I'm forced to admit I do rather *like* a large amount of things humans do. Maybe it's time to take my own advice and refine the targets of my hatred.

I hate people---and yes, reluctantly, I am people--- embracing known cognitive glitches and finding excuses to nurture them rather than learn.

I hate social organizations like religions and corporations that seem to inevitably replace their initial purpose and morality with the need to grow and self-perpetuate indefinitely for its own sake.

I hate sociopaths, narcissists, and exploiters coming along to subvert any Nice Thing that we can have into something that fundamentally serves their malign psychological needs.

I hate social orders---like patriarchal masculinity AND queer orthodoxy---that put symbolic purity ahead of individual personal happiness, dignity, and most of all, practicality.

I hate economic systems that trap people in cycles of useless labor and consumerism instead of actually meeting basic human needs and giving people the freedom to become the kidn of educated, sophisticated thinkers we need to maintain a free society.

When I say "scrap it all, damn us to Hell, and hand it over to the raccoons and crows," I guess that's what I really mean. When you get right down to it, humans are just the hosts for these things..

And yeah. Setting the quarantine house on fire is a solution of sorts. I think there IS a time and place where The Thing has pretty much won and "nuke it from orbit" is the only solution.

But that's not the Good End, and I am forced to admit that as bleak as it seems sometimes, there is absolutely no reason we can't still get the Good End.

OK, there are a lot of reasons to think we can't actually. >___< I'm sorry. I don't think it's LIKELY. I can't pretend otherwise, and it's very frustrating to see people in denial about the possibility that we are not at all unlikely to fail and die. I think some of my morbidity and misanthropy is an attempt to deal with that.

But I also have to concede that we still CAN win, and there's absolutely no reason to give up before we've really tried. It's going to be extremely difficult, because it will involve us purging our society of bad human cognitive tendencies that have, if anything, only gotten MUCH WORSE recently.

But we've done it before. We'd need a rational & spiritual technology like nothing we've ever seen. I used to get flashes of it back in my stoner days; now, it seems so hazy I can't figure out how to talk about it. But I think it's out there.

There is one last frontier and it's not space; it's our fucked-up little brains. If we can go in there and figure out a technology for what people call "wisdom"... some kind of real memetic and ethical immune system... we might actually be OK.

I'm still gonna be nice to the raccoons and crows just in case though. 🤷​