I certainly agree regarding fear, and nothing has proved to me what you say about it more than my own experiences.
I do not agree that viruses aren't real and actual.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/settling-the-virus-debate-challenge
But, my reasons have nothing to do with the above challenge, exosomes, or terrain theory, nor even the fraudulent and egregious criminal imposition of medical tyranny since the Covid psyop started in China with outrageous videos of hapless victims gushing blood from their various orifices and falling dead in the street.
Biology is simply so complex that it is impossible viruses have not arisen.
Life is an act of war. Every blade of grass is striving with every one of it's neighbors for it's very life. Every leaf, root, and stem in the beautiful, fractal forest is strategically placed to take light, and that taking blocks something else. In the PNW rainforest the climax forest is almost exclusively hemlock, because as a seedling it can endure light deprivation at the bottom of the well of shadows. Doug Fir grows faster, straighter, and far taller than Hemlock. Sitka Spruce is more shade tolerant than Doug Fir, but cannot match Hemlock. When it's seemingly greater brethren finally fall to the forest floor, the lowly Hemlock that has been waiting, draped in moss, wretched and wracked, barely alive, perhaps for centuries in their shadow, is far ahead of any new seedlings that may sprout in the suddenly sunny soil.
It has husbanded it's resources, carefully spending it's hoarded nutrients and scant sugar on a hopeful twig here, a few needles there, patient as death itself while awaiting the opportunity only death can provide. No other tree can survive that deprivation and denial for decades as can Hemlock. In the deep old growth where the canopy stretches across the sky, no other seedlings lurk in it's shadow. The only woody stems you can find are Hemlock seedlings in a full canopied old growth forest.
Life is extremely competitive. In time every niche is filled. There are plants like the Indian Pipe, white, pink, and purple, never green, because they don't bother with photosynthesis in the shadows of giants. They are strictly parasitic on the roots of those that can reach the light. There are Redwoods and Doug Firs as white as snow, completely parasitic, all the sugars they need donated by their community through their interconnected roots, but they are a rare sport, and not separate species breeding true, and so cannot compete with the shaggy Hemlocks once they comprise the whole of the forest.
Certainly life is predatory, and the lower on the food chain you go the more hideous the methods of killing and eating you find. Vertebrates rarely eat their prey alive, and never just by dissolving them in acid and absorbing the nutrients. So I am confident in germ theory and there is certainly ample evidence for pestilential creatures at the microscopic scale. I am also familiar with parasitism, having myself often experienced vermin sucking my blood.
And these are relatively massive and mind-bogglingly complex creatures compared to viruses. Where there is a gap in defenses, some living thing will slip through to feed, to wage life, and where the gaps are too small for even microscopic vermin a variety of parasitic genes, prions, and viruses must insert themselves and reproduce, even if they can't feed in some horrific tortuous way.
Life is very reliable, even when it's not alive. You can count on it making you suffer somehow.
Because of that I am sure viruses exist in plethora, even disregarding mountains of evidence, such as our own DNA replete with more remnants of viruses than our sexy Neanderthal lover-cousins have left traces of in us.
I am glad we are here, and I hope you are well and hale, my friend.
Thanks for that awesome reply, @valued-customer. I wrote several paragraphs in response last night and then left to research - to double check my info, lol - and closed the damn Hive window and lost everything!
Anyhoo, I think viruses have been hijacked by mainstream acedemia/science/pharma/media cartels, and added to their collective fear arsenal. In fact on land sea and air, viruses are necessary and prolific - and good!!
Viruses are part of what keeps us operating effectively, working in harmony with the essential parasites and good bacteria, which somehow all got the rap of alien intruders, instead of part of our essential infrastructure.
Inside our bodies is an ecosystem, not unlike that found in the unadulterated version of nature. Sure, we're out of balance, but that's down to our horrible diet, poison in our food, water, chemtrails in the air, the plastics in our food packaging, etc.
Did you know ocean going vessels are allowed to dump billions of tons of garbage in the ocean - every year? Who is the worst of the filthy offenders? Executives at the highest echelons of the world's most powerful biz, the good ole USA Inc, and affiliated corporations, get off looking squeaky clean, while ensuring the masses are kept sufficiently misinformed, only by virtue of massive PR budgets!
https://abetterfootprint.com/does-the-us-dump-garbage-in-the-ocean/
"Recent studies show that the US dumps the highest number of water bottles in the ocean. In fact, studies show that the US contributes as much as 242 million tons of trash in the ocean every year."
Have you ever heard of phage therapy? And, do you know what happens in germ free animals? I was shocked to see the net has been scrubbed of material I found on that subject just two years ago, which is very telling.
I agree strongly with this, yet there are harmful parasites, predators, and viruses, and if we don't keep functioning immune systems these will eventually kill us. Something eventually kills us all, however, and I reckon the best defense is to prepare to die fighting.
Regarding corporations, I note that the actions of individual persons are their personal responsibility, and claiming to act on behalf of some legal fiction does not absolve anyone of their personal responsibility for their actions. This is why I think such institutions are the Antichrist, because they obfuscate our personal responsibility for our acts by the pretense that it is the institution acting.
Agreements cannot act, and all institutions are nothing more than agreements. In this context only people act, and regardless of their agreements they remain responsible personally for their actions. Whoever ordered ocean dumping, and whoever carried out such order, are personally responsible for ocean dumping, and that culpability is negated under color of law by other institutions that have no rightful authority to do so.
Crimes are crimes, and their committers criminals, even if they escape prosecution and penalization.
It is my fervent hope that the present evolution of technology to decentralization of the means of production will eliminate all such deception soon, and our children will inherit a better world as a result.
sounds like more philosophy
still doesnt make viruses alive or even existential at all
No, my belief doesn't make anything. However, what everything is sources my beliefs, so the incomprehensible complexity of life shows that opportunities, such as for parasitic mechanisms like viruses to hijack cellular machinery to reproduce, which is what viruses do, are eventually taken advantage of. Life is incredibly ancient, shown to have begun before ~4bya. In that time it is not credible to state that such mechanisms haven't arisen to take advantage of the available niche.
It's comparable to stating that if the government issues EBT cards no one will claim them. The nature of biological mechanisms, their literally inconceivable complexity, makes such parasitic mechanisms inevitable in time, and there's been far more time for such mechanisms to arise than is necessary to make such event certain.
In favorable conditions bacteria can reproduce asexually every ~20 minutes. Each reproductive event has a small chance of going slightly awry, which occasionally produces mutations. You can do the math regarding how many mutations that generates in 4B years, but with any plausible degree of error in replication that is more mutations than there are possible species on Earth. That many opportunities for relatively short chunks of RNA or DNA that happen to encode instructions to replicate statistically guarantees they have arisen.
It's not a list of genetic code of viruses, or the tiny subset that cause disease in people. It's not much of a philosophy, and certainly not nihilism. It's just acknowledging that things happen when opportunities to happen arise, and the extraordinary complexity of biology has created so many opportunities for self-replicating parasitic mechanisms to arise it's just inconceivable they have not. Taking that statistical certainty in view of the easily reproducible evidence in our own DNA of relic fossil viral DNA that is stated to exist by entire industries of specialists that have specific expertise in the field and agree on that evidence - even without the voluminous other evidence of viruses that exists - is enough to convince me viruses are real.
YMMV
Edit: I want to emphasize the word 'industries'. I'm not talking about AN industry, but a plethora of them, many of which depend on completely different kinds of products based on using the viral form to create economic returns. From vaccines to CRISPR, from bioweapons to food additives, mechanisms found in viruses are used to produce products that make money. I don't know what you call a philosophy that simply looks at what exists and acknowledges that it exists, but that's the philosophy I ascribe to.
If bacteria, viruses, parasites were really as threatening as I interpret them to be on the basis of your statements, how could the many species have existed at all in the course of their existence on this earth? Why don't people die in immense numbers all the time? How can it be that people grow old?
From my point of view, the assumption that humans are capable of biological warfare is due to the belief in the total feasibility and specific targeting of what is intended.
But it is also said that each organism's biome is distinctly different from every other organism's, according to another theory. What some researchers seek to identify as "hostile", "parasitic", "killing", others want to find out as "beneficial", "interacting" and "making healthy".
Some years ago I read a scientific paper on the subject of tapeworms in the organism, which until then had always been considered enemies of the organism and which were now considered to have their benefits. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I found it. The organism is far more than its DNA, the so-called building blocks of life, if you take it as the ultimate realisation that all life is the same, is in strong conflict with what is happening at the higher levels of the organism.
Similar to physics, where there have been or are efforts to establish an all unifying theory, I see this in biology, where the all unifying theory is genetics.
Ultimately, this leads to the long-standing dispute between pure materialism, according to which all living things can be explained and manipulated on the basis of their individual parts, and what people call consciousness or spirituality, according to which there is an intelligence at work that opposes materialism.
The "truth" will have to be assumed somewhere in the middle, I think, without being able to pin it down.
Placebo research and how one's mind influences one's body and vice versa are the great unknowns that materialistically attuned minds are reluctant to engage with because it offers them too much fuzziness and uncertainty.
For example, it is still not really known why anaesthesia works the way it does and there has been research into this where patients have been operated on by surgeons in hospital using only hypnosis and felt no pain at all during the operation. This raises the interesting question of how much the body/mind does its own to become insensitive to pain and how much is externally supplied and ultimately you can't really tell the two apart.
Let me respond by stating I strongly agree that life isn't mechanical, merely the sum of it's parts. I personally consider humanity to be sacred.
Neither do I consider genes to be some kind of ultimate blueprint, particularly in view of epigenetics and the glimpses researchers are beginning to get of gene expression. Further, I also expect that numerous genes have more than one mode of action. In other words just because it can be shown that a gene affects some particular thing, that does not mean it doesn't also affect others.
Generally, I do not consider the sciences mature at all, but that we are merely beginning to grasp some potential in scientific understanding.
I don't consider viruses and bacteria as generally threatening either. Pathogens are subject to the fact of evolution, and one aspect of that is that any organism that degrades it's environment reduces it's prospects for survival. A virus that is immediately utterly lethal almost completely eliminates it's ability to spread by killing it's hosts before much opportunity to be transmitted can be taken. The more lethal a pathogen, the less virulent it can be (the less it can spread).
The vast majority of viruses and bacteria aren't pathogens, at least not human pathogens, and some, such as I discuss in the OP here, are beneficial. It is not commonly understood that bifidobacteria in our guts is critical to human health, for example, and without our gut fauna we'd just die, unable to digest food or prevent infections.
However, there are pathogens, and that is why we have immune systems. Evolution creates a tension between host immunity and pathogen virulence and lethality that has been ongoing since life arose.
I do not only consider material, mechanistic factors real, but reason is the basis for understanding. Rationality is not materialism. Regarding cognition, consciousness, or how persons relate to bodies, I have strongly criticized the view that we even have a word to describe it. We are at a laughably rudimentary state of understanding what it is, and it is provable that consciousness continues when we are unconscious, such as when we sleep. This exemplifies the absolutely inadequate understanding presently attained by scientists studying it.
It is very, very hard for most people to honestly state they do not know, and the more educated and specialized they are, the more difficult it is to overcome hubris and not overstate confidence in their understanding. People allow insuperable speculation to overcome superable reason. For this reason I consider humility to be the foundation of wisdom, and try to carefully differentiate between my speculations regarding what I believe or think, and what I consider factual and have confidence is real.
It is useful to keep in mind that science is based on falsification of what can be disproved, not proving some theory is true. Every scientific theory will be found to be false in some way, and science will progress in that field when that happens. That's how science progresses. Therefore I try to be open minded regarding my beliefs, and prepared to change my mind when something I believe is fact is falsified. If I do not do that I will believe what is not factual, and that will cause me to act contrary to what is right. I do not want to wrong people, so I strive to correct my understanding as reason allows. This is why I find criticism so valuable, because that is what best falsifies things I erroneously believe.
For the most part, I can agree with what I find as overriding statements in your comment.
I think it is a paradox, in a way. As I noted in the other comment, "facts" are a word that comes from the origin "to do ", they are therefore always open to attack.
The moment you accept a fact as disprovable, you are following a logic given by others (which coincides with your logic, otherwise you would not be able to follow it. However, all inner logic ultimately follows conscience and what one subjectively deems significant).
Our entire modernity prides itself on being fact-oriented when it comes to research and experimentation, but it shies away like the devil shies away from holy water from naming the role of the scientific experimenter (as observer and evaluator of his work) as a decisive influencer on the success and failure of his research and experiments. The objective observer does not exist. Objectivity is completely excluded in human social interaction. You would otherwise have to have someone observing the observer, who in turn is observed by an observer, and so on. (I assume you will name blind and double blind studies, but they are not saving from many other experiments where nothing is done blindly).
I am not negating your statement, I am merely mentioning its weakness, but also accepting its strengths. But I differ little in my own attitude from yours, I would say.
While we all have biases, these biases do not completely exclude objectivity. Objectivity should not be considered only an absolute, but is a range. We are all more or less objective regarding the variety of things there are, depending on our beliefs.
Some of us strive to be utterly objective, and some of us strive to be utterly faithful to a given dogma. I strive to eschew the latter because I believe we are incapable of ascertaining understanding of the reality we are part of due to our limitations. I may be accused of taking objectivity as dogma I am faithful to, just as I note that Atheism is as insuperable and dogmatic is every other religion. Every argument that faith in God is insuperable factually also can be turned around and apply to belief there is no God.
You are right there are weaknesses in my rationality.
But that is exactly what prejudices do, they preclude objectivity, because otherwise they were not prejudices, i.e. preconceived views, but an open result. A result remains open as long as you leave it open. If one "closes" it, then one has subjectively agreed, nothing more. There is nothing wrong with that, one should just be aware that it is so.
I state that objectivity is not needed to move in relationships. It is, radically speaking, even irrelevant, to want to establish objectivity within human relationships and to even try is the horse's mouth here. I must first completely destroy my belief in objectivity in human interaction so that, relieved of this burden, I can talk to each other on a reasonable basis. One cannot "be a bit objective", objectivity is understood as absolute and is also applied in this way, trying to beat another's arguments to death by bringing his or her "false" subjectivity into the field against one's own "correct" subjectivity (backed up by "objectivity").
I consider it a misapprehension to give objectivity this relevance.
HaHa! Yes, I must always laugh at the claim to be an atheist. :D chuckle.