From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Thu Jan 30 2003 - 18:05:01 MST
Ramez Naam wrote:
> As a proxy for my own participation I'd like to point this list to
<snip>
> http://slate.msn.com/id/2070210/entry/2070211/
>
> mez
One interesting excerpt from the middle of the middle
( http://slate.msn.com/id/2070210/entry/2070214/ ):
''To put it another way: We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally
a "meme"—a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that
spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or
arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme, and the Bush
administration has done some of that effectively. But some forms of killing
and arresting—especially the kinds that get us bad publicity—do so much to
spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss. So, policy prescription
No. 2, in some contexts, can be more precisely stated as Policy Prescription No. 3:
/The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only
to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes./
''Rephrased in these terms, the point I've been trying to drive home is that,
for technological reasons, memes are getting faster and slipperier.''
Mike again:
I agree that the impulse to commit terroristic acts has a large memetic component.
Hard to measure or even _sense_ this stuff, but it does seem important.
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