What grinds my gears

Brown student protesters complain homework is interfering with their activism. The title itself sounds quite facepalmy, but the article itself reveals a darker aspect of the whole thing: “There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes, and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” an undergraduate student going by the pseudonym “David” told The Brown Daily Herald Thursday. “My grades dropped dramatically. My health completely changed. I lost weight. I’m on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills right now. Counselors called me. I had deans calling me to make sure I was okay.” This is something that wouldn't need to happen, and is caused solely because of the social justice brainwashing that these college kids are going through. But maybe if it's for a good cause, it's something to fight for, even if it means falling grades and mental health problems? The thing is, it's not: These protests are completely nonsensical. They are...

On June of last year, I wrote a blog post about how I think the development of VR headsets is taken too far , which will increase their price for no benefit. On January this year the Oculus Rift was finally announced for preordering... and surprise surprise, it's hugely expensive . Now one of OR's biggest competitors, the HTC Vive , has likewise been announced for preordering... and it's even more expensive, at 900€. And it's also stock full of useless augmented reality crap that no gamer will use for anything. Will they ever learn? We don't need augmented reality crap! We don't want augmented reality crap! It's useless! It may entertain us for a half hour, but other than that it's completely useless cruft that adds absolutely nothing to what really matters, ie. playing games. You do not play games by walking around your room. You play games by sitting on a chair or sofa. At most you might want to turn your head to look around, but that's it!...

Some people have hobbies that most other people may find strange and sometimes even off-putting. Sometimes it's just something that they might find completely ridiculous or even cringeworthy. The normal reasonable response that they can give to those hobbies is a simple "no thanks, I'm not interested", and let them be. As long as they aren't hurting anybody, they can do whatever they want. What they do among themselves, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody, is their business, and they can be left alone. Who cares? But sometimes the aversion towards a particular hobby goes to absolutely insane levels. It goes beyond "I'm not interested, it's not for me". It goes even beyond "they are crazy, I can't understand how can they do it, or why". It goes to total, absolute, pure unadultered hatred. For example, I have an acquaintance who absolutely loathes furries. It almost feels like an obsession for him to hate them. Sometimes he wil...

So we have burning of art , blatant antisemitism , and advocacy for the termination of constitutional rights . All at the same time. What does that remind you of? As George Santayana once said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

When looking at the ideas that scientists, especially biologists, had about species and races, especially concerning humans, in the 1700's and 1800's, much of it sounds quite horrible to our modern more knowledgeable ears. Back in those times there was a great deal of discussion in science about the question of how many species/races (the difference between the two concepts seems to be a bit fuzzy back in those days, often up to the point of the two terms being used interchangeably) of humans there are, and what their biological relation is to each other. Much of it sounds really, really degrading and blatantly racist to our modern sensibilities. The prevalent view back in those days was that all living beings could be categorized in terms of development. In other words, some species were more developed and others less developed. All species could be put in a "ladder" according to how developed they were. Worms were pretty down low in this ladder, dogs a lot highe...

During the past decade or two, there has been an increasingly widespread idea among very diverse (and often completely unrelated) groups with regards to food, especially plants. New age spiritualists, a certain type of conspiracy theorists and denialists, vegans, and in some cases even some religious people (especially from some denominations of Christianity), have this concept that "natural" plants are the most healthy and nutritious form of food, while plants that have been modified by humans in some manner, are the cause of most of our health and dietary problems. (The most spiritualist people of course think that we are messing with "Mother Nature", whatever that may mean to them. Even the most pragmatic people think that man-modified plants are somehow "wrong", and that completely natural ones are better.) The big irony is that, quite often, the very plant products that they promote have actually been heavily modified by humans, especially using art...

During the last decade or so, a strange kind of "new age" spiritualism has become more and more popular. (It's in fact such a new iteration on the older "new age" philosophies, that you could call it "new new age" spiritualism.) It's a really strange ideology that makes lots of esoteric claims with literally zero evidence, and these claims are often just outright preposterous, and they have become so bold that they don't even try to masquerade or "sell" these ideas to make them more palatable. They just make the outlandish claims outright. And the claims are almost always really vague and fuzzy, with no explanations or anything. And somehow many people are swallowing them whole. One example of this is a best-selling book called "The Secret". To summarize it in one sentence, it claims that if you want something, you should actively think about it and visualize it in your mind, and that will make that something more likely t...