Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous and rich in context and character. Men fantasise about copulating with bodies; women fantasise about making love to people.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.