Blog posts tagged "rant" – Posts 11..15 of 15 posts found:

I quite enjoy a good movie, so I frequently visit the cinema. Very often, I also buy the DVD for the movies that I liked in the movie theater, as well as season boxed sets of episodes of TV-series. Even though downloading such material is technically legal in this country (as long as you don't upload or otherwise share it), I prefer to own the real thing. With more than a thousand DVDs bought, you'd think the studios would love me. Unfortunately, they don't. They treat their loyal customers like thieves. I'm talking about DRM, of course, and how it makes life difficult only for the honest users without impeding pirates in any significant way.
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There are some online games that I enjoy playing. What many of those appear to have in common nowadays is that there are profanity filters in them. Personally I think that is a monumentally stupid idea. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it is a very ineffective and hypocritical form of censorship. I've never understood why people, especially Americans, (at least in public) condemn the use of certain simple words and go positively ballistic at the sight of even mild nudity, yet live in a society that glorifies violence to the point where the "right to bear arms" is a part of the country's constitution and many people make use of that right. I can sort of understand that parents don't want their kids to be bombarded with expletives, but can those same parents honestly say that they never swear themselves? I doubt it very much. Many are indeed terrible hypocrits and say they "won't swear in front of the children". As if no child hearing a curse suddenly makes it better. The parents learnt those words, the kids will too. Filtering them in a game isn't going to prevent that. If you really think swearing is that bad, then it won't do to keep your children ignorant, but you need to set the right example for them and explain to them what it is they shouldn't be doing and why they shouldn't be doing it.
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When I woke up this morning, I felt up rather like I did on September 12th 2001. The world seems different somehow. Last night at 18:06, the enfant terrible of Dutch politics, Pim Fortuyn, was murdered, the week before the general election.
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Recently, at a party, one of my friends said, "it's so easy to manipulate men". Following that, she continued "I know what you're thinking: oh, that doesn't happen to me". That immediately reminded me of the rules of psychology. Although psychology claims to study the way people think, to me it seems to be all about imposing your own way of thinking on others. The moment somebody disagrees, make use of it. The most classic example I can think of is this. Suppose I want to prove that everyone is a drug addict. I can do that with a simple questionnaire, with only one question:
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Are you American?
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