A warning to the identitarian left

 So...after getting done discussing GMS's video about how evangelical Christianity is a deeply racist movement rooted in white supremacy and getting a metric crapton of thoughts out on that, I ended up watching this crap take from Francesca Fiorentini and Emma Vigeland. Basically, it's a half hour long take of them crapping on Ana Kasperian for having relatively moderate and reasonable views on race, while they dunk on her for failing to internalize the proper leftist doctrines. It's annoying, offputting, and alienating to the majority of the broader public.

Which...brings me to another chapter in this current saga of discussing racism and what we need to do with it. Look. White supremacy is not the primary problem. It's a side problem. The core problem of society is the capitalist/imperialist project that reduces the world to wage slaves and sometimes literal slaves. And this affects ALL people and ALL races. As I see it, the vast majority of us have common interests, even if the exact manifestations are different depending on things like location, race, etc., 

Racism was created to establish a form of social hierarchy that keeps these masses fighting amongst themselves. It was created to stop whites and blacks from coming together, and realizing the common problems and common enemies they shared. While it is a problem, rank identitarianism hyper emphasizes it to a point that it's counterproductive. It's basically just the mirror image of the right's racism. The right has racism to justify the existing social hierarchy by turning whites against blacks, giving the white working class the impression of illusory superiority. It gives them someone to look down on themselves, and someone for them to kick around themselves. However, identitarian movements are cynically used by the elites to attempt to get the racial minorities so obsessed with their stuff, that it makes an actual working class movement impossible. That's the true tragedy of 2016. I was a white guy who wanted universal healthcare, I was told to check my privilege and blah blah blah. It's a toxic system. And then they accuse of of being racist because we dont accept their little doctrines. And their little doctrines are doctrines. it's just more religion in a sense. The racism of the past is the original sin, all whites are guilty, they need to feel bad about it, they need to admit to being part of the problem, and only them when they find redemption. The thing is, this is literally brainwashing. They're doing this to you to get power over you. it's like a trojan horse computer virus. You let it in and then it takes control of your mind's firmware. It follows a similar heuristic pattern as Christianity, which is why, as an ex Christian, I'm so able to detect it. It's like "wait, this is a lot like that other thing..." It literally is.

Heck, I'd argue that identitarianism is an adaption of the system to allow the left to keep acting like they're doing something when they're no longer doing something. The "New Left" arose in the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to move the left away from orthodox marxism. Dont get me wrong, I myself aint a fan of orthodox marxism, but they basically abandoned class analysis for identitarian analysis. And then the democratic party psyopped the left into hyper emphasizing identity at the expense of class and the rest is history. It's a LITERAL psyop. It's intended to distract us from class politics and hyper emphasize identity and race. 

Dont get me wrong, there are some aspects of identitiarianism that are valid. Like the whole history of racism, and the fact that some racist structures still exist today. But again, these are relatively peripheral issues. The CORE issue is that capitalist-imperialist superstructure. And to beat that, you DO need class analysis. That doesnt mean we embrace the solutions of orthodox marxism. I wanna remind people, my own ideology and its offshoots came about in part because former marxists like phillippe van parijs themselves moved away from orthodox marxism and asked "what, if anything can justify capitalism?" And that idea is FREEDOM. Since then, a whole wing of left libertarianism has come about centered around UBI and the idea that it gives people more freedom, while still maintaining the positive elements of capitalism. It itself is a reform based movement that isnt intended to destroy systems as they exist, but reform them. And my own ideas are mostly just a melding of my emerging humanist worldview with THAT. 

I aint saying we entirely ignore race, but it shouldnt be the primary point of the movement, it shouldnt define the morality of the movement, and it shouldnt gatekeep who is and isn't in the movement. TO make a class based movement work, we might have to deal with people who tend to reject these far left weirdo social identitarian dogmas, and who might have relatively regressive views themselves. And yes, you need moderates, like me or Ana Kasperian on your side. 

THe problem with the "max left", as Ana or Cenk of TYT would put it, is that tends to go all in with these unpopular movements that dont unite people and keep the left ineffective and toothless. Again, if we want to win, we need a coalition of 50%+ of the country. I aint sayint we shouldnt have SOME identitiarian stuff, but that should be like, a small fraction of what we do. It cant be the main course, or it'll just fall into the same identity trap that keeps us fighting useless "culture wars" and be a tool used by the elites against the masses to keep them in line and fighting amongst themselves. 

If you push this stuff, you're actively working against a movement that could actually win over a multiracial coalition to solve problems. You're reinforcing the neoliberal corporatist wing of "the left" and giving them power, even if you call yourself a "leftist." Youre also driving people to the right, as a lot of people are so turned off by that stuff, they flip back around to being conservatives. Great if you want to keep the working classes divided, terrible if you want to see some unity around some common causes.

We need to find common ground, identitarianism splits us up into little cliques and niches. It's not helpful. it's actually quite abusive. And it's unsustainable as a coalition. Abandon it. Embrace class politics instead. That's all I'm gonna say on that matter tonight.  

So discussing GMS's video on Christianity being racist more broadly

 So I covered much of what I wanted to say in the article immediately prior to this one, but I wanna discuss the premise that is being discussed here. Video for reference, let's get started.

So...yeah. This has been something I've been slowly realizing itself. but seeing it as stark as I'm seeing it here is a bit shocking. Like...I was a Christian nationalist back in the 2000s. I went to a fundamentalist Christian school, and they did mission trips to like Africa, Asia, Oceania, etc, trying to convert people there. I never got any racist vibes from it at the time. I mean, most seemed interested in just...spreading the word of Jesus to the ends of the earth, believing that all would need to know about Christianity before the end times could begin. 

But...let's face it, when I left the faith, I very quickly started putting some of the pieces together. Religion is the opium of the masses. The wealthy and powerful use it to dumb people down and to act as a sort of "matrix" or "plato's cave" to keep people subservient to them. Religion and its worldview messes with peoples' perceptions of things. It has these old and antiquated answers for why bad things happen to good people, and why suffering exists in the first place. And rather than address the real root causes of problems head on, it keeps people in a circle at sunday school acting like this is all some grand divine mystery and god knows all the answers, when, in reality, no, the causes of poverty and suffering are often mundane, and a lot more human oriented. And when we start ignoring those things, we kinda realize that we can just...solve a lot of problems that would otherwise be givens.

Heck, in my early days as an ex-Christian, I thought that the big problem was ignorance. And that the wealthy controlling everything with religion was just a current thing. I didn't realize how deep these attitudes went and how racist they were, etc. I thought that the problem was just a lack of knowledge, that the median person wasnt that smart, and yeah, some bad actors wanted to use that stuff to their advantage, but that a lot of people were well meaning, and that with people leaving religion, we can begin improving society. Like i looked at it like the enlightenment. Yeah, it made us realize there are scientific reasons for things like disease. That plagues werent afflictions from god, but caused by microbes, which spread in part because of the unsanitary conditions at the time. So instead of seeing like the black plague as something from god, we realize it came from a rat problem and that we need to control the rat population to solve the problem. Like this crap seems common sense for us today (although we're losing that in the days of RFK Jr being our health secretary), but it really was a big deal. And I thought a lot of social problems were like this. We've only realized how screwed up things are relatively recently, and sometimes progress is slow because people are stupid. It wasn't until later I realized these systems were literally DESIGNED to basically enslave us. 

And they are. As I dug into history, primarily to provide an account for how we got from the state of nature to where we are, it seems pretty obvious that since we've settled down and formed "civilization" as we know it, wealthy and powerful interests have used things like religion to enslave and subjugate the masses. 

And a lot of the modern iteration of this from 1500 onward is explicitly racist. There was this idea of cultural superiority among whites, and the need to go out and "civilize" the world, basically by imposing colonialism and later capitalism on them. They need to be taught the "right" way of doing things. Otherwise, they're "savage", we need to "civilize" them, and Christianity was often a tool used to domesticate these people and make them accepting of their servitude. The most successful evil empires in history dont succeed through raw force, they convince the populace that their enslavement is a good thing. And thats what religion does. It makes people submissive and subservient to authority, it dumbs them down, and as the decades and centuries progress, people only realize the world they live in now and believe it came from a fallen state. Christianity offers this huge "plato's cave" or "matrix" style worldview to convince people that their enslavement is a good thing. 

Evangelism in the modern era DOES have colonialist aspirations in it. It's the belief that their "western culture" (keep in mind, the bad, unenlightened version) is superior and that the masses of the world need to learn it for their own good. It's the idea that other peoples and cultures are inferior.

I dont doubt, in some cases, that this could be a thing. I think as progressives, we walk a tightrope on that subject. Go too far in one direction, and you're a sneering imperialist, to make a new vegas reference, go a bit too far in the other and you're just defending barbarism. SOMETIMES native cultures are violent and barbarous. I dont doubt that. Sometimes people do develop cultures with horrible cultural practices like, say, child rape, that shouldnt be acceptable. I'm not gonna defend obviously crude and barbarous practiced by natives. But....at the same time, I'm also not going to say that "western culture" is all that enlightened, especially when those who scream loudest about it are often representing the most barbarous aspects of it. Like on the child rape thing, look at who was in the epstein files, look at who just voted against banning child marriage in Oklahoma, for example. "Muh culture", F U, republicans, F U. 

 And that's the thing. We're not that enlightened either. And often times, and this is where Im very critical of the modern right, but they end up being just as barbarous as the people they criticize a lot of the time. Like take Israel again. When Hamas committed October 7th, I agreed, yeah, this is uncivilized bullcrap that shouldnt fly, and Israel seems more reasonable and civilized. 2.5 years later, here we are, with me condemning Israel for committing a genocide and grossly influencing US politics in a bad faith way. Did MY values change? Did my perception of "western culture" change? No, I've been consistent. What changed was the fact that Israel is flat out betraying that culture and being barbarous themselves. I just believe some accountability should be held there.

The same goes with MAGA in the US. We love to act like our western culture is so great. Freedom. Democracy. Rule of law. Constitutional rights. Well....MAGA wants to destroy all that to defend THEIR version of "western culture" which is...fundamentalist religion and the protestant work ethic, which just serve to enslave us to the wealthy and powerful. And that's the thing. When I talk western culture and civilized and uncivilized, I dont have this inherent "western countries good, white people good, christianity good" mindset these guys have. Im quite a critic of the west in some ways, not because i wanna destroy it, but because I wanna improve it and make it NOT suck. And on topics like racism, wage slavery, and religious authoritarianism, I flat out condemn that stuff as "uncivilized." What makes us better is those values. Without those values, what are you left with? Just rank tribalism and authoritarianism. But that's the hill MAGA and the right wanna die on. Destroy the good aspects of western culture, the actual high minded ideals that actually DO make us better, and replace them with....the same regressive crap that does the opposite.

Same with slavery. For the amount of white southern Americans who act like the confederacy is "their culture", what are you defending? The institution of slavery? I mean, the south has some nice cultural elements sometimes. Southern hospitality, good food, architecture and music unique to the area, but no, they're not out there defending their country music or right to have BBQ, they're going all in with slavery. No. Those parts of our culture can die out for all I care. It's better that they do. 

But that kinda brings us back to GMS's point. Christianity is part of this underlying capitalist megastructure. The megastructure was designed to enslave the world to a handful of people who hold all of the wealth. Christianity is just part of it. Racism is another. People used the racial hierarchy to keep blacks and whites divided and fighting amongst themselves so that the system would chug on unexpected.

And this is one of the reasons why I despise the democrats today. Sure, the republicans are the party of white supremacy either implicitly or explicitly (it was more implicit during the 6th party system), but the idpol of the left is just...the opposite of that. But we saw how it was executed by centrist democrats to defang the Bernie movement. They literally did all the "OMG T3H BLACK VOTE" stuff to do that. It was by design. They used identity politics, to keep us fighting amongst ourselves. Which is why it's taken me so long to adjust to the new reality in the 2020s where open racism is a thing again that we gotta deal with. Because I honestly didnt wanna have to open up that can of worms. It's not helpful, it's divisive. But honestly, that can of worms being opened has exposed deeper rot in our society where now it seems like all of those GOOD aspects of western culture seem to just be pretenses that the power people dont actually care about and now we got a fascist movement on our hands that wants to throw away the good parts that I and any reasonable people should agree with...to defend the bad parts that should be eliminated.

Again, what do you get with "western values" if you throw away all the high minded stuff about freedom and democracy? You're left with rank authoritarianism and slavery, the exact opposite of that. But that seems to be the part of the culture that the power people really care about. Because they're just like the nobles of old, we've just been living under the pretense that our society is more complex than that and that any leftover elements of that are just strange holdovers of bygone generations? But no, it seems like that stuff is just the main feature, and all the pretenses dont really matter. 

With me, since I left christianity, I went in the opposite direction, where those values ARE what matters, while the more regressive elements should be done away with. Keep in mind, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a reformist. I look at where we are, and I'm like "let's keep the good and get rid of the bad", the far right is like "let's get rid of the good and keep the bad." All while acting like they have ownership over the idea.

 Racism is bad. Imperialism is bad. Slavery is bad. I think we gotta take a good look at ourselves and think "are we the baddies" right now? Because to some degree we are. Put another way. Christians have a saying "what would Jesus do?" I think, when it comes to looking at the bad, we ask "what would hitler do?" And then we do the EXACT OPPOSITE. Because we can all agree with THAT at least? i thought thats what we thought, post 1945, that hitler was the epitome of all that was evil and we should strive to be the opposite, right? Like authoritarianism bad. Racism bad. Genocide bad. Slavery bad. Those are supposed to be BAD things, right? So why does the modern right look more and more like fascists, if not outright nazis? What the frick is wrong with these people?

Really. We're at a point in our history, where we're gonna have to take a hard look at ourselves, and either go in the good direction or the bad direction. Sadly, because most of society is run by the wealthy and powerful, and they hold all the cards, we're going in the bad direction and descending into fascism. The good is being stamped out. We're being ignored, thrown to the side. Hell, they might even throw those of us who are too educated to believe in their nonsense in camps one day. I literally wouldnt doubt that, given what trump is trying to build here in the good old US of A. 

But yeah. I appreciate the work GMS is doing and it's very good and thought provoking stuff. I just wanted to highlight it and give my own concurring opinion. 

Discussing Christians claiming ownership over the origins of secular morality

 So, Genetically Modified Skeptic had a new video about how "American Christianity is racist on purpose", and I kind of want to discuss a lot of themes in this. I'll probably split them over multiple articles, but in this one, I wanna discuss a theme that the Christians discussed in it, which is the origins of morality, and how they claim ownership over "western culture" and claim that atheists use their moral framework. I have mixed views on this topic.

First of all, morality and culture are evolutionary, not revolutionary. A lot of early moralities are based on religious morality like Christianity. However, that doesn't mean that such ideas need to be explicitly Christian. If anything, I'd argue the Christianness kinda ruins it. Like, the key example used was basically...the Christian duty to charity that gave rise to social safety nets. I dont deny that much of the modern approach to safety nets has origins in Christianity. if anything, I've discussed this AT LENGTH, and it's kind of a huge issue I have with these systems. You see, modern safety nets were designed with two contradictory sentiments in mind: the christian duty to charity, but also the christian duty to work. Safety nets are a form of state forced charity, which, quite frankly, modern evangelical christians dont even accept as legitimate (too much "big government"). They believe in charity, but not state enforced charity. If anything, they place a higher emphasis on free will, morality, and on economics, work ethic, whereas due to secularism I went in the opposite direction, rejecting the work ethic and adopting a more universalist idea of safety nets. if anything, the evolution of my philosophical tradition comes from the likes of Thomas Paine, who saw society as a "system of pulleys" through which the weight of economic misery could be removed. So for me, it's not even charity, if anything I'm anti "charity". I dont like the idea of imposing a moral quandry on individuals and guilting them to "do the good thing" when instead I can just solve the problem so as to not impose such a moral quandry on people anyway, this solving the problem.

With that said, you can kind of see how there's an entirely different set of principles being utilized in my secular approach, whereas the "christian" approach introduces a lot of weird BS into things that make things more complicated. I fully recognize that Christian morality is a hot mess of contradictions and also introduces a lot of moral dilemmas (read: trolley problems) on people in an attempt to force people to be good. but because I dont care about any of that, and just wanna solve problems while imposing as few moral obligations on the populace in the first place, I just have the state....solve the problem. The Christian approach is literally dysfunctional. But morality isn't about good living for christians, it's about obeying god, with regular debates about how much "good works" should play a role in going to heaven.

I admit, a lot of modern secular morality may have originally come from older, more religious frameworks. Even if these frameworks are primarily secular, a lot of Christians like to claim ownership of them. They act like the founding fathers were all Christians who based their views on the Bible (meanwhile, to invoke Thomas Paine again, he was quite frankly as critical of Christianity as I am). When they talk "western culture", they talk "Christian culture." And...based on what I wrote the other day when looking at the culture MAGA is trying to defend, it ends up just being religion and work ethic. But that's a topic for the NEXT discussion on this topic. The fact is, western culture has some ups and has its downs. If anything, Christians seem to be trying to offend the "bad" version of the culture in my eyes, the imperialist ones that subjugates us all and reduces us all to wage slaves. The aspects I try to eradicate from my own interpretation of the culture.

With that said, let me explain my framework toward things. I adopt an attitude of "free thought", I don't value the authoritarian aspects of this so called "Christian culture". I dont care what god said. I dont care if we always did things a certain way. I dont care about that stuff. I care about reason and evidence. When analyzing social structures, i do so sociologically. I look at the functionalist approach and whether ideas contribute positively to human well being and society. I look at the conflict approach to see who benefits from the existing status quo. And...Christianity fails on both fronts. Take the idea above. I pointed out how the Christian approach to "charity" and welfare is actually very self contradictory and dysfunctional. I also would argue that the adoption of the christian work ethic is often used to justify the wealth of the elites and the poverty of the masses. Heck, GMS's video makes a strong argument for a belief superstructure around capitalism that uses Christianity as a way to functionally enslave the masses. And when I lost my faith, and applied the methods above, those beliefs failed.

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I can be convinced, through reason, that certain attitudes are good ones, I'll still accept them. Even capitalism. I'm not some raging leftist because I understand that at the end of the day, we need some sort of system, and I tend to believe capitalism is functional, whereas trying to replace it can introduce all kinds of negative consequences I can avoid. So instead, I focus on reforming capitalism and western culture from within, rather than destroying it.  If the Christians "got us" in the sense that they argue we're using their structure, have at it, but I dont adopt such structures because of Christianity, if anything, explicit religious framing weakens the argument for such things because actual christian morality is outdated and dysfunctional. Rather, I justify them under different frameworks that extend from the free thinking sociological approach.

Christians love to claim liberal democracy as their idea, but in reality, it emerged as a criticism of the religiously authoritarian systems that preceded them. Just like protestantism emerged as a critricism of the catholic church, liberal democracy arose as a powerful criticism of the system of divine rights of kings. And revolutions were fought here, and despite my own "let's not reinvent the wheel" approach, these guys reinvented the wheel. Which brings us to the founding father. The founding fathers were not explicitly christian. They were religiously pluralistic, with the median founder probably being some sort of deist or at most relatively liberal Christian at the time. And they looked at the religious fighting in Europe with the church of england, the catholic church, as well as various groups in America like the puritans and were like "no thanks, we religious liberty and separation of church and state." 

They took locke's natural rights theory, and changed the right of property, something I have MAJOR issues with given my humanist perspective, and changed it to "the right to pursue happiness." Which I think sounds better. And my own morals do reflect this approach too. Except I take them and turn them into the end goals of morality, where when I try to figure out the actual goals we implement morality in the first place, it's to extend life, reduce suffering, protect freedom, and allow people the right to pursue their own happiness. These are just "good ideas" to me. I dont try to justify them from God or anything. I think that weakens them. Because when you invoke god as an explanation, it discourages deeper thought about them. People just accept them as a dogma, and if anything, I'm anti dogmatic. For me, it's like...well if we want a set of goals to guide the morals, these make the most sense. 

We can talk about, say, Hobbes and Rousseau for example. Hobbes has a secular argument for law and governments that Christians often use to invoke their morality, that without it, nature is a war against all and its better for people to band together and form governments, even authoritarian ones, than to live in chaos. But again, without the christian elements, it's just a good idea. it holds up under scrutiny. And even in the days before civilization and grand philosophies and social contracts, people just lived in groups of hunter gatherers. If anything, I tend to see the history of civilization more like Rousseau, where we're born free, but then everything's in chains. Our societies were created to enslave us, and I have no doubt about that. And there's been aspects of that in thinkers we tend to view as believers in "western culture" from the get go. It's never been explicitly christian, it's pluralistic. And enlightenment era philosophies did have to deal with the fact that much of society up to that point were literally created to enslave the masses. hell, the version of western culture these christians tout comes from the philosophical traditions that tend to prop up their argument. A lot of strains of western thought DO have explicitly colonialist and imperialist ambitions. A lot of them are pretty racist. And it seems like the aspects of western culture right wing christians seem most keen on defending....are those parts. 

I mean, as I see it, the best aspects of so called "western culture", liberal democracy, comes from ideas like the social contract, like the idea of limited government with rule of law, separation of powers, and constitutional rights, like the idea of freedom. Even economically, the strongest argument I can make for capitalism is that, in theory, it gives people freedom.

But...let's be honest. These ideas also have a dark side, and we can't ignore how imperialist that these systems have been over the years, how they have been and still are racist against those not like them. How they came to be in order to colonize and enslave the third world, including the americas (and hell, even europe). How they use religion to reinforce those systems. This is why I said the other day when it comes to these right wing MAGA idiots defending "western culture", there isn't much to defend. They're defending most staunchly the worst aspects and iterations of the ideas, because the aspects and iterations of the idea that reflect their values ARE those bad versions in my view. 

Which is why I've long held the stance, since leaving religion, that religion offers nothing of value. We dont need it. We literally dont need it. It's kinds like the saying goes, yeah, in a world of the blind, maybe the one eyed man is the one to lead everyone else. But at this point, secular morality has so far surpassed christian morality that christianity often reflects the worst and most backwards aspects of modern culture.

My own take on the link between christianity and western culture is the following. If you take the christianity out of western culture, you strengthen it and make it better. If you take the western culture out of christianity, you go back to the dark ages. Which side of things is actually doing the work, and putting in the work in making society better? This is why, when I left the faith, I started seeing religion as a regressive force on society holding it back, and that without it, we would have a much better world, with much better ways of doing things. Because if we left it all up to the christian fundamentalists, we'd all be living lives in which we just work all the time for rich people, while people are entitled to nothing (while feeling guilty about ineffectively giving to charity to maybe slightly help things), and we'd be living according to bronze age morals that don't actually help people. 

Maybe that stuff was good 3000 years ago. It's not 3000 years ago. It's not even 300 years ago. We live in the year 2026 and I know the right hates "current year" memes because they see their morality as eternal as it comes from god itself, but that's the fricking problem. It never changes, it rejects any positive attempts to change it from progressives, and it holds us back. Cut the cord, be done with the christian aspects of our morality, and let's move on into the future already.  

Some humanist principles for the future of the economy

 So...while I dont actively encourage at this time using my economic models in an explicitly degrowth sort of way, I'm well aware that they're compatible. And I wanna discuss how things should work in relation to the "fertility" discussion in the previous post.

First of all, in a post growth world where we enter a period where we hit or flirt with the hard limits of environmental sustainability, I'll say this, maximum supportable GDP will become fixed. If we can only sustain say, a $50 trillion GDP, well, we can only support a $50 trillion GDP. 

From there, considering the population debate, lower is better. Like there used to be this weird monument in georgia that advocated for the human population to be set at 500 million or something. Why would that be a good thing? Well, more population with a fixed economic ceiling means lower GDP per capita. Lower population means higher GDP per capita. The less people we have, the better we can live, assuming we dont need massive populations to generate massive GDP. Our current economic model is built around more people = more workers = more growth. But again, if that proves to be environmentally disastrous, yeah, you will eventually want fewer people, so each person can live better.

Now, reducing population is tricky. The obvious answer is the bad answer. Ya know...people dying....let's avoid that one. So....how's the best way to reduce our population? Through a reduced birth rate. So is low fertility really bad here? 1.58 kids per woman might not be a bad thing. 

If we have 500 million people in the US at a $50 trillion GDP economy, that's a $100k GDP. But if we only have a replacement rate at 75-80% of the population, well maybe we'll only reach 400 million, and if the economy becomes productive enough to hit $50 trillion GDP a year no matter what, as more automation means doing more with less labor, then we can have future generations at $125k GDP per capita instead. If we drop to 300 million with a $50 trillion GDP ceiling which our economy becomes increasingly easy to hit, that's a $166k GDP per capita. Ya know? Point is, with a fixed economic maximum, fewer people, means higher living standards. 

And once again, perhaps it's better for us to have fewer kids than to run into environmental limits the hard way, as that could lead to more death, rather than more kids not being born. So I say, yeah, if we reproduce below our replacement rate, and if, later this century, we hit an economic crisis that forces us to cut back on our economy to be sustainable (as we very well might some time this century), again, it's better if we reduce our population in a slow and controlled way than to just keep growing until we run out of resources and then we face some disastrous economic collapse. 

I also wanna talk about how UBI plays into this. Like....my own UBI is designed with neutrality toward childbearing. There's been the argument that if we give too much money for having children, that people will have too many kids as we're incentivizing it. I set my UBI at 1/3 of the poverty line for children, because that's around the amount adding a child to a family adds to the poverty line. THe first person is around $16k, but then additional people add around $5500 each, so yeah, my UBI is set around there. This, in theory, means that people won't have tons of kids just to get more money, but I'm not actively punishing people for having more kids. 

If we want to raise or lower the population, we can adjust the financial incentives accordingly. People have talked about raising the fertility rate with "baby bonuses". Yeah that's a good left wing way to do that. More money means more kids. Less money means less kids. And I dont wanna be cruel toward people, hence why I dont wanna actively punish people financially for having kids by not giving children ANY UBI, but you could, theoretically, reduce the benefit to children to disincentivize children. I wouldnt advise going nuts with this mechanism, but it seems like a lot better alternative than either, malthusianism where we actively deprive people resources through NO safety net system at all to punish people for having kids, or taking away rights and freedoms to force people to have kids. Like, it's a much softer incentive structure if we decide to use it. I wont advise going down obviously, to discourage childbearing unless absolutely necessary. But you could make an argument for a higher childrens' UBI to incentivize people having more kids. 

Again I kinda feel weird about this topic given some might think this goes into eugenics territory, but I'm actually trying to head that off here. I look at the trump administration acting like we have this massive "crisis" while pushing a handmaids tale style conservatism and I'm just trying to offer a better approach, I think a more subtle approach of carrots and sticks works better than just taking away womens' rights and turning them into breeding cows ya know? Because if we let the right do it, that's what they wanna do. We looked at their goals in the last article and that crap is DISMAL. I think my approach is better and more compatible with our freedoms and the culture we claim to have that is worth preserving. 

The same is true going forward. It would be better if we had a more managed population decline via fewer births than something that is...cataclysmic like the next great leap forward or something. I mean, we're not there yet, but I suspect we WILL hit a point some time in the next 100 years where the environment FORCES cuts to living standards if we dont voluntarily make cutbacks ourselves. heck, I've seen computer models suggesting it might happen as soon as 2040. That's 14 years from now. We'll see, but yeah. What we're currently doing isn't gonna be sustainable forever, and I'd rather encourage voluntary changes ahead of the time than something that is resolved through authoritarianism or mass death when we hit a major point of no return.

Anyway that's my general approach to these topics. Sorry to get dark. 

Do we ACTUALLY have a "fertility crisis?"

 So....everyone is grilling RFK Jr, the dumbest health secretary to ever exist, for going on a weird rambling about teenagers' sperm yesterday. And...I thought it might be a good topic to discuss what I think about fertility, childbearing, etc. 

To be frank...as a progressive, i DON'T think about it very often. I believe that the choice to have a child is...a choice, and that if we just let people make their own free decisions, the result will be "good enough" where I don't have an issue with it. I don't care if the population grows, i dont care if it shrinks. In general I tend to lean toward shrinking, but as long as remain somewhere around the replacement rate, it's like whatever.

Currently the replacement rate is 2.1, with the typical woman having 1.5 children, so we are below, which requires some immigration. Of course, I'm not opposed to this. I mean, if that's what it takes to keep the population stable, so be it, I really, really, REALLY don't care. I tend to value individual freedom over some weird coercive social conservatism. Of course, the right is the party of...weird coercive social conservatism, so I wanna discuss their perspective.

Discussing the weird obsession with breeding conservatives have

The right wing brain seems....relatively obsessed with this topic, in comparison. Social conservatives, at first, feared people breeding too much. Historically, they've been Malthusian. They're the ones saying we needed to be economically conservative and punitive toward poor people because all they do is screw and have kids, and that if we give them welfare, it encourages bad behavior. All throughout my youth, everything was obsession with teenage pregnancy and weird moralizing about how if you didnt wanna be poor dont have sex before marriage. They'd scream about abortion being this holocaust like evil but then lecture everyone about having sex before marriage and financial stability. They'd go on about how racial minorities don't value the structure of the American family and that's why they deserve to suffer. Really, there was this idea that people will naturally breed out of wedlock like crazy and reproduce at unsustainable rates and that this is bad and we need to be economically austere and impose "personal responsibility" on everyone to offset that. It was a crude and brutish mindset, and out of line with the data. But once you make arguments about how their policies actually seemed to encourage teenage pregnancy, they didn't seem to care, it seemed to be about punishing people for having sex out of the right circumstances. Meanwhile, liberal policies of distributing birth control, allowing abortions, led to more sexual liberalism, yes, but it also led to more stable replacement rates, with women having just short of the replacement rate, generally speaking. And isn't that what we want?

How I see it 

As we enter the twenty-first century, yeah, we do have an overpopulation crisis on our hands. Not so much in the first world, where, again, we've kind of stabilized around just short of replacement rate. But the third world? Yikes. Like...all that birth control stuff does lead to a much more stable population. And in an era of climate change, increased resource consumption, infinite growth on a finite planet, I'm fine if the population remains around the same or goes down slowly. If anything, that's a positive change. That's how we ensure long term stability on this planet. We're dangerously close to the maximum populations we can realistically support, and if we really care about sustainability and having a reasonably western living standard, we're already exceeding the population. The whole world can't sustain everything having the existing American living standard as of now. While growth and technological efficiency will allow for us to compensate for this to some degree, which is why the whole economic growth narrative has historically countered the more malthusian narrative, at some point, we're just gonna reach hard limits. 

So...as I see it, if we want to avoid more painful choices that come with such a philosophy in the future, we want to AVOID hitting those hard limits. Seriously. Isn't it better if we voluntarily choose to reduce our population somewhat, than for some economic crisis to precipitate a humanitarian one that leads to severe rationing of resources or starvation? Quite frankly, i think the idea that the modern western lifestyle leads to relatively low fertility rates is a feature, not a bug. In the pre industrial days, sure, maybe families needed people to have 10 kids to tend to the family farm and ensure enough kids survive....the horrors of pre-modern childhood (lots and lots of disease and high mortality), in the modern day of humans living longer and more consistently, it makes more sense for us to reproduce at...something close to the replacement rate. 

So...honestly? Modern lifestyles leading to relatively lower fertility seems like a good thing. like a potential crisis is sorting itself out naturally in a way that isn't dangerous for us. And that's why liberalism works. When people are allowed to make their own decisions, the choices end up leading to outcomes that are in the ballpark of where we wanna be.

The conservative mentality

 The conservative mentality is...very counter to mine. Despite all the malthusian nonsense that seems endemic in their worldview and how we need to be harsh to people who reproduce outside of the proper social contexts, they're actually starting to freak out. They're looking at the modern situation and saying "gee, this ins't good, we're gonna decline in population, people arent reproducing at the rates we WANT them to reproduce at!" And they're framing this as some grand moral crisis. 

Now, I admit, maybe we younger people aren't reproducing at the rate that we should. Maybe it could be a little higher. However, as a liberal, I once again have an answer for that. Sure, while childfree adults are on the rise and I'm one of them, I'm not under the impression the main reason we millennials havent been having kids like we "should" is more economic. See, after being told that we need to be financially stable before having kids and that this is the "right" way to do things and that we should expect a life of poverty and misery if we don't follow the proper life script, many of us...havent had kids. Even those who want to. We delayed marriage, childbirth, and building a life because, hey, guess what, the economy has sucked for us, we've been miserable, we've never had the economic stability that our parents had, and then we get yelled at by the same people now complaining we didnt have enough kids that we were eating too much avocado toast or not working hard enough. These people always have SOMETHING to complain about. But I digress. 

The point is, now they see this as a huge crisis. Why? because their economic model requires infinite growth. We need women to have more babies because more babies mean more future workers. If we dont operate above replacement rate, then that means the population ages on average. This means that, in theory, our social safety nets like social security become more burdensome. Supposedly they need like 2.5ish workers to fund one retiree, and if we're at a 1.5 replacement rate...well...you do the math. 

of course, conservatives hate social security and always advocate for cutting it. And the crisis of social security is completely artificial; people stop contributing taxes above a certain income, like, say, $140k or something. if we taxed the rich more, we could sustain it in perpetuity.

Heck, I'll be honest, in an age of automation and increasing economic efficiency, why do we need so many workers funding things? Modern economics is driven by rank consumerism, not actual necessities. Remember, we've discussed this many times before, but we should be able to, in theory, work a whole lot less and rely on machines a whole lot more. Hell, I advocate for a full on UBI, and reducing the work week. The whole idea that we cant fund a safety net for an aging population has more to do with the structure of said safety net (social insurance....) than on the actual sustainability of actually taking care of much of our population without work. A lot of the calls to raise the retirement age, or cut benefits comes from conservatives who always ignore that hey, we could raise taxes and fund stuff. But they dont want that. They want at most, the safety nets to remain unchanged, if their end goal isnt to shrink them, saying we cant afford them at all and that we need to give the wealthy more money to create jobs. I've seen conservatives argue that we shouldnt even have a concept of retirement and people should just work until they die. It's crazy, but this is how they think. 

So yeah, they're totally out of their depth on that, although, if we heavily value infinite economic growth like they do, i can see where they're coming from. At some point, my theory is we're gonna have to stop growing....in part because of the environmental sustainability ceiling mentioned above. We can only fund a certain GDP lifestyle for a certain number of people in the long term, and ultimately, I once again think it's better for us to voluntarily choose to work less and to address the situation that way, than to deal with say, rationing and resource deprivation. And if we wanna avoid those negative outcomes, it's better we address this NOW while we got some runway to start without crashing into those limits, than later when nature FORCES us to cut back on its terms, not ours. 

Of course, the right is completely ignorant of the realities of that. They think climate change and the idea of environmental sustainability are leftist plots to destroy capitalism, never mind that I believe in them despite being somewhat capitalist, and just think we can grow forever. So they keep insisting that now we have this crisis of not enough babies being born to fuel the economy of tomorrow, when I look at the situation and think that if anything, the ideas I promote would allow us to stave off a crisis that could otherwise kill a whole lot of us and make us miserable. If not make us go full on extinct from radically altering our environment. 

And let's not forget the racism angle...

And let's not forget the racism angle of the far right. They believe in this idea of the "great replacement theory." See, here's a few realities that the "white right" don't like. First, we can address any short term economic sustainability issues by bringing in immigrants. And second, POC tend to reproduce at a faster rate than whites. 

This SCARES the white nationalist types. Because they look at a future of America where white people aren't in charge and they are scared. Omg, they dont share our values, blah blah blah. And I'm gonna be honest, what is "white culture" in this case? It often comes off as like the protestant work ethic and christianity. Things that, IMO aren't worth saving. But yeah, that's why they're freaking out under trump. OMG IF WE DONT DO SOMETHING POC WILL OUTNUMBER WHITES AND WE WONT BE IN CHARGE ANY MORE. Again, given the values these guys are defending, is that a bad thing?

Like, really, back in the 2010s we had this idea of the coalition of the ascendant. It was why I was so overconfident of the future of america and believe that conservatism was dying and the future belonged to the left. It's also why the trumpers are going full authoritarian. Realizing that their "way of life" is under threat from demographic change, they're trying to force the demographics to go back their way. Which is causing them to become a lot more authoritarian on reproduction as a result. While abortion has ALWAYS been a long term goal for them to roll back, they've done it. And now they're claiming we have a problem of people having too few kids. But I bet a lot of these people only want WHITES to have kids. 

And that actually resolves a core contradiction of their movement. Like, we can talk about say, the evolution of the whole malthusian approach of the past generation. It started in the 1960s with the introduction of welfare and civil rights. The welfare queen narrative was always racially skewed. And conservatives tend to get angry about videos of POC women who have tons of kids going on welfare. It's why they always get so angry over that stuff. A lot of the anti welfare arguments came from racism. And there's always been this idea that POCs are like...culturally inferior to white people. Like...whites will only have kids when responsible on average while POC won't. And, I wanna point out, I dont endorse these narratives, but this is likely how a lot of them are thinking. So now they're upset when whites arent having enough kids...because they fear demograpghic change causing them to lose cultural power in the future. 

Me...again, I dont really care. As I see it, if whites have fewer kids, and POC have more, and the end result is close enough to the replacement rate that I dont see it as a major problem, I don't really care. Again, my philosophy is if people are free to make their own decisions, the result should be close enough to where we want that it's not a concern. If that makes america browner in the future, I dont really care. Like really...I DONT CARE. IT'S JUST FRICKING SKIN COLOR. And as far as culture, conservatives aren't really making a convincing case for their culture being so great during the trump era. If anything, it's like they wanna preserve the WORST parts of our culture, like the fetishiziation of hard work, and conservative religion.

In a way it goes full circle, their breeding fixation IS their culture. Like, really, a huge part of conservative culture is this weird religious authoritarianism involving a weird fixation on the family. Their idea of life is just a script. Be born. be a kid. Grow up, go to school, get a job. Get married. Have kids. Rinse and repeat. Everything is just....yep, all of life is just about working and reproducing. It's a really dismal take on life i REALLY dont vibe with. And this is what they defend? Really? This is their culture. A life of hard work, responsibility, and misery.

Meanwhile, my culture? Freedom. DO what you want, enjoy your life, stay out of others' way. If we have to work to live, so be it, but dont live to work. There's more to life than just all being wage slaves and making more wage slaves. We love to act like others are so tyrannical and we're for freedom, but are the conservatives really for freedom? Are they REALLY for freedom? They're just as conservative and authoritarian as the conservative regimes we crap on. Fundamentalist christianity isnt much different than fundamentalist islam when you deal with the extremes. The trump regime's aspirations seem more in line with Putin's Russia than any America I grew up believing in. It's the left, the liberals, who represent the real America. The america that is based on freedom, and doing what you want, as long as you dont harm others. What the right represents these days is closer to fascism. They've become the same people they claim to fear and despise. 

The elephant in the room: Gen Z

 So...with millennials, I pointed out that while yes, some childfreedom has led to declining birth rates, a lot of it is economic. The economy for millennials has been a crapshow, with a lot of us deferring having kids due to not achieving some level of economic sustainability. This comes after a generation of telling us to keep our legs closed and not to reproduce irresponsibly...while then engaging in the responsibility that our economy allowed. I honestly think millennials would have likely had more kids if the economy didn't suck for them. If we had the economic opportunities our parents did. CONGRATS, GOP, YOU PLAYED YOURSELVES, YOU SHAMED A GENERATION INTO NOT HAVING KIDS AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE KIDS, YOU HAVE MOSTLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME! If we adopted practices like UBI, higher wages, etc, to make life better for the masses, maybe people would have had more kids! 

But...then there's gen Z. Gen Z, especially the tail end, I believe the first half of the generation are just like millennials, but the more tail end now in their teens and early 20s, they...have unique problems. And it actually has a lot to do with culture wars. As we know, the men are becoming increasingly conservative, and wanting to go back to an authoritarian approach in which womens' sexuality is more controlled due to their lack of success with dating, and the women...dont wanna be controlled and have gone in the opposite direction of being radfems. Like....those who grew up in the post 2016 environment which has been particularly divisive and toxic has led to a generation of young people who arent having sex, are distrustful of dating, and who seem to hate the other gender due to political polarization.

Idk how these guys are gonna settle down and create the next generation at this rate. it's like all the problems millennials had, and then ON TOP OF THEM, they got their weird utopia 25 situation going on where the culture is so F-ed up that the men and women aren't pairing off like they should. Some of this is the consequence of the internet and its impact on dating. But a lot of it is just...the culture wars between the far right and far left.

Again, I feel like under a liberal model, freedom will prevail where enough people will have kids that we get an outcome that isnt particularly socially undesirable. Like conservatives will complain the birth rate aint high enough, but my answer: FIX THE FRICKING ECONOMY! Which they dont wanna do. But...when radfems hate the men for being conservative, and the men hate the women for being radfems, well....you're dealing with the illiberal extremes just screwing everything up. Anyway these guys are still young, and maybe they'll straighten out as they age, but that COULD be a problem. Either way, this is a problem with EVERYTHING with our politics post 2016. And I've been condemning that from the start as it's not helpful and just dividing us for no fricking reason at all. Of course, the rich wanted us to fight because otherwise we'd demand concessions for them and....wait...

can't we just say ALL OF THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE WEALTHY NOT ALLOWING THE WEALTH TO TRICKLE DOWN AS WE SHOULD AND INSTEAD DISTRACTING US WITH CULTURE WARS?! Arguably yes. Except now their solution to fix this is rank authoritarianism. Because of course it is. *sigh*, we are in hell, and this is why no one is having kids.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude? Well, largely, i think the "fertility crisis" is largely a made up crisis. Generally speaking left to their own devices people make good enough decisions that im happy with the outcome, and we should encourage them to do so. However, conservatives always seem miserable, always seem to be in culture grievance mode, and always ciomplain, and always make up fake crises to get us distracted. 

And at the end of the day the crisis is arguably their fault in various ways in the process, if it exists at all, because the contradictions of their own ideology cause all the undesirable outcomes in the first place. Of course they're just gonna blame progressives for existing and insist on taking away our reproductive rights in order to force authoritarianism on us, because of course they would, it's all they really know.

Also, a lot of them are really racist and probably only wanna have the "right" (white) people to have babies, so that's probably what all the complaining is about.

Anyway, i dont think it's a crisis mostly. Insofar as it is, it comes down to conservatives in the first place, and if we just practiced liberalism, the problems would resolve themselves naturally and peacefully to some degree.  

Discussing McMorrow's campaign imploding

 So I'm not gonna do a full election update as recent posts still have done a pretty decent job on that, but I do want to discuss a new poll out of Michigan since other people are talking about it. Basically Mcmorrow's campaign has cratered significantly and she's now third place. Somehow she imploded so bad she resurrected Stevens' flailing campaign. So why is this?

Well, it should be obvious. I mean, I'm someone who was right up McMorrow's alley originally. When I knew next to nothing about the candidates other than El Sayed being the medicare for all book guy, I actually trended toward mcmorrow and my first post on the matter actually endorsed her. Why? because I've come to realize I dont always think in lockstep with the progressive movement due to my UBI centric ideal platform and how I need to make compromises on other priorities to keep a full UBI viable. As such, I've become okay with a public option and slightly more incremental solutions. While I love the energy progressives bring, and am on board with fixing the country with real solutions, we disagree somewhat on what those real solutions should be, and I'm fine with voting for someone who is a little more moderate (but still to the left of the centrist wing of the party) in order to get something a bit closer to what I want.

But then I started wading into the toxicity of the primary race itself, and how McMorrow had the brilliant idea of flinging tons of dishonest mud at El Sayed painting him as a radical for daring to appear with Hasan Piker, and it really made me wonder, gee, is McMorrow even genuine? Can i trust her to have my back on these issues in practice? And the answer is no. no, I very obviously cant. Her campaign has the establishment's stink all over it, and she seems to have aligned with some third way interests and hasan derangement syndrome. And again, that makes me wonder...okay, well how well will she stick to her purported interests in office? Or will she just conveniently drop them because the donors say so like Biden/Harris did?

Because we've seen this before. Biden/Harris had a mildly progressive campaign in practice, and then Biden kinda distanced himself from say, the public option, and Harris dropped it from her platform, and honestly, are these guys gonna actually do what they say in office? If you align with third way style interests...I dont trust you. 

She also reminds me of Elizabeth Warren in 2020, who had some major progressive street cred in 2020, but then went all in with knifing Bernie in the back with a hillary-esque campaign claiming he was sexist, and basically splitting his votes by refusing to drop out.  There's a reason we call her a "snake." Because she is. And McMorrow comes off as one too.

Especially when El Sayed's message is basically just "I want to help you people." Granted, he hasnt done a good job outlining exactly what that entails. His platform is vague. But yeah, vibes tend to win elections over policy for many people. And McMorrow just went in a direction that made her extremely unlikeable, whereas El Sayed is literally midwestern zohran mamdani, and he's popular AF in NYC.

now, can El Sayed win the general? That's the big concern. El Sayed polls way worse than McMorrow or Stevens do, and I'm kind of inclined to back McMorrow in the sense that McMorrow has a better shot at actually winning. While recent polling shows all 3 underwater for some reason (which is highly anomalous given all other polling I've seen on 2026), El Sayed does do a good 2-3 points worse than the others on average. Stevens is the only one who in the averages still wins (and its like 0.6 or something). McMorrow is down around 1-2, and El Sayed is down like 3-4, with recent polling showing him at R+5 in the general election matchup. That's...not good. And given winning the senate is important, and even I'm inclined to be "blue no matter who", I really don't like El Sayed's chances. But...I get why McMorrow isnt that popular. She kind of outed herself as a warren like "snake" and is suffering for it in the polls.

Either way, Im not from Michigan. Those who are, vote your conscience. Objectively speaking I still kinda like McMorrow outside of her smear campaign, I just really hate said campaign. And while I love El Sayed's progressive campaign....on policy I'm a bit more mixed, and on electability, I'm just not sure he can pull it off. Do with this information what you will.  

Updated my house model: New forecast (election update: 5/11/26)

 So, against my better judgment I decided to update my house model. 

 So, to discuss it. I went by Cook PVI's house ratings, and included all districts not considered solid/safe. I labeled all districts, TU means tossup according to cook, LR/LD are leans, YR/YD are likelies, and yeah. 

Then I basically looked for obviously gerrymandered districts that go the wrong way, like if something from California or Florida is like lean/likely red/blue and then goes the other way, I flipped them back the way cook had them. This is an measure to compensate for gerrymandering. Since my model takes 2024's districts and shifts them uniformly so many points, and some districts arent even the same any more, I declared a few results invalid and flipped them back. This gives the GOP a net +2 advantage over the raw data, which I included in the results.

With that said, my model has the dems winning at 231-204, with a 96% chance of victory. A bit lower than my 235/98% stats in the old model, but that's why i rebuilt it, to update it considering how districts have changed. This seems like a possible result.