Being The Lesser Of Two Evils Is Not Good Enough

Incremental improvements to the status quo: good.

Incremental improvements to the status quo which further entrench a fundamentally harmful pattern: bad.

We all (well most of us, I'm an optimist if a despairing one) want to make the world a better place, and perfect is the enemy of the good and all that, but sometimes I think that people get too caught up in a narrow problem space and forget to step back and look at the big picture from time to time.

If you're making iterative improvements to something that is systematically corrupt, flawed at its core, or downright evil you're not helping as much as you want to believe you are.

If you find yourself saying that look, you know it's not ideal, you acknowledge the harms, but at least it's not as bad as this other thing (that your thing may or may not be replacing, but is likely just supplementing, realistically), take a break, then spend that all that energy and enthusiasm and goodwill and smarts to do something that is not actively harmful or even actively beneficial instead of slightly less actively harmful.