Thanks for sharing this. I’d heard of this before, but being reminded of it bolstered my spirits a little.

Damn, that’s pretty dangerous, right?

I don’t think we’re awful as a whole. To some extent, I need to believe this, in order to avoid breaking down and killing myself. However, I do think it counts for something that there are so many people who want humans to be better, and are doing what they can. I think that resigning oneself to humans being awful will lead to a world with more awfulness.

One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

The anti-benefits rhetoric is fucking dystopian. When I highlight the harms of making vulnerable people jump through hoops to get basic support, people often respond that it’s a necessary evil to prevent “scroungers and cheats” claiming benefits.

The minuscule number of people committing fraud is a large part of why I oppose this, but I would feel the same if there were 100x more fraudulent claims than there is now. Fundamentally, there are always going to be people who slip through the gaps, and the only choice we have is whether we’d rather that involve: disabled people and other vulnerable groups not accessing support they need; or people getting away with fraud and getting money they aren’t entitled to. For me, the choice is obvious, because I think by sacrificing vulnerable people’s wellbeing to prevent fraud is absurd when the entire point of the system is to help those vulnerable people. It undermines the whole concept — though I imagine that for many politicians, undermining it is the point