The Wayward Axolotl

I’m going to make the case for the “eugenostate”, by which I mean a state that has eugenic policies, in contrast with the ethnostate, which is based on racial or ethnic criteria. I will contrast them in terms of how easy or difficult it would be to create them, and the benefits provided by each. I claim that the eugenostate is far better as a political goal. I should explain what I mean by “eugenic policies”. Let’s dispense with the various strawmen first. Eugenics is not Nazism. It does not require killing people. It is not some perverse meddling in nature. Eugenics is deliberate social regulation of the genome. As I define it, eugenics is selecting for traits that make people good members of society. Some people are more productive and responsible than others. They make a net contribution to society. Others are less productive and responsible. They are a net cost to society. Eugenics means socially selecting for traits that make people productive and responsible members of...

The other day, I was talking with some friends about whether there is less good music being created now than in the past. Of course, that’s a highly subjective question. Whether music seems good or not depends on personal taste and personal experience, not just on the music itself. Also, musical tastes change over time. With that said, however, it seems to me that the frequency of good new music has declined over the last 20 or even 30 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, every year had a number of hits that almost everyone knew, and almost everyone would have a list of personal favorite songs from the past year. That seems to have ended, not only for Gen-X-ers like me, but also for millennials and zoomers. There are other signs that music is stagnant. There haven’t been any important new genres of music since the early 1990s. There were a few medium to small ones, such as the dubstep/EDM wave of the mid 2000s, vaporwave and K-pop. But those don’t compare (from my admittedly subjective ...