Essay:A Whole Lot of Bullshit by Blithering Genius

I'm writing this to put together a whole lot of bullshit claims written by Blithering Genius on his blog The Wayward Axolotl, and briefly summarizing what's wrong with them. Some of this should make it to his article. This page will go over many more quotes from him than would be reasonably put in his main article.

I'm organizing this by blog article.

This is currently incomplete.

Charlottesville

Published in August 2017.

Oh boy! What does he have to say about this?

The rally was a huge mistake because it played into the moral narrative of the left. The left is desperately hungry for events that fit its moral narrative of evil white males being oppressive to victim class X.

It would all have been great if the leftists didn't ruin it, right? Note that this event was explicitly organized to unify the American white nationalist movement.

Plus, the crowd was out of control and the circumstances were out of control, so the whole thing got out of hand quickly. To top it off, someone died. Now, I know that is almost entirely the fault of the authorities and the leftist rioters, not the "Nazis". But in a situation like that, the narrative trumps the truth.

That death happened because a self-identified white supremacist deliberately rammed his car into counter-protesters. What were you saying about "truth"?

More generally, communism as an ideology gets a pass for its death toll because communism fits the dominant moral paradigm.

No it doesn't generally get a pass, and no it doesn't fit the dominant moral paradigm. That's insane.

There's more to this article that I might get to later.

White Erasure in Advertising

Published October 6, 2022.

In this article he rants about white people being underrepresented in mass media, particularly his YouTube advertisements, in which he watches 40 of to count how many have white people, black people, etc.

It turns out that more of them had black people than white people, 20 vs 15 to be exact. This is interesting given that black people were only 3.5% of Canada's (his country's) population (as of 2016).

Now here's his bizarre conclusion:

The obvious conclusion is that ads are incredibly biased against white people, and in favor of black people. The advertising industry seems more concerned with pushing an ideological agenda than selling products. Advertising has become little more than a propaganda campaign against white people, and especially against white men and white families.

There we have BG's understanding of economics. According to him, these companies are throwing a whole lot of money to spread some "ideology" by showing us black people. This is more important to them than selling products, according to him. Of course, this is assuming that these companies believe in this "ideology" far more than potential customers. It's bizarre that in other places he says that virtue signalling is a selfish act done for self-promotion, to falsely appear altruistic. Yet when it's done in advertising, he says it's because they genuinely believe in the ideology they're promoting, not for self-promotion.

Actually, the presence of black people in advertisements was found to increase effectiveness in some cases. TBF, this research happened after BG wrote this article.

If BG had a consistent understanding of economics, he would stick with only one of the following:

• Major economic transactions are generally made for selfish reasons. People aren't going to put huge money or effort into things without an expectation of return on their investment. Communism will never work.
• Communism would totally work! Everyone will just work for everyone else out of the kindness of their heart. No money required!

One more thing in his description of one of the ads:

Tim Hortons Virtue signaling about native mass grave myth

Oh no! He's a denialist of the mass graves at Canadian residential schools.

Israel, Palestine and Moral Confusion

Published October 2023.

This is an article about the recent violence between Israel and Palestine.

Palestinians are poor and brown, while Israelis are rich and white or whitish, especially the Ashkenazi Jews. In the West, people have been trained to view whites as bad guys and non-whites as good guys. They have also been trained to not be “Islamophobic”. So, they naturally tend to take the side of non-whites and Muslims. That moral stance cannot get you fired from your job, or kicked off social media, unlike the opposite stance.

People have definitely been kicked off social media for taking a stance against Israel.

Stranger in a Familiar Land

Published May 2018.

This is story of BG visiting his old University; Simon Fraser University, which is in Burnaby, British Columbia.

It was “Club Day” when I was there. That’s the day when the various campus clubs set up tables to attract new members. There was a Chinese club, which seemed odd because almost everybody there was Chinese. Why would they need a club? Of course, there were no clubs for white students, or for European culture, or anything like that. That would be racist and exclusionary —

Based on my experience at UBC, I doubt that this is actually true. At the Club's Day at UBC, there were plenty of clubs for students of particular regions, including European ones such as a Nordic student association, a German student association, Ukrainian student association, etc. There were various clubs with signs in Chinese languages, including a Chinese theatre club, but there was no "Chinese student club". That would be silly given the large number of Chinese students. I don't exactly disbelieve him that he saw one at SFU, though it is indeed quite strange.

The rest is largely talking about white people being minorities in various nearby cities, and also some in other provinces of Canada. As you'll see he will try to claim that it's not that he's opposed to non-white people, but then it's suspicious that he gives percentages for each city by how many "non-white", rather than white. Glass half-empty, right?

They [Canadians] are told to celebrate their replacement [by immigrants]. —

This shit doesn't require rebuttal.

I don’t hate immigrants or people of other races. It seems silly to even say this. I have always had friends of other races. I don’t mind living in a society with people of different races, and I don’t mind low levels of immigration that are balanced. Maybe if I could move to India or China as easily as Indians and Chinese can move here, I wouldn’t feel so screwed by mass immigration. As it is, however, it’s a one-way street, and I have been screwed by it. My kids will be even more screwed by it. I don’t agree with what is happening to Canada or to the West in general. —

You were just listing the non-white percentage for various cities! If many of the white people in these cities were moving to China and India, those percentages would be higher.

Canada is a country without a common heritage and culture, and without any sense of historical continuity. So-called “Canadian values” are just trite, meaningless slogans. Canada is just an economic unit that imports people and exports natural resources. It is a land of cookie-cutter housing and generic strip malls. —

Correct. Hopefully he will advocate for embracing this reality rather than trying to turn this into an argument for Canadian nationalism. There was never a moment in Canadian history with where Canada was strongly culturally united by a common identity.

I miss the Canada of my youth. It felt like a country. It had a culture of sorts. Now, I don’t feel like I have a country or a culture anymore. Canada is my native land, but not my home. —

Fail!

The Conflict Between Hedonism and Altruism

Published September 2020.

The article starts of by saying that the humanist worldview (which to him is the dominant ideology of the Western world) values two things (though he uses the word "assumptions"); hedonism & altruism. It then goes on to say that these two values are in conflict.

Some people claim that hedonism is self-evident, based on an appeal to experience. In their view, we know that pain is bad because it feels bad, and we know that pleasure is good because it feels good. This is really a definition of bad and good, not an empirical argument. Regardless, this argument negates altruism, because I don’t feel the pain or pleasure of others. Their pain doesn’t feel bad to me, and their pleasure doesn’t feel good to me. So, if I know from direct experience that pain is bad and pleasure is good, then I also know that the pain of others is not bad and the pleasure of others is not good. If hedonism is self-evident, so is selfishness. —

This is pathetically stupid because valuing altruism can very easily be justified as a means to a better collective hedonistic state between multiple people. There is already research that shows that altruistic actions increase emotional well-being for even those who perform them, and the benefit to others should be obvious.

So he needs to frame hedonism in a very specific way to say that it contradicts altruism, and then trying to portray this conflicting worldview as the dominant ideology of the west.

Of course, he ends this article by saying that everyone else doesn't notice this because they are too illogical.

The conflict between hedonism and altruism goes unnoticed by most people, because the assumptions are not stated explicitly and thought about carefully and logically. Also, they are not used to generate value judgments in practice. Ordinary value judgments are generated by intuition. They are not consciously derived from axioms. The hedonism and altruism assumptions are only used as a basis for post hoc rationalizations. If you try to explicitly derive value judgments from them, you will discover this conflict and other problems. —