Found an interesting chapter which details an anti-colonial Sri Lankan folk tale which describes Jesus as an avatar of Mara ("the Buddhist devil" in oversimplifying terms), sent to trick the world to trap people in samsara (citation in alt-text).

Big fan of having these conversations, but it was funny to read the book's description re: liberalism as "under siege." Critics have noted liberalism requires a fantasy enemy of subversives to define itself against, the political scientist Michael Rogin used "under siege" to describe the mentality:

Our greatest living philosopher <3

Next week our reading group on politics and demonization is covering a chapter from Ryan Duns's book on the theology of horror + screening George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Associationist Demonology: James Gilray’s 1798 etching "The Tree of Liberty."

Charles James Fox as the Edenic serpent tempting John Bull (personification of England). Amongst the rotten apples of the Tree are the fruit of "democracy" and the "Age of Reason," associated with "murder" and "treason."

I'm super excited to look at this in more depth, great "game design as poetics" here.

If you ever see a depiction of Satan, the Devil, or a demon as an octopus or other cephalopod, please send it my way. The attached screenshot is from a Latter-day Saint magazine and depicts Satan's temptations like an octopus's "tentacles" (octopuses actually do not have tentacles).

Oh, thanks for your interest! I'm looking at the ways demonic portrayals of cephalopods have been used to justify expressions of political power/movements. You may already be familiar with this type, but I've included an example of French anti-communist fascists in the 30s in the picture.

Devilfish-style squid monster as featured in the game Dungeon World. It has the common tropes of dangerous tentacles and the demonized cephalopod somehow being unnatural or not part of the normal order of creation, but this one adds a disgust factor via the association with maggots.

As many continental philosophers have pointed out, what we take as "morally real" is more about our ideology and less about being in touch with some metaphysical truth. Alenka Zupančič critiques positive psych this way in an interview with Jule Reshe's Negative Psychoanalysis (p. 128).

Social psychologist Daniel Sullivan argues that societies with high degrees of visible social control (e.g. states with authoritarian tendencies and their populace) tend to exposit their norms in the form of moral injunctions (Cultural-Existential Psychology, p. 92).

David Livingstone Smith discusses in his book *On Inhumanity* how genocidal violence is "almost always" justified using moral language (p. 91).