The Wayward Axolotl

Society is not just a collection of individuals. It is a power structure. That structure holds society together and allows it act as a unit. It gives society coherence and agency. Regardless of the nominal political system (democratic or otherwise), the social power structure will always be hierarchical, because a hierarchy is the only effective way to organize a large system. The establishment is the upper level of the social hierarchy. The establishment itself is a power structure. In the modern West, the establishment is complex, and few people view it as a unit. We are taught to view the components of the establishment as independent parts of society. In this essay, I will describe the establishment in terms of its component parts and how those parts are linked. In the modern West, the establishment has the following components: The government. The financial system. The owners of big capital. Politicians and political parties. The entertainment and new...

The word “abyss” comes from the Greek for “without bottom”. Taken literally, it means “bottomless pit”. Thus, it literally means something that cannot exist. There are no bottomless pits. The word seems designed to be confusing. It is a concept that can only be used as a metaphor for something else. The deep-sea floor is called “the abyssal plain”, but that makes no sense, as it is the bottom of the ocean. “The abyssal plain” literally means something like “the bottom of the bottomless pit”. I suppose that the concept of a bottomless pit made more sense before people knew that the Earth is a ball in space. You could imagine a hole in the Earth that goes down, down, down, and never comes to an end. But even then, can you really imagine a bottomless pit? Can you imagine infinity? A bottomless pit is a metaphor for infinity. You can only conceive of infinity in terms of what it is not. Infinity can only be defined and understood as the absence of something finite. The word “...

I thought I would talk about the recent shootings by police and shootings of police, mainly to have all the details in one place. Tuesday July 5 2016 On Tuesday July 5th police killed Alton Sterling, a 37 year old black man, outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge. They had been called by someone who claimed that Alton had threatened him with a gun. Alton did have a gun. The police attempted to arrest him and he resisted arrest. He was taken down to the ground with a struggle, and while the police (two officers) were struggling to subdue and cuff him, one of them said "He's got a gun!". One of the officers shot Alton multiple times in and he died. I think the police definitely handled the situation poorly, although of course it is easy to say that sort of thing sitting at your computer, not fearing for your life. There was no evidence that racism had anything to do with the altercation or death, since the police were responding to a call and dealing with an armed...

Comrades, I want to speak to you about the greatest injustice of the modern world: the unequal distribution of sex. Sex is not distributed equally among us — far from it. Some, through no virtue or effort of their own, have an almost unlimited supply of sex, while others go their whole lives without even getting laid, let alone being loved. Some of us inherit good looks from our parents. Others are born into ugliness. Is this fair? Is it humane to allow millions of people to suffer without sex or love? I think not. Sex and love are basic human rights. They must not be denied on the basis of ugliness, shortness, fatness, age or poverty. We all deserve love and sex. The history of sex is a story of class struggle. Women are the owners of sexual capital, while men are the sexual proletariat. Women are born with baby-making factories inside them. Men must purchase access to the means of reproduction with their labor. In the past, this system, although inequitabl...

February is black history month in the United States. Unfortunately, the month is not dedicated to actual history. It is not about understanding the past. It is about constructing and reinforcing the myth that black people were (and still are) oppressed by white people. The myth of black oppression is part of a larger myth: that white people and European civilization have oppressed the entire world for the past 500 years. The truth is very different from the myth. The preceding graph shows the population history of Africa from 1500 to 2000. The population grew very little over most of that time, and then it exploded in the last 100 years. This graph shows the entire African population: North Africans as well as Sub-Saharan Africans (blacks). A graph of just the black population would show an even more dramatic upward curve at the end. It is important to understand both sides of this graph: why the population remained flat for so long, and why it grew at the end. Let’s...

On New Year’s Eve, there were sex attacks in Cologne and other European cities, perpetrated mostly by Muslim immigrants. These attacks demonstrate some of the problems associated with mass immigration. The response of leftists has been denial: the attacks didn’t really happen, and if they did, they had nothing to do with immigration or Islam. Liberals, on the other hand, are somewhat more honest. They admit the existence of the problem, but view it as entirely cultural, as something that can be solved by “education”. They believe that the migrants have “retrograde ideas”, and that they will adopt our obviously superior Western liberal humanist values. The Muslims may even thank us for teaching them our superior ways! To me, this view is dangerously naive. There are problems with this migration that go beyond cultural differences. One is the sex ratio of the migrants. Most of them are young single men. Almost none of them are young single women. This migration creates a sexual i...

When I was 9 years old, I lived in an apartment complex at the edge of a small town. Behind the complex, there were hills covered with bunchgrass, sagebrush and a few old ponderosa pines. In those days, kids ran wild from dawn to dusk. We rode around on our bikes, played games, went exploring in the hills, etc. In the process, we learned about life. In the summer, there were lots of grasshoppers. They would often lay their eggs in cracks in the road. I would sometimes kneel on the road and watch them pumping their eggs into those cracks, oblivious to my presence. Once a female grasshopper is committed to laying her eggs, she stays there until the job is done. I have always been close to nature. I spent much of my time as a kid outdoors, exploring the landscape and observing plants and animals. I found those grasshoppers interesting for their own sake. But the other kids in the apartment complex enjoyed killing them. They made a game out of running over the grasshoppers with the...