Don't forget the Great Firewall as an extant example of ideological quarantine. Also consider CCP's domestic banning of the TikTok algorithm that is used overseas.
It deliberately misses the point about Claudine Gay's ouster from Harvard. It is not because she black and Rufo white. It's because, after three months of genocide BY Jews, Congress asked her if her students were allowed to call for genocide OF Jews. Rufo's campaign against DEI turned into a campaign for Jewish cancel culture.
"The Jewish billionaire class wants to stop students from opposing genocide."
Why use the dubious and confusing metaphor “mind viruses”? The literal thesis seems to be that some ideas have a great tendency to catch on while having maladaptive consequences. I am inclined to call these “fashionable follies”. Criticism and satire seem to be the most appropriate response.
Your analogy reads like taking revenge on the mindshare of "viral", the manifest competition, on the front both of its allusion to germ transmission -- contagion -- as your examples freely involve a case of traditional mass media distribution: which puts out of scope the reproductive fitness of the germs; and on the front of its ambivalence when you go virus=pathogen to focus on a *negative* impact on the reproductive fitness of the hosts (which amounts to wholesale dismissal of the symbiotic role of bacteriophages in healthy microbiomes).
My own favorite among analogies competing for the material is that which swaps gut and cerebral cortex, simultaneous to gut flora and native language vocabulary. What's a word but a contagious idea of what some phonetic chain means? Doesn't vocabulary populate the brain after birth much like gut microbes populate the gut?... to play comparable function.
I was familiar with the tale of the Xhosa tribe in Victorian times, but your retelling of it suggested a parallel with the farming situation in large areas of the EU. Who should we think of as the 15 year old visionary female - Klaus Schwab (he could always self-identify) or Ursula van der Crazy of the EU? The lunacy of cutting back livestock and fertilisers to save the planet could easily destroy Western Europe.
I'm not sure the term "virus" is a good description of the phenomenon because viruses never confer positive benefits on their hosts whereas good ideas do.
It's also useful to talk about the feedback that exists between culture and biology. For example, intestines make up 20% of the weight of humans, but proportionately almost double this for other primates. Why? Because the culture of fire making, passed on from generation to generation, means that most of our food is digested outside of our bodies via cooking, thereby negating the need for a long and energetically expensive digestive tract. In fact, humans now cannot survive on raw food (despite what Gwenyth Paltrow would tell you).
Gene-culture coevolution is a better descriptor of what is happening than "mind virus" in my view.
Good article otherwise, I was particularly fascinated by the tribe in South Africa destroying itself through following supernatural "visions".
Depends on what you count as hosts. On the one hand, phages participate to the equilibrium of a healthy gut flora. OTOH, look up syncitin and the syncitiotrophoblast.
"I suspect some of the hostility towards the phrase comes from the fact that “mind virus” sounds kind of dumb, like something Rush Limbaugh would say. "
That is the kind of gratuitous, smug elitist crap that I'd expect out of someone sick with their own mind virus. Otherwise, interesting article...
Don't forget the Great Firewall as an extant example of ideological quarantine. Also consider CCP's domestic banning of the TikTok algorithm that is used overseas.
This is not about this article, but here's an article commenting about Aporia in the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/rightwing-activist-christopher-rufo-ties-scientific-racism-journal
https://archive.is/LljD8
It deliberately misses the point about Claudine Gay's ouster from Harvard. It is not because she black and Rufo white. It's because, after three months of genocide BY Jews, Congress asked her if her students were allowed to call for genocide OF Jews. Rufo's campaign against DEI turned into a campaign for Jewish cancel culture.
"The Jewish billionaire class wants to stop students from opposing genocide."
https://twitter.com/normfinkelstein/status/1734212191719440473?t=E_4NpybuSxGEQomZOU7JJA&s=19
Why use the dubious and confusing metaphor “mind viruses”? The literal thesis seems to be that some ideas have a great tendency to catch on while having maladaptive consequences. I am inclined to call these “fashionable follies”. Criticism and satire seem to be the most appropriate response.
Is your conception of mind virus just a sunbset of the classical meaning of memes (i.e., the subset of memes leading to negative group outcomes)?
https://www.youtube.com/live/FFxsig1ZlG8?si=yQPPgW_FrEcY_qQo
Your analogy reads like taking revenge on the mindshare of "viral", the manifest competition, on the front both of its allusion to germ transmission -- contagion -- as your examples freely involve a case of traditional mass media distribution: which puts out of scope the reproductive fitness of the germs; and on the front of its ambivalence when you go virus=pathogen to focus on a *negative* impact on the reproductive fitness of the hosts (which amounts to wholesale dismissal of the symbiotic role of bacteriophages in healthy microbiomes).
My own favorite among analogies competing for the material is that which swaps gut and cerebral cortex, simultaneous to gut flora and native language vocabulary. What's a word but a contagious idea of what some phonetic chain means? Doesn't vocabulary populate the brain after birth much like gut microbes populate the gut?... to play comparable function.
I was familiar with the tale of the Xhosa tribe in Victorian times, but your retelling of it suggested a parallel with the farming situation in large areas of the EU. Who should we think of as the 15 year old visionary female - Klaus Schwab (he could always self-identify) or Ursula van der Crazy of the EU? The lunacy of cutting back livestock and fertilisers to save the planet could easily destroy Western Europe.
> Who should we think of as the 15 year old visionary female
Well, there's an obvious parallel here to a certain autistic Swedish teen.
Bad faith critique of Bronski's position.
I'm not sure the term "virus" is a good description of the phenomenon because viruses never confer positive benefits on their hosts whereas good ideas do.
It's also useful to talk about the feedback that exists between culture and biology. For example, intestines make up 20% of the weight of humans, but proportionately almost double this for other primates. Why? Because the culture of fire making, passed on from generation to generation, means that most of our food is digested outside of our bodies via cooking, thereby negating the need for a long and energetically expensive digestive tract. In fact, humans now cannot survive on raw food (despite what Gwenyth Paltrow would tell you).
Gene-culture coevolution is a better descriptor of what is happening than "mind virus" in my view.
Good article otherwise, I was particularly fascinated by the tribe in South Africa destroying itself through following supernatural "visions".
Depends on what you count as hosts. On the one hand, phages participate to the equilibrium of a healthy gut flora. OTOH, look up syncitin and the syncitiotrophoblast.
"I suspect some of the hostility towards the phrase comes from the fact that “mind virus” sounds kind of dumb, like something Rush Limbaugh would say. "
That is the kind of gratuitous, smug elitist crap that I'd expect out of someone sick with their own mind virus. Otherwise, interesting article...