shortcolumn

half-formed, published anyway

  • 172 words

    Repetitive Experiences

    When you experience something negative for the first time, it doesn’t lead to a judgment. When it happens again some time later, your judgment is triggered. When it happens a third time, your judgment registers it as a pattern for possible future events.

    When you sense you’re about to experience something similar again, your judgment immediately draws on your memory and tells you to fight or flee. It doesn’t matter how you react in the end. You are simply following your judgment.

    Interestingly, the more repetitive experiences we have in life, the more judgmental we become. And the more judgmental we become, the more we treat new experiences as if they were the same as old ones, even when they are nowhere near what we went through before. This isn’t our fault. We are misled by judgments that stem from repeated experiences.

    The solution is to recognize that each experience is unique, even when it looks the same as a past one, and to never let our past experiences cloud our judgment.

  • 1 month167 words

    The Debate of Violence

    I have no idea where the world is heading. Everyone has a strong opinion about what the future will look like. I don’t. and I don’t think I ever will.

    We saw violence on TV. We saw it on the streets. We saw it everywhere except in the places built for arguing intellectually. That part is new.

    • X obliterated Y in this debate. Click here!
    • Y annihilated Z in this video!
    • Z nuked B’s argument. Watch!
    • The debate of the year, and one side destroyed the other…

    This is where we are today. We are against wars but want to happily destroy someone’s argument. We don’t even need to watch it. The thumbnail is enough. And this gives us an undeniable satisfaction.

    I would like to argue that the language of violence is less harmful than physical violence. But it is not. Like how I don’t want to care about winning an argument, but I can’t.

    Are you looking for hypocrisy? Don’t look any further. Look here.

  • 2 days202 words

    Amsterdam’s Trash Epidemic

    We went from “oh, they are poor” to “fucking poor” faster than climate change went from a forecast to a season. Overconsumerism took over everything, and it produced both.

    The income distribution is so unfair that many people are fine throwing money into the garbage. The same people are not fine when someone else picks that money up from the garbage.

    These people are now complaining about the trash epidemic in Amsterdam. In the meantime, they ignore that it is the byproduct of their overconsumerism and the unfair income distribution.

    The streets in Amsterdam are covered with piles of trash because someone needed to survive by collecting that money thrown into the garbage. To find it in the garbage requires digging. And digging is a messy job.

    These people are angry not because of the trash on the streets. They are angry because the money was not a donation. The money thrown into the garbage was a deliberate act. It belongs to the garbage, it has to be in the garbage, and it needs to go extinct in the garbage.

    Poor people, please leave the rich alone. A bin is where things go to stop existing. And you made them exist again.

  • 6 days192 words

    An Unimaginable Oversight

    Imagine this. There is a god. God creates the whole universe. Then god creates a planet called earth. Then it creates everything in it.

    It is not enough. There are homo sapiens -because we have no idea what was happening with the previous ones- who have to worship god, since their existence is a gift.

    But wait a minute. They have to worship in the way god asked them to. Go to a church on Sundays, pray five times a day facing Mecca, keep the sabbath from Friday sunset…

    With all its unimaginable power that exists in our understanding, god couldn’t imagine how it wants to be worshipped a couple of times. And with the imaginable power we have -as homo sapiens- we can’t agree on which one is the right one, since worshipping shouldn’t matter, as it’s an acknowledgement of god.

    If god couldn’t decide on the worship the very first time, then an unimaginable power couldn’t imagine the very first time. And if we failed to apply it the very first time, and god couldn’t imagine -with an unimaginable power- that we would fail, then whose fault is it here?

  • 3 days113 words

    I Will Fail You Too

    Every person I’ve admired has, over time, said something so outrageous that I ended up disliking, being disgusted by, or even hating them.

    I’m saying this because I now know this is inevitable. One day I will also say some batshit crazy thing that gets me cancelled to death.

    Christoph Waltz, who is a great actor, once said that casting a white Martin Luther King wouldn’t make any sense, as an argument against the possibility of an African-American James Bond.

    Yes, Christoph, it doesn’t make any sense. One is a real human being and the other is a fictional character, and you can do whatever the fuck you want with a fictional character.

  • 180 words

    American Entitlement

    Trump is bad. I know there are many other adjectives for him, but for now I’ll stick with bad.

    Let scholars argue whether he’s a fascist. He is one in my eyes, and nothing is going to change that. And more and more Americans are no longer comfortable with the dream they had for the United States, because that comfort is being poked at to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

    Obama was bad too. No one from the Middle East will say anything nice about him. He’s regarded as a war criminal, because drone strikes killed thousands of civilians for nothing. I don’t even want to get into Bush, Clinton, or anyone further back. But the impact of those presidents on American society was not as substantial as it is now.

    The damage the USA has done to the world is continuous. It didn’t start with Trump and it won’t end with Trump. Trump just made Americans uncomfortable inside the USA, and maybe made the world a bit less predictable.

    Is he bad? Yes. Like the rest.

  • 121 words

    Is It Racist?

    Stereotyping is the cognitive machinery racism runs on. Prejudice and discrimination are what it produces. That’s the whole structure, and none of it requires you to hate anyone.

    Which is why i don’t think wearing someone else’s traditional clothes makes you racist. But I don’t think it’s that simple either.

    Anyone with common sense won’t complain if you wear their clothes and visit their neighborhoods. They’ll welcome you, because you’re not there with bad intentions. And the welcome feels like a verdict. It isn’t one. Intent and effect come apart. You can mean well and still be working from a flattened version of a whole group.

    So think twice before calling something racist. And think twice before calling something not racist.

  • 188 words

    The End of Physical Disks

    I will make it very clear. If you are against physical discs, you are taking the side of the rich and the powerful who don’t give a single fuck about you. Period!

    The problem with ending the physical discs is it kills the ownership. You don’t own the digital copy. You are renting it for as long as they allow. Imagine you bought a book. You read it and put it in your bookshelf. A couple of years later, the publisher knocks on your door and said the book is old, not many people are interested anymore, and they are taking it off your shelf. You said “but this is my shelf, I own the book and maybe I want to read it again.” and the publisher responded “nope, it is mine even if it is on your shelf.”

    It sounds absurd, isn’t it? This exactly what owning a digital copy is. You don’t own it. And courts have held the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital sales. You paid for permission to hold it. And someone is going to ask you to give it back. That’s it.