What grinds my gears

Trump banned entry to the United States from seven countries. This of course pissed off regressive leftists who seem to think that free travel to the United States is some kind of basic human right. Whether you agree with the ban or not, let's make some things clear about international politics. Firstly, a question: Do you have the right to enter another sovereign state, which you don't have an official citizenship of? Answer: Absolutely not! Being able to enter another country is a privilege that said country might grant you, but it's not a right . I'm sorry, but that's just how international politics work. Whining about being banned from entering a country, as if you had some kind of international human right to do so, is just outright stupid. No, you don't have any right to enter another sovereign state if you are not a citizen. You might be granted permission to do so by said country, but that's not a right. If that country denies you entry, th...

A somewhat lesser known (in the west) phenomenon that's quite prevalent in many parts of eastern Asia is that lighter/paler skin is often considered more beautiful and desirable than darker skin. In some countries, like Thailand, this is so prevalent that a skin-whitening industry has formed there, selling all kinds of lotions and pills to whiten one's skin. The ads of these companies may often appear to be incredibly "racist" to the modern politically correct sensibilities of westerners (even to some who aren't regressive leftist social justice warriors.) Some ads may even feature a relatively pale-skinned person in "blackface". Some such ads have caused quite a lot of controversy in the west. But is this racism, or caused by racism? No. What most people forget, or don't know, is that in the Victorian and pre-Victorian eras, mostly in Europe, a tanned complexion was often taken as a sign that you were a poor peasant, while a pale skin was take...

One common trait of radical authoritarian ideologies is that they will take words with rather specific meanings, dilute them until they pretty much lose all of their original meaning, and just use it as a generic insult, to try to discredit and offend anybody who has a differing opinion. "Racism" would be your quintessential example (as well as "sexism", "misogyny" and "islamophobia".) One such example is also "fascism". That word used to have a rather specific meaning in the past, referring to a particular authoritarian nationalist political ideology prevalent in some European countries between the world wars, and some time after. But like with all those other words, nowadays this one is also used just as a generic insult against basically anybody who has a differing political opinion. For example, during both elections of Barack Obama, he was accused of "fascism" by republican protesters. And, of course, during Trump...

There seems to exist a lot of misconceptions about the PS4 Pro in regards to whether it supports "true" 4k resolution or not. I think Sony is to blame for not making it clear in their promotional material. You see, there seems to be this really prevalent notion that the PS4 Pro does not support rendering to 4k (ie. 3840x2160 pixels) at all. That it instead always renders to some lower resolution (like 1440p) and upscales it for the 4k display. This misconception is so prevalent that when I have corrected it eg. in some YouTube comments, people have directly told me that I'm wrong, that the PS4 Pro does not support 4k resolution rendering and it will always upscale. But that's not true. It is true (and probably the cause of confusion) that the PS4 Pro will render existing PS4 games at a lower resolution and upscale them, by default. However, new and patched games can, if they so wish, support native 4k directly, with no upscaling. In other words, they will rende...

I think this comic exemplifies perfectly one of the most fundamental core problems with the modern regressive feminist ideology. In fact, it exemplifies a couple of them. Firstly, there's the patronizing and mocking attitude. This is really, really common in the regressive feminist rhetoric: Mocking their critics. They have this holier-than-thou attitude and look down their noses at the critics, and mock and ridicule them. In one occasion, someone posted to Facebook a link to a Finnish newspaper article (written by a female journalist) that was moderately critical of the current politically correct regressive ideology, and how it caused, in part, for Donald Trump to be elected president. I responded to that post by giving actual examples of how far the regressive ideology has gone, such as the BBC engaging in racial discrimination , and psychological abuse of children . A full-on regressive feminist activist responded to my post. Can you guess what was the very first thing...

A half year ago I looked what VR games look like . Has the situation improved in this time? And, once again, I'm not pick&choosing the worst examples. I'm examining indiscriminately the top-rated VR games on Steam, in order, using their promotional screenshots. A few of the same games appear in the list again, so I'm going to skip those, and only presenting the new ones. Waltz of the Wizard Looks decent enough. Not much to complain. Maybe not Crysis 3, but compared to the average it might just as well be. Rec Room Looks like barely PlayStation 2 level graphics. Google Earth VR This may look quite nice as a thumbnail, but if you look at the full-sized version, it's actually much more simplistic than it appears (it has a quite low polygon count). But looks decent enough, I suppose. Accounting Again barely PS2-level graphics. Looks like garbage. I could expect a DOS game to look something like this. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand...

Because the Nintendo Wii was quite less powerful than its two competitors (ie. the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3), yet outsold them by quite a wide margin, branding itself as the ubiquitous "casual gamer console" and "family console", many people today (especially younger ones) have got this impression that Nintendo has always been about content rather than technical specs, and that they have never cared about the latter, and that their consoles have always been "weaker" than the competition. This is actually completely false. In fact, the Wii was the first Nintendo console that was significantly less powerful than the competition. Moreover, in all previous console generations Nintendo has always been about boasting about technical specs, and trying to out-perform the competition on that front. This, somehow, is actually somewhat surprising to these people. (And, on a meta level, the fact that it's surprising to some people is in itself surprisin...