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Cultures Are Disgusting

July 20, 2025

Society

experiencing, ignorance, religion, social masses, society

Yeah, that’s one of those deliberately provocative titles of mine. The thing is, the word “culture” has such diverse meanings that it makes it easy to be offended by the claim, Cultures Are Disgusting. I mean, if we talked about bacterial growth on a Petri dish – a culture – few would disagree with it!

Obviously enough, that’s not the case here – I’m not referring to bacterial growth. I also don’t try to attack being cultured, since, equally obviously, the entire existence of Home for Fiction revolves around art, philosophy, knowledge, thought.

Rather, by arguing that cultures are disgusting, I attack the prevalent societal idea of conglomerating thought, boxing identity, (de)limiting expression.

Cultures are disgusting – we can imagine hearing Slavoj Žižek saying that while watering his (?) flowers – because any given culture (and I will attempt to define it more precisely in this post) is essentially an attempt to direct your thought.

cultures are disgusting. image of unimpressed cat.
Cultures are disgusting; cats are not – guess why: because they are individuals
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Two Decades since I first Tried Linux

July 6, 2025

Experiencing, Programming

computer, experiencing, programming, social masses, society

On October 14 2025, a few months from now at the time I’m writing these lines, something special takes place in the context of computers and operating systems. It’s the day when support ends for Windows 10. And, to throw a science-fiction twist into the mix, I’d say this is the day I anticipated when I first tried Linux back in 2005. It sounds absurd, but sometimes reality lies in the things we can’t quite see. In these two decades since I first tried Linux I’ve learned a lot of things – including learning how to learn – and it all led to this moment in time.

For the vast majority of people, this means nothing. They will continue to happily use Windows 10 unsupported – some of them might even think they’re smart, claiming they don’t need security updates because they have an anti-virus program. Or, they will succumb to the blackmail and buy a new machine to use Windows 11. Some of them might already be using a Mac, thinking they’re really smart.

Truly smart people aren’t necessarily defined by their actions, and that certainly includes the computer they use. But they are defined by their understanding of why they act the way they do.

two decades since I tried linux. image of Debian wallpaper
This image doesn’t reveal its connection with the topic, unless you are (like me) a user of Debian 12 Linux, as this is the default wallpaper for the log in screen.
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“Am I the Asshole?”: The Art of Self-Assessment

July 15, 2024

Experiencing, Society

art, experiencing, ignorance, society, writing

There is an often quoted claim suggesting that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. This isn’t always true – there are never black-and-white answers – for reasons we will examine, but it implicitly focuses on an important issue: How do we determine whether we’re right or wrong? How do we determine, “am I the asshole”?

There’s even a Reddit thread where people share incidents with strangers and expect them to answer, “Am I the asshole”? Of course Reddit, like the internet at large, relies on consensus. If 10,000 people insist you’re wrong, they must be right… Right? At least that’s what the bandwagon fallacy would like us to think. Obviously enough, this takes us back to the “assholes all day” problem.

But again, there are never easy answers.

So in this post, let’s try to unpack all this. Let’s see why we can’t rely on public consensus to figure out whether we’re right or not, and what we can do about it.

Am I the Asshole? blurry image of people
Humans are social animals. We want others’ approval. But what if others are wrong?
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