There was a wood rat called Poot

 --- Tove Jansson, in Comet in Moominland (Moomins, 2), Chapter 8 (h/t Susan T)

Excerpt

“Now we should tell a story,” said Sniff, turning to the smallest of the small creatures. “Do you know one, Little Creep?” 

“Oh, no, really,” whispered the Little Creep, who was terribly shy. “Oh, no, well, really, perhaps.” 

“Well, out with it, then,” said Sniff. 

“There was a wood rat called Poot,” said the Little Creep, looking shyly between her paws. 

“Well, what happened then?” prompted Sniff. 

“The story’s finished now,” said the Little Creep, and burrowed into the moss in confusion. 

They all roared with laughter, and those who had tails beat them on the ground in appreciation. 

 

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines

 --- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four: Maxims and Intentions, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics (Rev Ed) 2003

p. 99, paragraph 130 (complete)

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines – when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also finery; finery is also a hiding place.

Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite

 --- Matt Taibbi, "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo," Jun 30, 2021

In context:

. . . You wonder: Am I high? Didn’t I just read that? And didn’t I read that in the last book also? 

You did, because the rule, “If you wrote it, don’t write it again,” has an exception: “Unless it makes money, in which case write it as many times as the market will bear.” Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite. DiAngelo is monetizing white guilt on a grand scale, and there’s an extraordinary irony in the fact that she’s got a home-field advantage in this game over someone like, say, Ibram Kendi, because she’s more accessible to people like herself, the same phenomenon she decries. Normally I’d salute the capitalist ingenuity. Unfortunately, like Donald Trump, DiAngelo is both too dim-witted and too terrific an entrepreneur to stop herself from upselling a truly psychotic movement into existence. 

It's a high-octane rant; much more like this in the piece.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced

 --- Attrib. to James Baldwin

capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety

 --- Celso Vieira,  in "The capricious gods counterattack: on what the empirical method and the rational gods model miss" Academia Letters, 2021

From the Conclusion

According to the big gods hypothesis, moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions play a key role in reinforcing human cooperation. Hence, a religion with a big god is instrumental in the development of complex societies. This hypothesis has been questioned recently. . . . Factors such as wars and accessibility of resources seem to bear a closer connection with rising and falling complex societies. Wars and drastic resource depletion follow heavy-tailed distributions, that is, a body of events in which rare outliers are big enough to distort the mean of the whole. . . .

Regularity-centred models will not work to make predictions or estimates. The advised way to deal with a potential catastrophic event is a zero-risk attitude. However, it is not easy to advocate for it. Heavy events are rare, so people are expected to adopt self-constraining behaviour based on unavailable observed evidence. To make the perils more vivid, older generations who experienced heavy events might want to find a way to convey this information for the generations to come. Storytelling might work. Again, because of the rarity, no foreseeable gratification for the self-constraining behaviour is available. If so, piety, that is, prudence plus a humbling recognition of uncertainty might reinforce the right attitude. According to the previous discussion, capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety. Thus, capriciousness might be a side of religiosity playing a non-negligible role in the avoidance of catastrophes by long-lasting societies.

There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.

 --- Alec Ryrie, closing of his Gresham College lecture "Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich," March 2017.

Closing comments, starting at timecode 51:49:

We might imagine or hope that had we been there, we would've done something or taken some stand, and we are fooling ourselves. We would've understood what was happening around us, in the same way that they did. We would've shared their hopes, their experiences, their resentments, their assumptions, and their prejudices. Like them, we would've lowered our heads and muddled through increasingly terrible times as best we could. There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.