Time

The primary process thinking, up to 90% of brain activity, knows no time the way we think of it consciously. It's the same as the mythical time, it's particular and eternal at the same time.

How can we shut down racism?

Flocking into groups based on any shared, real or imaginary, trait is a basic human drive. The good side of it is that humans can only survive by cooperating. On the flipside are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, groupthink, etc. It takes a self-realised individuated human to become aware to what extent one needs to be part of a group and when it is time to say, 'I'm out of here'. Overcoming group dynamic by propaganda and mass education will mostly create knee-jerk reactions of the anti-political-correctness kind. Even when suppressed very effectively, sooner or later this will burst into something ugly (kind of like suppressed wish pops up elsewhere as a neurosis): just look at how rampantly and shamelessly xenophobic have become the supposed bulwarks of tolerance like Holland and Denmark.

The preachers of Neo-Liberalism, beware of what you preach

The real problem for people who adopt the Neo-Liberal rhetoric of the deserving vs. the undeserving in relation to social security, universal healthcare, free comprehensive education, etc. is that in 99% of cases they are NOT the ones who will actually decide who deserves and who doesn't, and the chances are that at some point of time in their lives, those very people will get the shitty end of the stick of the policies defined and justified by the very views they so eagerly profess now. A classic case of human ignorance sawing off the branch one is sitting on.

Social difference, the alpha and omega of any human group

 "The system produces only waste and social difference", quoth Baudrillard in 1970. The strife to achieve the latter, however, is in fact one of the prime drivers, rather than mere outcomes, of the whole shebang.

Post-modernism and post-structuralism

A lot of contemporary social, literary and cultural theory (Latour a prime example) so obviously comes from white male upper-middle class arm-chair pontificators who have never experienced any kind of discrimination or even material discomfort so they feel free to blabber on how power is everywhere, everyone is an agent and everything in the world boils down to a bunch of abstruse, yet flashy buzzwords.  Argumentum verbosium at its best funded.

Ten percent of the brain

Time after time again, I come across people claiming, "according to recent research" as it goes, that humans only use 10% of their brain. I guess, neurologists BELIEVE that we don't use a great part of our brain because they yet HAVE NO IDEA what it's for. When information like that percolates from the academia through the media into the public domain, it loses all academic nuances and becomes a simplistic meme people take for a gospel and repeat until the majority believes it to be true. Foucault often used to bitch about it.

Proof and evidence in science

Everything in science is about enough evidence beyond reasonable doubt, never a conclusive proof, especially so in social sciences. So everything is essentially "may" or "may not". To claim otherwise, is journalists' job.
 

"Once one says "may", all the evidence have been redacted. All the educated guesses, all the logical inferences, thrown out the window. With the empirical data, and the established theories, what can one conclude? Of course it is not impossible that the conclusions of one's analysis is incorrect, but that's an interpretation of the conclusions, which is up to the reader. Don't put words in the mouth of the reader. Especially not words of doubt, not after so many pages trying to convince the reader of the legitimacy of the conclusion of the analysis. With the empirical data, and the established theories, what can one conclude? Nothing? Ok, then put the "may" in there, so the reader knows the text was a waste of time to read..."
 

That's essentially the logic of what happens to scientific information as it passes through the media on to the layman: it ends up trivialised and truncated so that it can be presented as "scientific facts from recent research" in the latest Marie-Claire. Even Foucault bitched about that in one of his interviews. But then again, it helps "sell science" to the masses, so there you go.
 

That one can conclude nothing is a bit too dramatic. We can gather enough evidence to suggest that certain things are most likely to be true. Considering how much effort and rigour go to get to that point, and that at some point of time, it is bound to give way for better, or perhaps, entirely different results, it's decent enough. In reality, science is a lot of educated guesswork, just the way it is put together, the scientific method, makes it much more reliable than, say, gossip, but it is not inherently THE best or multi-purpose method of cognition. Trying to create a belief in the infallibility of "scientific proof" is what makes science scientism, a religion like any other. Do we really want that now?