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> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies w
by SllX 11d ago
> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus!
You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.
The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
- andai 11d ago>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield. This is also how I was made, I think.
- patrickmay 11d agoYou don't remember?
- SllX 10d agoSlightly different process but it’s in the ballpark… down the street, playing a different sport. lol
- dagss 10d agoThe point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
- SllX 10d ago> The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.
- dagss 9d agoSorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally, at all (and I do feel you are interpreting my comment uncharitably). It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you. I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose, because one has (for other reasons) decided that the religion or ideology is bad. The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
- SllX 8d ago> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally Hakuna matata. > I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”. > The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good. Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.