What grinds my gears

Many commentators and critics of the modern regressive leftist ideology sometimes allude to the custom of judging people, especially historic people (eg. from hundreds of years ago) based on modern moral standards, as if those people were as guilty of those moral atrocities as they would be if they lived today and did those things today. This is often unjustified and unjust because the moral standards were different back in those days. But what does that mean? It's easy to misunderstand this sentiment. Does this mean that the dubious moral acts that those people did eg. 200 years ago were not abhorrent simply because people didn't think of it being abhorrent? Is injustice against and oppression of people dependent on what the culture of the era happens to think of it? No, that's not what the criticism is saying. The criticism is not saying "those acts were ok 200 years ago, even though they are not ok today." What the criticism is saying "we shouldn

The current "open borders" immigration policies of the extreme left are not actually something new. They have just gained a ton of traction in the mainstream in recent years. However, in many western countries these sentiments go back quite a while, even 20 and 30 years. It's just that these ideas started being relatively fringe, and have only recently escalated exponentially due to some kind of global political perfect storm. Back in those days, 10 to 20 years ago, the ideology was more commonly called "multiculturalism". While that term is still being used somewhat, it has kind of been put a bit on the sidelines as the somewhat related "progressive social justice" ideology has merged into and largely appropriated it. It's not merely "multiculturalism" anymore, but a plethora of other ideologies mixed into it as well, which is now collectively called "progressive social justice" ideology, or sometimes called "intersectio

In previous installment of this "series" I have dealt with the terms " mansplaining ", " gaslighting " and " dogwhistling ". This time the term of the day is "white supremacy". "White supremacy" is in itself an existing term that has a rather clear definition: It's an ideology. This ideology posits that the white race is inherently superior to other races, all the other races being inferior. A milder form of the ideology doesn't necessarily claim that this difference is caused by biology, but simply because of the history, culture, knowledge and technical know-how of white people, as opposed to other demographics. The full form of this ideology believes that it's an actual biological thing: White people are actually biologically superior to other races. More intelligent, more capable, higher in the "evolutionary ladder" ie. more evolved (if they believe in evolution, which isn't always the case), mo

If you have followed my years-long saga of ranting about modern VR, you might know that one of the main reasons why I think it failed to become so ultra-revolutionary as everybody was expecting was their exorbitant price. Also, their low resolution and inconvenience of use. When the headsets costs about 700€ (the Oculus Rift) or even 900€ (the HTC Vive) at launch, that's way too much for such a niche product with no triple-A titles to speak of. (These prices include VAT, if you are wondering.) I have also noted how Valve/HTC doesn't seem to be learning the lesson, as they are coming up with new improved versions of their headset... which are even more expensive than the original. The "HTC Vive Pro" is just ridiculously expensive. Their next iteration, the "Valve Index", is also more expensive than the original Vive (about 1000€). However, it appears that Oculus actually has learned the lesson, at least partially. Rather than making new improved revis

Although these tests are pretty arbitrary and inaccurate, I decided to take one, just for the fun of it. I answered every question as honestly as I possibly could, rather than trying to rig the system or get a result that I wanted. The end result was not very surprising: Two things to note about this particular test (which I'm sure are quite common to most if not all such tests): Firstly, many of the questions are really vague and hard to answer, because they could mean anything. For example: " The enemy of my enemy is my friend." This is way too vague to give any answer at all. There are so many completely different situations where this could apply that it's not possible to give just one definitive answer of "agree" or "disagree". I ended up answering "disagree" because the sentiment, as stated, would imply some kind of automatic thing: The enemy of my enemy is automatically my friend, no questions asked. No. Some questions

We have become a society where some publications and entities consider it perfectly possible and even undeniable that a man can "give birth" or "have periods", because they have fully accepted and moreover promoting the post-modernist idea that if a woman says she is a man, then that's a hard undeniable irrefutable written-in-stone fact and holy gospel that cannot be questioned, doubted, criticized or denied (and if you even try, you'll face dire consequences for your blasphemy and apostasy). Thus they will ask questions like "can a man give birth?" and answer in the positive, in all seriousness. Or write articles like "the first man to give birth". This is nothing more than a redefinition of words for sociopolitical purposes. An Orwellian redefinition of the language, as a tool to exert power, control and dominance over society. A "woman" is by definition a female human, who has female reproductive organs capable of beco

"White privilege" is one of these buzzword terms that serves the same role in social justice ideology as "original sin" serves in certain religious denominations: You are born with it, you cannot do anything about it, and you are a bad and horrible person because of it, even if you do good things and have never hurt anybody. Even if you try to redeem your sinful nature, and make amends, you'll still be sinful and wicked, for your entire life, and you deserve nothing but punishment and scorn, and there's nothing you can do about it. You are simply born wrong. Where does this concept originate from? Rather unusually, we know exactly where it originates from, and who invented it. It's a relatively (and perhaps a bit surprisingly) old concept: It was invented by one Peggy McIntosh, a feminist academic, in 1988, in an article she wrote named "The Invisible Knapsack". This article is essentially part of the canon and Holy Gospel of modern social j

The revolutionary LARPers and terrorists that call themselves "antifa" have become a real problem in some countries, especially in the United States, where they are pretty much daily breaking the law and committing acts of political terrorism and intimidation. This is especially problematic in the United States in particular because in most cities there the police will do nothing to stop them ( making them complicit in their crimes , but that's another tangent). They are free to roam the streets, break the law and harass people with almost complete impunity, and there's nothing stopping them. Some conservatives, such as the so-called "Proud Boys", are making very ineffective attempts at countering them. They are having little to no effect. The problem with these people is that they are playing too much by the rules. They are too gentlemanly and "fair" about it. They want open discussion, they try to keep out of fights as much as possible, they

Recently Donald Trump held a rally in Minnesota, and his supporters were harassed and even violently assaulted by left-wing terrorists. In full view of the police, who refused to intervene, even when directly asked to do so. These things do not happen in the Nordic Countries. Do you know why? Because here the police actually upholds the law. It's as simple as that. The police does not simply stand by, doing nothing, when a group of people is breaking the law by, for example, disrupting traffic, disturbing the peace, or harassing and assaulting people. Those things are illegal, and the police is efficient at upholding the law and stopping people from doing that. Not so in most of the United States. While there are some cities in some states where the police is very "Nordic" in this regard, ie. they strongly enforce the law and quickly detain and arrest people breaking the law in front of them, in most of the rest of the United States, however, the police will simply

The social justice ideology is fundamentally collectivist . It doesn't see people as individuals, but as mere parts of a group. Individual personal characteristics are inconsequential, and all that matters are the external characteristics that make the person part of a particular group. Moreover, every member of that group is pretty much essentially identical, and do not possess any individual unique traits of any significance or importance. The entire group is completely homogeneous, with no distinguishing traits. It goes so far as being an outright dehumanizing ideology, taking away even the notion of personhood and using dehumanizing language , up to the point of devaluing a person's right to life . But not only is it an ideology that considers people to be just part of a homogeneous mass, but in fact seeks to enforce that notion onto the population. It actively wants to dismantle the notions of individuality, of people being different with individual characteristics, p

One form of confirmation bias that happens to people is that certain events may seem like they are happening more often than normal if for some reason they start paying more attention to those events. The opposite is also true: Such events may seem like they happen more rarely than they actually do, if people do not pay attention to it. Especially in the United States, especially in the current political climate, many people claim that there's rampant racism everywhere, and one of the classical examples given is that if a white person enters some store, it's much less likely that an employee will check on him (and eg. ask "do you need some help?") than if it's a black person. The idea being that store employees are more prejudiced against black people and think that they are there to steal something and thus will keep a closer eye on them and make their presence known by asking them a seemingly innocuous and polite question (which actual purpose is to send the m

For some strange reason the new Joker movie has been for many weeks the target of a massive moral panic campaign by the regressive leftist media and activists. I'm assuming that some social justice activist or journalist got the idea of bashing that movie, made up some reasons to bash it and claim that it will pander to white men and will cause "white terrorists" to commit crimes, and the mainstream media at large went along the ride, creating this massive artificial moral panic about it. Many have pointed out that the media is actually and effectively trying their hardest to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: By going on and on and on about how this movie presents the danger of someone going on a mass shooting attack... they are actually inciting people to go on a mass shooting attack. If the media didn't care about this movie at all, nor talked about it, nobody would care. However, the media is drawing a lot of attention to it and, willingly or unwittingly, insinu