The Wayward Axolotl

In case you follow this blog and not my YT channel, I am posting a couple of links here. I created an ebook. It is a compilation of (mostly) cleaned up blog posts and video texts, with some new stuff. It makes a great last minute gift for your liberal uncle. Check it out here:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078H8KJLK. I have another book in the works, but I thought I would put out this one first. If you use discord and want to talk to me, you can find me on discord here: https://discord.gg/zfMtWK2. Merry Christmas!

“Cuck” is a favorite insult of the alt-right. It is used to refer to anyone who puts other races ahead of their own, personally or politically. For example, a family that adopts a black child would be described as “cucked”. More importantly to the alt-right, social policies are “cucked” if they put the interests of non-whites ahead of whites. The immigration policies of most Western countries are extremely cucked: they import large numbers of non-whites into white countries. The “cuck” insult is based on two metaphors. One is the metaphor of the cuckoo: a bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. The host bird is deceived into raising the offspring of the cuckoo instead of its own. The term “cuckold” was commonly used to refer to a man whose wife has the child of another man. The other metaphor is conceptualizing the collective as an individual. An individual has reproductive interests, and (via the metaphor) a collective has them too. A collective that reproduces the g...

These days, most people seem to believe that overpopulation is not a problem, although the reasons for that belief differ. Also, most people view eugenics as both evil and unnecessary. The conventional “wisdom” on these topics is wrong. Overpopulation and dysgenics are serious problems. If we don’t solve these problems, they will destroy modern civilization. The idea that overpopulation is not a problem is usually based on the evidence of recent history: that we have been able to expand food production to keep up with population growth for a hundred years or so, and thus (I guess the reasoning goes) we will be able to keep doing this…forever?? The absurdity of this is pretty obvious. Imagine that you are walking up a mountain in the fog. You can’t see the top of the mountain, and it might take longer than you expected to reach the top. Just because you can’t see the top, and haven’t reached it yet, that doesn’t mean the mountain is infinitely tall. Just because we haven’t reach...

This is a story about a friend from my youth. I’ll call her Indigo. I met Indigo when we were both in the second year of university. I didn’t go to university immediately after high school, so I was a few years older than her when we met. We were in the same program, Cognitive Science, and we had similar interests in philosophy, psychology and linguistics. She was very intelligent and open to new ideas. We naturally became friends, and would often hang out between classes, talking about life, the universe and everything. Indigo came from a sheltered, middle-class background. I came from a much grittier background, and my life experiences were a lot different from hers. There was also a political difference. She had left-wing, collectivist views, and I had more right-wing, individualist views. We would argue political philosophy sometimes, but in a friendly way. When we finished our undergraduate degrees, we went our separate ways. She went somewhere to do a grad program in u...

Nazism is usually presented as a negative moral exemplar without any rational analysis. Nazism is also linked to the theory of evolution, again, without any rational analysis. Nazism is often referred to as “Darwinian’’, although what this means is never spelled out. Certain ideas that were incorporated into Nazism, such as eugenics, are now considered evil because of their association with Nazism. Any use of evolutionary theory to understand human nature and/or solve social problems is equated with Nazism and rejected as evil. This places some very important ideas off-limits to discussion and debate. In this essay, I am going to analyze and critique the Nazi worldview from a “Darwinian” perspective. I will also critique the popular moral narrative about the Nazis and WWII. In the modern Western mythos, Hitler is the epitome of evil. He is simply portrayed as an evil person motivated by hatred. The Allies are presented as morally good, and their victory in WWII is portrayed as ...

You think inside a box. There is no pure reason, no pure arriving at conclusions by rational thought without assumptions or biases. To generate beliefs, our brains use various heuristics and biases in addition to rational methods of inference. One of those biases is framing. We use fixed assumptions to frame thought, so that only a few details are under consideration when we think. Framing assumptions limit your freedom of thought. Most of what you believe is either nailed down or tied to something that is nailed down. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is necessary. If your beliefs were always open to revision, or if you thought about everything, then you would have no stable beliefs. You would be in a perpetual state of confusion. Framing assumptions make thought possible. Everyone thinks inside a box, but some people have bigger boxes than others. Some people think more than others. They bring more alternatives into consciousness to consider. They can have more comple...

In this post, I will make the case against anarchism, or to put it another way, the case for the state. To make the case against anarchism, I need to explain what society is, what it is for, and how it works. So, this essay is not just the case against anarchism, it is also the outline of my social theory. Any social theory must be consistent with biology and physics, so I will begin from fundamental principles of life derived from physics and biology, and then build a theory of society on that foundation. Life is Competitive Life is a type of emergent order. It must extract (potential) energy from the environment to survive and reproduce. The energy could come from the Sun, other living beings, or chemical energy (such as deep-sea vents). Ultimately, all the energy in the biosphere comes from nuclear fusion in the Sun or from nuclear fission in the Earth’s core. Every ecosystem has finite resources: a finite stock of matter and a finite flow of energy from the Sun. Life has...

Written in 2014. This is about an old friend of mine. I’ll call her Violet. Violet is in her mid-30s. She is married but has no children. She is Chinese. Her parents were immigrants to Canada. She grew up in an area that is very racially diverse, where at least a third of the population is Chinese, and whites are a minority. She is now a professor of communications. A while ago, Violet came to my city for a conference. We arranged to meet up and go for coffee (it ended up being tea instead). We met at her hotel. It was a bit awkward at first, as these things usually are. We hugged and exchanged the typical greetings. I suggested that we go to a little tea shop nearby. She agreed. So, we left the hotel and started walking to the tea shop. As we walked, she told me about her recent struggles moving to a new city and starting a new job as a professor. We started talking about her research. I made a remark that academia is dominated by politics rather than truth-seeking, which is...

Does evolution have moral implications? It is taboo to discuss the implications of evolution for human nature and society. It is dismissed as “discredited”, “pseudoscience”, “bigoted” or simply “evil”. We are not supposed to think rationally about the implications of evolution for human beings. This taboo exists because evolution seems to conflict with established moral and social views. In particular, evolution conflicts with the moral value of altruism: the belief that we ought to be nice to one another. Evolution has no direct moral implications. Evolutionary theory is a truth theory . It tells us how the world is. Morality, on the other hand, is a value theory . It tells us how we should act, or how the world should be. Evolution is on one side of the is | ought gap, and morality is on the other. There is no way to reason from an “is” to an “ought”, or vice versa. Evolutionary theory doesn’t tell us how we should act, any more than physics does. However, like physics,...

What is freedom of speech? People often confuse the principle of free speech with a specific law intended to protect free speech, such as the first amendment of the US constitution. Freedom of speech is not a specific law or set of laws. Freedom of speech is the principle that coercion should not be used to suppress ideas. What is freedom of speech for? The primary function of free speech is to enable social rationality. Social rationality means thinking together. Discussion and debate are ways of thinking together. They are ways of solving problems and making decisions together. Freedom of speech creates a space in which people can freely exchange ideas, and thus think together. Freedom of speech is necessary for social rationality, because otherwise alternatives cannot be presented for consideration. Without freedom of speech, only popular or official opinions can be safely expressed. Under those conditions, the social belief system is fixed. Errors cannot be corrected,...