We’re not the ones who have “bought into the confusion.”

A stupid counter-factual assertion doesn’t become less stupid or less counter-factual because you add a “Period” to it. Matt Dillahunty is Lauren Boebert’s second-best espresso machine. Period. See? It doesn’t work. Trans women are men who say they feel like women inside. That’s what “trans women” means. It’s the word “women” that means “women”; the phrase “trans women” means something else. The “trans” part of “trans women” indicates “not” or “opposite” or “fantasy.” It doesn’t indicate “real” or “literal” or “genuine.” And the “Period” is just decoration.

And he’s wrong that it’s not remotely like believing the bread turns into Jesus. It’s really quite like it. Granted bread is a different kind of thing from a man who thinks he has the “identity” of a woman, but the belief in a miraculous change from one kind of thing to another kind of thing is plenty similar enough.

But it gets worse.

“It’s right there in the name” – oh come on. “God” is right there in the name too, but that doesn’t make the claims about “God” true. Of course it’s right there in the name: it’s right there in the name because the “trans women” put it there, because they’re hell bent on taking our ability to name ourselves away and giving it to themselves. The claim doesn’t become true because the people who want us to believe it’s true worded the claim so as to trick us into believing it’s true. Language isn’t magic that way.

We’re not paying attention to Dillahunty’s saying some people with penises are women? And if we were paying such attention, we would Understand and Believe?

What a buffoon.

Harrop was worse than I knew. Graham Linehan and ripx4nutmeg share some revolting details of what he and Stephanie Hayden did to Caroline Farrow:

Not your average caring GP.

Caroline’s husband is a Catholic priest at two parishes and in 2019 Harrop asked Stephanie Hayden for a game of golf, using a picture of one of her husband’s churches. Hayden famously has a conviction for attacking a man with a golf club.

Taunts and “jokes” that went on and on, and more. Targeted sadistic relentless harassment of a woman he disagrees with over trans dogma. One month really doesn’t seem like enough after reading all that. (The worst harassment shown here was by someone else, but Harrop’s was only relatively less foul. The man’s a sadist.)

The BBC picks up a very long pair of tongs to talk about [whispers] hijab.

Europe’s top human rights organisation has pulled posters from a campaign that promoted respect for Muslim women who choose to wear headscarves after provoking opposition in France.

See it? The very long pair of tongs? It’s the “choose to” bit. It’s tendentious to talk about Muslim women “choosing to” wear hijab when in fact women are forced to wear it, and tortured or even killed for refusing to wear it, in many places where Islam has not liberalized even slightly.

It’s probably the case that many Muslim women in Europe do have a choice, but it’s also well known that many of them don’t – that their parents or brothers or husbands don’t let them. We know that rules about female “modesty” are enforced with violence in France and the UK as well as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly more than well known enough for a news organization like the BBC to be aware of it. But still they insert that “choose to” even though they must know better than that.

The Council of Europe released the images last week for a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination.

That doesn’t actually look like freedom though, does it – that tight muffling thing wrapped around the head and neck, and notice also the long sleeves on what the hijab-free woman seems to find a warm day.

Several prominent French politicians condemned the message and argued the hijab did not represent freedom.

But some Muslim women who wear headscarves said the reaction showed a lack of respect for diversity and the right to choose what to wear in France.

France’s youth minister, Sarah El Haïry, said she was shocked by one poster, which showed a split image of one women wearing a hijab, and one not.

In an interview on French TV, the minister suggested the poster had encouraged women to wear headscarves. She said this message jarred with the secular values of France, which had expressed its disapproval of the campaign.

On Wednesday, the Council of Europe told the BBC that tweets related to the campaign had been deleted “while we reflect on a better presentation of this project”.

Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there just is no good way to frame the hijab as a “choice” when for millions of women it’s no such thing.

The Times quotes Stonewall:

A Stonewall spokesperson said: “It is not true that Stonewall looks to shut down debate. Meaningful, constructive debate and discussion around complex policy ideas are at the heart of what we do as a charity. The one thing we do not debate is whether trans people exist. They do, and what we need to discuss is how to make a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves.”

Even if it’s true that Stonewall doesn’t look to shut down debate, it sure as hell does muddy it. That spokesperson spokement is some very wet sloppy mud.

Nobody is saying “trans people don’t exist.” That’s not the issue at all. We all know there are plenty of people – who exist – who say they are trans. Of course we know that, we see them saying it every day. The issue is what that means, and whether or not it’s true, and what implications it has for everyone else.

We don’t dispute or “debate” that some people say they are trans. We dispute the claim that saying you are sex X or Y means you are that sex. We dispute the idea that declaration supersedes physical reality. We dispute the magic-like belief that words=a change of sex.

We also dispute the claim that it’s possible to change sex. We may agree that people can perform or “live as” the sex opposite their own, but we don’t agree that that makes them the sex opposite their own in every sense, and that not believing that claim is the height of evil and violence.

But of course Stonewall doesn’t want to put it that way, because then the fantasy becomes all too obvious. It has to pretend that we’re skeptical of existence as opposed to attributes. It’s all a big tedious lie.

As for “a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves” – the whole point is that they want to be not-themselves – they want to be other people’s selves. They want to pretend to be the sex of other people and to force everyone to endorse their fiction. That’s not a reasonable demand. We get to debate the fuck out of it.

Such a nice man, and (as he doesn’t mind saying himself) such a feminist.

Huh. Tell that to a woman giving birth. Tell it to a woman in her 35th week of pregnancy. Tell it to a woman who’s been raped. Tell it to the women who lost medals to Veronica Ivy and Laurel Hubbard. Tell it, as another person on Twitter said to him, to the Taliban.

So as you’ve seen Harrop received a one month suspension.

That sounds like nothing but word is it’s not. It’s on his record and will limit his career from now on.

It’s on the record that he engaged in inappropriate, insulting and at times intimidatory communications on Twitter – in short that he’s a bully.

There’s an odd thing about Matt Dillahunty’s trans dogma though.

Ok so trans women are women in the sense of having (or being or living or some other verb) female gender, but not in the sense of being of the female sex. But in that case, what makes it ok for trans women “to access spaces where women and girls are undressing, such as changing rooms?” How does gender, a social construct, make that safe and reasonable?

And for that matter, how can someone who concedes that trans women are female according to gender but not according to sex also say flatly that trans women are women? How can it be that simple and self-evident and absolute? If women are women physically as well as socially while trans women are men physically but women socially, why are we called terfs for saying that that difference matters? If Dillahunty himself concedes that trans women are not physically women then why is he so abrupt and belligerent and absolutist that all the same they are women so shut the fuck up?

It doesn’t really make any sense. I mean even in his terms it doesn’t make any sense.

From the Shut Up I Win files:

I feel lucky that I never wasted any admiration on Matt Dillahunty. Never listened to the podcast, only ever heard him speak once, at the American Atheists jamboree in Austin, and found him obnoxiously macho-loud and overbearing. Stamped CONFIRMED.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on All the rights.

There is only one trans “right” being asserted by activists, and that is the “right” to have everyone else in the world affirm their particular religious beliefs, at all times and in all places.

The incoming government of Germany has recently signed an agreement in principle on their governing priorities, which must now be referred to the coalition parties at large for approval before that government can be put into effect. When the agreement is approved, the measures within it will not automatically become law, but they provide a roadmap for what the government wishes to accomplish during its reign.

Many of the proposals are undoubtedly an improvement over the status quo; in particular, simplifications to immigration and legalisation of cannabis would materially improve the lives of millions of German residents, if and when these come into force before the next election.

More neutral, or at least less obviously good, are a few economic policies on offer; in particular, opening the German retirement fund to market speculation (supposedly with the equivalent of mutual funds in the US, though possibly a bait-and-switch to allow stock traders access to retirement funds for their individual bets) and a philosophy of austerity-for-all-seasons could have dramatic medium- and long-term negative consequences for the German and thereby the European economy.

But, more contentiously, the government proposes to bring in a raft of “trans rights” which ultimately amount to the reimposition of blasphemy codes in public and private life. As the incoming coalition is left-leaning, they all seem to have drunk deeply of trans activist dogma, at least their various youth wings. In particular, they are promising to enact some form of Self-ID (possibly with no-questions-asked statutory insurance coverage of any cosmetic procedures under the umbrella of “gender medicine”), along with a proposed fine of up to 2,500 Euros for instances of “misgendering” people.

Given the fervour of adherence to trans dogma and the promise of liberation and meaning it provides to its adherents, it is a virtual certainty that these measures will remain in the coalition agreement, and the chances are quite high that they will be among the first implemented by the new regime. Trans activists online are lustily promising to scour the timelines of suspected TERFs in search for wrong-think which they can then report in order to impose this fine, and some trans activists (with the barest cover of irony) are welcoming the construction of an anti-TERF “police state”.

I do not believe that the people proposing these measures have thought through the societal implications of them, nor of the reaction they are likely to engender across the voting public. The most likely danger is that these young activists accomplish this policy of compelling the speech they approve of and forbidding the speech they disapprove of with harsh penalties, and when enough people outside of the core of Berlin come into contact with these policies, they generate enough scandal to bring down the government and force a new election.

It could very soon be a reality in Germany, at least for a time, that such questions as drove Ophelia from FreeThoughtBlogs are no longer matters of philosophy, or interpersonal comity, or even personal politics; being asked “Meinen Sie, dass Transfrauen Frauen sind, ja oder nein?”, on the Internet or on the street or in the privacy of your own home, could well come with a hefty financial penalty for offering a negative answer, regardless of what you actually believe.

Trannish Inquisition, indeed.

The stars of Activism are really on fire today. Not entirely in a good sense.

Spaces set aside for other people aren’t a “right.” Puberty blockers and elective amputations aren’t “health care.” “Legal protections” that endanger other people aren’t “protections.”

He summoned the troops.

Well, really snarky, at least.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

On a visit to Paris earlier this month, Harris reportedly spent more than $500 on cookware at E Dehillerin, a shop near the Louvre museum. 

Well, yes, that Le Creuset stuff is expensive.

Republicans and rightwing media outlets seized on the purchase, attempting to use it to show that the vice-president, a former California attorney general and US senator, was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Ahhhh yes because 500 whole dollars, in sharp contrast to Donald Trump.

That’s his very own tasteful understated man of the people living room. It cost $37.99 at Walmart.

Trump famously criticised Barack Obama for playing too much golf, said he would be too busy to play much himself, then spent considerable time on the fairways. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers vary. One dedicated website, Trumpgolfcount.com, put it at $149m.

And the kicker is that most of that public money went to Trump himself, because unlike any president before him he charged his Secret Service agents for housing in his own hotels at his own golf clubs. Profit profit profit.

Points of view.

Oh what was that? thought I, and it didn’t take much hunting to find out.

It was on PM on Radio 4, so I’ll be listening later.

Well that’s a stupid question for a psychologist, even a TV one. Of course we can debate what people claim to “know” and “feel.” If we couldn’t there wouldn’t be much debate about anything.

Surely one of the first and most basic things you learn in psychology is how very fallible human knowing and feeling are. It’s even a bromide – “the easiest person to fool is yourself.”

That is in fact one of the things that irritates me the most about this idiotic movement, the sudden disappearance of this basic item from the toolkit of people who “identify as” skeptics and fans of reason and secularists and all the rest of it. It’s all right there in the question that started my departure from Freethought Blogs: “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” One, no, but two, more to the point, nobody expects a trannish inquisition. Since when do unabashed atheists interrogate other unabashed atheists about what they believe?

It makes people stupid. The whole “movement,” as a movement, makes people stupid, and then it makes them dogmatic and punitive.

I don’t understand what their point is, the people who write this kind of thing, whether in the Telegraph or on Fox News or on Twitter.

The PM says these measures are designed to prevent a lockdown, but I am utterly convinced they’re the beginnings of one. If they are necessary because the omicron variant’s mutations mean it travels fast, and it has already been spotted nesting in the UK, logic suggests that cases will jump – which means more pressure on the NHS and on ministers to act. How many times have we been told “thus far and hopefully no further”, only for the PM to appear on television days later and admit, with regret, that we have to shut up shop?

What is he, six? He’s complaining that the rules change as what we know changes. Well does he think they shouldn’t? Does he think it’s someone’s fault that knowledge about a constantly mutating virus changes over time? What is his point?

The Government says we should plan for Christmas as normal, but these are the same people who said we could travel to France or Spain earlier in the crisis only to reverse-ferret and give us a few days to get home.

But could that be because of new information? Granted it could be incompetence or politicking, but it could also be because what they know about the virus isn’t fixed in amber.

They don’t know what they’re doing because they don’t know what’s going to happen (we don’t have the data on how bad omicron is) and because there is no silver bullet for a pandemic. We are double-vaccinated. We have been offered a booster. We were encouraged to think that science would lick this thing, yet at the first sign of trouble, we return to the same blunt methods of disease control we introduced last summer.

And? What should they do instead? Just throw their hands up and surrender?

It’s true that we’re not fully locked down, and our rules aren’t as draconian as in parts of Europe, but don’t swallow the propaganda that these measures, however proportionate, are “light”. Cancelled travel means divided families. PCR testing and isolation on return from abroad will hit the travel industry hard. Isolation if you come into contact with a carrier is a recipe for another pingdemic. Then there are the masks, compulsory on transport and in shops, which might do some good and bring a little comfort, but are also irritating, uncomfortable and an invasion of our civil liberties. This matters, or should.

Or, rather, masks might do quite a good job of reducing transmission, and the “civil liberty” of not masking during a lethal pandemic is not one worth writing heroic poetry about.

There are a few paragraphs more of the same kind of childish “I don’t wanna and I don’t hafta” bullshit. It’s all so stupid I don’t know how it gets so much ink.

Other news:

The tribunal is deciding whether or not to suspend him.

Trans activist says what?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Oh is that what they call it.

The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, said on Saturday he had “reached out” to Democrats over Islamophobic comments made by one of his party, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, about the Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.

Boebert apologised for the remarks, in which she likened one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress to a suicide bomber, on Friday, saying she wanted to meet Omar in person. 

No she didn’t. We saw this yesterday. She didn’t apologize. She did the “sorry you got so offended” thing. You don’t apologize for an insult by saying “Apologies to anyone who was offended by the insult.” That’s not an apology. It treats the insult as only contingently an insult, and it puts the onus on the targets of the insult as opposed to the trashy person who tweeted the insult. That’s not just not an apology, it’s a further insult, in painting the targets of the insult as whiny babies and the insulter as a patient adult telling them to calm down. Lauren Boebert is not that patient adult, she’s a trashy vulgar belligerent ignoramus.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy said: “I spoke with Leader [Steny] Hoyer today to help facilitate that meeting so that Congress can get back to talking to each other and working on the challenges facing the American people.”

Never mind that, speak to your trashy vulgar member and tell her to stop with the insults.

McCarthy did not condemn Boebert’s remarks.

Of course he didn’t.

A tweet prompted me to look for sources.

The Koch organization (only one of the two brothers is still present-tense) is notorious for funding all kinds of reactionary causes, though it also funds items like the PBS series Nova, but I don’t know specifics about an attack on US universities. So, here’s a Trotskyist site with details!

Joking aside, I think I have seen the details before, without properly filing them in the memory system.

Last month, the George Mason University protest group “UnKoch My Campus” released documents to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request detailing how the Charles Koch Foundation and the Federalist Society, groups dedicated to the promotion of ultra-conservative “free market” public policy and ideas, maintain control over the appointment of law school and economics professors at the college, a public university in northern Virginia, as part of a nationwide campaign to promote ultra-right politics.

The ideological activities of Charles and David Koch, with a combined net worth of $96.6 billion, extend to universities, colleges and even high schools. Taking advantage of the deficits caused by the decades-long bipartisan assault on public funding for both K-12 and university education, groups like the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation use their grotesque wealth, squeezed from the working class, in an attempt to inculcate young people with libertarian and other right-wing, pro-capitalist ideologies.

I like “squeezed from the working class” so that we’ll remember they’re genuine Trots (which is not to say I disagree).

In 2016, George Mason University (GMU) received the largest donation in its history, a $30 million gift to its law school. $10 million came from the Koch Foundation and $20 million from the BH Fund, whose president is Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society. The BH Fund’s secretary and treasurer is Jonathan Bunch, vice president and director of external relations at the Federalist Society, a right-wing organization that lobbies for the appointment of ultra-right judges.

Leo played an instrumental role in getting Federalist Society member and far-right Justice Neil Gorsuch a seat on the US Supreme Court in early 2017, suggesting nominees to the Trump administration and meeting personally with the president. Top donors to the society include Koch Industries, David Koch, and the Charles Koch Foundation. Through the BH Fund, the Federalist Society is intimately involved in faculty hiring, gaining admittance for prospective right-wing law students, and suggesting law graduates to clerk for right-wing judges.

That’s all familiar. I don’t exactly see how it’s an attack on US universities in general, at least not a meaningful one, but it doesn’t need to be if it can shape the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. You got your libertarian capitalist greedies and your whirly-eyed racists and your Republican gerrymandering and hey presto that’s all it takes. The US probably has only another year before everything goes to hell for the final time.

It’s all “shut up and take it, bitch” at the rape therapy support group.

A rape victim who thought she had found a safe all-female space to help her come to terms with the sexual violence she endured has told how she was left deeply troubled by the arrival of a biologically male trans woman ‘with no obvious female attributes’.

…

Charity bosses insisted the trans woman had every right to be there as they allow people to define their gender for themselves, saying: ‘We do not police gender.’

Well they should. They’re an absolutely worthless, indeed harm-doing charity if they refuse to keep men out of women’s support groups.

Sarah, who was abused between the ages of eight and 12 and raped when she was in her 20s, said that the new arrival disrupted the dynamic of the support group.

‘Some women had been abused as children so obviously we had that shared experience of being a girl and abused by a man,’ she said.

‘We talked a lot about male entitlement, about how men feel entitled to women’s bodies. Quite often we just said how we didn’t trust men and it felt like a safe space to say that.’

But after the trans woman arrived, such talk became ‘nonsensical’, Sarah said, adding: ‘It felt like the priority of the group was not to talk about male entitlement any more or our shared experiences, but about making sure this person who was born male felt comfortable.’

What was he even doing there?

Sarah said there was no outward physical sign that the new member was transitioning to become a woman and the recruit did not volunteer any comment about any sexual abuse that she may have suffered.

So he was there to get his jollies listening to the bitches whine. Awesome.

Sarah wrote a long, carefully considered letter of complaint to the charity.

‘Please understand this is not a personal attack on the individual group member but an account of how their inclusion felt for me,’ she explained. 

‘When the trans service user began speaking, my first instinct was to leave the group and never come back. I knew that I couldn’t possibly tell the facilitator or any of the volunteers how I felt because the group is explicitly trans-inclusive and I could be labelled a bigot or a transphobe.’

But a reply from Carys Jenkins, head of operations at the charity, ruled out any change of policy. 

‘We do not police gender and we do not define who is and is not a woman; we allow women to define this for themselves,’ she wrote.

No, they allow men to define this for themselves. At the expense of women who need help.

Find a group suitable for bitches like you, she was told.

Sarah, who works in accountancy, took the advice and tried to find another support group solely for biological females in Brighton, but discovered there were none, as they all stated that they welcomed ‘self-identifying females’.

Brighton. They’re not fond of women in Brighton. Just ask Kathleen Stock.

In written evidence to a Commons select committee last year, [Survivors’ Network’s] chief executive Jay Breslaw opposed tightening rules on single-sex spaces, adding that her charity ‘strongly feel that the use of women-only spaces by trans women should be actively encouraged’.

Actively encouraged. Yes, campaigners, get out there and recruit men who say they are women to destroy all the support networks and groups women have, so that women will have nowhere to go to escape and talk about male violence. Brilliant active activism!

Updating to add:

LGBTQ Nation is furious at feminists who think women in prison shouldn’t have to be locked up with men. LGBTQ Nation doesn’t call them feminists, of course.

A group of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) have filed a lawsuit against the state of California for placing transgender women in female prisons.

Well, yes. It’s cruel and unusual punishment to place men in women’s prisons.

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a group that opposes the extension of legal and civil rights to transgender people, recently filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Bakersfield.com reported. The lawsuit  claims to represent a group of incarcerated women as well as Woman II Woman, another TERF group.

Ah ah naughty – the group does not oppose any extension of rights to transgender people. There is no “right” for men to be imprisoned with women. That’s not a right. Not every want or wish or fantasy or desire or hey might as well give it a shot is a right.

Both WoLF and Woman II Woman oppose SB 132 — state legislation successfully authored by gay state Assembly member Scott Weiner — which requires jails and prisons “to house transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people according to their own sense of where they will be safest.”

What about women’s own sense of where they will be safest? Why doesn’t that get first priority? Seeing as how women are physically vulnerable to men, and the converse is not the case, why isn’t women’s safety the first requirement, and the wishes of trans people conditional on safety for women?

Two incarcerated women listed as plaintiffs in WoLF’s lawsuit alleged that transgender or gender nonbinary inmates sexually assaulted them. One woman said the attack occurred after SB 132 became law. 

And? Does LGBTQ Nation know that the allegations are false? If so it failed to say so. It just treats them as self-evidently wicked and leaves it at that. Pfff, it’s just women in prison, who cares about them. Very left wing, much progressive.

Guest post by Bruce Everett

Been feeling oddly Kantian lately, on account of some considerations about the Drake equation, red dwarfs, and the evolution of the universe. The imminent launch of the James Webb telescope is bringing this on as well.

Several terrible documentaries and an awful lot of bad science fiction makes a bit of a fetish out of the idea of “Ancient Aliens”, largely because the narrative of some kind of idealized past that can return to save us addresses a weird but pervasive need…

I can’t relate to it. I find it a bit puerile to be honest; quit an over-reliance on Sky Daddy; start looking for Space Daddy. Couldn’t stand Stargate, sorry.

And the kookiness of thinking Atlantis was any more real than Mordor, or that brown people can’t build monoliths, aren’t things to overlook, but the emotional need for there to have been Greys from Zeta Reticuli on Earth, stacking rocks and benevolently putting things up people’s bums in the early Holocene is something else, too. F***ing why?

We have a nice stable host star. For the time being at least. 100 million years from now it’ll bake our planet well before becoming a red giant. Complex life will clap out a bit earlier. But until then; nice.

What’s not nice are all those planets currently in the “habitable zones” of young red dwarfs. By which I mean “any red dwarfs” because on the timescale of a red dwarf, they’re all young. Young, cool, and unstable like a dirty burning flame.

So “cool”, planets have to be in close to the star for any heat, and as a result are tidally locked. And “unstable” as in anything that gets close is going to cop an all mighty-star parp to the face on a regular basis on account of really, really big solar flares. Flares that strip atmospheres.

The Milky Way is littered with red dwarfs. Stars like ours? Not so much. We’re odd. Even the configuration of our planets (no “super Earths”, nothing inside of Mercury’s orbit) is starting to look peculiar. (Our moon’s pretty spesh too).

Eventually, as the more common red dwarfs age and warm up, they’ll become more stable, and stop dropping huge star-parps. Their “habitable zones” will migrate outwards to where maybe there’s a chance of planets not being tidally locked. And we already know there are a good number of these systems where further out, there are exoplanets with water ice.

So warmth, water, possible rotation, and no atmosphere-scouring solar flares. Oh, and bonus; these red dwarfs will stay stable for billions of years more than our own star will. Plenty of time for life to establish. Could be easy living for the locals, and there’s a metric-fuck-tonne of these stars out there.

Downside: it’s not been even close to enough time for these red dwarfs to become stable. They’ll stay stable long, but they’ll take a long time getting there. Huge timescales. Longer than the present age of the universe. And certainly longer than our own star has left.

Earth will be long dead and gone before the first of these stars mature.

So… If the galaxy ever does wind up with abundant complex life living on a multitude of red dwarfs, it’ll be a long time from now, which makes us the “ancient aliens”. We’re quite possibly just too early to the neighbourhood to find any neighbours. Whether our descendants live long enough to find any neighbours isn’t certain either.

But it’s not all bad being early. The universe as it stands now is pretty interesting and special. There’s stuff we can witness now that will eventually be impossible to witness. The cosmic background radiation will eventually red shift so far it’s no longer visible – but right now it’s available. The observable universe will recede as accelerating expansion throws galaxy after galaxy out of sight. Large bright stars will form less frequently and our galaxy will cool, dim and redden – a number of the things we find beautiful will be gone.

The Milky Way and Andromeda will merge well before the first stable red dwarf becomes welcoming, so the sky certainly won’t be familiar.

A lot of knowledge will become unobtainable, or at least a lot, lot harder to come by. “Hubble flow”? Wot’s that? “Inflationary period”? Huh? “Andromeda Galaxy”? Who the what now? Wait, there are *other* galaxies?

How much of this knowledge winds up unobtainable depends on how far flung into to future we’re talking.

It seems feasible that we’re first cab off the rank, or at least one of the first, and yet there are people who’ve literally killed themselves over the prospect of there being older, wiser, guide-like space beings out there. There are people who still wish they could bring themselves to. The species that is about to launch the James Webb telescope is also the species that came up with the Heaven’s Gate cult. There’s a class in cosmic humility right there.

Perhaps the space-grown-ups could act like it a little more?

So yeah, the Kantian bit. We’ve stumbled our ape-selves into a position of privilege; the ability to witness the early universe. This may have left us all alone, but it just won’t be possible for most of the rest of the universe’s existence and may be far out-of-view by the time complex life becomes common out there (if ever).

I’m kind of feeling that humanity and its descendants owe any possibly intelligent life that follows in our sphere of influence the information that we gather. Let them make of it what they will, but at least they wouldn’t be deprived of the option.

Space-faring descendants, or space-faring artifacts; either way it’d be nice to pay it forward, knowledge-wise, if there’s anyone to listen. As far as finding meaning in an uncaring universe goes, I’d rate this pretty high as a strategy.

And in the meantime, maybe humanity could take its position in the cosmos a little less for granted. That’d be nice too.