I don't recall the context of that quotation of mine, but I understand that there's cooperation and balance in a stable ecosystem. The point about "natural events being a sick joke" wouldn't even be specifically about the evolution of life. I was likely talking about the absurdity of nature's mindless self-creation of physical order in general. But regarding life, the critical point likewise wouldn't be that this planet is Hell so that every minute for every organism is filled with nothing but torture and horror. It doesn't have to be that bad to be part of a sick joke in the existential sense.
The problem is that the ecological harmony involves a food chain, with meat eaters feeding on plant eaters. Nature evolved predators, parasites, or freeloaders to occupy that niche, to capitalize on the docility of other species, just as nature evolved plant-eaters to capitalize on the relative defenselessness of plants.
You seem to be taking something like a Daoist view that we ought to fit into nature and stop rocking the boat. I take a more Gnostic, existentialist view that explores the evident conflict between personhood and the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, our species is anomalous for not fitting in and for not reaching equilibrium with other species. Nature evidently evolved people who invented civilization which led in turn to the Anthropocene and to the sixth mass extinction. That's not cherry picking of evidence. It's seeing the big picture.
I don't defend social Darwinism. On the contrary, I condemn conservatism for entailing self-refuting social Darwinism (links below).
I also don't see where I equivocate on "wokesters," as you suggest. In the article I mean to explain what's really going on with the so-called social justice warriors, with cancel culture, safe spaces, overprotectiveness, and rampant political correctness. I point out that in so far as this movement is based on Foucault's hyper-skepticism, the movement is as self-refuting as social Darwinism. The wokesters are sanctimonious to conceal their implicit nihilism. So I'm not illicitly expanding the meaning of the term; rather, I mean to show the difference between the superficiality of the conventional idea of wokesterism, and the deeper, unsettling reality of that progressive movement.
