Breaking News: Now They Want to Outlaw... Memes
I hope you guys will come visit me in prison.
When my youngest daughter was in second grade, she was the third leg of one of those adolescent love triangles common to young female friendships. Sometimes, the three girls would have group sleepovers or playdates and coexist perfectly peacefully without anyone getting their little feelings hurt. Other times, two would gang up against one—and by “gang up” I mean “want to ride bikes, not play Barbies”—and epic drama would ensue.
One day, the “ganging up” was apparently so out of control at school that I got a call from the principal. It seemed as if my daughter had been holding hands with one of the other trinagulators, which sent the third into a spiral. The spare wheel didn’t just retreat to the bathroom to pout; she dashed to the office and had them call her mom, who dropped whatever she was doing and marched immediately to the school and demanded that hand-holding be banned on campus. I am not making this up, nor am I fabricating the part where the principal agreed this was the perfect way to handle this unconscionable, traumatic offense. That’s why she was calling; to tell me hand-holding was thus banned on school grounds, and encouraging me to emphasize the importance of this new rule at home.
“That’s your solution?” I laughed.
“Well, yes,” she stammered, defensive. “It’s clearly problematic.”
“You do realize,” I pointed out, “that prisons build the best criminals, don’t you? If they can’t hold hands, they’ll hug. If they can’t hug, they’ll create a secret handshake that only two-thirds of them are privy to. If they can’t shake hands, they’ll carry each other on their backs, tie their shoelaces together, or make up a secret language. The hand-holding isn’t the problem.”
I was not particularly popular at that school.
It’s recently come to light (for me, thanks to this post by the great Meryl Nass) that Principal Gates would like to ban memes with “anti-vaccine messaging” from the sprawling Internet campus, home to 4.6 billion students.
On the Gates-funded Gavi website (tagline: VaccinesWork literally, that’s the motto of a site supported by the guy who said, “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, we could lower the population by perhaps 10 or 15%” ), these two paragraphs live completely rent-free:
Today, memes remain an important part of the anti-vaccine movement. The internet enables memes to be created anonymously, repurposed and shared at scale – making them a highly effective medium for spreading health disinformation.
They are often used as part of a meme war, defined as “the intentional propagation of political memes on social media for the purpose of political persuasion or community building, or to strategically spread narratives and other messaging crucial to a media manipulation campaign,” according to disinformation research platform The Media Manipulation Casebook.
I’ll point out to Principal Gates and the rest of the class that the pro-vaccine side isn’t exactly Switzerland in the meme war (albeit, they’re not nearly as skilled as we are). To wit:
The maker of this meme was so excited about his clever little word play that he basically turned the dangerous swimmer into Jesus.
Actually, it’s not a horrible idea.
I’m personally offended at the suggestion that Cheetos won’t protect me from bad guys. I’m pretty sure I could stick my orange powder-caked fingers into their eye sockets and blind them on the spot.
Hahahahahaha we’re killing our kids, get it?
Guys, do you think this works? [*orders lovely handmade wooden 10” cross from Amazon just in case]
This one confuses me. The anti-vaxxer’s ability to multi-task makes her less than? And look, she’s not even wearing gloves. What a badass! She’s diligent and fearless. Personally, I think she deserves a trophy. You go, girl!
It doesn’t take a lady with her feet propped up on her Squatty Potty to point out that Billy Manboob’s pathetic attempt to target memes is nothing more than censorship sporting a little lipstick.
Here’s the thing: If they take away our memes, we’ll draw cartoons. If they ban cartoons, we’ll pen satirical letters to their leaders. If they ban letters, we’ll bellow catchy tunes like “You Can Stick Your Vaccine Mandates Up Your Ass” directly into the nearest police officer’s face. (Some of us really, gleefully will.) If they criminalize singing, we’ll publish hilarious and uplifting anthologies packed with wit, wisdom, guidance, and gospel.
And no matter how hard they try to stop us, we will always—every single time—have the last laugh.
"Memes" is a synonym for "narratives." They clearly want to outlaw narratives that don't comport with the authorized narratives - that they get to determine. Actually, as we all know by now, they've already done this. They just want to be able to do more of this in the future.
The Law of Opposite Effects does suggest this program will backfire, which would mean those trying to increase censorship to increase their control ... will, one day, lose all their control and power. I just hope I'm still around to see that day - which might be next year or 100 years from now.
Ok. I haven’t read it all. I just got to the part about the banning of hand holding on campus. And the busybody parent that insisted this be the remedy. And I thought omg this, THIS is the beginning of the tantrum prone children we are subject to seeing at every university. It begins thus. Every perceived annoyance to a child from then on will be dealt with in whatever way is crazy enough to make the “injured” party “feel better”. Because it’s all about your feelings, you know. The parents are indoctrinating their children to be narcissists and just the sort of people no normal person wants to be with.
If my kid had come home with a problem like this, my response would’ve been: ok. Deal with it. You are not the center of the universe. And it’s just too bad. They must learn to control their emotions. But the kid in the article didn’t even make it home to complain; she went full tattletale mode and actually was allowed to call her mother. It’s got to stop. Can’t treat children like this. They are much stronger than you think.