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.  

So let's discuss the economy a bit

 So....I've been watching the news this morning and there's a lot of doom and gloom indicators about how bad the economy is. Jobs are down. Some of this is tariffs hurting consumption and some is AI. A lot of probably AI. AI is killing the entry level job market. AI is also driving the price of computing sky high. RAM is getting more expensive and is now 3.5x the price, SSDs are like 2x the price, and GPUs are expected to rise next year. People are suggesting we're witnessing the death of affordable computing if the AI bubble doesnt pop. AI is also affecting the price of electricity and making that go up too. I really hate this AI trend in some ways. Again, nothing against the tech but it seems highly destructive to the economy in its current form, at least with the aggression it's being pursued. Apparently consumer spending is down. Tariffs and inflation are just causing people to pull back. I saw an article today suggesting the switch isn't selling that well. Gee, I wonder why. Could it be you're charging $450 for an underpowered last gen console that's a poor value proposition vs a PS5? Honestly, I'm happy to see that silver lining. The businesses tried to push people for higher prices, and people are pushing back. Of course, most spending is driven by the top, which is why the computing industry is abandoning the little people. Some people are calling it the "whale based economy." What happens when a handful of all people have all the money? Everyone else becomes irrelevant and the economy is just a massive churn between these huge corporations selling to each other. That's what's happening now and why the AI thing is so terrible. While AI should, in theory, benefit everyone, without my policy prescriptions, all the money just goes to the top and everyone else gets shut out. Fordism is dead. The wealthy have won capitalism, and now it's like the system is eating itself, and we're all on the menu. It sucks. We really do need a new New Deal to fix this. Ugh. 

Ibn Khaldun Reaction (3/8/2009)

 Another reaction to my reaction to political philosophy from back in the day! Yay!

 This time it's Ibn Khaldun, ie, this Islamic philosopher who existed in like the middle ages. Society was such where Islamic society was booming, while Europeans were basically in their dark ages. Anyway, this guy was interesting enough to talk about too.

Personally, I agree with much Khaldun’s view of history and the world. It is very advanced for his time and adopts a rather scientific perspective (Khaldun, 5-69). In my research methods class I am taking right now, one of the main issues we grapple with is how we know what we know (Other class, 2/2/09-2/4/09). Khaldun used logic to poke holes in many of stories people told in his time (Khaldun, 36-37). After all, it would not make sense that Alexander the Great would go underwater in a box to observe sea monsters wreaking havoc on his empire (Khaldun, 36). Moreover, Khaldun approached the world from a scientific perspective; he knew the earth was round and even accurately predicted the circumference of the earth (Khaldun, 49; Geography). He said that the “the geographical degree is twenty-five parasangs, the parasang being 12,000 cubits or three miles” (Khaldun, 49). This means that one degree is seventy-five miles (Khaldun, 49). He also recognized that the earth’s circumference is divided into 360 degrees (Khaldun, 49). Seventy-five miles times 360 degrees is twenty-seven thousand miles (Khaldun, 49). The real circumference is 24,860 miles (Geography). Therefore, Khaldun was actually very close (Khaldun, 47; Geography). What makes me so intrigued with Khaldun’s scientific explanations of the world is about this is the fact that during this time, many people still believed that the earth was flat. After all, he lived in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century before Columbus made his journey to the New World (Khaldun, xxxvii-xxxix). This is a side of history that I have never heard of before this class.

I do not, however, agree with Khaldun’s views on why certain races are superior and others inferior (Khaldun, 58-64). While I believe that culture and the environment have some impact on why certain civilizations are more advanced than others, I do not think that climate effects a person’s intelligence (Khaldun, 58-64). Looking at history, I also disagree that advanced civilization cannot develop in hot or cold climates (Khaldun, 58-64). Until recently, the Soviet Union, which has one of the coldest climates in the world, was one of the two major powers in the world (Kegley, 108-115). Moreover, I think it is safe to say that climate does not have as much of an impact on one’s skin color than genetics (Khaldun, 60-61). While one can tan his or her skin by being in the sun all of the time, this does not necessarily mean that a person’s descendents will change color just because they are moved to a completely different climate (Khaldun, 60-61). However, I can understand why Khaldun believed this. After all, Europe is in the North, and there are a lot of white people in Europe. Moreover, Africa is in the south, and many black people live in Africa. In his time, Muslims in the temperate zones dominated most of the known world (Class, 2/25/09).

I agree with Khaldun that human organization is necessary (Khaldun, 45-46). Without such organization, I do not think that we could have developed such an advanced society (Other class, 3/4/09-3/6/09). In my research methods class, my professor mentioned that what made culture and social structure possible was surplus, which freed a small amount of people from rudimentary work and allowed them to bring society forward (Other class, 3/4/09-3/6/09). Without human organization, everyone would be too busy just trying to survive instead of inventing things like medicine (Other class, 3/4/09-3/6/09). Moreover, Khaldun’s claims are pretty accurate (Khaldun, 45-46). After all, the human hand is not very effective against a tiger’s teeth and claws. Moreover, one person is not very effective at fighting a group of equally armed people (Khaldun, 45-46).

I mostly agree with Khaldun’s theory on how empires become strong and then decay (Khaldun, 123-142). The description given throughout the book, particularly on pages 141-142, sounds a lot like a modern theory that is still taught in political classes today (Kegley, 94-95; Khaldun, 105-142). It is known as the “long cycle theory” (Kegley, 94). This model has been applied to many famous and infamous empires such as Spain in the 1500s, France under Napoleon Bonaparte, the Axis powers during World War II, and even the United States today (Kegley, 95). Though a war, a dynasty, or “hegemon”, as it is called in this context, establishes its dominance through a war that caused a previous empire to lose its power (Kegley, 94). The hegemon then consolidates its power (Kegley, 94). However, this empire eventually begins decaying and a new power rises to challenge the old order (Kegley, 94). This leads to another major war in which the hegemon is normally defeated and a new world order arises (Kegley, 94).

While the modern “long cycle” theory does not address issues such as group feeling and desert toughness (Khaldun, 123-142; Kegley, 94), I think that these concepts are important as well and serve to answer the question of why empires fall. The U.S.’s rise to power is a good example (Kegley, 95-124). World War II is probably one of the defining moments where the U.S. became a major world power (Kegley, 95). Our country was attacked by Japan (Frankel). This brought about a strong feeling of group feeling in a sense; people were so outraged about the attack they many people volunteered to fight against the Axis powers (Frankel). Some people even committed suicide because they could not join the military (Frankel). Tom Brokaw even referred to the people who were young adults during World War II as “the greatest generation” (Boston Globe). While “group feeling” was really nationality in this case, people were still willing to die to preserve the country, which is basically, at its core, what makes group feeling so important (Frankel; Khaldun, 123). Out of this war emerged a bipolar system with Russia and the United States as the major world powers (Kegley, 108). The U.S. still is the world’s major power today (Kegley, 118-120). On the other hand, I believe that the U.S. is now weakening as the sole “dynasty” in the world. When it comes to the wars the U.S. is currently fighting, we do not have the same kind of group solidarity we had during World War II and many people do not even think that we should be in some of the wars we are currently in (Page). Moreover, my generation is immersed in luxury, which eventually leads to decay according to Khaldun (Khaldun 137-142). Until recently, our economy was doing very well. People in the U.S. are generally used to a sedentary lifestyle with a stable job and decent paycheck, and take for granted many luxuries for granted such as television, computers, and ipods. While I disagree that the rule of law makes society weak as Khaldun believed (Khaldun, 95-96), I think that we have lost our group feeling and have become cowardly in comparison with “the greatest generation” (Khaldun, 137). I do not believe that my generation would die for a cause as our predecessors who fought in World War II would. After all, why would we want to give our stable life of luxury up to endure the rigors of warfare? I am guilty of this mindset myself.

I agree for the most part with Khaldun’s view that external circumstances such as culture influence a human being (Khaldun, 94). While I believe that genetics can play a part in a person’s character and are a driving force behind some of peoples’ predispositions, I agree with Khaldun’s proposition that “the soul in its first natural state of creation is ready to accept whatever good or evil may arrive and leave an imprint upon it” (Khaldun, 94). After all, socialization is a powerful force. In my own life, my past experiences have made a major impact on what kind of person I am today. My parents, church, and private schools taught me Christianity throughout my life and I have become a Christian. If I were raised in a Muslim family, I would have probably become a Muslim. If I were raised without being introduced to religion, I probably would not have any religious beliefs. The same applies to my political ideology. If I were born into a stone-age society, I would be different than I am in our current, sedentary society. I would hunt for my own food and probably think that the earth was flat.

When it comes to injustice, I also agree with Khaldun (Khaldun, 238-242). I believe it is unjust to take away a person’s property, especially without compensation, and to distribute it to people who are well liked by the rulers (Khaldun, 238-239). Our own society considered this injustice to be so important that there is a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice (U.S. Constitution). Moreover, I also believe forcing people to buy certain goods at high prices they cannot afford where they have to resell them at a low price is unjust (Khaldun, 241). In this sense, I agree that injustice can ruin a dynasty (Khaldun, 238-242). After all, that practice reminds me of the housing market, which is a major part of the economic crisis we are in right now (Cornett). After all, banks gave people loans they could not afford, and as a result, many people lost their homes (Cornett). Now the banks themselves are in trouble and looking to the government for support (Norris).

Overall, Ibn Khaldun covered a large amount of issues in his book, the Muqaddimah (Khaldun, 5-301). He laid out his views of history, the world, the necessity of social organization, differences between desert and sedentary cultures, the emergence and decay of empires, justice, ways of making a living, and human development (Khaldun, 5-301). I find his book to be extremely interesting. In particular, I am astonished by his very advanced view of the world (Khaldun, 45-69) and even the fact that he accurately predicted the approximate circumference of the earth (Khaldun, 49). While I disagree with his views on why certain races of people were inferior to others (Khaldun, 48-54), I agree that culture and the environment effect how a person develops (Khaldun, 94). I think Khaldun is correct that human cooperation and organization is necessary for survival (Khaldun, 45-46; Other class, 3/4/09-3/6/09). I agree with his view on how empires rose and fell and even found it to be more descriptive than a similar theory I learned in an international politics class, since that class did not cover concepts such as luxury and group feeling (Kegley, 94-95; Khaldun, 123-142). Much of what was described in his theory reminds me of what has been going on in the U.S. since World War II (Kegley, 94-95; Page; Frankel). Finally, I like Khaldun’s view of injustice (Khaldun, 238-242). In particular, I like what he said about how the rich and make people buy stuff at high prices that they cannot afford where they have to resell them at lower prices (Khaldun, 241). This reminds me of the economic crisis we are currently in (Cornett).

 So...to go through it. Yeah, as you can tell, even at this point, I liked relatively scientific approaches to the world rather than whatever the F Rousseau was doing (even if he ended up being right on the concept of property). 

Yeah, Khaldun was racist, he had this idea that brownish skin people were superior because they were advanced, while black Africans and white Europeans were dumb due to the climate being too hot or cold. I mean, it's kinda funny, any culture that dominates thinks they're the best. Nowadays there's a lot of whites who think they're the superior culture. Meanwhile, skin is just skin, a lot of it is just the spawn lottery in this game of civ. Btw, the reason Africa hasn't had strong civilizations in recent centuries is in part due to western imperialism, and in part due to the fact that the geography is just too hostile to human development. I mean, I've watched a lot of those real life lore videos on how geography makes or breaks countries, AND I've literally played civ on a world map. And yeah, best spawning spots on the planet are north America and northern Eurasia (basically where Russia is, but you need to control Europe and China to make it work). Whereas a lot of the less successful places just have rough geography that screws them over. It's not the people themselves, and I'd argue even culture has little to do with success. It's the geography. US has the best and is only rivaled by a combined Russia/China/Europe. And that's why the world is as it is today. 

On human organization. YES, it's human development and organization that makes society advance. And economic surplus can free people from labor, which could advance society further in its own ways. Which is why it baffles me we continue to work and produce more and more surplus while keeping people chained to their jobs. It's nonsensical to me. We should be freeing people from a lifetime of labor. And society would be better off for it.

On long cycle theory, I have more mixed thoughts these days. It's basically the whole "strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" argument. He argues luxury is bad and living like a bedouin who lives in the desert makes you tough and resilient. I can see an argument for that, but eh....we're both luxurious and the strongest military on the planet. Even other rivals have their own problems. China is a paper tiger, their soldiers dont wanna fight to my knowledge. Russia's meatgrinder is held together by pure repression and it's demographically killing the nation long term. At the same time, we kinda are weak. And I kinda cringe at my whole "this generation would never storm normandy" take. Our generation and the one before me wouldn't even turn the heat down come winter in the 1970s, or get vaccinated today and sit on the couch for a year collecting paychecks. We are an entitled society, and to some extent, I do fear that we are seeing the rise of that "destroyer" generation with late gen Z. 

The human nature thing is a big reversal from my stance as a fundamentalist Christian. Back then, human nature was driven by sin and external factors were irrelevant. But that's what college does to you. it teaches you things and backs up its arguments. 

On property, I have evolved a lot though. I'm fine with redistribution of property. It beats the legal screwery that comes from an ironclad belief in property as a natural right, which just enslaves humanity to have to work for the wealthy forever. We also have a massive economic surplus even someone like Khaldun couldn't possibly imagine. So....again, different ideologies for different times. Khaldun's works made sense in the middle ages, but today? yeah, I think we can do better.

I was kinda dead on with the housing crisis, but that's also why I've evolved to be so progressive on property. This system doesn't work for most, it works for the wealthy. And operating from that, I'm fine with my own ideas. After all, my ideas are created for the times I live in, and intended to solve the problems of today. As I said, I kinda have a problem with people reading old books and making them their entire ideology. The books make sense for the time they're designed for, but not necessarily for the modern era. We have to figure out how we wish to live today. 

So with that said, Ibn Khaldun, interesting guy. Some stuff holds up, some doesn't, but that's to be expected from some Muslim philosopher from the middle ages.  

Reacting to 1 Texas Democrat vs 20 Undecided Voters

 So....Jubilee has had a few more debate. I aint gonna react to the doctor vs RFK supporter one. Quite frankly it's not that interesting from my perspective and not a good use of my time. I would like to address James Talerico debating undecided voters though. 

So...overall....kinda cringe. The debaters were ignorant. And James was...well...too Christian for my tastes. i get it, dude's from texas, he has to push the "good old Jesus boy" thing, but UGH...I really don't like Christianity mixed with politics given my own belief system. 

Anyway, let's get on with it. 

Claim #1: Cuts to healthcare and food assistance hurt all of us

He's right, you know. They do. And of course the people he's arguing against are going on about fraud. And it's like...ugh. Really? That rarely happens. And honestly, cutting welfare programs to punish the undeserving does more than it helps. And of course, Christian boy over doing the protestant work ethic thing, debating on their terms. Going on about teaching people to fish and hands up, not handouts, but yeah. As a secular progressive, handouts are based and we should normalize that.

Here's the thing. I wanna solve problems. I wanna solve poverty. I wanna improve peoples' lives. My policies would benefit around 70-85% of people depending on the measure you use, and I stand by that. On the question of what of people "taking advantage" of the system, I don't see it that way. I believe that UBI and other services should be a RIGHT of citizenship, not a privilege. I believe that if we wanna talk personal responsibility and people misusing cash that they're given under my proposals, the thing is, if they waste it, that's on THEM. They're only hurting themselves, and no, they shouldn't get more. That's personal responsibility in my system. I aint interested in debating welfare fraud and undeserving people who are lazy and blah blah blah. This guy is and that's why I dislike democrats like this. I get it, it appeals to moderates and undecideds with ignorant takes, but yeah. Again, not super sympathetic.

And then there's a debate about how we shouldnt have the state do this but have charity take care of it. Again, this is something that irks me about christians. I look at it like Thomas Paine did. You know, one of the founders? The dude who wrote agrarian justice. He talked about how charity doesnt solve problems and if you wanna solve poverty, you do it by organizing society like a system of pulleys to remove the weight of the problem. Instead, Christians wanna keep the problem existing so they can then impose this moral burden on people to give. It's backwards. Like, again, I wanna solve problems. These guys don't have a solid exegesis of the facts that allow us to do so. So they leave us with a fragmented and broken system instead. 

Really, this is why Christianity in politics irks me and why I'm so hostile to it. Everyone gets caught up on these BS shoulds and oughts and in reality we should be doing what Paine suggested, use society like a system of pulleys to solve problems. But people are unhappy with those solutions because of these stupid shoulds and oughts and we all gotta suffer because of them. Again, it just annoys me. 

 Claim #2: Immigrants make America stronger and richer

 This is unequivocally true. Again, this is why we need a secular worldview that values things like facts and statistics. This is an objective reality the sociological data tells us. Welfare fraud is low, most immigrants arent harming the country, they're paying taxes, blah blah blah, and people just get so caught up on the immigration thing. Anyway, I dont have the energy to argue this one like I do point 1, but I believe I've made my points clear on this blog before. 

Claim #3: Your vote matters in 2026

 Here I see things both ways. On the one hand, to James Talerico's point, let me make my argument for voting in 2026. Texas is technically a swing state. It's not a very swingy one, it is likely R to "safe" R, but honestly, it's in that zone where if enough people came out for the democrats, they could swing it. It's mostly a theoretical exercise, but let's go back to a few of my previous predictions.

2024 (presidential): 1.2% chance

2024 (senate): 13.6% chance

2020 (presidential): 38.2% chance

2020 (senate): 3.0% chance

 I mean, the chance is never great, and sometimes it's rather insignificant, but it can happen. I consider texas in play for good reason. And if voters turn out highly enough, yeah, it can flip.

On the other hand, will that make their lives better? A lot of these guys don't really feel like their vote matters because even if this guy could win, he's not gonna represent them. This guy is saying he's gonna try, but honestly? I kinda feel sympathetic to some of them. Like the atheist dude who didn't think that anyone actually represented their beliefs. yeah, I dont blame him for thinking that way. This dude gives me HRC vibes at time laying on the christianity so thick, and honestly, that's one of he reasons i disliked her and many other moderate dems too. Those guys just represent a milder version of the same worldview the right has. The right is fundamentalist christian and then these guys are just moderate christians who think the same thing just with more nuance. So I can understand feeling disenfranchised. 

To Talerico's credit, he pointed out he doesnt always like the dems either and he places his convictions above the party, but let's think about what that means. He basically talked about already having a church and a sports team. So...again, more loyalty to religion. Not really inspiring me there. Because when someone like that does defect from the party odds are they'll run right, not left. So again, not really feeling this dude much. 

And thats the thing. if you're disaffected, and feel disenfranchised by democrats, this guy doesnt give me much hope for the party. Question #1 tends to center around my own ideological vision for the country and this dude isn't that. He's just another moderate dem in my views who has those flawed views and it doesn't inspire confidence. I get it, it's texas, but still. I really wish we could throw religion into the trashbin of history and just abandon it. It just holds us back and stops me from reaching common ground with these guys on basic existential philosophical issues. Like, my values are not his values. And he might appeal to what the dems conventionally consider moderate, but that ain't me. 

Claim #4: The biggest divide in our politics is not left vs right, it's top vs bottom

Eh...I do kinda agree with this. But again, let me put some nuance here. What is the top vs bottom? Corporate interests vs the interests of everyone else. THis one woman who spoke was talking about how she's like in the 97th percentile of income and how she was willing to pay more taxes, but are all people willing to do that? Will they do that to advocate for policies that I support like UBI? A lot of those guys bristle at that idea. And they'll go on about how they earned it and everyone else should work for theirs. Even though that's clearly not working. And those guys being democrats....actually makes the dems weaker. because that's why they become this insufferable moderate hugbox. They're like "we cant do that..." because they wanna appeal to those guys. A generation ago, many were republican. Hell, as recently as 2012, many were republican. But the centrist dems keep trying to bring these guys into the party and it weakens it. 

But, at the same time, it's also values. And for me, I define left wing politics between the Christian worldview vs the secular one. I understand that's not a clear divide in reality. Pope Francis was pro UBI and left wing and Ayn Rand was an atheist. But, if we really wanna discuss the cultural issues of American politics, and the real existential, philosophical stuff undergirding these views, I really do believe Christianity seems to drive a lot of right leaning thinking in the modern era, while secularism drives the left. And we can see that statistically demonstrated just by checking out the build a voter stuff.  You go from evangelical to atheist and BOOM you shift like 75% of the spectrum from that one variable. And then other brands of Christianity are in the middle between them. Kinda fitting all things considered. The right is driven by evangelical Christianity, the left by secularism, and the "moderates" are....moderates. Kinda in the middle. Almost like religion matters. 

So idk is it left vs right? To some degree, yes. Where you stand on cultural issues does influence your ideology down the line, and a progressive christian is still gonna cede a lot of ideological ground to the right that I'm not comfortable giving up (see question 1). On the other hand, it is top vs bottom. because both republicans and democrats in America kinda both serve the wealthy interests. It's not one or the other, it's both. And if anything, one of my arguments is that religion really is the opium of the masses where it kinda placates people. It keeps them running around with this worldview full of flawed premises and all of these nonsense shoulds and oughts that people just won't think straight on the subject from my perspective and solve problems. When i left Christianity, it really did make a HUGE difference in my ideological perspective.And I feel like, if people approached these issues from a secular perspective where people could think straight, that we would see a left wing revolution that crushes modern conservatism. 

On the flip side, maybe it might make the conservatism we get worse. Look at germany, and the split between the CDU in the western parts, and the AFD in the eastern. Whereas western germany's conservatives are religious, eastern germany's conservatives are turning into fascists. Of course, eastern germany also might be nostalgic for authoritarianism given it was communist for four decades. Either way Im willing to concede that point back to the Christians on that one. Maybe their influence makes their version of conservatism significantly more ethical and less homicidal, despite it making me role my eyes from all of its arbitrary beliefs and rules for how things should be that hold us back. Idk. 

Undecided Voter Claim: No matter how much gun violence happens within the state of Texas, there will never be a gun ban or gun reform

I dont remember much about this one and it wasnt that long, but honestly, I won't say "never." Either way, yeah, I kinda agree. I don't see it happening any time in the foreseeable future. Texas is really "yeehaw" country and big on their second amendment. And honestly, I think pursuing the gun issue is a good way to lose. Even I'm pretty moderate on guns and am basically a second amendment lib. Still, you give people enough time, and enough party realignments happen in American politics, and anything can happen. 

Conclusion

Honestly, not a bad debate, but I really don't care for James Talerico as a candidate due to him being so up front with his religion. Again, it's texas, I get it, but...UGH. It just reminded me why religion and politics don't mix. And before people ask of me what James said of himself, and how doesnt my spirituality influence my politics? of course it does, in a sense. But let me explain HOW.

My deconversion was apparently planned "from above" to bring me to my current ideas, which I then express to everyone else. My views are based around secular humanism. And even coming back to spirituality, the secular basis of my politics haven't changed. Like really, I'd still believe 99% of what I currently belief if I wasn't spiritual. Why? Because I developed my belief system as a literal atheist, and I still fight for that perspective even though I have spirituality. 

So...I'm in a unique perspective to say that yes, I wish there was less religion in politics. 

Either way, my spirituality just strengthens my belief that I'm advocating for what I see as the right thing. Because if this whole thing was planned, then I'm supposed to be like this, and I'm supposed to advocate for what I do. It just adds even further conviction that "this is what I'm here to do." and makes me double down even harder on my views. If that makes sense.

But even if I was still an atheist, my beliefs would be the same and you can probably tell that since I literally sound like a new atheist here still. 

Either way, yeah, I still think the world would be better off if they leave Christianity...and for that matter, other organized religions.  Because they just mess up your worldview with all of these weird arbitrary shoulds and oughts that stop us from seeing the issues with clarity, and advocating for solutions that would actually fix things. I really think we allow problems to exist for a lot longer than they should because people see those problems as part of god's design and think fixing them goes against said design. Meanwhile if we removed that veil from peoples' thinking, it would be like, oh, yeah, the way we're doing things is irrational, let's change this. ya know? That's all I'm saying here. 

Like, why teach people to fish when we're advanced enough to create a machine to do all of the fishing for us? It's just maddening to me. Ya know what I'm saying? 

Why I'm not a conservative because I don't support social media bans

 So...there's a debate recently to be had around social media and how it affects kids. Being a grown adult who doesn't have kids and who hasn't been a kid for almost 20 years now, I don't have a strong dog in this fight, but if anything, I come out against them. The fact is, I dislike this idea that everything is a problem that has to be solved, and my stance since I was young enough to be affected by these bans is "keep your hands off my internet." I'm a child of the wild west days of the internet of the 90s and 2000s, mostly the 2000s for me, my family was a bit behind the curve in adopting computers, internet, etc. And honestly, I think most changes made since then have been negative. Because you got all these people coming in and finding "problems" with the status quo and insisting we have to make the internet safer, specifically for kids. 

Like, I'm of the generation who were the people on those unmoderated xbox live lobbies of the mid-late 2000s. And I recall back around 2015-2016 when we started moving toward "oh, we gotta make it so people can't say mean words on the internet." Me, I'm like sink or swim. I respect the trash talk, I respect the freedom, but you got these weirdos who are like "we gotta regulate this", and now you can't say anything without getting banned in some games, it's ridiculous. I forget exactly what was said but I saw someone got banned from BF6 lately for something really mild and really dumb. You truly can't say anything any more that is offensive or controversial in a lot of places. And I kinda hate it.

I also resent crap like how we need to have porn bans "to protect the kids." Use parental controls, monitor your kids' online activities.  Don't make us have to submit our fricking IDs just to jack off. Jesus christ, who thinks this is a good idea? Just braindead authoritarians.

And now with australia banning social media for those under 16, there's debate here in the US about whether we should follow suit. NO! Just...NO! Again, why does everything have to be a problem solved by some law? And yes, I am aware social media is making kids depressed, I just dont think the solution is government regulation that could lead to the end of internet anonymity and the need for people to submit their IDs to actually access websites. I get it, kids should be protected from certain things, I just believe it's the parents' job to do that, and there are plenty of tools available to them. 

 Anyway, today I got called conservative for having this stance, given liberals are typically in favor of government regulation, and conservatives are opposed to it, preaching personal responsibility.  I can see why someone might say that, but I'd like to flip the script. 

 For most of my life, every time there's a moral panic, it often came from conservatives. it was the conservatives freaking out over satanism in the 1990s, over violent video games, harry potter, and pokemon in the 2000s, over terrorism in the 2000s (remember the patriot act?), and more recently, they're going nuts over porn and crap claiming we gotta protect the kids.

Quite frankly, the whole "OMG WE GOTTA PROTECT THE KIDS" mentality is inherently conservative. It comes from that part of the lizard brain that embraces authoritarian and conservative thinking. When I came to liberalism, i did it via libertarianism. I rejected these conservative impulses and designed my philosophy around...well...actual philosophy. I understood the limit of government action and how just letting people do what they want is often better. I believe that decriminalizing drugs is better than prohibition. That regulating abortion access only harms people who legitimately need access to it. That teaching abstinance only education in hopes to stop people from having sex doesn't work and they're gonna do it anyway, leading to higher rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. 

Quite frankly, when I came over, i thought liberals were just libertarian on social issues, but then you got these weird paternalists within liberalism as well, who end up having this pathological "must protect the kids" mentality. Reminds me of HRC, since she was into that, supporting conditional safety nets to protect kids, but then having a history of also crusading against violent video games in the 2000s. And I dislike that mentality. I mean, my opinion is what about everyone else? With safety nets, protect everyone. With social issues, just let people figure crap out for themselves. It's simple.

And some liberals might see me more as just a libertarian. Fair. I kinda am. Even my economic positions are in part driven by a desire to be free from the economic coercion of capitalism. Economic security is necessary for liberty IMO. But that said I'm not a right libertarian, aka, a propertarian or one of those lockean property rights guys. My views are obviously more influenced by Rousseau, Mill, and of course, more modern thinkers like Phillipe Van parijs and Karl Widerquist. So I kind of am in my own eclectic political lane here.

Either way, I'm DEFINITELY not conservative. They're the opposite of me: authoritarian on social issues, but then free market on economic issues to the point of social darwinism. I'm libertarian on social issues and very progressive and left wing on social issues. Even if I sometimes agree with conservatives on things like "instead of asking the state to ban this behavior, maybe you should take more personal responsibility here?", I do it from a perspective of anti authoritarianism. I dont believe that all problems are worth solving through state action, and on stuff like social media bans with stuff like that, I just see that as the latest moral panic where authoritarian minded individuals try to ruin a good thing with heavy handed solutions that cause more harm than good. 

Some might try to insinuate that I'm okay with letting kids suffer. Okay, I'll play that game. Go ahead and say it. I dont cave to pressure from the OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN crowd who use such rhetoric to politically pressure and emotionally manipulate me into supporting authoritarian positions. That crap doesn't work, you have no power here. Go ahead and hate me, I don't care. My principles are my principles, take them or leave them.