The Wayward Axolotl

When I was 18, I saw an ad that said something like “Make $500 a week selling a revolutionary product!”. The product was a package of “life-changing” nutritional supplements: pills, elixirs, powders, etc. The ad said to go to an address for a meeting on a certain evening. Out of curiosity, I went. The meeting was in a big room in a community center, rented for the occasion. First, there was a speech promoting the life-changing product and the potential for selling it. Then various people in the crowd stood up and gave testimonials about how the product had changed their lives: they were healthier, wealthier, having more sex, etc. Of course, it was a multi-level marketing scheme. To join, you had to buy a batch of the product, and then you were supposed to use it yourself, sell it to others, and recruit others to sell under you, in which case you would get a percentage of their sales. At the time, I had never heard of such schemes, but I was not fooled. I understood that it w...

In the modern West, we have discarded the tradition of marriage without much thought. It has become a hollow, meaningless ritual. In the past, marriage was a life-long commitment and a license to have sex. Now it is just a ceremony. Many people view the abandonment of traditional sexual morality as progress. They see no reason why we should follow archaic norms of sexual behavior. Those norms were justified with appeals to religious authority, not with rational arguments. Now that God is dead, or at least very ill, and we have the birth control pill, there is no reason to follow ancient traditions. However, just because traditional sexual morality was justified on religious grounds, that doesn’t mean it was arbitrary or oppressive. Traditional sexual morality had very important functions. People did not understand those functions, so it was justified with appeals to religion. But it has a rational, pragmatic justification. Traditional marriage had two aspects: Marriage...

I'm sure most of you are aware of the recent shooting in Charleston SC, in which a white man motivated by racial hatred killed 9 black people. Predictably, many people are using this event to promote their political agendas. Some are using it to promote the view that white racism against blacks is a major problem in the US. Some are using it to promote gun control. Some are using it to promote censorship of beliefs they don't like. Some are using it to promote hatred against whites. It is always a fallacy to infer from an isolated incident to a general conclusion. Isolated incidents tell us nothing about the way things generally are. They are anomalies. Sometimes people see a pattern, real or imagined, in isolated incidents such as mass shootings. For example, one slogan says "Why is it always a white guy?", circulating with a picture of some famous white mass killers. The intended message is something like "Whites are evil" or "Mass killings are ...

This is a response to an article by Roosh V : The Theory of Evolution Does Not Apply to Modern Human Beings . I quote extensively from his article. He, in turn, quotes extensively from the book Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove. I will not identify which passages were written by Roosh himself, and which were quotes from the book. I will respond to everything as if one person said it. However, the source should be pretty clear from the style of writing. This is not a personal attack on Roosh. I appreciate that he is thinking and writing about these issues, but he is very wrong about evolution. I’ll begin with his opening paragraph: I know your blood is already boiling from reading the headline above and that your intellectual self-defense mechanisms have been activated to refute all ideas you are about to encounter henceforth, but make yourself a cup of tea, relax, and consider the following viewpoint that has been concealed from you during your entire life. Okay. I’ve got my ...