Social Media, Memes, Censorship & Interference

I'm not a very talented meme maker, but it's a fact that the best military intelligence recognises the power of memes, and I made the mistake of referring to that authority, and so the Memetic Warfare post above was denuded of the images I posted.

Out of all the memes I've written over the last 9 years, only a handful have been passed around enough times, that I've been inadvertently sent my own work.

Usually this is by a well-meaning connection of mine, hoping to red-pill me, which is always a good chuckle.

From time to time, I've also seen my memes passed around social media and that's rewarding when it happens. Usually they've been copied, butchered, nicked, repurposed and sometimes revitalised in exactly the way Richard Dawkins intended, when he mutated the word 'gene' to explain that instead of mutation by random change, and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity as memes.

Social media is no longer so effective, so I  don't mind getting blocked on Facebook. the latest 3 month ban has given me a chance to really look into different platforms, but it's still a great address book. 

Losing my twitter account in 2014 was a quite a loss, but it's still the best research tool despite the censorship, and I get to do a lot more of that lately, which is why I'm reasonably upbeat and confident about the future, although there's a lot of work to go and we can't drop our guard.

As I've mentioned, it does surprise me when individual posts on this blog are censored or tampered with. I posted a bunch of my hottest memes in a post from October 2018, and they were removed with a kind of image placeholder left behind as shown above, in case this link is not inviting enough to verify for yourself.

The most annoying interference is when an important post is tampered with, so that there are spelling, grammar or punctuation mistakes. Don't get me wrong, I do make regular mistakes, but they're always the same, such as repetitive use of a word in a paragraph and a few other idiosyncrasies of mine.

Around once a month or so, I'll reread a notable post of mine, and find the kind of errors that are not typical for me at all. They always undermine an important posts' credibility. It's been going on for years and it never happens if I'm just sharing something for shits and giggles.

Which is sometimes the case.

UPDATE - As if the universe is trying to help me, I just came across one of my TV memes being shared on Twitter, just now.

Regrettably the machine is censoring emails to my father, with links to my blog.

Update: Another of my memes spotted on June 1st 2022

Nurse? Nurse?

Sources say 'no mention of crisis actors have yet been made'.

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

I've been meaning to watch this for some time and it's a belter. Hedy comes from that wealthy Jewish-Austrian milieu that includes Wittgenstein and Popper (and Hitler if we excuse the wealth). She's a stunner and by the age of 19 had filmed the most erotic movie ever and married a wealthy Austrian industrialist. 

Bored with parochial Tyrolean mise-en-scene, she legs it to the USA with a reputation as a kind of teenage pornstar, and a stifling movie contract with Louis B Mayer that required a life of amphetamines and benzos to stay awake or get some sleep during 6-day-weeks of production.

Hedy is clearly no slouch when it comes to innovation and free thinking, but after some consideration of the documentary, and a fairly fierce conversation with my father who has some expertise on the topic, I have to concede that although she had a large hand in developing spectrum-hopping for guided missiles, torpedos and drones, it's likely her Italian collaborator George Antheil had a lot of input. It's also possible with her Austrian Jewish origins that she may have been a conduit for leaked secrets from Germany? 

Just a thought.

That said, Hedy also dated Howard Hughes who gave her free rein with all his designers and engineers for anything she wanted. So she must have been a brilliant mind.

Hedy was also an early adopter of plastic surgery and even provided suggestions for her surgeon on how to do it better. Sadly that story continued too long and by the end of your life her face was a mess (sic).

For me though the early Hedy isn't that attractive (though I wouldn't say no), but in 1969 she appeared on one of those vapid chat shows with creepy hosts. 

Despite the toe-curling dialogue she's a stunner even if there's a nip or a tuck here and there.