We are, all of us, in denial about what awaits us in the Changes. Not just the conservatives. Liberals and social democrats deny as well; so too does the Left. Denial is repression, the putting away of an unpleasant idea. We deny because we are human. We repress. Repression and the return of the repressed are the same. What cannot be confronted converts into stranger commitments and violence.

In the end, the most crucial question for Brazil is not where the left is, or who can replace Lula, but what kind of society is ‘left’ when the opposition retreats?

There are clear limits to how many political victories can be won through disputes over points-of-fact. But this ‘popular’ face of queer history does not seem likely to exhaust itself yet.

Both ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, in this sense, are for spectators. We visit, and contemplate, but do not participate. Yet this suggests that any nature worth writing about is always somewhere else. Must nature writing, to achieve its world-defamiliarizing, transcendent effect, take us to Great Scenery – forests, islands, frozen seas, mountains, ocean floors, jungle canopies, river deltas, landscapes criss-crossed with hedgework forming rumpled parallelograms – made remote by the territorial matrix of the capitalist state?

The lack of time and consideration for grief in particular is built into the capitalist mode of production, which cannot care if humans die. Capitalism cannot pause for death or accommodate the inherent weakness, frailty, and emotionality of human bodies.

The campists are right, not about the states they defend or the revolutions they condemn or defile, but about this. They bear witness to the awkwardness that accompanies talk of hope and freedom and equality today. In a sense, they embrace the recognition that these are strange and foreign terms now, and so in wielding them they choose to sound like cynics and not like the feebler ingenue.

If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps the last thing to die is bloodthirsty sanctimony. Biden, once a hawkish advocate of the ‘war on terror’, had little choice but to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. US military strategy had collapsed, as even the Pentagon had finally recognised. The fictitious state in Kabul had no independent means of survival. Afghanistan had overwhelmingly turned against the occupation.