Word: memes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bush tries to avoid these words because the cheery meme of compassionate conservatism depends on affirmative language—speeches about what marriage should be rather than what it shouldn’t. Imagine Bush posing for a photo-op with Mary Cheney, only to have her turn to him in front of the cameras and ask if he thinks that she and her longtime partner should be able to marry. Such a confrontation would surely leave Bush stammering and red-faced, because it’s far easier for him to say a dehumanized “no?...
...second criterion, variation, is all too plain to see in this set of religion memes. We have innumerable belief systems tailor-made for the wide-ranging habitats of human minds. We can even point to major “speciation” events such as the Reformation where a major mutation in one strain of meme (Catholicism) leads to a flowering of variation and variety of different memetic strains (Protestantism in all its divergent glory...
...third characteristic, differential reproductive success, that is the most fascinating in the realm of the meme. The memes of the Quakers and Shakers are slowly evaporating before our eyes as their children are exposed to the competing memes of the modern world—memes of capitalism, gender equality and consumerism. Quakerhood is an endangered meme, a meme that can no longer compete in the marketplace of ideas that has opened in the 20th century...
...more terrifying are the virulent yet self-destructive memes of radical Islam, or radical Christianity for that matter. The memes that inhabited the brains of the hijackers happened to ensure the destruction of their host, but if they are virulent enough to spread to the brains of others prepared by their local conditions to provide good homes to their ilk, this is no matter threatening their survival. Like viral particles of HIV that infect 20 others for every host they happen to kill, the suicidal terrorist meme is likely spreading in the face of these wanton acts of destruction...
...memetic battleground does not as yet include, however, places like Afghanistan. Here are the game preserves for weak and un-adaptive memes, the great game parks for the memetic equivalent of the dodo. We need to introduce the rabbit to their Australia, the zebra mussel to their Mississippi. Instead of bombs, we should be dropping radios that receive a generous sampling of free-world radio in order to inoculate them with a normal culture of memes before they are infected by the worst of the bunch, the Ebolas of the meme world, suicidal self-righteousness...