When we act against what we know is true, we put our habits in conflict with our knowledge, creating more work for us in the future. Hypocrisy is technical debt; guilt is a code smell.
A narrative is a mapping from descriptions to a mathematical structure, typically a sequence.
Racial separatism is to sociobiology what Leninism is to economics.
Computation is the creation of physical systems whose evolution represents proofs in arithmetic.
A lichen is a symbiosis of an alga and a fungus. A person is a symbiosis of an ape and a story.
A skill is anything that you have to be bad at before you get to be good at it.
The line between good and evil does not divide subculture from subculture; it runs through the middle of the individual mind.
Language is that thing that we're doing now.
In order to help someone, it is not only necessary to have the good intention of helping; it is also necessary to have the skill of helping in a particular way, and the knowledge of the situation to be helped.
Beware of the Designated Hitler.
Hell and heaven are like the point sources, point charges, or points at infinity in physics or geometry. People behave as if there were infinite sufferings, unique rewards, etc.; so we can use these as simplifications to predict human behavior. For example, guilt works as if people wanted to escape hellfire; charity works as if people wanted to attain heaven.
Guilt is not a prediction that hell exists; hell is a model of guilt, and a fear of hell is a model of aversion to guilt.
You can't go to heaven, but if you locally move in the direction that seems to be toward heaven, you will {do, make, get, experience} good things, as if there were a point source of goodness infinitely far away in that direction.
Behave locally as if heaven is there; but don't try to actually go to heaven. The metaphor breaks down, just as the "infinitely long massless wire" of freshman physics does.
Eye of Newton / Mom of Freud / Will of Shakes / and Spider-Man!
Race is the politicization of heredity, and thereby of (heterosexual, reproductive) sexuality.
When a Freudian observes the distribution of human sexual attraction, he says, "People tend to be attracted to people who look like their opposite-sex parent." When a racist observes the same distribution, she says, "People tend to be attracted to people of their own race." Since most people are of the same race (whatever that is) as their parents, the very same data can be interpreted as Oedipal preferences or as racial preferences.
The choice between the Oedipal interpretation and the racial one is underdetermined by the data; rather, it is specified by the observer's ideology.
The Oedipal interpretation is (pace Foucault) confessional; it is political in a narrowly professional sense of endorsing a psychoanalytic religious caste, but (pace Reich) it has little to offer to mass politics or demagoguery. The racial interpretation has much to offer to demagoguery; and racism has been a staple of demagogues since its invention.
The Old English ancestor of the modern word bad meant inadequate, defiled, or effeminate. To be a baddie or badling (OE bæddel or bædling) didn't mean you were cruel or that you served the Dark Lord; it meant you were gay, intersex, or otherwise sexually deviant.
Poor meant lacking wealth long before it meant inadequate in a more general sense. Rich shares an origin with ruler, both in the sense of a king (rex) and in the sense of regulation or drawing straight lines.
A villain was a rural person or peasant; someone from a village; just as a pagan was someone from the hills (Greek pagoi) who wasn't hip to the current urban trends in religion, and a heathen was someone from the heath.
The expression wicked witch is redundant in a sense: both words are from OE wicca meaning sorcerer.