and water supplies, expecting some kind of pretty much end-of-the-world scenario, where the entire country and the government will complete collapse into chaos and lawlessness. Well, apparently it doesn't end there. There are people in the UK who in all seriousness seem to believe that Brexit means the raising of bona fide fascism into power, and that the UK will completely close its borders, which they believe means that the country will kick out all non-citizens, after which no citizens will be allowed to leave the country, and no outsiders will allowed in. You know, North Korea style. If there are families where some are citizens and some are not, they will be separated and never see each other again, because non-citizens w...

Imagine a small community, like a small rural community of like 100 people or so, who are very hospitable, amicable and essentially all friends of each other, living in harmony and working together. They may have slightly differing opinions on some things, and different interests and hobbies, and different preferences, but all that's just fine by everybody. They can discuss their different preferences or opinions, analyze the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, and they may even disagree on many things, but by the end of the day they are still friends and understand each other and understand that not everybody is identical, and people have different tastes, preferences and opinions on minor things. As long as everybody lives in peace with each other, and works and collaborates with each other, everything is just mighty fine. But then there are like a couple of people in this community who have, for example, a rather unusual hobby, something that nobody else in the commun...

This has been widely noticed and commented on, but I'll repeat the same complaint myself, because why not. Just a mere few years ago the vast majority of (completely reputable normal) websites were rather simple: You go there (often due to a google search), you get the content you were searching for, that's it. No fuss. Nowadays, however, many websites can be extraordinarily irritating. And we are not even talking about obscure scammy websites selling shoddy products hosted in some Chinese server. Very often they are just major reputable mainstream websites that have existed for decades, like news or other similar sites. The worst cases I have seen, and I'm not even exaggerating, implement all of these and are an absolute chore to get into the content: It asks for permission to use cookies (because apparently some EU law demands it), it whines about you using an ad-blocker and may or may not allow you to proceed without disabling it, it requests the browser to allow n...

A few months ago I wrote about how the relatively well-known "fact-checking" website snopes.com, which during its initial years appeared to be relatively conservative in its politics, seems to have swung to the very extreme left of the political spectrum, becoming so favorable towards extreme left-wing politicians that they seem to be ready to even distort facts in order to paint them in a positive light, or remove negative light from them. Out of curiosity, I decided to browse the site a bit, to see how widespread this seems to be there. I browsed the "what's new?" section of the site, which lists all the newest articles posted there. Once upon a time, decades ago, the website was almost completely dedicated to debunking or confirming urban legends and other similar stories and claims circulating the internet and popular culture. Almost all of the articles were like that. In other words, the claim, a verdict ("true", "false", or somethi...

One of the doctrines of the modern social justice ideology is that only minorities can be oppressed, and that the majority cannot. It's somehow a completely ridiculous and illogical idea to even think that the majority could somehow be "oppressed". It's not physically and logistically possible. The majority cannot be oppressed for the simple reason that they control everything. Only minorities can be oppressed because the majority decides everything. This notion has once again become quite prominent with the "Straight Pride Parade", which rather obviously the eternally offended regressive left not only opposes, but fought strongly against, because reasons. One argument for ridicule is that straight people don't need a "pride parade" because they are a majority and thus cannot be oppressed. The notion is so obviously false that I don't even understand how it has become a thing. The notion has become so common that even many non-SJWs som...

In my previous blog post I commented how Zoe Quinn, the wannabe queen of professional victimhood (who is permanently outclassed on that front by Anita Sarkeesian) recently caused a man to commit suicide by publicly making sexual harassment allegations against him, knowing perfectly well that he would be fired from his job, it would end his career forever, and would be the subject of a massive online harassment campaign. In this case the man in question was mentally so fragile that he ended up killing himself, as he saw no future for himself (as testified by his sister). Zoe Quinn is directly responsible for this, and whether her allegations against him are true or not has no bearing on her responsibility. (Even if the allegations were true, her approach to it was completely wrong and despicable, especially since it's relatively clear that she did it for personal gain and fame, and/or petty vindictiveness. Even assuming that her allegations were completely true, which I doubt, she ...

It's highly ironic that the "progressive" crowd in the western world, especially in certain countries, keep repeating the mantra of how women are oppressed, how nobody listens nor believes them, how they are just ignored, dismissed and laughed at when they make serious allegations... yet time and again the modern society proves them wrong by constantly reacting and over-reacting to complaints and accusations made by women, often single individuals, and companies, employees, CEOs and higher-ups bend over backwards to placate to them and "correct" any alleged slight that they are complaining about or allegedly suffered. These complainers, most usually women, have an incredible amount of power in society, making society grovel at their feet because of mere accusations, yet they still maintain that they are "oppressed" and nobody listens to them. They make themselves into martyrs, while abusing the system for their own personal benefit. In the modern wor...