I don't care about "AI slop" in video games

 So...AI is a complicated topic for me politically, mainly because of the political divisions involved. The right LOVES AI, wants to inject it into everything, destroy all the jobs, not have safety nets, MONEY MONEY MONEY! And the left...HATES AI, and acts like it murdered their dog because of the likes of Elon musk and silicon valley just pushing it in such an obnoxious way.

And here I am, in the middle, a pro technology progressive who loves the idea of AI, even if I hate the actual implementation at the hands of all of these corporations and billionaires. I don't care if AI takes jobs. Because, my whole thing is, we shouldnt be forced to work for a living any more in the first place. We should change our social structures to accommodate people in the 21st century away from an economy based on work, and quite frankly, I feel like the left are just luddites on this, becoming derangedly against AI in an absolutist, tribalistic fashion. Meanwhile, the right is basically going way too far with it, pushing it super aggressively into everything when it just doesnt have as many consumer uses, and now we cant afford computers any more because these corporations are buying up the entire world supply of RAM. And electricity is becoming expensive because they're buying up all the electricity. I've heard some call AI like the tree of might from DBZ where it's just sucking up everything and destroying the earth in the process.

But, again, for me, this isn't even AI as a concept that's bad. It's the implementation. It's pushing too much too fast. If we tried to do this with computers in the 1950s, we'd have the same problem. The tech just wasnt advanced enough, and it was super inefficient. And if the wealthy decided to suck up all the world's resources to bring us computers in the 1950s through, say, our TVs and radios, we'd have the same problem. It's energy efficiency that's the problem. Not the tech itself. It's the ownership among billionaires that's the problem. Not the tech itself. Basically, the problem of AI is a problem of rich people and billionaires, not a problem with the tech itself. And we can hate the rich people and the billionaires, I mean, no argument from me. But hating AI itself is dumb? AI IS the future to some degree. Every decade, we see innovation and new tech. Radios, TVs, computers, the internet, and they always revolutionize our societies. And AI is just...another step of that. And if we oppose it, we're gonna sound like our boomer parents going on about how great things were back in the 1970s. Yeah, okay mom, let's get you to bed already. Ya know? Seriously, a lot of US are turning into that in our 30s and 40s and it's dumb. 

If AI saves companies money on artists and they put it in games, what do I care, as long as the quality of the final product is good? but it seems like people just categorically hate AI in games. Like we should only use real artists, and they should be paid salaries, and jobs are good, shouldnt we have jobs? NO! We should fricking long for the day AI can replace work, so we can work less, again, the problem is our societal model of expecting people to work for a living...to live in a world where everyone is expected to work for a living, and if suddenly people can't work for a living, that's bad because our entire economy is designed around forcing people to work for a living. So maybe we shouldnt have to work for a living. Unpopular idea, but thats how I see it. Let them take all the jobs. I don't care. Just pay me for doing nothing instead. Ya know? 

Again, AI isn't bad in and of itself. AI is bad because our societal model is bad. We should address those societal issues. If we do that, AI becomes not just not a problem, but a solution to a lot of problems. Again, you just gotta break your mind out of this weird job centric mindset and suddenly it all makes sense. AI is good, it's not bad. It's billionaires that are bad, and it's our economic model that is bad. Tahnks for coming to my ted talk.  

I don't have to explain that bad things are bad, right?

 As I said, I hate talking about conservatives on here because I feel like I'm saying the obvious. Bad things are bad but half the country doesn't seem to realize bad things are bad so we keep repeating history in the worst possible ways. 

Now we're just straight up invading countries, kidnapping their leaders, charging them with crimes where we have no jurisdiction, and taking over so we can seize the oil. And Trump, unlike Bush, is explicit, it's about the oil. He's talked about how Bush's biggest mistake in Iraq is not just taking the oil, even though people would argue that's the core reason we were there, and here Trump is going on about taking the fricking oil. We just invaded a country, and took over, because we wanted the oil. Full stop. This is imperialism.

To be fair, im not sure how much better it is when we did have a pretext. Bush lied us into Iraq, that didn't make it much better, but at least we had the pretense of building democracy. Trump doesn't care about democracy. He just wants oil. To be fair, we don't really care about democracy much either, we'll put up with dictators as long as they play ball with us, but we'll just invade countries with democratically elected socialist leaders because they won't let us exploit their natural resources. 

I'm not gonna act like if I had my way, we wouldnt care at all about natural resources. After all, we don't just get involved in places out of the goodness of our hearts. There needs to be a strategic benefit involved, like natural resources or other geopolitical goals, but ideally, that should just be the bonus and we should be there for the right reasons. And even then, we should want to rehabilitate nations into being democratic. Socialist or capitalist, I dont really care. But I do support liberal democracy. And we should govern based on those ideals and not JUST look at the raw realpolitik of things. Trump, this IS just all realpolitik. No justification, just invasion. 

I wanna be honest, I dont like Maduro much. I mean, he was legitimately democratically elected but then suspended his country's democratic process. I can see why leftists defend him given our interventionist streak, but I also ain't really a fan of him either. I don't like authoritarians for any reason. And if you cant have socialism without authoritarianism, well, maybe it isn't the best of ideas. I am pretty flexible on economics. My ideal economy is more a mix between the two. Like a social democracy. Just with UBI and more outright libertarian philosophy behind my thinking. Which is kind of like an American take on social democracy given how pro freedom we're supposed to be. But yeah. I dont like pure capitalism, I dont like authoritarian capitalism, and I think the far right is just...feudalism again. Rich people owning everything while the poor are reduced to wage slaves struggling to get by in a system hostile to their interests. And quite frankly, that seems to be what we wanna impose on venezuela and the rest of the world. Imperialism is still alive, let's not act like it isn't, and I quite frankly don't support our foreign policy goals of imposing right wing capitalism on people whether they like it or not.

This was a raw and unjustified act of aggression toward another nationstate. What we are doing is, or should be illegal under international law, and it makes us look like the bad guy, because we are the bad guy. And it's just gonna strengthen our real enemies of russia and china long term. Because russia wants Ukraine, China wants Taiwan, and we just lost all moral high ground with this very obvious land grab. Even the less politically intelligent people in my life are saying the obvious to me today, like "hey doesn't this just mean people can just take us over in theory now?" It wont happen since we have the biggest stick, BUT...yeah. Once you throw out international law and the institutional norms that have held world politics together since 1945, everything is on the table. This was a catastrophically stupid move by a catastrophically stupid president, and as some have said to me today, we just opened pandora's box here. 

So yeah. Bad things bad. Do we have to say bad things are bad? I cant believe I have to write that bad things are bad. But here we are. BAD THINGS ARE BAD! Wtf is this timeline, like seriously.  

Just how bad do you have to screw up in 2016 to lose me as a voter?

 So, I was debating the whole Jasmine Crockett vs James Talerico thing with some lib who believes in so called "electability", and I ended up making a comparison to 2016 and how the dems elevated Donald Trump thinking it would make Clinton more electable, and then it backfired massively. What happened? Well, Trump was an interesting candidate that fired up their base, while Clinton demotivated theirs. And I argue I find Talerico demotivating while that sassy attitude Crockett has makes me like her more. 

But I digress, I dont think it matters much and despite polling showing texas isn't out of reach, I honestly think it mostly is. It always teases libs by being statistically in range, but then the polls always overestimate the republicans. And the polling aint much different between the two anyway.

 But, it got me thinking about 2016 again, and as someone who was pretty much a die hard democrat after 2012, it really makes me beg the question: how DO you mess up so bad that I won't vote for the democrat in 2016? Its like, you REALLY had to work at pissing me off after 2012 to do that.  

 But...in a nutshell, what really did it for me? Well, basically, you become half republican. You stop fighting for anything different. You run to the center, you compromise our values away, you don't fight for anything, and if anything, you embrace the values of the other side.

I'll tell you why I aint big on James Talerico, because he's boring white Christian boy who basically sounds like a conservative to me. He has the worldview of conservatives. he has the values of conservatives, he just ends up framing liberal ideas from a conservative perspective. But I dont want a conservative perspective, and I don't want conservative values. I want CONTRAST.

This isnt to say that I won't vote for christians mind you, but it does take a hit on the worldview question when it becomes explicit.  Even if I can agree with you on actual ideas, we dont support those ideas for similar reasons. We have differing ideologies and value systems. And if it IS too in your face where it's driving your entire value system, it makes me pause on whether you're even a good fit. We already have one side pushing christian nationalism, we don't need another.

When Clinton was speaking out of both sides of her mouth on abortion and gay marriage, even going so far to pick fricking Tim Kaine as a VP, I was turned off. When Kaine was talking about machismo when my own ideology is about engineering society to make the world a better place, I was turned off. When Clinton leaned hard into her protestant work ethic BS, going on about "god given potential", I was turned off.  Basically, my entire worldview was secular at the time (and still is politically), and when you start sounding like a christian conservative, you start sounding like the people I left. Clinton offered little positive economic change, she offered almost nothing on the economy, and socially, for all the shaming the blue no matter whoers do, I wasnt even sure she WOULD fight for abortion rights or gay rights. Because that's how bad she was. 

So...that's a big part of it. When you stop trying to even contrast yourself from the right, it's like...why bother? And then you get the other half of the equation. She seemed to express open hostility toward me and the things I was for. Her whole strategy was sanders supporters was calling us sexist and racist and privileged, telling us we couldnt have good things, and voter shaming us into voting for her. And that crap doesn't work on me. If anything, it just pissed me off and made me hate her more.

So yeah, between not positively contrasting herself from the conservatives I left, and if anything, trying to emulate them to win over literal mccain and romney voters, and then being openly hostile and dismissive toward me and my faction's concerns, it was like, yeah, F Hillary Clinton. 

Really, it baffles me how even a decade later, people don't seem to understand this. Clinton literally offered no positive contrast for progressives vs the republicans. It was just...here's the actual republicans...and here's a republican lite. Like, keep in mind, you guys read some of my 2009 era political essays for college. And I can tell you at the time, I considered myself the kind of "moderate conservative" who would've crossed over for clinton. And I literally LEFT that brand of politics, and became as wildly progressive as I am now. Again, she was literally appealing more to literal mccain and romney voters, than me. And obama showed, we never needed them. So it's like, wtf democrats?

And yeah. We can talk about this all day, but I got things to do, and I just wanted to post that shower thought on the subject. But really, it still baffles me to this day. How do you alienate someone as partisan as I was at the time? Turns out, simply by not being partisan yourself, embracing the ideology of the enemy, and being openly hostile toward your own voters. And that sums it up in a nutshell, doesn't it?  

Discussing "Utopia 25" and its limitations to applicability in humans

 So, I just saw a copypasta about this "universe 25" experiment involving mice, which seems to be cited for political purposes to argue that utopia is impossible, and we shouldn't even try. The copypasta goes as follows:

The "Universe 25" experiment remains one of the most unsettling studies ever conducted in behavioral science.

It was carried out by American ethologist John B. Calhoun between 1958 and 1962.

Calhoun built what he called "Mouse Paradise" — an ideal environment with unlimited food, clean water, no predators, controlled temperature, and constant medical care.

The mice had everything they needed. No hunger. No disease. No threats.

At first, the population grew rapidly.

The colony thrived.

But around day 317, something changed.

Once the population reached around 600 mice, the social structure began to break down.

Dominant males became aggressive and territorial. They attacked others randomly.

Some females responded by becoming violent toward their own young.

Others isolated themselves completely.

Meanwhile, a group of males withdrew entirely from social life.

They stopped fighting, stopped mating, stopped interacting.

They spent their days grooming themselves, eating, and sleeping.

Calhoun called them “the Beautiful Ones.”

They looked physically perfect — clean, well-groomed — but showed no interest in courtship, reproduction, or social roles.

As these passive males increased in number:

Birth rates collapsed

Infant mortality rose to 100%

Sexual behavior broke down

Cannibalism and pathological violence appeared

Eventually, the colony stopped reproducing entirely.

Even when conditions remained perfect, the population continued to decline — until every mouse died.

Calhoun repeated this process 25 times.

Each trial ended the same way:

Collapse from within.

Not from starvation, disease, or predators — but from a breakdown of social structure, purpose, and meaning.

Since then, “Universe 25” has been used as a model in:

Urban sociology

Population studies

Psychology

And discussions on how abundance and disconnection can destroy societies

The conclusion was disturbing:

When a population no longer needs to struggle for survival, and no meaningful roles exist, social and behavioral collapse becomes inevitable.

Universe 25 wasn’t about mice.

It was a warning.

So...as you can tell, the person pushing this narrative arguing that this is a warning of what will happen if we pursue utopias in human societies. A lot of conservative types love to argue that utopia is impossible, we shouldn't even try, blah blah blah, human nature, and also a bunch of protestant work ethic nonsense about how we need meaning and purpose and blah blah blah. 

Now, before I go further, let me point out my initial thoughts before doing more research onto this. First, this is an argument that comes from conservatives. More specifically, it comes from the Christian worldview. Christians argue human nature is evil and that if we give people utopia, that they'll just ruin it anyway because they're evil. They also argue that humans NEED struggle and adversity, and that we shouldnt try to remove those obstacles, as it'll just lead to a result similar to this.

However, even I have issues with this right off the bat. First of all, humans aren't mice. While animals, including humans have a "nature", I wouldnt necessarily argue this nature is "evil" or that we are incompatible with a society in which we have our basic needs met. That seems like a pretty wild claim, and I really don't necessarily see a human utopia going the same way. 

With that said, let's start picking out facts of the experiment:

At first, the population grew rapidly.

The colony thrived.

But around day 317, something changed.

Once the population reached around 600 mice, the social structure began to break down.

 It sounds like it reached a point of overcrowding. 

Dominant males became aggressive and territorial. They attacked others randomly.

Some females responded by becoming violent toward their own young.

Others isolated themselves completely.

Meanwhile, a group of males withdrew entirely from social life.

They stopped fighting, stopped mating, stopped interacting.

They spent their days grooming themselves, eating, and sleeping.

Yeah, sounds like overcrowding. Males fighting over territory, females killing their young, it sounds like the environment was no longer healthy, possibly from there being too many mice in a confined environment.

Ya know, my parents have an interesting anecdote about this. Apparently when they were young, they had hamsters. Once, they donated 2 of them to this friend who was a teacher, and they brought them to class to be the class pets. Well....as it turned out the two hamsters were male, and one of them killed and ate the other. Apparently it traumatized the students, and my parents' friends were kinda mad at my parents for that, even though they didnt know better. 

But yeah. Rodents...do that. Humans...don't necessarily. 

Female rodents might kill their young if they find the environment distressing.

And o be fair with the other group, we see that with humans. Ya know, societal dropouts, NEETs, arguably I'm one of these guys. We check out, again, in part because the environment is unhealthy. And we have this problem today, in our capitalist dystopia where we struggle. Except, that struggle has lost its meaning, it just seems pointless, the arguments made by conservatives fall apart as conservatives are creating the problems, and yeah, society just ain't working for people. It seems clear that this "society" isn't working for the mice either. Something went wrong here, but I'm not gonna go and say it's because utopias are bad. No, I'm gonna say that something happened where this got overcrowded and things started falling apart, that's my hypothesis at least. 

As these passive males increased in number:

Birth rates collapsed

Infant mortality rose to 100%

Sexual behavior broke down

Cannibalism and pathological violence appeared

Eventually, the colony stopped reproducing entirely.

Even when conditions remained perfect, the population continued to decline — until every mouse died.

 Yeah, again something happened where the the environment became unhealthy. Some males became aggressive, females stopped caring for their young, some males checked out. And eventually the society killed itself. 

Now, does this have applicability to humans? Maybe, human environments that become overcrowded can develop societal dysfunction. Look at Japan, unhealthy work culture, overpopulation, stagnant GDP, and you get societal dropouts and women having less kids.

 

The US has similar issues in recent years. The economy isnt working for people and problems happen. Of course, in our real world society, some of this is artificial scarcity, this happened among mice who had their needs met,  so there were other stressors. Still, I would likely argue that this was related to overpopulation somehow. 

 

Each trial ended the same way:

Collapse from within.

Not from starvation, disease, or predators — but from a breakdown of social structure, purpose, and meaning.

 Where are you getting this purpose and meaning crap? Like this is where i get turned off. Conservatives love to use these arguments to argue that society as it is is the best we can do and changing things and pursuing a better world is bad. But is it really about purpose or meaning? Do mice have purpose or meaning? Do they subscribe to the protestant work ethic or biblical christian version of he world?

 

There's obvious dysfunction here, but that doesn't mean that it's this weird narrative they're pushing.

 

 

Since then, “Universe 25” has been used as a model in:

Urban sociology

Population studies

Psychology

And discussions on how abundance and disconnection can destroy societies

The conclusion was disturbing:

When a population no longer needs to struggle for survival, and no meaningful roles exist, social and behavioral collapse becomes inevitable.

Universe 25 wasn’t about mice.

It was a warning.

 Yeah, okay, whatever.

So now that that's out of the way, let's actually look at what the actual science says on this one:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

 

 https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941

 

 https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/mouse-heaven-or-mouse-hell/

 

 From the wiki article:

The specific voluntary crowding of rats to which the term behavioral sink refers is thought to have resulted from the earlier involuntary crowding: individual rats became so used to the proximity of others while eating that they began to associate feeding with the company of other rats. Calhoun eventually found a way to prevent this by changing some of the settings and thereby decreased mortality somewhat, but the overall pathological consequences of overcrowding remained.^[13]

Further, researchers argued that "Calhoun's work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."^[14] "Social density" appears to be key.

 So there was learned behavior where eating became a socially learned behavior to do in the company of others, leading to crowding at feeding time. This led to overcrowding in a social sense even if the environment could theoretically support more mice.

Calhoun had phrased much of his work in anthropomorphic terms, in a way that made his ideas highly accessible to a lay audience.^[7]

Calhoun himself saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of humankind. He characterized the social breakdown as a "spiritual death",^[10] with reference to bodily death as the "second death" mentioned in the Biblical verse Revelation 2:11.^[10] 

 And here we go, religious nut trying to push an agenda.

The 1962 Scientific American article came at a time when overpopulation had become a subject of great public interest, and had a considerable cultural influence.^[16] However, such discussions often oversimplified the original findings in various ways. It should however be noted that the work has another message than, for example, Paul Ehrlich's now widely disputed^[17][18][19] book The Population Bomb.

Calhoun's worries primarily concerned a human population surge and a potentially independent increase in urbanization as an early stage of rendering much of a given society functionally sterile. Under such circumstances, he hypothesized, society would move from some modality of overpopulation towards a much more irredeemable underpopulation. 

 To be fair I think this may be one of the big issues. We do see similar things happen with humans in large urban areas under capitalism. I'm not a fan of huge cities. I think they amplify social dysfunction. We get a lot of crime, a lot of poverty from them. I honestly think a huge problem with society under capitalism is urbanization taken to the extremes that it exists. it just leads to an unhealthy environment for humans. Perhaps there is some similarities that can be drawn here.

 Now, from the first scientific article I cited:

Debunking Popular Interpretations of Universe 25

Calhoun wasn’t shy about anthropomorphizing his findings, binning rodents into categories such as “juvenile delinquents” and “social dropouts,” and others seized on these human parallels. Population growth in the 1970s was swelling, and films such as Soylent Green tapped into growing fears of overpopulation and urban violence. In a 2011 article, Ramsden writes that Calhoun’s studies were brandished by others to justify population control efforts largely targeted at poor and marginalized communities. 

 Yeah and the 1970s were pretty bad crime wise. Much worse than today. Still, this article seems to criticize the urban hypothesis i just put forward.

  But Ramsden notes that Calhoun didn’t necessarily think humanity was doomed. In some of Calhoun’s other crowding experiments, rodents developed innovative tunneling behaviors, while in others, adding more rooms allowed the animals to live in the high-density environment without being forced into unwanted contact with others, largely minimizing the negative social consequences. According to Ramsden, Calhoun wanted these findings to influence the architectural design of prisons, mental hospitals, and other buildings prone to crowding. Writing in a report summary in 1979, Calhoun noted that “no single area of intellectual effort can exert a greater influence on human welfare than that contributing to better design of the built environment.” 

 Yeah it seems to be overcrowding but specifically within a social context.

  Importantly, despite popular interpretations of Universe 25 deeming it informative about urban crowding, many human studies on crowding and population density have yielded inconsistent results.⁴ Behavioral scientists today largely acknowledge that how humans experience and respond to crowding is governed by a range of individual-specific social and psychological factors, including personal autonomy and social roles or contexts.⁴ In some ways, this aligns with how Calhoun discussed his Universe 25 findings, not as effects of population density per se but effects of altered social interactions.² Additionally, the Universe 25 experiment did not address systemic determinants of well-being at the time, nor does it reflect present-day systems that are endemic to the human experience. The societal implications of increased population density and its effects on human beings are a far throw from Universe 25’s experimental design and the behavioral changes that Calhoun observed in his caged rodent experiments.^2,4

 Yeah so applying this to humans is more complex. After all, WE ARE NOT MICE.

 Moving on to the second article:

That robust growth masked some serious problems, however. In the wild, infant mortality among mice is high, as most juveniles get eaten by predators or perish of disease or cold. In mouse utopia, juveniles rarely died. As a result, there were far more youngsters than normal, which introduced several difficulties.

Rodents have social hierarchies, with dominant alpha males controlling harems of females. Alphas establish dominance by fighting—wrestling and biting any challengers. Normally a mouse that loses a fight will scurry off to some distant nook to start over elsewhere.

But in mouse utopia, the losing mice couldn’t escape. Calhoun called them “dropouts.” And because so few juveniles died, huge hordes of dropouts would gather in the center of the pen. They were full of cuts and ugly scars, and every so often huge brawls would break out—vicious free-for-alls of biting and clawing that served no obvious purpose. It was just senseless violence. (In earlier utopias involving rats, some dropouts turned to cannibalism.)

 So...remember the hamsters i was talking about? Yeah....

 Alpha males struggled, too. They kept their harems in private apartments, which they had to defend from challengers. But given how many mice survived to adulthood, there were always a dozen hotshots ready to fight. The alphas soon grew exhausted, and some stopped defending their apartments altogether.

 So yeah it IS overcrowding. Not physical overcrowding as the environment could theoretically support more mice, but because rodent males are territorial it was crowded enough where the males would get in fights and then they couldnt escape. And then the males had to remain on the defensive from other males.

 As a result, apartments with nursing females were regularly invaded by rogue males. The mothers fought back, but often to the detriment of their young. Many stressed-out mothers booted their pups from the nest early, before the pups were ready. A few even attacked their own young amid the violence or abandoned them while fleeing to different apartments, leaving the pups to die of neglect.

 So eventually the environment got unhealthy for raising new generations of mice.

 Eventually other deviant behavior emerged. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments—unusual behavior among mice. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day—preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.

 So....that's why things broke down. The newer generations of mice became traumatized by all that fighting

Intriguingly, Calhoun had noticed in earlier utopias that such maladjusted behavior could spread like a contagion from mouse to mouse. He dubbed this phenomenon “the behavioral sink.” 

 Between the lack of sex, which lowered the birth rate, and inability to raise pups properly, which sharply increased infant mortality, the population of Universe 25 began to plummet. By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether. Older mice lingered for a while—hiding like hermits or grooming all day—but eventually they died out as well. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct.

  Yeah, it's like they just gave up and then they stopped reproducing. 

 The first people to fret over Universe 25 were environmentalists. The same year the study began, biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, an alarmist book predicting imminent starvation and population crashes due to overpopulation on Earth. Pop culture picked up on this theme in movies, such as Soylent Green, where humans in crowded cities are culled and turned into food slurry. Overall, the idea of dangerous overcrowding was in the air, and some sociologists explicitly drew on Calhoun’s work, writing: “We . . . take the animal studies as a serious model for human populations.” The message was stark: Curb population growth—or else.

 I mean, we live in a finite planet, we can't keep growing forever. I do admit I kind of do have some malthusian views at times, but I also believe that in the west we're already kinda levelling off population wise due to women's liberation and widespread access to contraceptives and birth control. And that's fine. I know some people actually use this experiment to argue for conservatism, but isnt conservatism about increasing population endlessly in this context on the idea of "be fruitful and multiply?" Seems to be why so many of them are so weird about sex and gender.

 More recently scholars saw similarities to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern urban society. The 19th and 20th centuries saw population booms across the world, largely due to drops in infant mortality—similar to what the mice experienced. Recently, however, human birth rates have dropped sharply in many developed countries—often below replacement levels—and young people in those places have reportedly lost interest in sex. The parallels to Universe 25 seem spooky.

 We're not at 0 population growth though. If anything, I would point to other problems here. The woke/alt right continuum has kinda wrecked dating for a lot of younger generations leading to maladaptive behavior among gen Z. And capitalism has made it hard for younger generations to start families when they otherwise would. Either way, I'm fine with a happy medium of give or take the replacement rate. Even if its a little below, I dont think that's the end of the world. 

 Behavioral biologists have echoed the eugenics movement in blaming the strange behaviors of the mice on a lack of natural selection, which in their view culls those they consider weak and unfit to breed. This lack of culling resulted in supposed “mutational meltdowns” that led to widespread mouse stupidity and aberrant behavior. (The researchers argued that the brain is especially susceptible to mutations because it’s so intricate and because so many of our genes influence brain function.)

 I dont buy this at all. If anything what led to maladaptive behaviors was an overpopulation of aggressive territorial males leading to those who remained interested in sex to engage in "king of the hill" type behaviors while many just mentally checked out and stopped caring. We have the mentally checked out behavior in TODAY'S society. And it's not because of a lack of conservative views, but because of them, in my view.

 Extrapolating from this work, some political agitators warn that humankind will face a similar decline. Women are supposedly falling into Calhoun’s behavioral sink by learning “maladaptive behaviors,” such as choosing not to have children, which “destroy[s] their own genetic interests.” Other critics agonize over the supposed loss of traditional gender roles, leaving effete males and hyperaggressive females, or they deplore the undermining of religions and their imperatives to “be fruitful and multiply.” In tandem, such changes will lead to the “decline of the West.”

 Yeah we still deal with this today. However, if anything I see the opposite. The world conservatives have created has made it unhealthy for people to have kids and be interested in sex. Their worldview only works when they get to impose it on people. 

Funnily enough, I did study a little social psychology in college and I recall that subtle differences in male/female populations can lead to different behaviors in humans and our....well...mating rituals. Too many males and not enough females causes the men to become more territorial and seek to control women more. More women and less men leads to more sexual liberation as there's less competition for mates. I know IM kinda treating humans like they're animals here, but we...kinda are. The kind of behaviors that are exhibited here are actually the more conservative mindsets taken to extremes as competition over mates leads to more aggression between men. 

In the modern age, women outnumber men 100-98. Its a bit more complicated, more boys are born, but women live longer. But yeah. Either way, I dont think it's significant in either direction. What we have is a culture war between the left and the right. Men are becoming more conservative, women more liberal, and dating is breaking down as the dynamics between genders become confused. Conservatives would blame women's lib, which is why they're so weird on these subjects, and that weirdness is driving women to hyper feminism as they're like "hell no." It's not healthy. Honestly, given this experiment I do worry about the future of the US, as it seems like we're reaching a point where we DO have maladaptive behavior, but that doesnt mean i embrace conservatism, if anything, i just advocate for good old 1970s-2000s style liberal feminism, over the weird woke varieties that make things so confusing. Conservatives are obsessed with the nuclear family, but the current gender norms arent even representative of all humanity at all times, they literally extend from like the biblical model of ancient hebrews. As any "woke" person will tell you, people from non white cultures have had different ways of doing things for...well....forever. So maybe it's our way that's unhealthy. As long as we have a way that works well enough to produce a next generation, we're not really failing. 

 Still others have cast Universe 25’s collapse as a parable illustrating the dangers of socialist welfare states, which, they argue, provide material goods but remove healthy challenges from people’s lives, challenges that build character and promote “personal growth.”

 This and the previous point is why i wrote this. Given I am the "utopia is possible" guy who does want peoples' needs met, and hates this protestant work ethic BS, I really resent conservatives using this to argue for why we can't ever make the world better. All it really shows, if anything, is that putting hyper competitive rodents in an enclosed space leads to bad outcomes. It's basically my parents' experience with the hamsters except on a much larger scale.

 Another school of thought viewed Universe 25 as a warning about “the city [as] a perversion of nature.” As sociologists Claude Fischer and Mark Baldassare put it, “A red-eyed, sharp-fanged obsession about urban life stalks contemporary thought.”

 I actually could get behind that. Cities are enclosed spaces and I've already said that I think a lot of social dysfunction comes from them. When we talk an urban-rural divide, often times the reason cities get a bad rap IMO is too many people in tight confined spaces leads to an acceleration of social dysfunction like crime, poverty, and social structures and norms breaking down. 

Even then, my worst criticisms of cities are nowhere near THIS apocalyptic. Once again, we're not mice. We're not THAT hyper aggressive as a species for one, and for two, we have more intelligence. Still, I have pointed out before that I view cities as a major problem with modern society. 

 Most critics who’ve fretted over Calhoun’s work cluster on the conservative end of the political spectrum, but self-styled progressives have weighed in as well. Advocates for birth control repeatedly invoked Calhoun’s mice as a cautionary tale about how runaway population growth destroys family life.

 Yeah I kinda just made this one. Eventually you ARE going to have overcrowding that strains the environment or causes other kinds of social dysfunction. I aint like a strict malthusian though. I would agree with more liberal interpretations that we society grows more efficient we find ways to accommodate more people. I just don't believe this can continue INFINITELY. I also fear hitting hard resource limits more than running out of space. This is a problem of not enough space, rather than not enough resources. It's a social failure, not a resource one. 

 More recent interpretations see the mice collapse in terms of one-percenters and wealth inequality; they blame the social dysfunction on a few aggressive males hoarding precious resources (e.g., desirable apartments). In this view, said one critic, “Universe 25 had a fair distribution problem” above all.

 That's a problem of capitalism but i wouldnt compare hyper competitive mice to landlords here.

 Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them.

 Yeah worldviews and political views do bring stuff into it. And you saw how even I kind of made observations that align with my own worldview. 

If we were to be scientific, I would say this study has little to no relevance on humans at all. STILL, I am willing to admit some parallels exist and am giving my own point of view on them.

 When forecasting population crashes among human beings, Population Bomb–type environmentalists invariably predicted that overcrowding would lead to widespread shortages of food and other goods. That’s actually the opposite of what Universe 25 was like. The mice there had all the goods they wanted. This also undermines arguments about unfair resource distribution.

 Exactly. And I just pointed out my own take on that. Again, the problem was too many aggressive territorial rodents in a small enclosed space.

 Perhaps, then, it was the lack of struggles and challenges that led to dysfunction, as welfare critics claimed. Except that the spiral of dysfunction began when hordes of “dropout” mice lost challenges to alpha males, couldn’t escape elsewhere, and began brawling in the middle of the pen. The alpha males in turn grew weary after too many challenges from youngsters. Indeed, most mice faced competition far in excess of what they would encounter in the wild.

 Yeah, again, overcrowding, but not an issue of resources, but more living space for the rodents to thrive in.

 The appearance of the sexless “beautiful ones” does seem decadent and echoes the reported loss of interest in sex among young people in developed countries. Except that a closer look at the survey data indicates that such worries might be overblown. And any comparison between human birth rates and Universe 25 birth rates is complicated by the fact that the mouse rates dropped partly due to infant neglect and spikes in infant mortality—the opposite of the situation in the developed world.

 Yeah I pointed out parallels myself, but once again, it's unhealthy social environments.

 Then there are the warnings about the mutational meltdown and the decline of intelligence. Aside from echoing the darkest rhetoric of the eugenics movement, this interpretation runs aground on several points. The hermit females and preening, asexual males certainly acted oddly—but in doing so, they avoided the vicious, violent free-for-alls that beset earlier generations. This hardly seems dumb. Moreover, some of Calhoun’s research actually saw rodents getting smarter during experiments.

 Yeah they dropped out because they realized it wasn't worth competing for mates so they just checked out. That IS a sign of intelligence. 

 This evidence came from an earlier utopia involving rats. In that setup, dropout rats began digging new burrows into the dirt floor of their pen. Digging produces loose dirt to clear away, and most rats laboriously carried the loose dirt outside the tunnel bit by bit, to dump it there. It’s necessary but tedious work.

 But some of the dropout rats did something different. Instead of carrying dirt out bit by bit, they packed it all into a ball and rolled it out the tunnel in one trip. An enthused Calhoun compared this innovation to humankind inventing the wheel. And it happened only because the rats were isolated from the main group and didn’t learn the dominant method of digging. By normal rat standards, this was deviant behavior. It was also a creative breakthrough. Overall, then, Calhoun argued that social strife can sometimes push creatures to become smarter, not dumber.

 This reminds me of me. "Lazy" but in reality just...intelligent. I prefer to do things efficiently over expressing "work ethic" and beating my head against the wall doing things inefficiently. 

So if all these interpretations of Universe 25 miss the mark, what lesson can we draw from the experiment?

Calhoun’s big takeaway involved status. Again, the males who lost the fights for dominance couldn’t leave to start over elsewhere. As he saw it, they were stuck in pathetic, humiliating roles and lacked a meaningful place in society. The same went for females when they couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly. Both groups became depressed and angry, and began lashing out. In other words, because mice are social animals, they need meaningful social roles to feel fulfilled. Humans are social animals as well, and without a meaningful role, we too can become hostile and lash out.

 I mean, I can see parallels to say, "anomie" here, but again, you dont need a utopia without "meaning" to have this. We've had societal dysfunction for as long as capitalism exists. We're experiencing it now as we expect people to take on social roles in a system that DOESN'T FRICKING WORK! You dont need to have some purposeless utopia without struggle to have that. Much of the struggle under capitalism actively causes these problems too. When the norms break down, yeah, you get dropouts. And many of these dropouts are actually more intelligent on average, because they figure out that things arent working so they change their behavior to adapt to that environment. In universe 25's case, it led to the complete and utter breakdown of mating. In the real world, the effects arent quite as pronounced, but once again, we're experiencing these issues NOW. 

There are some parallels to draw here.

 Still, even this interpretation seems like a stretch. Humans have far more ways of finding meaning in life than pumping out children or dominating some little hierarchy.

 Exactly. And this is what we should be fostering. Instead conservatives are all about pumping out children and maintaining the hierarchy. Meanwhile I'm one of the "beautiful ones" who basically figured out that society aint working and we should do things differently. The goal is to create a new social contract here. Humans have intelligence well beyond mice. What makes us better is our ability to contemplate things and manipulate our environment for our benefit. So, if anything, I'd argue we should use those traits to evolve our society around the current realities to, you know, make it less dysfunctional. When you have anomie, there are two ways to handle it, impose authoritarianism to make people conform to the existing social contract, or to change that contract to make it conform to the people. Conservatives want the former, I want the latter.

 And while human beings and mice are indeed both social creatures, that common label papers over some major differences. Critics of Calhoun’s work argued that population density among humans—a statistical measure—doesn’t necessarily correlate with crowding—a feeling of psychological stress. In the words of one historian, “Through their intelligence, adaptability, and capacity to make the world around them, humans were capable of coping with crowding” in ways that mice simply are not.

 This too.

 Ultimately Calhoun’s work functions like a Rorschach blot—people see what they want to see. It’s worth remembering that not all lab experiments, especially contrived ones such as Universe 25, apply to the real world. In which case, perhaps the best lesson to learn here is a meta-lesson: that drawing lessons itself can be a dangerous thing.

 Yeah even my conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. After reading this I dont feel like we can truly derive anything from this. I still think there are common points we can reach, as both we and mice are both animals, and we have at least SOME mild similarities, but we also have many differences and many aspects just dont track. Even where I find similarities, we also have major differences in, for example, intelligence and ability to cope. Mice and their aggressive behavior and relatively low intelligence leads to a different set of problems than say, modern capitalism, which i keep drawing comparisons to. 

Are we cooked in 2028?

 Okay, so this isn't about asking whether democrats can win. Honestly? I think we can. Trump's approval is in the toilet and it hasn't even been a full year yet, and public opinion has shifted around 4-8 points depending on how you measure or estimate it. Trump only won by 1.7 overall so...do the math. 

Or, I can just take 2024 data and shift the results 4-8 points to give you some ideas. 

4 points:

 6 points:

 8 points:

 Most likely 2028 maps right there, based on how 2024 went. It's hard to get past the 7 2024 swing states. You literally would need a 10-15 point shift to start cracking the next line of states. It can happen if Trump and the GOP get unpopular enough, but I ain't gonna support something that ambitious. 

Here's what that would look like (D+15):

 

For the record, I'm estimating something closer to the D+4 scenario. That's where the generic congressional vote is now, whereas it was dead even in 2024. Based on the 2025 results, we could see something closer to 6-8. Given how static the map is, all it would really flip is arizona. Really, this is why I say trump never had a mandate. Because when you win that narrowly, your really don't.

But...that's also what I fear from the democrats. if the democrats win in 2028, it's not going to be because people like them and their brand of politics is popular. It just means that people rejected the GOP. It's like football. You can get turnovers all day, but if no one can score a touchdown, what does it matter? And that's been politics since 2016. These guys dont have mandates. They win narrowly. The election is driven more by the fundamentals against the incumbent party, and then they lose, become unpopular, and things flip back. 

And here's the thing. The democrats didn't learn a darned thing from 2016 or 2024. The public rejected them, rejected their ideology, their vision for the country, and then they turned around, blamed everyone but themselves, refused to admit that they're unpopular and that nothing likes them, and insist on ramming a candidate no one actually likes down their throats. Which...works when the fundamentals work against the GOP, but then when they run against the democrats the next election, they lose. 

And that's what I fear is gonna happen again. 

Here's where we're at for 2028:

 Newsom: 24%

Harris: 20%

Buttigieg: 11.7%

AOC- 8.5%

A bunch of other generic dems: 5.3% or less

That's it, that's the field. It's basically 2020 except with no progressive wing. AOC is at 8.5%. She's a distant FOURTH, and she's the only dem candidate who is actually remotely progressive and anti establishment. Newsom is #1. I admit, he has some fire against Trump. He's been owning Trump on social media a lot and trolling him. However, here's the thing. Trolling and memes works for election season, but you eventually have to govern. And he's gonna be a boring centrist. He's already talking of a coalition from Manchin to Mamdani, which means he's likely gonna do nothing, since the Manchins will dictate policy and we'll see a repeat of the Biden years. Dont these people realize it's time for action and that the public is tired of worthless dems who don't do anything?

 Harris is #2. I've read parts of 107 Days, not all of it, but honestly? Based on what I saw, Harris is a hard no for me. She's learned nothing. She's too much of an insider to even understand that the rest of the country doesn't like her. If she runs again, it's gonna come off like an insufferable "it's her turn" hillary thing. i dont think she really takes responsibility for her loss. She doesn't understand why she lost, and she's probably running again, whether people want her or not. I dont think she will win the primary, but she's one of the frontrunners simply because dems and dem voters are just that unimaginative. 

Buttigieg, he's another centrist with no flair or character. 

The dem base doesnt seem into progressives and it seems post bernie our wing of the party is dying. 

Some say we need a celebrity to come out of nowhere and run. Some are suggesting Jon Stewart. Im not gonna lie, I'm interested in the idea at this point, given how bad the establishment options are. Unlike trump, Stewart actually knows politics. He knows how the system works. hell, I have a physical copy of America the Book, his political science 101 textbook. It's satirical but still pretty accurate. 

I also could get behind Yang running again. I mean, he's the one guy with my actual ideology who is a political figure in this country. Although to be fair, he's also a fundamentally flawed iteration of that ideology as he's way too compromising, way too centrist, and way too tone deaf to the purity tests of progressives. Still....given how bad the alternatives are, Yang is still leagues ahead of the competition. 

Idk. Honestly, most of these dems are so generic, they probably get like 50 on my main 2024 purity test. Like let's think this through:

UBI support- 2/10

They might run some variation of small cash grants for some people, but nothing groundbreaking

 M4A support- 2/10

Most likely gonna do tweaks around the edges while ignoring the problem. "Must protect the ACA", blah blah blah.

Economics- 8/10

Eh, on other stuff they might do piecemeal stuff but nothing amazing.

Social issues- 9/10

Largely in agreement with me minus some cringey positions on guns or maybe race/immigration.

Foreign policy- 8/10

Largely align with me but are way too pro Israel at this point

Worldview- 12/20

Eh, lukewarm match at best

Consistency/dedication to progressive values- 2/10

PSH NO!

Experience/competence- 8/10

Whomever they run is gonna be fairly competent

Electability- 5/10

They're electable precisely because 2028 will be a blue wave year. Whether they can maintain popularity is another question. Even then, like 2020, I think the results will be fairly close. Because let's face it, I dont think the public really can stomach the dems. It's like "ugh these are our options, what else can we do?" They're not gonna be popular. 

So yeah. Total score? 58/100

So...that's where generic dems end up. They're not really inspiring.

Yang:

UBI- 10/10

M4A- 7/10

Economics- 6/10

Social- 8/10

Foreign policy- 8/10

Worldview- 18/20

Consistency/dedication- 5/10

Experience/competence- 3/10

Electability- 6/10 

Total: 71/100

He has weaknesses, but simply being more aligned with my ideologically makes up for some of them. Still, I dont trust the guy to stick the landing given his forward party and cringey both sidesisms, but uh...he's an option.

And of course, Bernie/AOC

UBI- 2/10

M4A- 10/10 

Economics- 10/10

Social- 9/10

Foreign policy- 7/10

Worldview- 15/20

Consistency/dedication- 10/10

Experience/competence- 8/10

 Electability- 6/10

Total: 73/100

Here I kinda split the difference between bernie and AOC, but I think bernie is a bit stronger and AOC a bit weaker. Still, we're talking 70-75. 

Again, these are the best candidates.

How would Jon Stewart fare?

It's hard to tell without a platform. He could be generic democrat or a progressive. I'm gonna make some assumptions but let's assume:

UBI: 2/10

M4A: 7/10

Economics- 8/10

Social- 9/10

Foreign policy- 7/10 

Worldview- 14/20

Consisrency/dedication- 8/10

Experience/competence- 5/10

Electability- 8/10

Total: 68/100

I mean, assuming he meets certain benchmarks for policy/ideology, he can be a formidable candidate. i think he would be popular, he would win, although would he deliver? or try? Maybe. idk. 

Idk. I mean, I really dont see any true realigning figure here. The dem base will likely unite behind whomever we put up, but that doesnt mean they'll be able to seal the deal for a while. We need a realignment that drives the dems to dominate policy discussions ideologically, while making the GOP collapse, and their current goals untenable. But as long as we run moderate dems without a strong vision, and a candidate who doesnt fight for their vision, we're not gonna accomplish much of anything. We might win, but again, it's like football. They do a turnover, then we dont get anywhere, and we do a turnover.  

Bleh. 

Man those Epstein files sure are something...

 So....the Epstein files released yesterday, and man, they're mind blowing. I didn't know that [redacted], did [redacted], or that [redacted][redacted][redacted]. Or that donald trump is mysteriously missing from them altogether! And man, Bill Clinton surfing off of Cinnabar Island, man. Wild.

 I mean, how else are you supposed to interpret Bill Clinton in a pool with a black block? Obviously that's missingno, which means he's surfing off of the coast of Cinnabar Island in Pokemon Red/Blue. 90s president playing the 90s pokemon game. Gotta love it.

...

.....

.......

.........

Okay, so....can we just acknowledge that Trump is holding back? Yeah he's holding back. He redacted and censored tons of stuff. Some if it NEEDED to be censored, obviously, you dont want child porn being released. BUT....it's like he removed anything incriminating except for what he wanted like pics of bill clinton with black blocks in pools because obviously, gotta emphasize bill clinton. Even though no one cares about clinton, even on the left. This isn't an own. We don't care if he was a pedo, and if he was, well, lock him up. Even fricking Noam Chomsky who was in the files, if he did something wrong, lock him up, we. don't. care!

Like thats the thing here, we don't care! We dont idolize these people. They're not our cult leaders.  We don't worship them like MAGA worships Trump. 

Either way, this is a clear obstruction of justice and "malicious compliance" at best. Like release them but do it in the worst possible way to hold back the info that they don't want released. And it's illegal. And Ro Khanna has threatened to impeach Bondi over this.  Good, I hope they do, because we should've seen ALL the files released. That was the legal mandate, and Trump isn't even trying to release them in good faith. They're just dragging their feet. 

Anyway, that's all I have to say on this.  

Do I even need to discuss Venezuela?

 So...the epstein files are due out in a few days, and trump is giving a speech tonight, so you know what that means, let's invade a country and start a war as a distraction!

 Trump has been trying to manufacture consent for regime change in Venezuela for a while, and it's not working. Most people see through it. Why? because this is Iraq again, only with an even flimsier justification. They're bombing fishing boats that are allegedly drug boats, but everyone with a brain knows they're fishing boats. They're even doing war crimes and doing double taps and stuff.

And yeah, we'll see tonight, but I suspect his big speech tonight is about attacking Venezuela. Why now? Again, the epstein stuff is gonna drop and he's gonna want the news on something else. It's the standard switcheroo. 

Anyway, do I need to really discuss this further? Obviously, I'm against the war, it's stupid, it's unnecessary, he's going in for the oil. It's Iraq 2.0. And I dont think it's gonna unite the country for a time like iraq did until it didn't. Because I don't think anyone wants to invade really outside of trump and his die hard base.