What grinds my gears

Especially in the United States there's a brand of ultra-conservative highly homophobic Christians who, among other things, have loudly sensationalized how homosexuals are trying to convert children into homosexuality. This conspiracy theory is quite ridiculous, and I have laughed at it as much as anybody else. I'm not laughing as hard anymore. Not exactly homosexuals per se, but feminists are finally making that conspiracy theory actually somewhat true. For instance: 80 primary school pupils a year seeking help to change gender UK Police Target Schoolchildren As Young as FOUR With Tax Payer Funded, Transgender Propaganda Boy aged 5 returns to school as a girl It really is happening. This is not just a question of raising awareness of transgenderism. It's actually encouraging kids as young as four years old into it. This crosses the line. No matter what your stance is on gender identity and transgenderism, it can be medically and scientifically argued th

What is the highest honor that a movie can receive in the United States? Lots of Oscars and other film awards? Yeah, sure. However, I would argue that there is an even higher honor that can be bestowed on a movie (although, of course, this is subjective and a matter of opinion): Being inducted into the American National Film Registry. The Registry was founded in 1988 for the purpose of officially preserving movies that are culturally and historically significant. Only a very, very small selection of movies get this honor: At most 25 movies are selected per year. Oscar-winning movies are aplenty, and most of them are forgettable. I'm sure that if you try to think of any oscar-winning movies (no matter when they were made), you would remember just a tiny, tiny fraction of them. Only a very small portion of all oscar-winning movies are actually culturally and historically noteworthy. And the original Star Wars, made in 1977, was this in droves. It was more than just a movie.

The game Watch Dogs became very infamous because its final release had quite drastically lowered graphical quality (even at maximum graphical settings) than what was showcased prior to launch at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo.) People were disappointed that the final version of the game didn't look even nearly as good as what was shown at the expo. The thing is, the footage shown at E3 was, ostensibly, video of real-time gameplay, not some pre-rendered graphics. In other words, the developers themselves had a PC that could run the game at that graphical fidelity with a good framerate. Therefore most high-end PC gamers likewise would have had a gaming PC capable of running it. Thus these gamers felt a bit cheated and robbed when what they got was visibly of lower graphical quality, even at full settings. Watch Dogs is not the only example. Other examples of exactly this include Far Cry 3 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt . Both of them had E3 pre-launch demo videos with higher

I was watching an episode of the TV series Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition . The episode was about a woman who weighted 133 kg (292 lbs), was in extremely poor shape, suffered from psoriasis mostly caused by her weight, and was extremely unhappy about her life. So unhappy, in fact, that she confessed that she had been seriously considering taking her own life prior to being contacted by the TV show. (Now, I understand that these American reality TV shows really love to sensationalize things, and create extra drama via editing and coaxing their participants. However, such a thing as suicidal thoughts is so serious that, unless somebody can definitively prove to me otherwise, I'm willing to believe that the woman was being completely serious and honest, rather than being coaxed by the show's producers into telling such a lie, as that would be a new low even for such a TV show.) During the course of a year she lost weight from 133 kg to 73 kg (162 lbs), which is basically

In the United States (and some other countries) brave people fought to end racial segregation, which was rampant and really egregious. Today, spoiled privileged entitled rich kids at universities want it back. They are demanding "safe spaces" at universities, which are effectively "no whites allowed" zones. And the staff of these universities are caving in into every such demand, like sheep. All these people seem to forget that racial segregation is illegal in the United States. It was criminalized in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which full text you can read here .) Here are some relevant excerpts: "All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin." "All persons shall be enti

Feminist answer: Because men are misogynists. Actual answer: Because men respect women. That answer might sound completely nonsensical at first, but let me explain. (Also, I'm not saying that there exist no men who don't want women in their playgroups because of very sexist reasons. Of course there are. However, I'd argue that those are a minority. In the majority of cases where this happens, the reason is rather different, which I'll explain below.) Think of it what you want, but on average men's psychology is different from women's. Men do not get easily offended, and are rather stoic. When men who are close friends are engaged in a hobby, they often like to trashtalk. This trashtalk may sometimes even sound highly offensive and insulting to an outsider. Some of it might even be technically speaking "sexist", even though the men aren't actually sexist in the least. That's just trashtalk. And that's just how men's brains work.

Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully congregate to express opinions and so on and so forth are some of the most fundamental core values of a modern free society, most often, in most countries, expressed in the most fundamental guiding document of the government, ie. the so-called "constitution". The constitution is an attempt to guide and limit the government in order to protect individual rights, freedoms and equality, and stop the government from trampling over and infringing its citizens' fundamental rights. There's a great irony in this, however. You see, dissemination of anti-constitutional ideologies, ie. ideologies that seek to limit or even annul the country's constitution itself, is, quite ironically, protected by the constitution. (It would indeed be quite contradictory and even hypocritical for a constitution to say, essentially, "all speech is protected, except anti-constitutional speech.") These basic free

On the 18th of September 2015, ie. almost exactly two months ago (as of writing this blog post), I made a comment on Facebook about the European mass refugee immigration, and how Europe has finally lost its mind, pretty much opening its borders to anybody who just wants to come in. I predicted that within six months there will be the first terrorist attack by "refugees" (either actual refugees, or islamic terrorists pretending to be ones.) Well, it took only two months for my prediction to become true. To the surprise of nobody. (The exact time and place of the attack was of course unpredictable, but not the fact that a terrorist attack in the very near future is inevitable. And what do you know.) The attack didn't surprise me in the least. However, it does anger me quite a lot. I feel anger for the fact that people have to pay with their lives for this European madness. Citizens whose opinion on the subject of opening the borders was not asked. Citizens whose tax mon

As I wrote in a previous blog post , modern "progressive" feminism is highly authoritarian, and seeks to control, censor, silence, ban and even criminalize dissenting opinion. It is, in fact, becoming more and more frequent for such social justice warriors to outright openly say that free speech is a bad thing, an antiquated concept, and that it should be limited. Many of them aren't even beating around the bush about it, but just outright state it. The frightening thing is that this exact branch of "progressive" feminism, the highly authoritarian and anti-constitutional kind, is extremely virulent, and extremely powerful. It is represented not only by regular citizens, but all the way to high-ranking officials, politicians, members of the press, university professors, and so on. And in an alarmingly increasing manner. Feminism, the wrong authoritarian kind, appropriates and invades everything. It's like Scientology: Infiltrate every major branch of our

Among many C++ programmers, there's an extremely strange aversion to using the std:: prefix for names in the standard library (which is why you see C++ code out there littered with the " using namespace std; " statement, and a complete avoidance of the std:: prefix.) There is a common sentiment among these people that the prefix makes the code more unreadable. This notion is extremely prevalent all the way from complete beginners to university professors teaching C++. Yet I have never seen an actual rational argument for this. It seems to me that these people are just repeating the notion simply because they were taught it, and everybody else is saying it. It's like a form of cargo-cult programming: Hating something for no good reason, simply because everybody else hates it too. And the thing is, many of these people will defend that notion vehemently, even aggressively. No matter what kind of logical counter-arguments you make, they won't budge. There is,

Whenever there is discussion about the burqa, all such discussion is immediately shut down with people putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "choice" and "religious freedom" and refusing to hear anything else. However, the fact is that a Muslim woman wearing a burqa is not a personal choice. It may oftentimes (especially in the west) be masqueraded as a personal choice, but in practice it's not. In Islamic religion and culture, the burqa is a symbol of submission to Islam and Allah, and a sign of purity and modesty. Moreover, not wearing a burqa is in many Islamic cultures a sign that the woman is a prostitute, or at the very least not chaste. In the most totalitarian Islamic countries a woman not wearing a burqa in public leads to punishment. Even in more liberal Islamic countries it's usually taken as a sign of the woman not being chaste, in other words a "slut", if not outright a prostitute. In many of these countries women wh

I find chess engines, and how they have advanced in just the last ten years, really fascinating. In 1997 the chess computer Deep Blue gained a lot of notoriety for being the first computer to beat a world-reigning chess master, Garry Kasparov , in a tournament of several games with long time controls. (More specifically, 6 games were played, and the score was 3½–2½ in favor of the computer.) Since then, however, chess engines have advanced in major leaps. Note that Deep Blue was a dedicated computer for the sole purpose of playing chess. It could calculate approximately 200 million nodes (ie. chess positions) per second. Modern top chess engines will run on a regular PC, and their calculation speed on such a PC, even when using eg. 4 cores, is less than 10 million nodes per second, only a small fraction of what Deep Blue was capable of. Yet these modern chess engines, running on a regular PC, are significantly stronger than Deep Blue was, and would easily beat it (and even th

When it comes to political stances, all kinds of words and terms are thrown around, and it can get a bit confusing. There is left, right, conservative, liberal, authoritarian, progressive... Two terms in particular are often confused and thought as interchangeable. Namely, "liberal" and "progressive". And both are often considered synonyms with "left-wing" (or "left-leaning".) In other words, if your political stance is left-leaning, you are thus a liberal and a progressive. However, that is not the case. "Liberal" is not a synonym for "left-leaning". Rather, it's the opposite of "authoritarian". It's on an independent axis compared to the left-right categorization. A simplistic but illustrative way of depicting this is with the following "political compass" graph: Depending on your political opinions and stances, you can locate yourself basically anywhere on that two-dimensional graph. W

So there's this incident where a student, of middle-eastern descent, in a Texas high school made a "homemade" clock, put it into a briefcase, and then got arrested because they thought it was a bomb. When one reads the headlines version of the story, one very easily gets the impression that this is an electronics genius who built an electronic clock from scratch, then went to his school to show it off, and then got arrested mainly because of prejudice and racism (a muslim brings a briefcase with a clock to school, it must be a bomb!) This story got so much attention that even the president of the United States made supporting comments, and this kid was soon offered scholarships to the most prestigious universities of the country. However, when you actually dig deeper, the story is a bit different. Firstly, was calling the police to arrest him overreaction? Definitely. Americans especially, but in increasing amounts westerners in general, are scared shitless of ter

The rape culture in our society (not the imagined feminist "rape culture", but the actual rape culture ) has now gone to such ridiculous extremes that some colleges are encouraging their students to use a smartphone app to make affirmative consent "contracts" before sex. Yes, we are finally going this far. The feminist fear of "rape" has gone to this extreme. But putting that aside, something particular stands out in that article: But Jasmin Enriquez, 23, who was date-raped as a student at Pennsylvania State University, branded sex contracts ‘pure evil’, saying: ‘They are nothing more than stunts and money-generating schemes which distract from the real issue which is education. We need to educate students of both sexes. Informed consent is an ongoing, shifting process which cannot be encapsulated in a contract. A contract fails to safeguard a woman who might change her mind after signing it.’ Firstly, notice that it doesn't say "person&qu

There's a recent new meme called "meninism" making the rounds. "Meninism" is a parody of feminism. It is to feminism what "pastafarianism" is to religion. It's not an actual thing; it's a joke, a parody. It's a parody of feminism (kind of like "what if men acted like radical feminists?" thing). It's deliberately over-the-top, and nobody is seriously a "meninist" (any more than anybody is seriously a "pastafarian".) The funniest thing about it is, however, that many feminists do not understand that it's just an over-the-top parody, and believe that it's an actual real thing, an actual movement. They take it seriously, and attack and ridicule it, as if it were a real movement, a real sociopolitical philosophy held by some men. The vast majority of religious people understand that "pastafarianism" and the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" are not a real thing, but just a parody of

There is a video making the rounds because of the astonishingly stereotyping, and sometimes even nonsensical, questions being presented: BuzzFeed's " 24 Questions Black People Have For White People ". It has gained some notoriety due to how obnoxious and nonsensical it is. But, I'm a white person, so I suppose these questions are directed to me. So I'll answer: #1: "Why do you always make such horrible decisions in horror movies? It's not cool to split up." WTF? I'm not in a horror movie. And what exactly does this have to do with me being white? This question is absolutely nonsensical. As for fictional characters in horror movies making dumb decisions, it's because of the script. The scriptwriter decided to write them like that. Usually to cause conflict, tension and drama. But what exactly does this have to do with being white? Are you saying that no black fictional character has ever made any "horrible decision" in a ho

It seems that Europe has finally snapped, and lost completely any kind of sanity and control. According to some estimates, at some border entry points where "refugees" from "Syria" are entering by the thousands, approximately 90% of these people have absolutely no proof that they actually come from Syria. And they are still just let in, without question, without control, and without monitoring. Many of these "refugees" do not act much like actual refugees fleeing from a war, and seeking shelter on a neighboring country. Instead, they act exactly like Muslims like to act in Europe: Rioting, throwing stones, stealing, and raping. If anybody thinks that every single one of these "refugees" actually comes from Syria, he's being just delusional. And this unrestricted mass immigration wave will have lasting repercussions. Most European countries are incapable of sending "refugees" back, because that's "wrong", and wi

I briefly mentioned in a previous blog post about a man who was sued by feminists for the simple reason that the man had criticized those feminists for their doxxing tactics. I stumbled across a much more detailed description of that story posted by Karen Straughan on a YouTube comment. Because this excellent writing on the case cannot be found anywhere else, and would otherwise be simply buried under the literally billions of other YouTube comments, I decided to quote it here: A feminist in Toronto named Steph Guthrie, who founded a non-profit called Women in Toronto Politics, put out a call on Twitter a year or three ago for artists willing to donate their work to her organization. A man named Gregory Allen Elliot, a father of four and a graphic/web designer, volunteered to provide her with free art work for her campaigns. They connected over Twitter, met up in person, and arranged for Elliot to provide her with some art. Then, BAM! A dude named Ben Spurr, who was incen

There was a time, starting somewhere in the late 90's, and continuing for over a decade, of operating systems and programs using fancier and fancier looking graphics for GUI elements. This was true in all three major operating systems, and the majority of applications followed suit. However, in later years, for some reason, there has been a trend into the opposite direction. Sometimes to the ridiculous extreme. Consider, for example, the window decorations in Windows 7 vs. those of Windows 10: The change into the opposite direction is just outright ridiculous. It goes so far as to be actually detrimental to usability. Of course every single fancy graphical effect is gone, and symbols have become nothing but one-pixel-wide straight lines, but that's not all. In Windows 10 there is no difference in coloration between the title bar of the active window vs. an inactive window; it's always just pure white. (Applications are supposed to define their own colorations, wh

Suppose that a semi-wealthy person gets into the habit of helping beggars. These beggars can simply go to that person's home, and get food or even money just like that. Word gets spread around among homeless people about this, and soon enough there's a stream of beggars. This person then decides that he can't keep doing this anymore, because it's taking too much of his money and time, and the beggars are becoming a nuisance to the neighborhood. So he decides to politely ask the beggars to stop coming. A very likely outcome of this is, at the very least, protest. At worst it could even go as far as violence. Even if it's just protest, it's rather inappropriate behavior. It's almost as if when that person started doing charity, and he got known by doing that, now he, somehow, has some kind of duty to keep doing it. If he stops doing it, the beggars will start protesting and even rebelling. If he had never started his charitable work, nobody would care. I

I think that this article at xojane.com really demonstrates the problem with modern feminism: " 35 Practical Steps Men Can Take To Support Feminism ". I'm going to briefly comment on these "steps". (I'm not going to fully quote the text, to keep this shorter, and to avoid copyright issues. You can read the full text from that link.) 1. Do 50% (or more) of housework.  WTF do you mean "or more"? Really? I thought feminism is about equality. Besides, the amount of housework done by people is none of your business. It's their business. Spouses can agree on the amount of housework done by each, which may depend on things like how much other work each has to do. They can also agree on who wants to do what. (For example, if one spouse would want more housework to be done than the other, they ought to reach a compromise. If there's something that eg. the woman would want to be done and the man doesn't, then perhaps the woman should do wha

Feminists just love to sensationalize the "wage gap". It's an enormous problem affecting the entire world, and needs to be fixed urgently. Well, let me propose a solution: Firstly, if too many women are applying for lower-paying jobs, we stop them and force them to take higher-paying jobs. For example, if too many women are applying for the position of pediatrician, then we put a limit to how many women can apply to it, and force the excess to apply for the position of surgeons, cardiologists, and so on. (Naturally they will have to study those degrees, but we can force them to do that as well.) Or if, for example, too many women are becoming hair stylists or kindergarten teachers, we put a limit on that, and force the excess to become construction workers, miners, electrical engineers, and so on. Of course this has to work in the other direction as well (else there will still be an imbalance.) In other words, if too many men are applying for the position of cardiac s