fabulous book

Useful. I didn't know Dawkins was behind the word. As Wiki describes it, more meta-pseudo-faux science about nothing. I'd tried to capture the colloquial usage, e.g., covering the 'meme generator' websites.

The 'meme generator' notion is that provocatively captioning a photo encapsulates an idea, and a shareable pic packages it for transport to infect Kim Kardashian fans worldwide.

Preeetty boring.

It feels related. They're trying to make ideas viral, create idea-units / 'truisms' that spread.

When they're ideas about specific people, we once called that 'gossip.' When Adolf did it, we called it 'propaganda.' (I stood many times where he did it--rode my skateboard there.)

It killed a lot of people.

James

Except that its dynamics could be studied by, say, epidemiologists, or sociologists, or even someone who can do math.

The distinction, if it matters, is that the meme spreads spontaneously through a population (or nutrient media) like an infection. Propaganda, from the New York Times, is pushed out deliberately from a central source.

People don't tell other people that "CO2 is a pollutant." MSM does that, deliberately.

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Dubbya used exactly the same kind of trick. He didn't end up killing as man y people.

WW2 killed about 60 million, the invasion of Irak about 600,000, but we can 't blame all the WW2 dead on Adolf, whereas Dubbya and his clique didn't ne ed to invade Irak. Saddam was a nasty piece of work, but what's replaced hi m seems to be just as nasty, and less capable of maintaining any kind of or der.

Actually, it can't. A "meme" isn't sufficiently well defined to sustain that kind of study.

Not exactly. They are trying to catch people's interest with the shortest possible string of text.

Gossip is about repeating information - not all of it reliable information - about people of interest to the listener. Newspapers have to make the subjects of their "gossip" interesting to the reader, which is a different kind of exercise.

Adolf wasn't the first person to use gross over-simplifications and downright lies, and he's certainly not the most recent example - Dubbya does come to mind.

The problem is that the "meme" changes as it propagates, much faster than the genome of a biological infective agent, and there's no guarantee that each propagator wants it to means the same thing to their targets as it does to the propagator.

But CO2 is a pollutant - if you dump enough of it in the atmosphere - and we've definitely got to the point where adding more to the atmosphere is a bad idea.

Lots of gases are fine in moderation, but dangerous in excess.

That's information, and it is the kind of information that newspapers should be spreading. Claims that our current atmosphere is dangerously low on CO2 are simple lies and the Murdoch media spread them, deliberately.