#david against goliath

[entities-of-posts]

Why are all of your links in pinned post broken I'm frothing at the mouth let me in let me see the secrets let me in let me in let me in let me in let me in

I have no idea, they work for me, but they don’t work for some people… you can try manually searching for the tags which title the arcs, and either scroll to the end and then read back up or tack on the chrono function yourself. It’s build into the links, which might be what doesn’t work for you. Recurring characters also have their own tags.

I’ll tag this post with all the arc tags, so you can click on them, as the search function is terrible.

Of course, a lot of the lore is actually on discord now!

[cavalierzee]

A Palestinian David vs An Israeli Goliath

A Palestinian David vs An Israeli Goliath

A Palestinian Child vs An Adult Israeli Trained To Kill

A Palestinian Rock vs An Israeli Assault Rifle

A Palestinian Original Land Owner vs A Zionist Invader

[cjestme]

Do people really not get whiplash when they think about how RB chucked in their reserve driver on a cold Silverstone morning to visualize how a racing incident was actually attempted murder, without thinking about the ramifications of that kind of slander, especially on a poc? If after almost 3 years you can’t detach yourself from 2021 and say, 'Yeah, you know what, that season was fucked up,' then Idk man.

[impossiblyobvioushideout]

https://www.cahsuesmusk.com/

And if you're one of the original subscribers, you'll get $100 if they win. Though they have also said they will accept the ownership of Twitter as compensation.

"In 2017, 150k people paid Cards Against Humanity to protect a pristine plot of border land from Trump’s racist wall. But then an even richer, more racist billionaire—@ElonMusk—stole their land and dumped his shit all over it. Fuck that! www.ElonOwesYou100Dollars.com #ElonOwesMe100Bucks"

[short-wooloo]

"Lucas based SW off of the Vietnam war-"

No, Lucas compared the conduct/strategy of the conflict of the Galactic Civil War (original trilogy) to Vietnam, one side being more numerical than the other who uses guerrilla tactics to even the odds, it's an aesthetic, the conflict(s) of Star Wars are not the Vietnam War, Star Wars is good vs evil, light against darkness, selflessness against selfishness

It's fantasy for crying out loud

[daenystheedreamer]

me personally kid... this is all words on teh screen and words on the page...

[jeremycollinsstan]

david vs goliath is the season that never falls out of cultural relevance

[nonbinaryphantom]

in short reaper au valerie is a soulsborne protagonist does that make sense

[owlinahazeltree]

I once played a game of Monopoly with my friends and while everyone was shouting I bought a property from another player for 4 dollars on the one condition that I don’t give it to anyone else

When someone else offered 500 dollars for it I gave it traded it back to who I bought it from for 3 dollars

I may have lost by the rules standards but playing the game like a capitalist joke was a moral victory in my heart

[yeetus-feetus]

Today my mother made me go to the beach. And while I was there I let myself enjoy the water and sand between my toes.

After a little while I felt like crying.

I felt like crying because remembered the videos I had seen of Palestinian children playing in the water of their beaches, of parents chasing children around while they laughed, of people enjoying the water and feeling the sand between their toes.

Then I thought about how these people don't get to enjoy their beaches anymore. Because Israel won't let them, because Israel is bombing the families who used to play in the sand.

When we got in the car my mum rolled all the windows down, said something about the fresh air. And as we drove I felt the cool wind against my face, in my hair.

And I wanted to cry.

Because the people in Gaza don't get to just enjoy the fresh air. Because all they're breathing in is debris from destroyed buildings and white phosphorus, and the smell of the dead.

I looked out my window and saw my old school as we passed. And I felt guilty, because I dropped out. But their are children in Palestine who are crying and begging to go back to school and they can't.

The children in Gaza can't go back to school because Israel has destroyed and bombed them.

And I think about the displaced people taking refuge in those very schools while Israel attacked them. I think about how unfair and cruel that is.

And then I see the trees. My favourite trees, Gum trees that are native to my land. And I think about how the native trees in Gaza are being destroyed and bulldozed, very important trees that mean a lot to the Palestinian people. And those trees are being taken away by Israel.

Then there are houses, homes and people going about their day. I watch them from my car window and I want to cry still. Because the people in Gaza have no homes, they don't get to go about their day.

I think about the displaced people in Gaza, who are lucky to have a tent to sleep in. Because Israel has bombed their homes, rained white phosphorus above their homes, bulldozed over their homes, forced the Palestinian people to flee from their homes.

I'm barely holding in my tears, because I'm in the car on the way to my own home and the people in Gaza don't get to do that.

We pass the shops, and my throat starts to close up because there's people buying ice cream and groceries for their families. And the people in Gaza are being starved by Israel.

The people in Gaza don't get to have ice cream, they can't do their grocery shopping. They don't even have enough food for their own children because Israel refuses to let any aid trucks in, because they control all the borders and entries into Gaza.

We pass by a chemist in particular and I think about all the children in Gaza not being able to receive medical care. Because the hospitals are being attacked by Israel. Because no medical aid can get in. Because they have doctors being killed.

And then we pass by the park. The park is empty. And I think about the empty parks in Gaza. Because there are no children to play on the swings, no children to run and laugh. Because the children are crying instead. The children have no legs to play because they've been bombed. They can't laugh because white phosphorus has burned through their faces. They can't do anything because they are frozen in fear.

Theses children who should be filling up empty parks are holding their baby siblings, trying to keep them alive because their parents, aunt's and uncles, have all been slaughtered by the IDF. These children who should be laughing are screaming out for help because members of the IDF are raping them.

These children who should be having fun at the park are prisoners of Israel for throwing rocks at tanks like the boy David who threw a rock at the giant Goliath to save his people. And these children are being tortured in these prisons because they were hopeful and brave.

These children who should be with their families at the park are dying. Are dead. A lying beneath the ruble. Are cold and limp with no air in their lungs. These children are in pieces scattered across the blood drenched ground.

They should have been at the park today.

I can hear a man talking on the radio, and he's talking about unimportant nonsense things and I feel angry. I feel frustrated. Because why is no one else talking about this!? Why is no one talking about what's happening to these people!??

We pass by the fresh water creak right before my house and I want to scream! Because I know there's no fresh water in Gaza. I know there are Palestinians dying of dehydration and yet there is fresh, drinkable water running right there! But the water in Palestine has been polluted by blood and disease, and the seawater Israel has flooded their water supply with.

And when I get to my bed I finally scream and cry and punch my mattress to get all my emotions out.

Now I'm numb and writing this so that someone will see it, hoping that someone will understand, hoping that someone will fight even harder for the people of Palestine.

I'm hoping that they can enjoy their beaches again. I hope that's sometime soon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[the-eeveekins]

Can't believe my eyes 🥲

Welcome to the Unofficial Top Tumblr Relationships Bracket!

Many people on Tumblr might have engaged in the practice of "shipping" in relation to "media". Some, according to legend, even have opinions on these matters.

If the above happens to apply to you, you might be eligible to vote in this bracket! We have pitted the most popular pairings of the 2023 Tumblr Year in Review against each other to see who will emerge victorious. Final polls drop on Sunday, May 12th at 6PM PDT, and will run for a full week.

Check current vote counts here!

FAQ:

How was the bracket made and seeded?

This bracket was made based off Tumblr's 2023 year in review ship list, and edited to fit into a workable bracket. Matchups were seeded according to ranking on the list.

What are your stances on voter fraud, campaigning, bribing people with drabbles and/or art, etc?

Enthusiastically in favor! We do, however, ask that you don't DDOS Tumblr, and ideally don't commit any murders that can be traced back to us.

Why aren't there platonic relationships in this bracket? There were in the AO3 one.

The AO3 data we were working with included all kinds of relationship tags, including platonic ones. The Tumblr year in review top ship list does not.

I have an issue with [x] being included in this poll.

This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with some of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement of anything included in the bracket, and refrain from harassment.

In general, please remember that this is intended to be a fun time for the wide community which is fandom culture, and treat each other with respect!

Bracket Schedule!

[fairuzfan]

Hello. I just got in contact with a group in Seattle making "solidarity" art and I wanted to know what that means to you. Is acknowledging the horrors in Gaza the most effective way to make Palestinians feel seen? Or is there more value in incorporating symbols of resilience, like olive trees, watermelons, and spoons?

By acknowledging, I mean create something enraging, like depicting the drastically different living conditions on the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the border wall. Healthy people in open farmland on one side and a warzone on the other. Or is it better to include a little hope? One idea I've been mulling over is painting a Palestinian child and IDF solider in a way that suggests David and Goliath (I found out the most common charge against Palestinian youths is throwing rocks). Another is Gaza as a torn tapestry with Mother Palestine sewing over and repairing the rips with tatreez.

I guess the real question is: Do you think most Palestinians would appreciate an attempt at comfort, or is it better to simply grieve with them?

Thank you so much for sending this in. My personal take is the most inspiring imagery are symbols of resistance. For example, this poster is embedded in many Palestinians' minds (click) as a prime example of resistance. I love images of olives and flowers not because they're soft, but because they represent life to me. Something I also adore is Rafeef Ziadah's poem "We Teach Life, Sir" and Samah Fadil's "Then, A Palestinian was Born," as words that speak to me as core parts of Palestinian resistance.

I think you can definitely mix strength and grief, or comfort and grief together when talking about Palestine. Refaat said it best: "the most dangerous thing I have is an expo marker but if an Israeli soldier were to come to my house I would use that expo marker and throw it at them." To us, the idea that we have to resist is grief and the grief moves us to resist. I personally really love the david and golaith imagery because it reminds me of the poster below.

I guess this is all to say that you can mix them together, the grief of seeing people dying and the strength of resistance against the oppression. What's the most effective thing is portraying the truth: Israel kills and Palestine resists.

Here is the image. I highly encourage everyone to print out this poster and post it around town if you're able. Or even post it around social media if you can, and link back to palarchive so that people can see there's so much palestinian art and history that they can explore.

[miath3great]

One thing that will never cease to baffle me is how zionists talk about Israels enemies. It’s all talk about „the David Israel vs. the Goliath Arab world“, when that has never been the case. Hamas was using rockets made from plumbing materials that could not be expected to land within a kilometer of their target. Israel has an iron dome system that caught almost all projectiles. In 2017, a Hamas rocket barage got through and killed a few israeli citizens, the retaliatory strike killed as many people as palestinians had killed up to that point combined. They matched the destruction that palestinian resistance had done in decades in one singular strike.

If we go further back to the first war that israel fought, we see an alliance of four states, that was using outdated equipment. As an example, Egypt was fielding the german made Panzer 4 Ausführung F2. This tank was introduced in the first half of WWII. It was long outdated by 1945 and absolutely inadequate. Israel was using french made AMX-13 and M-51 tanks, both far superior in firepower and far more modern.

The war started with a preemptive strike by Israel. Through the betrayal by Jordan, one of the four nations was not able to send any significant amount of troops, down to three that were not able to match Israeli combat power.

During the 2006 war with Lebanon, the weapon that showed the most effect against Israeli and American forces was a cement truck stuffed with fertilizer. It was a weapon that required the death of the user to work.

During the earlier days of the Gaza invasion, the IDF was fielding Merkava 4 tanks, which are among the most modern and capable tanks in the world. The Hamas answer to that? Bags of high explosives attached by hand.

Israel is the definition of a Goliath. They are not bravely defending Judaism against the Arab terror. They’re kicking people while they’re down to crush any thought of resistance. This can never be the face of anyone‘s safety and while I’m not jewish I think it is safe to say that this should never be the picture we have of jewish people.

[fangirloverlode]

Going insane thinking about both of Leigh Whannell’s character in the saw franchise: Adam and David. They’re both biblical names (and the most common names ever but bear with me)

In the Bible Adam is The First, just like Adam is the first character we see in the Saw franchise. In most depictions Bible Adam was also punished for what were arguably Eve’s actions (just like Adam was for Lawrence’s, being just a part of his game.) Yeah he ate the apple, but he wouldn’t have had Eve not suggested it. Yeah Saw Adam’s job was shady, but he never would’ve been taken had he not been photographing Lawrence specifically.

And then in David’s story, he overcomes great adversity (Goliath) against all odds, just like David from Saw 0.5 (the bear trap.) Which may sound like a bit of a stretch but considering survival is so rare in this franchise it sticks out to me.

I may be overanalyzing lol

[tyrantisterror]

Who's THE Devil?

You know, from, like, The Bible?

One of the things the various takes on Hell more or less agree on is that there is one demon among the legions of Hell who more or less reigns supreme - The Devil with a capital The. What they rarely agree on, however, is which devil that is. So, for funsies, let's look at all the candidates for The Devil, shall we?

Belial

The concept of demons arguably predates Abrahamic religions, at least if we take it at its most nebulous definition of "supernatural people from an Other world who are somewhat antagonistic toward humanity." But the more specific and probably more familiar version of them began with The Book of Enoch, one of many texts that were deemed non-canonical by Christians yet still holds a great deal of influence on Christianity as a whole. It's an extended account of the Noah story, positing that a group of angels rebelled against heaven because they wanted to sleep with mortal women, and created a race of giant half-human half-angel offspring called the Nephilim (Goliath, of David and Goliath fame, was one of the nephilim). God wasn't happy with this, and sent the rebel angels to a fiery pit before killing most of the nephilim with the big ol' flood (though Goliath's lineage survived somehow I guess).

It's not quite how most people picture the War in Heaven and rebellion of the angels, but it's nonetheless where that story started, and that makes it important. This is the first take on what would become the classic origin story for demons and Hell itself. And who is the leader of the rebel angels in this story? Why our good friend Belial, of course. Belial would remain a prominent demon from hereafter, but despite having the earliest claim for the crown of The Devil, Belial has not remained the frontrunner in the race, and is generally demoted to just being a high ranking demon, rather than the Highest ranking one.

2. Beelzebub

I've talked about Beelzebub before and I don't want to spend too much time rehashing that post, so brief recap: Beelzebub began as a mean nickname for a god from a rival religion to Judaism who was named Baal Zebul, which means Lord of the Heavenly Place. Baal Zebub, by contrast, means "Lord of the Flies." Eventually Baalzebub becomes Beelzebub and, divorced from the original context of its creation, becomes a character in his own right, being a prominent demon. And because Beelzebub appeared in a lot of texts, many of them very old as demonology go, he became a major competitor for the title of The Devil, and remains so to this day. I think it's partly because the name "Beelzebub" is really fun to say, but the sheer history and volume of demonology texts portraying him as a big, powerful devil also help. In the rare stories where Beelzebub appears but does not get to be The Devil, he's still portrayed as fairly high ranking, with both Milton's Paradise Lost and Marlowe's Faust making him The Devil's right hand demon, second in command of Hell. So even when he loses the crown, Beelzebub takes home a good silver medal

3. Asmodeus

Asmodeus is another of our "predates Christianity" demons, right up there with Beelzebub and Belial, and as far as I can tell from what I've read he was originally intended to be The Devil rather than just a devil. It's kind of right there in the name - "deus" means god, so Asmodeus having that name marks him as a demon who thinks himself equal to God.

(well, ok, there's some debate about the full origin of his name, with some arguing the "deus" part was originally a play on "deva," which in turn is loosely translated as... demon. The fact that Asmodeus's name is pronounced/spelled differently to a preposterous degree is part of why the water is so muddy - Asmoday, Asmodai, Asmodee, Osmodeus, it goes on and on)

One of his better claims to the crown comes from the story of Solomon - you know, the wise king who told people to cut babies in half. Solomon's less canonical feats include enslaving a shitload of demons to build a temple for him by way of the rite of exorcism, using a magic ring and the power of Christ to compel the damned to do manual labor for him. Asmodeus is specifically stated to be the strongest demon he summons in part because he is the King of all Demons, i.e. The Devil - and the other demons weep at the sight of their king being reduced to a slave by mortal hands.

Why is this a strong claim? Because the story of Solomon in turn inspired The Lesser Key of Solomon, a text about using the rite of exorcism to summon and use demons to do your bidding. The Lesser Key of Solomon includes the Ars Goetia, which is basically a big ol' bestiary of demons, and where many of your favorite pop culture demons - like, say, Stolas the owl guy - come from. Being the King of all demons in the story that inspired one of the more thorough and exhaustive lists of demons and their hierarchies should count for a lot.

There's one other great claim to fame Asmodeus has in his favor. While not directly named in Dante's The Divine Comedy, the description Dante gives of Satan's physical appearance matches with the most popular descriptions of Asmodeus - in particular, his three heads, one of which is yellow, one red, and one black. Granted, it'd be more of a smoking gun if one of those heads was a bull and the other a goat, but they're all very ogre-like, so I still think it stands. Dante's Devil is, more likely than not, Asmodeus, and that's a BIG point in Asmodeus's favor.

4. Hades/Pluto

Ok, so, a great deal of the Old Testament was originally written in Greek, and the New Testament was written in Latin, both of which happened when belief in the Olympian Gods was pretty strong. As such, the word "Hades" appears in the Bible a lot when talking about the place where dead people go, though it probably wasn't meant to literally be the same underworld as that in Greco-Roman mythology. Probably.

But because Christianity was spread primarily by the Roman empire once they converted to Christianity, and because Europe ended up getting a centuries-long case of stockholm syndrome for the Roman Empire that involved many people in power declaring that Greco-Roman mythology was super important literature and Latin was the language of God Himself, there is a good chunk of Biblical apocrypha that treats the use of Hades as, well, a literal crossover of sorts. Which is to say that Hades the god is sometimes treated as, like, a figure in Christianity, generally a demon specifically. And because he's, you know, Hades, from, like, The Odyssey, people feel he needs to be prominent. I mean, Hades RULED the underworld in Greek mythology, so if we're stealing him for Christian folklore, he should at least be in upper management, right?

The strongest case for Hades being The Devil comes from The Book of Revelation, one of the few books in the Bible that actually contributes to demonology (despite what people tell you, demons really don't show up in the Bible that much - most of what we think of as iconic demon lore come from non-canonical works). You know the four horsemen of the apocalypse? War, Famine, Plague, and Death, right? HA, WRONG! It's Conquest, War, Famine, and Pestilence & Death, you fake horseman fan. Well, anyway the line that introduces Death/Pestilence & Death ends with "And Hell followed with him." Except, no, not really, because the specific word used is... Hades. "And Hades followed with him." Which, depending on how you want to interpret the line, could very well mean a literal, King of the Underworld Hades.

Of course, the problem with using Revelation as proof is that Revelation itself is pretty unclear on who's leading the forces of evil. Is it the Seven-Headed dragon who's cast out of Heaven at the beginning of the end of the world? Is it the seven headed leopard monster that the dragon gives his crown to? Is it the monster who crawls out of the ground to speak for the seven-headed leopard with the voice of a dragon? Is it Hades? Is it God, the one who's allowing all this violent shit to happen and frequently sending his angels to make it way fucking worse? Who can say.

So, while it's not super common, there are more than a few works where The Devil is none other than Hades himself. Disney... might not have been completely off the mark, I guess?

While I think Hades's claim is pretty weak, I should note that one of the works that puts a LOT of Greek mythology into Hell is none other than Dante's The Divine Comedy. 70% of the demons in Dante's Hell are just Greek monsters, with the remaining few being Asmodeus and some OC demons he made up with portmanteu names a la Pokemon. Notably, Hades is one of those demonized Greek figures - presented as the Judge who decides where in Hell sinners end up based on their crimes. He's not The Devil, though, so while Dante kind of helps Hades's case, he also kind of ends up making a counter argument to it.

5. Abaddon/Apollyon

Ok, so, the word "abaddon" is used in some texts to refer to Hell, and sometimes it's personified as well. It literally means "ruin." Well, in time, Abaddon is personified and become a demon, which should feel like a familiar story to you by this point. And because Abaddon can also literally be Hell itself, it's only natural that some stories posit Abaddon the demon as the rule of Hell, much as Hades is the ruler of Hades in Greek mythology. This is Abaddon's big claim, and it's not bad, but it's not super strong. Nonetheless, it was enough for at least one prominent Christian text, Pilgrim's Progress, to make Abaddon (under one of his synonym names, Apollyon) to be The Devil, so we can give him that too.

6. Sheol

The sections of the Bible that are written in Hebrew use the word "Sheol" to refer to the underworld/afterlife rather than Hades. Now, Judaism doesn't have the same Hell as Christianity, or the same concept of Heaven either for that matter, and Sheol is less a place of torment for the damned and more of a waiting room for the dead to hang out in until the Messiah comes.

Nonetheless, Sheol did get personified like Abaddon and Hades, and that personification (which, in some versions, is a batty old lady, which is fun) later became a demon in its own right, and thus, for the same reasons as Abaddon and Hades, has a claim to being The Devil by dint of also being, you know, Hell itself. Not the strongest, most popular claim, no, but a claim nonetheless.

7. Satan

Feels rather obvious, doesn't it? Ok, so, in The Bible, one of the characters who was retconned into being The Devil is the angel in the Book of Job who takes on the title of Satan. In the original context of the story, "Satan" is not a name, but, again, a title - a job title, really, roughly akin to "prosecuting attorney." The Satan in the Book of Job isn't a rebel angel, but an angel whose job is to argue for the opposing view point to make sure everyone is doing the right thing. Less "The Devil" and more "the devil's advocate."

But! Christians fucking LOVE the devil, and they want more devil in their Bible, so many translations treat (the) Satan not as the hard-working servant of God he was originally written as, but as, you know, The Devil, arch-enemy of God and justice. And so Satan becomes synonymous with The Devil, and over time more and more appearances of The Devil give him the name Satan.

I can see an argument for this being the strongest claim, because the sheer amount of works where "Satan" is treated as The name of The Devil is enormous. But I think it's important to note that many of those works actually treat it as a name for the devil, which is to say, not the only name. I guess a lot of modern works think the name is so commonly used that it lacks its punch, and so they have The Devil pull the "I have many names" schtick to sound more imposing.

8. Lucifer

So there's a part of the Bible that talks about a star falling out of Heaven as a sort of metaphor for how people can fall from grace. Well, good ol' King James translated this as not just a falling star, but specifically The Devil himself, giving him the name Lucifer, which means "light-bringer." The King James translation of the Bible is bad in that it's immensely inaccurate, but good in that it's a beautiful piece of poetry in its own right, and since it had the authority of a goddamn king behind it, it quickly became a prominent Christian text and is still the preferred translation of many Christian sects to this day.

So, you know, that's pretty fucking big as claims go. There is one incredibly prominent (if woefully inaccurate) translation of the Bible where Lucifer is The Devil. Kind of hard to fight that one.

But it doesn't end there! I would argue that the most influential origin story for Christian devils, the one that has become ingrained in the cultural consciousness as THE story of the War in Heaven, is Milton's poem Paradise Lost. That's where most of the tropes we associate with The Devil and demons and Hell really come together to form the great devil mythology - well, it and Dante's The Divine Comedy, anyway. You know which name Milton chose for The Devil?

Lucifer.

Well, ok, he also calls Lucifer "Satan" with about equal frequency, but still - Lucifer is The Devil of Paradise Lost. And because of the sheer weight that both Paradise Lost and the King James Bible have in culture, Lucifer has ended up being used as The Devil in countless works since! Not bad for a translation error, right?

While the sheer number and notability of literature that uses Lucifer as The Devil is kind of argument enough for him having the best claim, I'd like to add one more argument in his favor: dramatic irony. I think what draws people to Lucifer is the meaning of his name - "the light-bringer" - and how it contrasts with his role as the king of a pit of darkness and misery. "Light-bringer" is a heroic name, the name of a character who brings hope and joy, which makes it so delicious when it turns out our "light-bringer" is an utter bastard. It's just irresistible, isn't it?

9. Mephistopheles

A good number of demon stories - arguably the majority of them - focus on mortals who make deals with demons and end up damned to Hell for doing it. We call these stories "faustian pacts," and we do that because the most famous story of this kind is the story of Faust, a scientist/alchemist who makes a deal with a devil named Mephistopheles to learn the secrets of the universe and ends up doing a lot of sinning in the process. Since Faust is such a famous and influential story, it only follows that its main devil is frequently viewed as The Devil.

...except

In most versions of Faust, Mephistopheles is not presented as The Devil within the narrative. He's a henchman, a flunkie, with one of the bigger names like Lucifer or Beelzebub pulling the strings. So while there are a number of stories (including a few versions of Faust itself) where Mephistopheles gets to be The Devil, it's far more common for him to be a devil - perhaps a prominent devil, maybe even one of the strongest and a close member of The Devil's inner circle, but rarely the one in charge.

10. Baphomet

Baphomet is a god whose name and appearance was repurposed as a demon by The Church of Satan, and so while I have to admit that is a claim to the crown, I don't think it's a great one. First, nothing about the Church of Satan's belief system is meant to be taken genuinely, with them admitting that they view Satan/Baphomet as a symbol rather than a literal supernatural being they believe in. Second, by rights Baphomet should be allowed to be Baphomet instead of being literally demonized. I honestly think it's better for Baphomet to lose this race than to win it.

11. Iblis

Demons in Islam work differently from demons in Christianity. Rather than being fallen angels, demons are wicked Djinn - a race of people made from fire and smoke rather than ash and dirt like humans. Djinn aren't quite as powerful as angels in Islam, but do have significant supernatural powers that humans lack. Like humans, Djinn have free will and can choose whether to be good or evil - and those that choose to be evil reside in Islam's version of Hell, where they are ruled by Iblis, the first Djinn to choose the wicked path and the ruler of Islam's Hell.

Unlike Christianity, there isn't really any debate on this. Iblis is, for all intents and purposes, the CANONICAL ruler of Hell, The Devil of Islam, and thus has the strongest and really ONLY claim to be The Devil of that religion.

...but, at the same time, Iblis can't really be the Christian devil, because Christianity doesn't have Djinn, and all the iconic parts of Christian demonology kind of hinge on the idea of demons as rebel angels, which demonic djinn very much aren't. So while Iblis's claim in Islam is irefutable, he doesn't have one in Christianity. Ain't that wacky?

I think it should be noted that there are more-or-less canonical texts where Iblis isn't treated as purely evil, either, including one where he actively asks for help in repenting and is turned down because, well, evil has to exist, and someone has to rule over it, and like it or not, that's Iblis's job now. It ends with Iblis wailing that he has become the greatest martyr of Islam. Which is so fucking hardcore, I love it. In Christianity, the texts where we humanized demons are non-canonical at best and deemed heresy at worst, but Islam allowed it to be more-or-less canon. They saw the coolest takes on the Devil and said "yeah we can allow that" - so much more rad than what Christianity did with them.

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So, who do YOU think is The Devil? You know, from, like, The Bible?