I think you are on to something there with community. It seems like too much of our society has moved from close-ish groups of acquaintances, neighbors, friends and family to be replaced by entirely arms length relationship. That is, a lot of relationships where no one will help the other move house. A mix of intimate and arms length is always needed, but I think we have moved too far in one direction, and I am inclined to think it is not by accident. It seems to be official policy of the last few decades to separate kids from their parents, parents from extended families, etc. (I am also starting to think that is why cities are so damaging to people: the vast majority of interactions are with strangers, and density means you have trouble sorting through neighbors, crazies, family, etc.)
Judeo-Messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are a recent thing, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals... The trans-national, trans-racial, trans-sexual, trans-cultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond peoples, races, cultures) and which are the daily food in our schools, in our media, in our popular culture, at our universities and on our streets, have ended up reducing our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride to its minimal expression. We National Socialists came to liberate Paris, we did not destroy it.
No country is leading its own race in this invasion because it is a political agenda run by the UN and pushed forward by the Jews and their puppets (the politicians). Most people simply won't know or understand that this is a political program. However, some manage to understand that politicians are deliberately working to import Muslims and replace people, but that's about it, they are like a computer that cannot work because the program does not allow it. Jewish bankers are flooding Europe with Muslims and America with Third World trash.
People sometimes ask why the European left gets along so well with Muslims. Why does a movement that has often been openly anti-religious side with a fierce religiosity that seems to oppose almost everything the left has ever claimed to stand for? Part of the explanation is that Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
The three ideologies have certain key elements in common. Their whole worldview is based on an in-group/out-group concept: Chosen Race/Goyim, believers/kuffar, workers/exploiters. In-group/out-group polarization is represented in terms of purity. In some cases, it's quite literal: the outgroup is seen as a physically contaminating influence. In other cases, the impurity of the outgroup is less tangible. They are pathologized and dehumanized, portrayed, often using metaphors of disease, as immoral, bestial, even demonic: Islamophobes, anti-Semites, capitalist exploiters. Mammonism and Bolshevism are Jewish half-sisters.
💬 My thought is that it might be a more fruitful method, firstly to get people thinking of emergent beings seriously, but also of getting around what to me seems like the pitfall of demons/Satan language: we tend to imagine them as basically people level beings with magic tricks, not huge super organisms without interest in individuals as such. ~~Doc Hammer
Your(* magic-tricks-wielding demon Joos have just crept out of above language pitfall 🤭
OOHH! Hah, sorry, I saw the quote and thought you were responding to that :)
I hadn't read the Clarence guy's comment at all, actually. It hit my daily breaking point of "historical stupidity" patience pretty quickly, by the first paragraph in fact.
Congratulations on the weight loss! That is quite an accomplishment.
If I am understanding you, your argument is that focusing on the big 'them' or 'Satan' allows people to reorient their thinking away from symptoms or little bits but towards recognizing that something big is changing, that one's opponents are perhaps not just like you but mistaken, but very different in their goals and fit within society.
I don't disagree with that. I think it is quite useful to think about larger scale processes and systems, and not just try and knock down the occasional proud nail poking out here and there while the building burns down.
I think the weakness in focusing too much on the name of the evil, as opposed to the cause of evil itself, is that it doesn't actually help us act in a better way. We need to figure out how we are creating, or at least aiding and perpetuating, the evil. Naming it Satan or Tiamat or Loki doesn't really help that, and might actually hurt it.
My guess is that the root of this evil is lust for power, and we need to reorient our relationship with society by drastically changing how much power we allow e.g. the state to have over us as individuals. That has concrete steps and goals, as well as an idea of how we can prevent the lust for power demon from gaining the upper hand in the future.
I don't see how calling it Satan helps a great deal. Then again, if one doesn't have the temperament to address directly the larger social dynamics, maybe calling it Satan helps in a way that I can't appreciate myself. Like a Buddhist style "Well, it isn't literally Satan, but if that helps you behave like you should, go for it." sort of deal. I am always a little skeptical of that sort of thinking, however, as if we mistake the metaphor for reality we can come to some really bad conclusions.
Agreed. I think even just the concept of "emergence" is too foreign to most people. Hell, most writers on the subject don't even have a good definition of it. (Rob Axtel doesn't have one, for God's sake, and that man is a genius!) Finding concept handles that people can grasp and use is a difficult trick, and many that seem to fit come with a lot of baggage already attached.
(I am inordinately pleased at how well that sentence came together :P )
I am thinking through a follow up essay, imagining larger society as the being and the sub-societies within it as parts of the being that can go sick, or even cancerous, becoming destructive to the whole. My thought is that it might be a more fruitful method, firstly to get people thinking of emergent beings seriously, but also of getting around what to me seems like the pitfall of demons/Satan language: we tend to imagine them as basically people level beings with magic tricks, not huge super organisms without interest in individuals as such.
Still thinking it through, but it is more interesting than the half dozen other things I could be working on, so it might happen quickly :)
Thought I'd drop in here and muddy the waters. I'm currently reading Mauro Biglino's "The Naked Bible" (highly recommend). His literal translations tell a very different story from the one commonly accepted, and shed considerably new light on the origins of things like "Satan".
Huh, I didn't know that was a thing people did, or at least something I thought people would have already done. Can you give some sort of summary of the high points? That seems super interesting, at least in a "Top highlights, we skip the 45,000 people begetting and begatting each other" way :)
A precise literal translation seems to indicate the Old Testament is the chronicle of one single tribe of Jews and their relationship to an alien overlord that genetically engineered man as a slave race and then for some reason, fucked off and never came back; also spaceships and big weapons and sci-fi stuff.
There's quite a bit more, but that's the best I can do in one run-on sentence.
Interesting. For me the evil is seeing evil everywhere. It is believing that Covid vaccines are ‘genocidal’ and asserting that they do more harm than good, when we cannot possibly know that at this point.
The intemperate language of super-confidence that one can see what the ‘sheeple’ can’t seems to me an exact mirror image of the bullshitting from institutions and mismanagement by high authorities.
Amusingly, were there a ‘Satan’ he would encourage us to believe in simple binary good versus evil where messy complexity, cock-up and confusion reign.
Certainty in vaccine scepticism or blind faith in safety and efficacy are two cheeks of the same arse. They make each side believe in their inherent superiority and goodness. Satan would love that.
Exactly, that's I think one of the core reasons to really think through what it means to say "Ok, there is actually an evil entity at play here". It seems to me that chances are it doesn't affect how you treat people or respond to them much, assuming you already include considerations like 'some people have some really unusual preferences and goals, which I might find horrible' in your judgements. History suggests we need to be more open to "humans do some absolutely horrific stuff", while at the same time reminding us they often seem to do that stuff while thinking it is for the good.
So I am all for coming up with rules of behavior that work with or without a particular evil agent, and adding a few for when you believe it exists but might be wrong.
I love that line "two cheeks of the same arse." :)
It's a very British line :) I feel very British today, under the circumstances...
Yeah, my discomfort in ascribing 'evil' to things we are simply passionately outraged about is kind of what started me writing Rarely Certain. I still lean toward that in itself as a potential 'evil', given the passions aroused.
Yes. Something I keep meaning to write more on is that judgement is critical, and learning to make better judgements is what makes you a more able to be moral person. So much modern morality writing tries to say something like "It is super simple, just do X!" where X is some version of 'ignore the possibility of this category of action'. I think in many ways that has veered towards either seeing evil everywhere you see something you don't like, or refusing to believe that anything people do is evil.
The example that always looms large to me is the question of killing. Obviously killing humans is something bad to be avoided, but that is not the same as saying killing is always wrong or should always be avoided; some people really need killing. Refusing to take responsibility for executing someone who desperately needs it is a failure on the level of your body's immune system refusing to attack cancer cells, with similar results for the body social. The difficult part is recognizing when someone really needs killing, in making the proper judgement. Bad judgements in either direction are a big problem.
At some point Batman and the Gotham justice system is culpable for not just putting the Joker down when he obviously is going to keep destroying other people. The Joker is just evil.
Sorry I haven't gotten the chance to properly comment on this yet, Doc. I will do so when I have a chance, either here in the comments or on my stack. Cheers!
Well-put RE the immune system. Our approach to microbes, still conceiving of them as not-self / invaders / enemies, leads to an assumption that the "immune system" is the biological entity built "for" protecting the self from the not-self, which is a narrow view to say the least.
However, it does seem like “meta-awareness” is at play on some level when it comes to immune cells. There are genes that are good at destroying cells or sub-cellular entities; immune cells want to use those genes the same way a dog wants to eat an invading mailman. So they are good at telling "self" molecules apart from "not-self" molecules; they have to be, being required to pass gauntlets demonstrating these powers of discernment before they are allowed to use their destruction genes. But they also have to develop the same tolerance reactions to bacteria. So in a sense they become something other than a mindless busybody. But at the same time, by so doing, they become something other than the "self" they are within. It is more like the house that the dog considers home; even if the same cells contain genes for the house and the dog, they are two different "selves." The genes for the immune system may have aligned interest with the genes for being a dumb ol kidney cell, but also for the genes for being a cool stomach bacteria; and the genes for the stomach bacteria or its viruses, if they are co-evolved for the host, "price in" the immune cells' genes. So there's no actual self / not-self distinction in terms of long term genetic cooperation.
Antibodies are made by genes that are good at imitating other molecular forms. Again we conceive of this as antagonistic; but the genes for antibodies share interest with genes for viruses too - just, not the currently fixed phenotype. Genes for future variants, however, are obviously more concerned about self-competition and antibodies are how they displace the current reigning model. So these immune cells basically regard viruses as KPop, just constantly waiting for the next band to gush over.
Viruses can almost certainly be thought of as symbiotic. Besides potential roles in tissue recycling* or a likely benefit to offering immune cells a "challenge" to keep them competent mailman-eaters, there's loads of cell cycle functions that viruses contain genes for interacting with. So there's a niche for viruses to inhabit our cells and activate functions that promote the resistance of that cell against further invasion, as with CMV which promotes antiviral genes during latency in monocytes https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4136239/ - So it could be that all of our genes have all "priced in" viral genes which promote cellular activities of all sorts, including the alleged oncoviruses. And obviously all -- literally 100% -- of our own genes for coordinated cellular activities may have been first honed in viruses.
*For multicellular organisms, this is speculative. Viruses are employed for some bacterial programmed cellular death algorithms, such as to release eDNA during biofilm formation or dispersion - https://www.nature.com/articles/cddis2014570. Once again it’s possible that all bacterial PCD genes are virus-derived, but also that viruses initiated as bacterial PCD genes that wanted to cross into more genomes. So using viruses as cell-death-regulators might extend to plants and maybe some animal tissues as well.
Rogers doesn't seem to offer any rationale for wholesale ruling out the utility of squirting public officials and globalist CEOs with holy water.
I love this comment, thank you. I read it quickly when posted, and am going to dive into it more in the near future when I have the bandwidth to really grok it. I just wanted to respond quick to let you know how much I appreciate it!
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I think that you (like Rogers) raise some important questions. I was genuinely concerned about whether or not I was being fair to his position, and reached out to him on his stack to be sure. I didn't get a response other than that he liked my comment, so I'm hoping that translates to him not being offended by my characterization.
Just to address one of your points:
"I read his actual question 1 as closer to "If the ultimate source is Satan, how must I change my behavior to account for this fact? Can I change my behavior to better account for this fact? If one answers 'Well, since Satan is beyond our comprehension and ability to directly affect, the best we can do is update our expectations about how much coordination there is behind the scenes of those who seem evil,' that is a pretty reasonable answer."
I read it that way, too. As far as behavioral changes go, I think such changes are downstream of a shift in map/territory perception that would necessarily take place. In other words, once we see the battlefield from a higher vantage point, new and better tactics would become recognizable to us. The history of warfare is littered with similar circumstances, where a new strategy is implemented when a war is going particularly badly, born from a different understanding of the enemy's long term goals And, yes, I do have a few concrete (i.e. real-world, actionable) ideas about what those might be, though as I mentioned, it will take me a bit of time to get there. First I have to redraw the map.
I'll give you one example: in the comment thread of my article, we were visited by a bot (i.e. a "conversation module"). I'm not sure if anyone else noticed it; some people interacted with it, myself included. I'm new to the substack interface, so my investigation didn't begin by examining the details of the "person-shaped thing" in my dashboard. Like all investigations, it began with a hunch. One thing I'd like to do is explain how such hunches are born, so we don't waste time talking to things that aren't human, and can develop tools to redirect that mind-weapon against our enemies. That is one example of an actionable tactic against a purely destructive foe, which I believe is using the tools of our era to manifest.
My hope is that even people who regard this foe is purely emergent/ unconscious/ disinterested/ etc. will still see the dangers of its current manifestation, and the shape of the new battlefields that are forming as a result (even in strictly evolutionary terms). I'm not saying there won't be bloodshed, and that some of it won't be warranted. What I'm saying is that we should go to battle with every possible tool of advantage, and there might be a few that we're currently missing in the ol' Molly kit.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't serious questions. Quite the opposite: this war of ours has the highest possible stakes. But I have a question for you, which both I and I think many of our allies ask ourselves frequently: how's the war going so far? From my perspective, we are losing, and disastrously so. I think part of the reason for this is that we cannot comprehend "evil itself" as a motive. At best, we see it as some kind of background radiation, an effect rather than a cause.
Like Heracles' battle with the hydra, this makes it quite difficult to mobilize properly and form coherent strategies: we keep lopping off heads, and watching more shoot up in their places. It took a leap in imagination for him to address and attack the root cause. In my case, I am talking about a "physical" being; something which evidentially exists, which seeks to harm human beings for its own reasons. The thought experiment isn't proposing a philosophical treatise, but a tactical one; if such a being exists (as essentially all human cultures both extant and extinct have surmised), how exactly would one fight back against it?
All that said, I apologize if I was flippant about Dr. Rogers' questions (or about yours, for that matter). I am trying my best to elaborate on my theory, with my mind always on actual strategies and tactics. I want to win.
The Biblical way to fight against Satan is recognize that he is our tester, our prosecutor. Even Jesus had to be tested by Satan.
Christians are failing the test these days, and so Satan is having a lot of fun at our expense.
To be more precise, Christians have outsourced their duties to the government and endowed foundations. Go back and read Paul's letters, especially 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. The early church was a mutual aid society which had high standards of moral behavior. It was a shadow government whose only enforcement power was shunning. It was a society of relatively righteous people that was worth joining despite the considerable cost.
Christians are supposed to do more than pray, sing hymns, and listen to sermons. They are supposed to practice governing, without the crutches of being able to tax or do violence.
The early schools and hospitals in this country were funded by churches and other mutual aid societies. They were powered by *ongoing* altruism, not government, not 501(c)3 status, not large endowment funds.
Build new schools that don't take government money. Build and fund free clinics for the poor. Build rustic communes for the mentally ill homeless; model them on medieval monasteries. Stop relying so much on impersonal institutions. Recognize that Christianity -- or self government in general -- is hard. Count the cost.
I think you are on to something there with community. It seems like too much of our society has moved from close-ish groups of acquaintances, neighbors, friends and family to be replaced by entirely arms length relationship. That is, a lot of relationships where no one will help the other move house. A mix of intimate and arms length is always needed, but I think we have moved too far in one direction, and I am inclined to think it is not by accident. It seems to be official policy of the last few decades to separate kids from their parents, parents from extended families, etc. (I am also starting to think that is why cities are so damaging to people: the vast majority of interactions are with strangers, and density means you have trouble sorting through neighbors, crazies, family, etc.)
Judeo-Messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are a recent thing, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals... The trans-national, trans-racial, trans-sexual, trans-cultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond peoples, races, cultures) and which are the daily food in our schools, in our media, in our popular culture, at our universities and on our streets, have ended up reducing our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride to its minimal expression. We National Socialists came to liberate Paris, we did not destroy it.
No country is leading its own race in this invasion because it is a political agenda run by the UN and pushed forward by the Jews and their puppets (the politicians). Most people simply won't know or understand that this is a political program. However, some manage to understand that politicians are deliberately working to import Muslims and replace people, but that's about it, they are like a computer that cannot work because the program does not allow it. Jewish bankers are flooding Europe with Muslims and America with Third World trash.
People sometimes ask why the European left gets along so well with Muslims. Why does a movement that has often been openly anti-religious side with a fierce religiosity that seems to oppose almost everything the left has ever claimed to stand for? Part of the explanation is that Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
The three ideologies have certain key elements in common. Their whole worldview is based on an in-group/out-group concept: Chosen Race/Goyim, believers/kuffar, workers/exploiters. In-group/out-group polarization is represented in terms of purity. In some cases, it's quite literal: the outgroup is seen as a physically contaminating influence. In other cases, the impurity of the outgroup is less tangible. They are pathologized and dehumanized, portrayed, often using metaphors of disease, as immoral, bestial, even demonic: Islamophobes, anti-Semites, capitalist exploiters. Mammonism and Bolshevism are Jewish half-sisters.
💬 My thought is that it might be a more fruitful method, firstly to get people thinking of emergent beings seriously, but also of getting around what to me seems like the pitfall of demons/Satan language: we tend to imagine them as basically people level beings with magic tricks, not huge super organisms without interest in individuals as such. ~~Doc Hammer
Your(* magic-tricks-wielding demon Joos have just crept out of above language pitfall 🤭
--
(* ETA ie @ClarenceWilhelmSpangle's
I have magic-trick-wielding demon Joos? I don't remember packing any last time I moved...
😂 Sorry for confusion produced utterly unintentionally! Been too clever by half I guess, again 😳
Your = @ClarenceWilhelmSpangle's <-- whose comment my reply dangles from 🤷
OOHH! Hah, sorry, I saw the quote and thought you were responding to that :)
I hadn't read the Clarence guy's comment at all, actually. It hit my daily breaking point of "historical stupidity" patience pretty quickly, by the first paragraph in fact.
Satan is a Hebrew god. Satanism is a Jewish cult.
Congratulations on the weight loss! That is quite an accomplishment.
If I am understanding you, your argument is that focusing on the big 'them' or 'Satan' allows people to reorient their thinking away from symptoms or little bits but towards recognizing that something big is changing, that one's opponents are perhaps not just like you but mistaken, but very different in their goals and fit within society.
I don't disagree with that. I think it is quite useful to think about larger scale processes and systems, and not just try and knock down the occasional proud nail poking out here and there while the building burns down.
I think the weakness in focusing too much on the name of the evil, as opposed to the cause of evil itself, is that it doesn't actually help us act in a better way. We need to figure out how we are creating, or at least aiding and perpetuating, the evil. Naming it Satan or Tiamat or Loki doesn't really help that, and might actually hurt it.
My guess is that the root of this evil is lust for power, and we need to reorient our relationship with society by drastically changing how much power we allow e.g. the state to have over us as individuals. That has concrete steps and goals, as well as an idea of how we can prevent the lust for power demon from gaining the upper hand in the future.
I don't see how calling it Satan helps a great deal. Then again, if one doesn't have the temperament to address directly the larger social dynamics, maybe calling it Satan helps in a way that I can't appreciate myself. Like a Buddhist style "Well, it isn't literally Satan, but if that helps you behave like you should, go for it." sort of deal. I am always a little skeptical of that sort of thinking, however, as if we mistake the metaphor for reality we can come to some really bad conclusions.
Agreed. I think even just the concept of "emergence" is too foreign to most people. Hell, most writers on the subject don't even have a good definition of it. (Rob Axtel doesn't have one, for God's sake, and that man is a genius!) Finding concept handles that people can grasp and use is a difficult trick, and many that seem to fit come with a lot of baggage already attached.
(I am inordinately pleased at how well that sentence came together :P )
I am thinking through a follow up essay, imagining larger society as the being and the sub-societies within it as parts of the being that can go sick, or even cancerous, becoming destructive to the whole. My thought is that it might be a more fruitful method, firstly to get people thinking of emergent beings seriously, but also of getting around what to me seems like the pitfall of demons/Satan language: we tend to imagine them as basically people level beings with magic tricks, not huge super organisms without interest in individuals as such.
Still thinking it through, but it is more interesting than the half dozen other things I could be working on, so it might happen quickly :)
The inordinately remarkable handle Tonic Masculinity™ masters the said difficult trick just swimmingly, like sorta magic 😊
Aaaaand we've got our first ban!
Thought I'd drop in here and muddy the waters. I'm currently reading Mauro Biglino's "The Naked Bible" (highly recommend). His literal translations tell a very different story from the one commonly accepted, and shed considerably new light on the origins of things like "Satan".
https://www.maurobiglino.com/
There's a bunch of interviews with him out there. Fun stuff.
Huh, I didn't know that was a thing people did, or at least something I thought people would have already done. Can you give some sort of summary of the high points? That seems super interesting, at least in a "Top highlights, we skip the 45,000 people begetting and begatting each other" way :)
A precise literal translation seems to indicate the Old Testament is the chronicle of one single tribe of Jews and their relationship to an alien overlord that genetically engineered man as a slave race and then for some reason, fucked off and never came back; also spaceships and big weapons and sci-fi stuff.
There's quite a bit more, but that's the best I can do in one run-on sentence.
Dig it baby latest Mauro interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjQQ_3xJ2lg
Interesting. For me the evil is seeing evil everywhere. It is believing that Covid vaccines are ‘genocidal’ and asserting that they do more harm than good, when we cannot possibly know that at this point.
The intemperate language of super-confidence that one can see what the ‘sheeple’ can’t seems to me an exact mirror image of the bullshitting from institutions and mismanagement by high authorities.
Amusingly, were there a ‘Satan’ he would encourage us to believe in simple binary good versus evil where messy complexity, cock-up and confusion reign.
Certainty in vaccine scepticism or blind faith in safety and efficacy are two cheeks of the same arse. They make each side believe in their inherent superiority and goodness. Satan would love that.
Exactly, that's I think one of the core reasons to really think through what it means to say "Ok, there is actually an evil entity at play here". It seems to me that chances are it doesn't affect how you treat people or respond to them much, assuming you already include considerations like 'some people have some really unusual preferences and goals, which I might find horrible' in your judgements. History suggests we need to be more open to "humans do some absolutely horrific stuff", while at the same time reminding us they often seem to do that stuff while thinking it is for the good.
So I am all for coming up with rules of behavior that work with or without a particular evil agent, and adding a few for when you believe it exists but might be wrong.
I love that line "two cheeks of the same arse." :)
It's a very British line :) I feel very British today, under the circumstances...
Yeah, my discomfort in ascribing 'evil' to things we are simply passionately outraged about is kind of what started me writing Rarely Certain. I still lean toward that in itself as a potential 'evil', given the passions aroused.
Yes. Something I keep meaning to write more on is that judgement is critical, and learning to make better judgements is what makes you a more able to be moral person. So much modern morality writing tries to say something like "It is super simple, just do X!" where X is some version of 'ignore the possibility of this category of action'. I think in many ways that has veered towards either seeing evil everywhere you see something you don't like, or refusing to believe that anything people do is evil.
The example that always looms large to me is the question of killing. Obviously killing humans is something bad to be avoided, but that is not the same as saying killing is always wrong or should always be avoided; some people really need killing. Refusing to take responsibility for executing someone who desperately needs it is a failure on the level of your body's immune system refusing to attack cancer cells, with similar results for the body social. The difficult part is recognizing when someone really needs killing, in making the proper judgement. Bad judgements in either direction are a big problem.
At some point Batman and the Gotham justice system is culpable for not just putting the Joker down when he obviously is going to keep destroying other people. The Joker is just evil.
Sorry I haven't gotten the chance to properly comment on this yet, Doc. I will do so when I have a chance, either here in the comments or on my stack. Cheers!
Well-put RE the immune system. Our approach to microbes, still conceiving of them as not-self / invaders / enemies, leads to an assumption that the "immune system" is the biological entity built "for" protecting the self from the not-self, which is a narrow view to say the least.
However, it does seem like “meta-awareness” is at play on some level when it comes to immune cells. There are genes that are good at destroying cells or sub-cellular entities; immune cells want to use those genes the same way a dog wants to eat an invading mailman. So they are good at telling "self" molecules apart from "not-self" molecules; they have to be, being required to pass gauntlets demonstrating these powers of discernment before they are allowed to use their destruction genes. But they also have to develop the same tolerance reactions to bacteria. So in a sense they become something other than a mindless busybody. But at the same time, by so doing, they become something other than the "self" they are within. It is more like the house that the dog considers home; even if the same cells contain genes for the house and the dog, they are two different "selves." The genes for the immune system may have aligned interest with the genes for being a dumb ol kidney cell, but also for the genes for being a cool stomach bacteria; and the genes for the stomach bacteria or its viruses, if they are co-evolved for the host, "price in" the immune cells' genes. So there's no actual self / not-self distinction in terms of long term genetic cooperation.
Antibodies are made by genes that are good at imitating other molecular forms. Again we conceive of this as antagonistic; but the genes for antibodies share interest with genes for viruses too - just, not the currently fixed phenotype. Genes for future variants, however, are obviously more concerned about self-competition and antibodies are how they displace the current reigning model. So these immune cells basically regard viruses as KPop, just constantly waiting for the next band to gush over.
Viruses can almost certainly be thought of as symbiotic. Besides potential roles in tissue recycling* or a likely benefit to offering immune cells a "challenge" to keep them competent mailman-eaters, there's loads of cell cycle functions that viruses contain genes for interacting with. So there's a niche for viruses to inhabit our cells and activate functions that promote the resistance of that cell against further invasion, as with CMV which promotes antiviral genes during latency in monocytes https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4136239/ - So it could be that all of our genes have all "priced in" viral genes which promote cellular activities of all sorts, including the alleged oncoviruses. And obviously all -- literally 100% -- of our own genes for coordinated cellular activities may have been first honed in viruses.
*For multicellular organisms, this is speculative. Viruses are employed for some bacterial programmed cellular death algorithms, such as to release eDNA during biofilm formation or dispersion - https://www.nature.com/articles/cddis2014570. Once again it’s possible that all bacterial PCD genes are virus-derived, but also that viruses initiated as bacterial PCD genes that wanted to cross into more genomes. So using viruses as cell-death-regulators might extend to plants and maybe some animal tissues as well.
Rogers doesn't seem to offer any rationale for wholesale ruling out the utility of squirting public officials and globalist CEOs with holy water.
I love this comment, thank you. I read it quickly when posted, and am going to dive into it more in the near future when I have the bandwidth to really grok it. I just wanted to respond quick to let you know how much I appreciate it!
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I think that you (like Rogers) raise some important questions. I was genuinely concerned about whether or not I was being fair to his position, and reached out to him on his stack to be sure. I didn't get a response other than that he liked my comment, so I'm hoping that translates to him not being offended by my characterization.
Just to address one of your points:
"I read his actual question 1 as closer to "If the ultimate source is Satan, how must I change my behavior to account for this fact? Can I change my behavior to better account for this fact? If one answers 'Well, since Satan is beyond our comprehension and ability to directly affect, the best we can do is update our expectations about how much coordination there is behind the scenes of those who seem evil,' that is a pretty reasonable answer."
I read it that way, too. As far as behavioral changes go, I think such changes are downstream of a shift in map/territory perception that would necessarily take place. In other words, once we see the battlefield from a higher vantage point, new and better tactics would become recognizable to us. The history of warfare is littered with similar circumstances, where a new strategy is implemented when a war is going particularly badly, born from a different understanding of the enemy's long term goals And, yes, I do have a few concrete (i.e. real-world, actionable) ideas about what those might be, though as I mentioned, it will take me a bit of time to get there. First I have to redraw the map.
I'll give you one example: in the comment thread of my article, we were visited by a bot (i.e. a "conversation module"). I'm not sure if anyone else noticed it; some people interacted with it, myself included. I'm new to the substack interface, so my investigation didn't begin by examining the details of the "person-shaped thing" in my dashboard. Like all investigations, it began with a hunch. One thing I'd like to do is explain how such hunches are born, so we don't waste time talking to things that aren't human, and can develop tools to redirect that mind-weapon against our enemies. That is one example of an actionable tactic against a purely destructive foe, which I believe is using the tools of our era to manifest.
My hope is that even people who regard this foe is purely emergent/ unconscious/ disinterested/ etc. will still see the dangers of its current manifestation, and the shape of the new battlefields that are forming as a result (even in strictly evolutionary terms). I'm not saying there won't be bloodshed, and that some of it won't be warranted. What I'm saying is that we should go to battle with every possible tool of advantage, and there might be a few that we're currently missing in the ol' Molly kit.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't serious questions. Quite the opposite: this war of ours has the highest possible stakes. But I have a question for you, which both I and I think many of our allies ask ourselves frequently: how's the war going so far? From my perspective, we are losing, and disastrously so. I think part of the reason for this is that we cannot comprehend "evil itself" as a motive. At best, we see it as some kind of background radiation, an effect rather than a cause.
Like Heracles' battle with the hydra, this makes it quite difficult to mobilize properly and form coherent strategies: we keep lopping off heads, and watching more shoot up in their places. It took a leap in imagination for him to address and attack the root cause. In my case, I am talking about a "physical" being; something which evidentially exists, which seeks to harm human beings for its own reasons. The thought experiment isn't proposing a philosophical treatise, but a tactical one; if such a being exists (as essentially all human cultures both extant and extinct have surmised), how exactly would one fight back against it?
All that said, I apologize if I was flippant about Dr. Rogers' questions (or about yours, for that matter). I am trying my best to elaborate on my theory, with my mind always on actual strategies and tactics. I want to win.
The Biblical way to fight against Satan is recognize that he is our tester, our prosecutor. Even Jesus had to be tested by Satan.
Christians are failing the test these days, and so Satan is having a lot of fun at our expense.
To be more precise, Christians have outsourced their duties to the government and endowed foundations. Go back and read Paul's letters, especially 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. The early church was a mutual aid society which had high standards of moral behavior. It was a shadow government whose only enforcement power was shunning. It was a society of relatively righteous people that was worth joining despite the considerable cost.
Christians are supposed to do more than pray, sing hymns, and listen to sermons. They are supposed to practice governing, without the crutches of being able to tax or do violence.
The early schools and hospitals in this country were funded by churches and other mutual aid societies. They were powered by *ongoing* altruism, not government, not 501(c)3 status, not large endowment funds.
Build new schools that don't take government money. Build and fund free clinics for the poor. Build rustic communes for the mentally ill homeless; model them on medieval monasteries. Stop relying so much on impersonal institutions. Recognize that Christianity -- or self government in general -- is hard. Count the cost.