Blithering Genius

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T. K. Van Allen, known online as Blithering Genius,^[1][2] is a writer, blogger, and YouTuber^[3] with some alt-right characteristics. He has articles describing how evolution works (according to him), his philosophy, some personal stories, and some very bad social commentary. He strongly dislikes humanism, which he believes to be the dominant ideology of the Western world. He is at least very sympathetic to white nationalism.

He has two blogs titled The Wayward Axolotl^[4] and Expanding Rationality^[5], with the latter consisting of some of the newer articles from the former. He also has a book published called Debunking The Selfish Gene, in which he supposedly debunks Richard Dawkins' 1976 book. He has a cult following that includes other bloggers.

Many of his article argue for some kind of thesis, but he generally gives very little evidence.

His view of evolution strongly favours individual organisms as the unit of selection, as he rejects kin selection and the gene-centered view of evolution.^{[note 1]} His views on evolution appear to greatly influence his worldview. He believes that altruism can't evolve, and therefore morality is an illusion; a collective delusion that hides people's true motives.^[6][7] His view that an organism's purpose is reproduction is also quite important to his worldview and values. Rejection of absolute morality and the claim regarding an organism's purpose aren't particularly controversial, but he derives some bizarre conclusions from them.

He has made the extreme hereditarian argument that differences in income, crime, and single parenthood between black people and white people in the US is "almost entirely due to genetic differences".^[8] This is a bigger stretch than most hereditarians make, who focus largely on IQ. His reasons for rejecting environmental factors are weak, to say the least.^{[See below]} Like with many of the things he says, he believes that the only reason people believe otherwise is because of the humanist belief that everyone is equal. Claiming that people who don't share his worldview are subject to a collective delusion is a common occurrence with him.

Blithering Genius promotes distrust of academic research in his article titled "Why Most Academic Research is Fake",^[9]. He argues that most research papers are "fake" because of ideological bias and perverse incentives. This may explain the tendency of other bloggers he inspired to cite various racialist and pseudoscience blogs for various claims. Of course, this isn't a problem for him, as he is only bothered by some kinds of ideological bias.

He is Canadian who has lived in various parts of Western Canada and the United States.

Views on academia[edit]

He has an article titled "Why Most Academic Research is Fake", which ultimately concludes with "the overall academic enterprise is a fraud". The way he defines "fake" here is unusually broad, as it's not limited to only intentionally false or fraudulent research. The replication crisis is a real issue in the scientific community, and some of the problems mentioned in the article are in line with reasonable explanations for how it may happen. But he places particular emphasis on "ideological bias", particularly with ideological views he doesn't like. The examples he provides are unsurprisingly, all reasons why researchers would reach conclusions different from his own.^[9]

Overall, the article isn't meant to encourage improvement of the scientific process. It ends telling the audience to distrust academic research and experts.

Not all academic research is fake, but the overall academic enterprise is a fraud. The appropriate attitude toward academic research is extreme skepticism. Don’t trust academic experts. Don’t accept academic citations as arguments. If you can’t verify academic research for yourself, ignore it. The academy is not a trustworthy source of knowledge.

Overall, this article serves to make his audience distrust mainstream science in favour of himself, as he works outside the scientific community. This is a subtle cult-manipulation tactic.

On evolution, genetics, and biology[edit]

Under the name T.K. Van Allen, he has published a book called Debunking The Selfish Gene.^[2] This supposedly debunks The Selfish Gene, a book by Richard Dawkins published in 1976. So far, Van Allen's book does not appear to have been reviewed by any professional biologists. As biology and genetics are advanced fields, his preference for common knowledge over research data easily reaches it's limitation in his writing on these subjects.

Blithering Genius has an unusual understanding of evolution, with some of his own self-developed hypotheses. He rejects kin selection, but unlike some other objections, it's not because he believes group selection to adequately explain all supposed cases of kin selection. He claims that kin selection would only work if both siblings (or other relatives) have the same altruistic gene, but that this would be selected out as the siblings with such a gene would be selected out in favour of those without. In reality, kin selection is likely to happen when the increased chance of group survival from an altruistic trait is enough to outweigh this effect. His article briefly hints at this, but quickly disregards it.^[10]

A particularly bizarre argument that he makes against kin selection is that members of the same species are genetically mostly identical; so genetic variation of 0.5% within a species would result in parents only caring about their children only 0.5% more than other members of the species if the basis of selection were shared genes and not just reproduction.^[11] While being mathematically shoddy, this doesn't properly account for other members of the species being competitors for reproduction, who can be expected to reproduce regardless of the actions of one individual. One's closest relatives; their children, are scarcer than more distant relatives.

Hereditarianism[edit]

In his article titled "It's Probably Mostly Genetic", Blithering Genius argues that statistical differences between black people and white people in the US are "almost entirely due to genetic differences". The areas he lists are income, crime, welfare use, and single parenthood.^[8] This is a bigger claim than the one made by most hereditarians that the IQ gap is 50-75% caused by genetic differences. For income, crime, and welfare use, the connection to one's environment is much more straightforward than it is for IQ, as it doesn't necessarily depend on long-term changes to the brain.

For income, a major factor would be wealth inheritance. White Americans are over twice as likely as Black Americans to receive wealth transfers from family members, and often receive larger ones than they do, resulting in white households inheriting 5 times more on average. Inherited wealth accounts for 20 to 50 percent of total household wealth in the US.^[12] This wealth can translate into income when invested.

The crime gap can easily be explained by blacks more often being in an economic situation that would encourage theft (being poor), and having worse life prospects. People are less likely to risk committing crimes if they have better life prospects. Therefore, the crime gap may be largely a result of the wealth and income gap.

Modern civilization has created an environment of abundance. The material conditions of human beings have never been better than in modern, developed societies. Almost everyone has access to adequate nutrition, medical care and education. Modern civilization brings out the genetic potential of individuals. As a consequence, the observable differences between people in the modern West are mostly due to genetic differences or random factors that are beyond our ability to control.

Unfortunately, it just isn't true that almost everyone in the US (or "modern civilization" in general) has all these needs met, with black Americans having this problem more often than white Americans.

The article doesn't provide very strong evidence for the genetic hypothesis, but according to him, he doesn't have to. He claims that attributing racial disparities to genetics should be the "default hypothesis", because race is based on genetically-determined traits. This is a case of the correlation-causation fallacy, and a lame excuse to reach his desired conclusion. He has also used an appeal to simplicity to argue in favour of this, which he seems to think is Occam's razor.^[13]

On society and social issues[edit]

Blithering Genius has a strange understanding of the current state of society in "the West". Much of his worldview is supported by his belief that "humanism" is "the dominant ideology of the modern West", though he also uses the word "religion" at times.^[14] He uses this word to refer to a combination of egalitarian views (both positive & normative), a high regard for altruism, a belief that humans are typically altruistic, and low importance of traditional religion (which he believes that humanism has supplanted). He blames humanism for many of his controversial views not being more common. He also sometimes rants on "leftism", which seems to be a stronger form of what he calls "humanism", but with added virtue signalling.^[15] He frequently blames humanism and leftism for his views not being more common.

He proposed a successor to humanism called "rational humanism". He said that it's about an individual purpose of reproduction, and a collective purpose of perpetuating and advancing civilization.

Many of his posts are rambles expressing familiar reactionary grievances, though from an atheist perspective. This includes not seeing enough white people in places,^[16] far-right extremists being blamed for the havoc they cause,^[17] etc. He frequently claims that governments and other power structures are tied to leftist ideology, even in the UK under the Conservative Party.^[18] Being an athiest, he occasionally calls out Christian reactionaries for their hypocrisy. He has said that "Christianity is batshit insane".^[19]

Feminism[edit]

In his blog article titled "What is Feminism?", he argued that feminism is "a memetic disease" because "It suppresses reproduction in the host". The way feminism is characterized in this article is a very hyperbolic take on the movement that grossly misrepresents feminism as it exists in reality.^{[20] [note 2]} It also asserts, without evidence, that women have a special desire for power (implicitly more so than men) that makes feminism appeal to them.

Much of the article is just rather typical anti-feminist ranting about feminism having unreasonable aims that demand too much for women. This doesn't really say anything as to why feminism is harmful to the host, but may serve to argue that feminism appeals to women for illogical reasons.

An argument he makes against universal basic income in another article is that it would make women more independent of men, and reduce the pair bond.^[21]

Denial of history and white victimhood narrative[edit]

While he frequently claims that truth doesn't matter to people who he disagrees with, Blithering Genius has at times denied historical events, and falsely described recent events in order to fit a narrative. This is very unlikely to be an honest mistake in all cases. These denials and tactical omissions generally involve non-white people being killed by white people with authoritarian tendencies, so it seems that he's trying to deny the destructiveness of white supremacy.

In a 2017 article on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Blithering Genius said that the rally was "a big mistake", but only because of the bad publicity it gave to the movement behind it.

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. They jump on everything that remotely resembles this narrative: the Trayvon Martin killing, the Michael Brown killing, and of course Trump, who is the second coming of Hitler to the left. An in-your-face pro-white march was obviously going to plug right into their moral narrative and trigger moral outrage. 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.

The truth about the death that happened there is that it was a white supremacist who deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of people, killing one of them and injuring many others.^[22] This fact was never mentioned in his article. The rest is an incoherent ramble about "leftists". He claims that "the moral paradigm of our culture is leftist", and is even "associated with the power structures of our society".^{[note 3]} Obviously, the purpose of this article was to make the white supremacists seem relatively harmless. Inconvenient to his narrative, white supremacy is the most common motivation for domestic terrorism in the United States.^[23]

Blithering Genius has explicitly claimed that there is a problem of anti-white propaganda and racism in the US and the West in general, while racism against other groups is not a major problem. While obviously wrong on the face of it, this causes some internal conflict in his worldview. Most people in the US and other Western countries are white, and this includes most politicians and people in the media.^[24] If his claim were true, it would require a very large number of white people turning against a group that they are members of. How could this possibly be explained by evolution? He might just say that they were duped by propaganda, or felt pressured to conform, but that would be a homunculus fallacy, as that would just lead to a question of how such a propaganda meme would have managed to take off in the first places in countries ruled and largely populated by white people.^{[note 4]}

In another article complaining about a perceived anti-white bias in media, Blithering Genius denied the existence of the mass graves that had recently been discovered at former residential schools around Canada.^[25]

Miscellaneous crazy beliefs[edit]

Here's a list of crazy things that Blithering Genius (wrongly) believes:

• "Leftists" deserve the blame^[26] when a white supremacist rams a car into them.^[22]
• Virtue signalling is a selfish act to raise one's status when done by individuals, but when for-profit companies do it, it's to spread ideology.^[27]
• Systemic racism is not a major problem in the US, but anti-white racism is promoted by media and enforced by the government.^[28]

See also[edit]

• The Pragmatosphere
• Racialism
• Cornucopian vs. Malthusian debate

Notes[edit]

References[edit]