Brett
At 12:29 AM 7/5/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Neco and Jeff wrote:
>
>> in. Hello to all my new virion friends by the way.
>
>Hello!
>
>> Memes do not operate in this way at all. A suicide meme can exist not
>> only in a person's mind but in books, songs, etc. If all of the people
>> in the world who harbored the suicide meme in any form at all were to
>> suddenly act on the meme and commit suicide, the meme would still exist.
>> In fact, its existence would probably be magnified immensely because of
>> the publicity it would generate. Obviously, if everyone in the world
>> who had blue eyes were to suddenly die from their eye color, the future
>> of the blue eye gene would be dismal at best no matter how many
>> newspaper articles were written about it.
>
>This is very clear. I hereby recommend all read it again! A meme gets
>propagated regardless of the success of the hosts *after* it has passed
>through them. The Heaven's Gate people are another good example. Via
>their web page (which I hear got over a million hits a day, after the
>Big Event) many more people knew about their memes *after* they were
>gone, than knew before. The matyr deal works the same way. Death is
>more of a *benefit* to meme's than a loss! (barring total extinction of
>humans, that is)
>
>ERiC
>
Not Spell-Checked,
rBERTS%n
A Blob Nest Net Terror