No Win

Content Warning: Despairing Rhetoric re: Politics, COVID, Environmentalism.

Fighting antivax beliefs, and indeed reactionary thought as a whole, feels like dealing with an insurgency.  There is just no good solution at this point.  (Government crackdown on facebook’s fascist bullshit algorithms in 2015 might have helped, but there’s no political will to make that happen even now.)  You’ll never win the hearts and minds of people deluded into feeling like brave defenders of an invaded homeland, any effort to force compliance will just lead to more terrorist reprisal.  We’ve already had a taste of that, in destruction of medicine, in obstruction of vax sites, and in many cases of physical assault all across the country.

Given all that, how does one adjust to this new world of biological gods and ideological monsters?  Knowing what endemic COVID looks like will be a good start for that discussion.  Funny to think if I live to my seventies or nineties I could be killed slowly and painfully, asphyxiated and brain damaged by a disease that could have been strangled in its infancy two years ago.  By funny, I mean all rethuglican fucks please eat shit and die ASAP, it’s the least you can do for us.

No, no, Satan.  Calm down.  These are human beings, this is humanity.  The same humanity that supports Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, that has LGBT Jamaicans assaulted every day, living in vacant lots and scrounging garbage to eat, that packs megachurch pews to fund murderous hate around the globe, that scapegoats anybody and everybody to pursue short-term political and financial gain while ensuring the extinction of your species.  You have no choice but to live with these people, or to die.  They are here to stay, for as long as humanity continues to exist.

I don’t know.  We can just keep having these conversations, every day until we die.  Very tiring.

 

 

The Fvckpile

Capitalism as practiced in most of the world – but especially the USA – revolves around one principle: I got mine, Jack, Fuck everyone else.  The future doesn’t exist, consequences don’t exist.  And as we see in fuckos like Biden, when the consequences do come home to roost?  It ain’t as bad as it looks, it wasn’t my individual fault specifically, it’s somebody else’s bad, somebody else’s duty, somebody else’s problem.  If he saw things clearly and accurately, if he wasn’t huffing the statue of liberty’s ass vapors, he’d know that by being rich he has no small amount of personal liability for it, and as president every moment that he doesn’t exercise his massive executive powers to fight AGW, he’s taking on much much more personal fault for the destruction of life as we know it.  He’d be wracked by grief, but spending all his waking effort to make right what has transpired on his watch.

I’m not going to write this story because it’s too bleak to focus on for the length of time required, but take in the short version, if you will.

Upper middle class family.  Dad’s a contractor, mom’s in publishing, they own their own home.  They have  more than a million in assets, but much less available for day to day things.  Nonetheless, a life of comfort.  The only worries they have are ones they brought on themselves by keeping up with the Joneses.  The kids all grow up to be similarly successful, but have fewer assets.  Their mortgages are less generous, housing prices massively higher, but still.  Not shabby.

One of the kids breaks the mold.  He’s a stand-up comedian, turned actor and screenwriter.  He gets a few hot breaks and is pulling royalties off of some kids movies he co-wrote, getting character actor parts with minimal effort, bringing in that cheese.  He is a millionaire with no quibbles – Where his parents had over a million in assets, he has more than a million in the bank.

You can’t expect that to last forever, kid.  You’re gonna be old and wanting the kind of loot that lets you pay for black market organs someday.  So how do you get it?  Pay a money guy, don’t ask questions.  It doesn’t matter what he does to increase your wealth – he just says that he can and has a track record of measurably succeeding.  You have proof it isn’t a ponzi scheme.

Money guy says all the B list celebs are getting theirs from real estate.  Not houses anymore.  It’s all about apartments.  All you have to do, comedian, is give me the money – and I’ll give you a reliable return every day for the rest of your life.  Money guy pools money from various Hollywood types to start a “property management company” that buys up apartment buildings around the country.  Now comedian has a partial stake in apartments from Florida to Oregon.

The apartments are any cheap pile of moldy lumber, with more effort put into faking a good look for the exteriors than any structural or maintenance issues.  They look alright from a distance but once you get in the door you realize it’s all falling apart.  PropertyCo still jacks the price up every year until people are forced to move into still cheaper places – owned by companies like PropertyCo.

Since these apartments are businesses designed not to deliver an essential service but instead to rob poor people blind, moneymaking schemes are added to moneymaking schemes.  Require pet rent, renters insurance, parking rent, etc.  Cut deals with shady insurance companies that will give you a slice if you coerce your customers into using them, or better yet toss together your own insurance company based out of a server in a Connecticut basement.  Have the price for units so high that people can only afford them by having more adults in a single unit than they were designed for, meaning more cars necessary for commuting than the parking lots were designed for, so that in desperation people who work late park in fire lanes and get their cars towed – by tow companies you have other shady deals with.

Inevitably a certain amount of people can’t afford to stay or pay timely due to losing work (possibly by having their only ride to work held hostage for thousands of dollars) or other bad luck, and they get evicted.  You have debt you can sell to a collection company.   It’s basically impossible to lose money as a property management company.

Some sixty year old lady with poor health is among the evicted and she manages to beg her way into the household of one of her children.  At her new residence she starts receiving harassment from a collection agency.  Story cuts to Hyderabad India where a call center full of crash course English speakers follow their scripts to hound people to desperation and suicide, while their company compounds interest on the debt every time somebody sneezes.

How do you convince a decent human to be a collections agent?  It probably helps to hire as many violently twisted people as possible, but no way there are enough people like that in a given community to comprise the entire staff of a given call center.  I imagine there’s some indoctrination session, like, “These are scum, criminals who don’t pay their dues.  They deserve all the scorn you can muster.”

Story follows a guy who took the job.  It paid better than anything else he could find and he needs it because rent is going through the roof, but he senses something wrong, messed up.  Still, he powers through it.  One day that he has inflicted exceptional cruelty upon the “clients,” he snaps out of it, like coming out of a dream.  He has become a horrible person and blames the business.  He burns the place down.

The debt collection agency gathers its insurance and ponders options.  Hey, the corrupt government has made it very easy to do organized crime against targets overseas, you have experience running a call center, just start over with an explicitly criminal call center.  Now the indoctrination is a little different.  “Americans are all greedy fat cats ruining the world for fun and profit, their old folks and disabled people have money but are too stupid to hold it.  Tell them you’re calling from a government agency and they’ll be in big trouble unless they give you their social security numbers, mother’s maiden name, bank account info…”

The new call center cuts deals with US telecoms to acquire thousands of US local phone numbers, makes it look like their calls are coming from within the US, and hits the phone book.  They dial everyone, but whenever they have a hint somebody might be old or disabled?  They hit them ten times as hard, calling round the clock, trying to scare someone into slipping up.

They call the comedian’s mom and pop, get enough info to run massive fraud on them.  Because of their assets they have higher credit limits than most of the call center’s victims and the scale of loss is immense.  Well, you know, even modestly rich USians get enough deference from financial institutions they could probably get out from under the damage, but it’s scary to get scammed like that.  Mom and pop spend the rest of their lives not answering phones, paranoid and scared.

It’s the circle of life under capitalism.  And notice I didn’t even invoke the evil of billionaires, easily the most destructive class in human history, with more resources than god emperors.  I kept the story down to millionaires at the worst.  Money chases money chases money, until the people who have the least are hounded into the grave.  And even people with resources know on some level that vultures are nipping at their heels.  They’ll blame taxes and the government, but it’s the whole sick-ass world.

This property company thing is real.  Mid-tier celebs from Fox News talking heads to liberal Hollywood types are all making their loot from stuff like this now.  I’d say, might be cool if somebody created a property company whose selling point was doing business ethically – minimizing the travail of tenants, not doing business with collection agencies, etc.  But if somebody did come up with that as a sales pitch for the millionaire investors?  It would be nothing but a snowjob and the apartments would still be horrid slums.

Anyway, smash the system, down with everything.  I’m gonna go back to sleep for a while.

Disparity in Politically Motivated Murder

Some politically left people are hard line against killing anyone for any reason, especially in Europe these days.  Some of those make allowances for self-defense or waging defensive war or whatever.  These attitudes are very much lacking in the USA.  We are all about the murder.  The states that do manage to abolish the death penalty often find that reversed by the vagaries of democracy within a few years.  I can’t speak for Canada, but it seems like they also might be more into murder than, say, Germany is these days.  Don’t know about other countries either.

But even with our comparatively bloodthirsty attitudes, with the tall talk we make about willingness to pull the trigger on those we regard as evil, where are the bodies?  US lefties have an incredibly meager body count to our name, compared to right wingers.  I sit here and say, yes, I will proudly and easily kill nazi sumbitches, put a knife in their soulless faces.  I can think that, I can say that, I can dream about it.  But at the end of the day, the vast majority of politically motivated violence comes from right wingers.

I have no problem attributing that to inherent goodness.  When you were a little rough with an animal or a sibling, and mommy rebuked you for it, did you feel bad?  Did you feel like you’d been justly reprimanded, that you would do what you could in life, from that day forward, to not be a bad person?  I have no problem saying that is a good thing.  Good people should not want to hurt people, let alone kill them.  The extent to which the evils of white supremacists make me want to shred their bodies with nail bombs or just break their faces?  Is the extent to which they have made me a worse person than I’d otherwise be.

And could I do those things?  If the scumbags get the war they’ve been gagging for since 1860, let’s hope that we all can do what needs to be done – and with gusto, why not?  But in these times of peace, whatever turmoil is happening, the people generating corpses right now are right wingers.  Might be that changes at some point, but I think those particular numbers will always be on their side.

They valorize cruelty.  They despise compassion.  This informs much of what they do and say in life.  Indeed, a common reason for people born into red states to become politically opposed to their own culture is from suffering the cruelty they inflict on their own.  If I saw a man in pain, mortal terror in his eyes, I might take my knee off his neck.  But white supremacists don’t do that.  Right wingers don’t do that.  They want to hurt and to kill.

I can say I’d kill every last Rittenhouse with a smile on my face and piss on their corpses, but at the end of the day, would I?  The numbers suggest that we just aren’t like that, and whatever violence is ultimately necessary to do in the defense of goodness and humanity, the fact it isn’t our first recourse is surely directly connected to our own goodness and humanity – whatever we have left of that – and it might be a good thing.

There’s a separate topic that came out of the discussion that spawned this post.  Is guns bad?  I don’t like them.  I have liked them in cinema an awful lot, but the reality is unpleasant.  Have you ever had a suicidal or homicidal thought, however fleeting, in your life?  How should you then feel about having a “make person instantly die” button in your fucking hand?  Like standing at the edge of a cliff with somebody.  I don’t like how it feels.  If you can’t dig my position, eat shit.  Step on up for a ban.  I’m generous with those.

Or you can listen to my follow up statement.

If you’re somebody who has never felt like I feel, or who managed to suppress that long enough to become comfortable with firearms, and you use them responsibly?  I have no problem with that, or even with saying that it is possible for you to be a good person.  I’m not saying that comfort with guns inherently makes you a bad person.  I personally believe no private citizen should ever be legally allowed to have an assault weapon, will side-eye the fuck out of you if you say otherwise, but that’s a difference of opinion I’m willing to hold without thinking of you automatically as a bad person.

But you have to admit, it’s easier for bad people to get cozy with killing machines, which again, might have something to do with the great disparity between murders by fascists and murders by their opposition.  I hope you won’t take offense to the statement of some plain facts here, and will spot me a roscoe when the soup goes down, comrade.  Thank you.

Fuccing Breakthru Cases

I have an online acquaintance I don’t know very well.  She’s been bitching about shitty family risking covid constantly – including a lady whose children have no father because of it.  My acquaintance got vaccinated and… currently has covid, surely from one of those family members.  Meeting at my workplace a week ago.  Guy says “I know three people fully vaxxed still that got covid,” boss says, “I keep hearing that at these meetings.”

Any luck and my acquaintance won’t so much as lose her sense of taste, though she’s about as old as me and it makes her more likely than the babes to come off of this scathed.  I told her I wouldn’t blame her for pistolwhipping a family member’s teeth out.  Motherfuckers got to know their limitations.

How are your vaxxed up people doing?

Blockchain Will End Civilization – Ask Me How!

CONTENT WARNING:  I am literally not an expert in anything and everything I say here could be dead wrong on multiple levels, so take that under advisement before you start to panicking, OK?  I look forward to comments that will temper my doomsaying.

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I was contemplating NFTs and crypto thanks to the latest episode of James Stephanie Sterling’s program and a rash of posts on tumblr besides, and I realized they are a perfect analogy to the cause of multiple extinction events on the planet.  Then I realized they aren’t just analogous – they could really be the straw that breaks the back of civilization.  This connects to my theory about how the rest of human history is likely to go:  Cyberpunk Dystopia, Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland, then Nothing.  If world leaders want to forestall the end of their power, and if I’m right, they’d best do everything in their power to outlaw criminalize and expunge blockchain-based currencies from existence.

It works like this: All you need to do to make money from nothing is run a computer for a while.  Cool trick, eh?  It generates encrypted information that can be exchanged for goods and services.  Now think about this for a minute.

Right now every con artist in the world is working every angle in the world 24-7 nonstop, from Mumbai to Macedonia, to raise every red cent they can.  They’ve all but destroyed the ability of senior citizens and the disabled to use phones, to use email.  Colonized people across the planet have become the vehicle of their own destruction, razing the forests to ash just to get by in whatever economy has been left to them.  Corruption is so widespread and thorough in the “socialist” countries that their infrastructure is inflicting mass casualty events left and right.  And the finance industry in the USA, every time it’s been let off the leash even an inch?  Has pushed us to the brink of utter economic disaster through money-making schemes so byzantine in complexity and somehow as utterly mindless as an amoeba.

Humans work angles.  But so has all life, since inanimate proteins first started to become something we could consider life.  The cutesy educational program PBS Eons has multiple episodes that have this theme and it really puts our coming destruction in perspective.  Basically a type of life finds a niche that allows it to grow out of all bounds.  Unknowable trillions of organisms in the primordial ocean have effected climate change so dramatic it turned the oceans purple once, it turned the Earth into ice planet Hoth once, and it caused multiple devastating extinctions – some before the evolution of the world’s first nervous systems.  Eons always puts a positive spin on it, saying “without this (unspeakable death and horror) that came before us, we wouldn’t be here.  Isn’t that swell?”  But there it is:  under global capitalism we are recreating the biosphere-wrecking mistakes of literally mindless creatures that came before us.

Now all you need is a computer to run for a little while to make money out of thin air.  Huzzah!  This can of course lead to various cryptos being devalued into nothing, but all you have to do to sidestep that is to create a new crypto.  It works even better than cruzeiro bills because those are obliged to have some relationship to the currency of Brazil.  Now when you’ve devalued your currency to nothing all you have to do is make a new virtual country.

All of this is, of course, environmentally destructive.  Every crypto dollar you create requires a certain amount of energy to perpetuate its existence.  Every dollar created within a currency gradually gives less value return than the cost to maintain its own existence, but they never stop existing.  There’s no landfill for these barrels of funny money.  So essentially the crypto gold rush only makes money as long as each currency is maxed out in sequence, and new ones are constantly created.

Multiply this by every spam email farmer from Manila to Johannesburg and the problem becomes more clear.  The creator of crypto may as well have been Tyler Durden, out to destroy the world’s economies in the pursuit of anarcho-primitivism, because nobody in the world can stop this.  A system has been created that allows everybody in the world to build a tottering carbon-sucking Tower of Babel that absolutely will collapse, and like nuclear proliferation, nobody in a position to stop it has the courage or self-control to do so.  It’s the monkeys in the old commercials pushing the “crack” button to the exclusion of the “food” button until dead.

Something changed recently.  I don’t know what, but suddenly “venerable” financial institutions have decided crypto is legit, and are pushing crypto cards, crypto retirement accounts, crypto everything.  Why wouldn’t they?  These are the people who caused the Great Depression and every financial crisis since.  It’s all about mindlessly rushing to squeeze every penny out of every angle until the whole thing collapses, while everyone with an ounce of awareness knows this exploitation just wheels us from one collapse to the next.

Now the video game industry is wanting in on the con, wanting to turn gamers into crypto miners for them.  You think they’re the only internet connected industry that will do this?  The literal internet providers are coming next.  Funny thing is, they might not even know they’re doing it.  Here’s why: The same corruption that ransacked the infrastructure of China is waiting to go platinum in the US of A.  Crime organized and otherwise is going to infiltrate any corporation with access to server farms and steal bandwidth to mine crypto.  And of course, there’s nothing to stop the telecoms themselves from doing a certain amount of crypto mining right out in the light of day.

Our internet will slow to a crawl and start to experience massive outages, and with it our civilization – now hopelessly dependent on it.  In my little quasi-marxist progression of history, this is the Cyberpunk Dystopia.  This era will end when the internet ends, heralding the Mad Max era.  Crypto-currency, if it isn’t defanged through an international blitz, could well be the force that flicks that off switch.

Tell me I’m wrong, please.

Pondering the Future of Life

HUGE CONTENT WARNING – APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE DESPAIR

It’s possible that humans, at the far end of this hellride (maybe a hundred years off), will have eradicated all life on this planet except the most intense extremophile bacteria and archaea.  I think even from where we stand now, assured of calamitous devastation, surfing the edge of an extinction event in progress, that does not seem likely.  The way that would happen is if the completely runaway global warming that is already too late to stop snowballs into temperatures that rival the Hadean Eon.  I don’t know how possible that is.

But it is surely probable for this heat to become globally devastating in a way we’ve never seen before.  It’s a pretty safe bet that all large mammals will go extinct outside of enclosed environments, and 90% of what else is living beyond the artificial spaces will go extinct as well.  That’s enough to make a nature lover miserably sad and some of us fit to suicide bomb a petrol exec or politician.  Looking forward to more of that happening, because this stuff does have me miserably sad, and I’d love to see the fuckers eat shit and die.  Zero qualifications regrets or backtracking on those words.  If you’re petrol or a political enabler, please, set yourself on fire on live TV for me.

But this post is about none of that.  I am inclined in this random moment to think about the life that will survive global warming.  Because unless we successfully turn Earth into Venus, this warmed world will settle into some kind of equilibrium eventually.  Birds and reptiles are much better at surviving heat compared to mammals, and despite the insect apocalypse going on at the moment?  You know those lil bastards will bounce back.  Again, huge numbers of species will be gone forever, but those that remain?  Will ultimately repopulate to exploit the niches that remain.

I know less about plants.  Obviously if they don’t make it through, the rest of life is in a bad way.  Goodbye to all tetrapod life if that happens, probably – no lizards no birds no rats.  But I suspect there are plants that will do well enough, even in a world that reaches a hundred sixty in the summer, choking in fire every year until the last scrap of tinder is mingled in deserts of ash.  The poles will not be quite that hardcore, some cool weeds will probably stick around and wait for a chance to spring back.  That will give a foothold for some insects and some kind of tetrapods.

If humans are lucky in all that, we’ll be living in tightly controlled environments with smaller populations.  Maybe underground.  We’ll be living off of vat-farmed algae and recycled garbage.  But what I’m most curious about in this moment of detachment is this – what animals will be the best survivors?  Who will be the lizards and bugs and weirdos that scrap back, diversify and repopulate the Earth?  If we’re lucky enough to still have dinosaurs, who will they be?  Ducks and chickens pulled off this feat once before, I bet they could do it again.

For the comments, I’d like to see people placing their bets on what animals survive this mess.  I, for one, believe that humans will be one of those animals – for good or ill.  But aside from eyebrow lice and gut flora, who will we be sharing the world with?

Eating Genesis Pi

Genesis 3:14:  And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

Injustice that calls itself justice, hatred that calls itself love, is foundational to the abrahamic faiths.  The serpent in the garden was a cartoon villain with no motivation but the joy of evil itself, taking the text at face value, but any cursory examination of the events of the stories as written exonerates all villains save god himself.  Of course he made the serpent to love evil, made men and women to be curious, and so on.

And as abrahamic faiths are foundational to western civilization, the injustice is baked into who we are and how we do.  Poor people deserve to suffer because whatever people have or lack in life is according to his will, is “just” by divine fiat.  We must have done something wrong to deserve this.

I am put in mind of all this because today my ramen noodles smelled and tasted like cigarette ash.  Having smelled that, why did I proceed to eat them (with a lot of butter and salt added)?  I didn’t want the ramen to go to waste and I’d already added the packet by the time I smelled it.  I thought about why I’m eating cigarette ramen.

Maybe somebody rich is adulterating ramen with literal garbage just for spite.  Or maybe some poor filipino working in a ramen factory, knowing he’s gonna die in economic hell and unable to do anything else, tipped an ash tray into the flavor packets, knowing it would find decadent western mouths, and fuck those guys.  I won’t blame the worker, as shit a thing as that is to do.  I blame the global system built on exploitation, making us poor folks as cruel as what the rich have given us.

And capitalism, as much as it runs contrary to the hippy shit young jeezy preached, is a perfect piece with the justice that runs through most of the bible.  I’m a serpent, I’m gonna eat my dust all the days of my life.  Or maybe I’ll rise to the middle class, where I can eat chaff instead, and rain dust upon my lessers with a sense of righteousness.  All is as it should be on god’s earth.

EDIT to add:  I’m living on my belly as well – more crippled this week than I’ve ever been in my life from throwing my back out.  Had to miss 3 days of work.  I turn 45 in a few days, so I probably got another 45 years of this worsening to look forward to.  It’s OK tho, I’m cool.

Ending Quarantine, Bound by a Death Cult

Past a certain point in the USA, holdout businesses and agencies are going to need to end their quarantines, even in places with low vaccination rates, where it will result in contagion and death.  A certain amount of americans have chosen ignorance and the risk of death – to themselves and others – that it carries.  We’re stuck together in this country.  Most of us do not have the means to emigrate, would not be allowed into many other countries due to our national antivax rep, nor allowed to stay due to local xenophobic policies that mirror our own.

We’re stuck together and that means we’re really over a barrel.  There are some things we cannot force on other people, any more than the US could force itself on Vietnam or Afghanistan.  If fashy freaks don’t want to participate in a public health project even to save the lives of them and their own, we cannot make them.  We cannot try to protect them from themselves forever.  It’s just not feasible.

At some point, we must embrace the horrible status quo.  Sufficient numbers of people want their grandparents, parents, husband and wives, themselves offered up as a plague sacrifice to their orange god, and they can make it happen.  Just like they can make getting a simple ID practically impossible in the pursuit of vote suppression, they can make vax carding illegal, or make enforcement unfeasible.  We cannot control them, cannot control this, and some crucial public services cannot remain limited like they are now.

It’s time to reopen the government offices (yes, many are still closed right now, even in texas), wear masks all day long if we have to, get used to this reality.  Trump-style virtue-signalling won’t die until the last trumpist dies, probably around the time coral goes extinct and the US midwest is the new Sahara desert.  Many of us will be alive to see that.  Looking forward to the death of qanon-type shit, not looking forward to the time that will drive in those coffin nails.

The Success of Qanon and Trumpism

There are a few articles around now about how laughable Qanon is.  It’s true, they’re the most absurd and easily mocked face of modern nazism.  And as atheists, seeing a new religion arise around a well-documented and incredibly obvious con man confirms our prejudices about religion as a whole.  Trump as messiah?  One wonders how much a twisted crapsack a historical Jeezy could have been and still ended up with that hagiography.

Trump showed the right wing of politicians across the entire planet how much they could achieve with bald-faced lies and appealing to straight-up white supremacy.  Qanon was a crucial component in the latter part of that project in a number of ways.  One, there is a limit to the bullshit the masses will accept, even if it’s dangerously high, and Qanon showed us the upper extent of that limit.  The majority of people who see the facts regarding Qanon will not accept it, now we know.  That gives the fascist bullshitters a neat metric to constrain their lies.

Two, Qanon has not reflected badly on Fox News, Breitbart, OANN, or any of the other people that helped create them.  It was an object demonstration in how the public consciousness is utter shit at connecting important related concepts, at holding the right people accountable for serious problems.  Now more than ever, Fucker Carlston knows he can have 100% swastika facial tattoo having nazis as audience members and nobody in the USA that matters will ever call him to account for it, or at least they will not be believed.

I’m not going to breathe any sighs of relief about this fascism crisis being near an end.  Not that I think any of my comrades are either.  They’re just taking the chuckles they can where they can.  But personally, not laughing right now.

Why that Moral Arc Idea Convinces

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That quote popularized by MLK Jr and originated in a different form by an abolitionist preacher in the 1800s has appeal for a lot of people, not just to our sense of optimism but also to our sense of reason and observation. We see injustice spark resistance, we see how some great injustices of the past were defeated, or at least greatly diminished by long struggle. It makes sense that given enough time, all injustices will fall, right?

With more recent history we can see resurgence, re-empowerment, and expansion of old injustices, which is a really useful reality check for those naturally inclined to optimism like (believe it or not) myself. And while outside of the worst environments for these prejudices (such as being trans in the UK) it can still be easy to see the resistance and feel optimistic they will overcome again, what would that mean long-term, if anything?

I’m not going to say that this process is perfect equilibrium, with history swinging between justice and injustice in equal measure. There does seem to be some staying power in some of the successes justice has achieved. People aren’t willing to lose the freedoms they earn with blood. But the arc idea is too simple to describe how the world works. A more accurate way to look at this fight, I think, is that there is an ecosystem of ideas in which selection plays a role.

Injustice species Misogyny rex rules the land unopposed, king of ideas. But wait, opposition appears. Justice species Feminism ceratops evolves defenses so effective that M rex dies out. But a subset of M rex mutated bigger teeth that can overcome F ceratops defenses, and do so well against them that F ceratops goes extinct. But lo, there were a few survivors of F ceratops and they evolve into the next progressive resistance.

In this model, injustices in their existing forms do go extinct – the phenomenon that makes the moral arc model seem convincing – but something always seems to evolve to replace them. What replaces them isn’t always equally bad, so it is still useful to keep fighting. But without the absolute destruction of these injustices, some form of them always survives and has a chance to grow again.

And now, from my reality-checked place of diminished optimism, I feel like even if every ounce of racism misogyny homophobia transphobia ableism antisemitism islamophobia colonialism etc. were magically extirpated from the minds of our species, some new injustice would arise de novo, due to the angling of the power hungry.

The arc of the natural universe is long, but it bends toward everything going extinct in ways ranging from miserable to horrible. Humans have time and again shown ourselves collectively unable to overcome our animal nature. As much as hippies like to separate man from animals to say industrialism is unnatural, it is not. Human decimation of the biosphere is the natural result of a species becoming too fucking successful – something we’ve seen many many times before in nature. The difference between freshly evolved plants causing a mass extinction and what we’re doing now are mostly cosmetic.

My only hope is in the unnatural. Not Elon Musk pipe dreams of technology saving us. More like Gene Roddenberry pipe dreams – the idea we can somehow overcome human nature to create a lasting utopia. And where I said the difference was mostly cosmetic? There’s a fundamental difference that might offer a sliver of hope. The tool of our decimation is a social construct, and we have the power to change those within the space of a single generation sometimes – if rarely. Whether that happens or not, praise for all of the warriors for justice, whatever your part of the struggle. Power on.