The Wayward Axolotl

This is a response to a comment by EyesWideOpen on the video Lucifer’s Question . His comment is long, so I will break it into parts and respond to each part. He began by quoting something I said: “Even if you fling yourself into the Abyss, so that you may reign in hell, you’re still serving in heaven.” Then he said: Do you really think that John Milton was an advocate of anything closely approximating the autocatalytic cells view of existence where ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ can both be reduced down simply to causality in a 100% materialistic universe? I believe Milton’s many metaphors should be viewed in context — Milton’s belief system was Christian. Although he was anti-organization when it came to Church governance, his ideas on existence and purpose were always structured within a framework built upon the Word of God as a divine revelation of higher truth (metaphysical). The video wasn’t about Paradise Lost or Milton’s worldview. I used the character of Luci...

This essay is about the economic problem created by the coronavirus pandemic. Here is the situation. There is a new disease that spreads like the flu or common cold, but with significantly worse symptoms. It floods hospitals with patients and kills about 3% of those infected. It spreads around the world. Stopping or slowing the spread of the disease is now a major goal of every government, and avoiding the disease is now an important goal for most individuals. Governments in most places introduce measures to slow the spread of the disease. They shut down travel, outdoor gatherings, restaurants, and other public activities. Individuals also change their behavior to avoid infection, mostly by reducing their exposure to others. The pandemic has effects on both production and consumption, both supply and demand. Certain goods and services are no longer produced, either because of new regulations or because of decreased demand. A huge number of businesses shut down and a huge number of ...

Consider the following statement: Trans-women are real women. It is a required belief in the current year. We are supposed to believe that trans-women are real women. Claiming otherwise is hate speech. Of course, this is crazy, and it demonstrates the insanity of Western culture in the current year. But the statement is more than just a blatant denial of biological reality. It is a semantic paradox. I’m going to call it the “trans paradox”. The trans paradox is similar to the liar’s paradox. An example of the liar’s paradox is “This sentence is false”. If the sentence is false, then it is true, and vice versa. Thus, it cannot be assigned a truth-value. The trans paradox is also self-negating, but in a different way. If the trans paradox is true, then it is meaningless. The trans paradox negates its own meaning because the concept of a trans-woman depends on the concept of a woman. More generally, it presupposes the gender binary. “Trans-woman” can be defined in differ...

The coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the West in a way that was completely predictable. Once the virus got into the general population in China, it was only a matter of time before it spread to the rest of the world. Mass international travel made that inevitable. But although the rest of the world had about a month to prepare, most countries did very little. As the numbers were growing in China, I kept wondering why there were so few cases in the US and Canada. Both have large Chinese populations, and there is a lot of travel between China and North America. In particular, there are many Chinese students who went home for the Christmas break and might have brought the virus back with them. So, I expected quite a few cases to show up in Canada and the US during February, and I was puzzled when the reported counts were much lower than I had expected. Now I know the reason for those low numbers. The health authorities in Canada and the US did very little testing. Dur...