The weekly Morgan multi-mode poll finds the Labor primary vote slipping three points to 38.5% and the Greens up 1.5% to 10.5%, with the Coalition up half a point to 41.5%. That translates to 52-48 to Labor on respondent-allocated preferences, down slightly from 52.5-47.5 last week. The change is sharper on the generally more useful two-party measure which distributes preferences according to the previous election result, with Labor’s lead down from 52-48 to 50.5-49.5.
Meanwhile, today’s Essential Research has the Coalition down a point for the second week in a row to 44%, with Labor steady on 39% and the Greens up two to 9%. After shifting a point in Labor’s favour on the basis of little change in the published primary votes last week, two-party preferred remains at 51-49 despite more substantial change this week, suggesting the result has moved from the cusp of 52-48 to the cusp of 50-50.
Essential also finds 61% approval for the government’s new asylum seekers policy against 28% disapproval, and concurs with Galaxy in having the two parties almost equal as best party to handle the issue. Labor is favoured by 25% (up eight on mid-June), Coalition by 26% (down 12) and the Greens by 6% (down one). Asylum seeker arrivals are rated the most important election issue by 7%, one of the most important by 28%, quite important by 35%, not very important by 16% and not at all important by 8%. The poll also has Malcolm Turnbull rated as best person to lead the Liberal Party by 37% against 17% for Tony Abbott and 10% for Joe Hockey, and also includes further questions on workplace productivity.
[Dawkins might have been better analogising the meme to the virus rather than the gene. When something goes viral its a meme which is reproducing at a very high rate.]
No, this would’ve been a bad analogy because it wasn’t the point he was making.
He was comparing the spread of information in societies to the spread of genes in organisms. Most viruses can’t reproduce without first infecting a host, so the analogy doesn’t make sense.
I can’t think of any sentence which benefits from the use of “meme” and for which any other existing word wouldn’t work far better.
shows on closer than aley
New people like to fancy they have new ways of seeing the world and will like to have new words or new uses to identify with their own tribe
So Mr Whitfield invited the Shadow Minister.
In the interests of transparency, could he therefore indicate when, and on how many occasions, he also invited the actual Minister, or indeed anyone connected with the Government?
I am glad I am not flying into Mascot at the moment
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR713.loop.shtml#skip
The ABC use to break the news.
[memes aren’t fads or trends. they are ideas, attitudes and beliefs that strengthen a culture and help it survive /thrive /outcompete other cultures.]
Or pictures of Fry from Futurama or Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka combined with a message of Socratic Irony…
alias
you are part of the pre meme people thats OK
my parents never got rock and roll. They weren’t supposed to
[You seem to be saying that Dawkins offered some sort of insight into the way that trends may evolve in society. That’s well and good but I don’t see it as necessitating a new and confusing word.]
Well if you read the bloody book you would realise he is actually making a fascinating point about the way the spread of information in human societies mimics the spread of genes in biology. So a behavior of organisms mimics the transfer and change in genetic material that made those organisms in the first place.
[However, unless I’m missing something]
Yes you are, you are missing the part where you read the book and understand it.
[I can’t see that it’s any great insight.]
Well he only won one of the most prestigious prizes in biology for writing it!
[It was already self-evident that trends evolved within a culture and between cultures.]
That’s not the point HE made!
[The fact that this might be likened to the behaviour of a gene is neither here nor there.]
You’re completely wrong. You’re so wrong you don’t even know you’re wrong.
Dee:
Yes, I can see John Button and possibly Ros Kelly.
Oddly one of the men looks like Assange, but obviously isn’t.
OK Kinkajou.. or anyone: come up with a sentence containing the word “meme”, along with an explanation of what it means, and I’ll render the same sentence far more intelligible in plain English.
[New people like to fancy they have new ways of seeing the world and will like to have new words or new uses to identify with their own tribe]
So Einstein should’ve just stuck with old terms and kept looking at the world in old ways out of fear he would be forced to devise new terms to describe reality in new ways?
@Dee/1506
ABC was silently bought by News Ltd.
Brian Howe maybe?
Denis Denuto 2010
…its like …the meme!!!
SHows
very occasionally they do have something new
…anything more recent?
[OK Kinkajou.. or anyone: come up with a sentence containing the word “meme”, along with an explanation of what it means, and I’ll render the same sentence far more intelligible in plain English.]
You could’ve simplified this by just writing:
[I don’t know what I’m talking about.]
Peut etre que se la meme chose, n’est pas?
Confessions
Do you reckon the guy on the right looks like Gorbachev?
[SHows
very occasionally they do have something new
…anything more recent?]
Simplify this word: “Internet”.
Strikes me as a word a bit like “Zeitgeist” (though of course that is a word borrowed from the German where “meme” is Dawkins’ baby). Every pretenious person on the planet was trotting “zeitgeist” on a regular basis not so long ago. Now you barely hear it. Reason? It finally dawned on everyone that it’s a bit of a wank.
[Craig Emerson MP @CraigEmersonMP 52m
.@CroweDM Third from left is Chris Conybeare, Bob’s Principal Private Secretary. Went on the head up Immigration Department.
Craig Emerson MP @CraigEmersonMP 47m
@CroweDM @sspencer_63 Bob Sorby over on the right at end.]
Never heard of either of them, so would never have guessed who they were.
I see you’ve declined to accept the challenge ShowsOn. No problem. I’ll rest my case.
Carey Moore
[Even I use the term “trots” and I am not what you would ideologically label a “right winger”]
Is that a boast or an admission of loose usage or an apology for someone else or a claim that there are lots of Trotskyists?
Speaking as someone who once self-described as a Trotskyist (though that was most of a decade ago) I’d say the aphetic “Trot” should be used only for those expressly avowing the salience of the Transitional Program of 1938, and positions deriving from it in relation to contemporary politics.
Cliffites (the “state caps”) probably shouldn’t be called “Trots” and I’d exclude the Northites as well, who constructively abandoned the distinctively Trotskyist Permanent Revolution in favour of various kinds of Pabloite and third worldist vanguardism from about the mid-60s. Even the Barnesites essentially became left cheerleaders for the neo-Stalinist Cuban Communist Party, casting aside both Lenin and Trotsky in the process.
In short, the people called “Trots” in Australia typically aren’t and given the way JV argues, I’d be very surprised if he were one such. Certainly, anyone who is a member of the Greens (or giving us political support) is not a Trotskyist, as that would be regarded by orthodox Trotskyists as “crossing the class line” (in this case by joining a party not of the proletariat).
I hope that clarifies the usage.
Psephos re meme: COrrect . Hence “memetic” (insert here equivalance sign I dont know the HTM for that) “genetic”
Disclosure (in case its not obvious) I only know anything about this at all from Neal Stephenson novels – anyone else read his “Cryptonomicon”?
Dee:
Was thinking the bloke stood next to Hazel looks like Gorbachev, but I reckon that’s Brian Howe. 😆
alias. ‘meme’ is a word describing a new and pretty wordy concept, and the point Dawkins was making was that natural selection applies to behaviour as well as genetic material, and that cultures evolve depending on their environments. It isn’t a confusing word once you know what it means. I expect some people didn’t like the term ‘gene’ when it was coined either. Or ‘internet’, or ‘poll’ or ‘keyboard’ or ‘laptop’ or any of the many things you are probably looking at right now. Language/culture evolves, and useful terms – like ‘meme’ – survive – and that’s what ‘meme’ describes.
[Strikes me as a word a bit like “Zeitgeist” (though of course that is a word borrowed from the German where “meme” is Dawkins’ baby). Every pretenious person on the planet was trotting “zeitgeist” on a regular basis not so long ago. Now you barely hear it. Reason? It finally dawned on everyone that it’s a bit of a wank.]
Oh FFS! If meme is a useless word, why does it have 450,000,000 hits on Google!?
Showson at 151. I see by checking things out on the web, that you are quite right that Dawkins did not see the meme as like a virus. But others who have taken up the idea like Blackmore did see the meme as like a virus of the mind, and most of memetics uses this somewhat different concept. Of course what is fascinating is that the discipline of memetics has not been very successful at reproducing, The Journal of Memetics is no longer published, for example.
[I see you’ve declined to accept the challenge ShowsOn. No problem. I’ll rest my case.]
You have no case. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re crapping on about.
Confessions
Bangs head 😀
Mmmmm….sure a PBer mentioned Conybeare recently….
[Here’s Bob Sorby, ALP press secretary, when asked if minerals and energy minister Rex Connor had died three days earlier: “I can’t say. I’ll have to have a look and call you back.”]
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/with-love-and-a-fond-farewell-from-rupert-20081118-6add.html#ixzz2aWnzS7A9
Bob Sorby is now District Court Judge Sorby. He is also married to Sally Loane of the ABC and former wife of Dr Mark Loane, Wallaby lock at the time of the Ellas
Fran, now you’re just showing off.
Lots of groups claim the heritage of Trotskyism.
* The old SWP, now subsumed in the Socialist Alliance.
* The Healyites, now the Socialist Equality Party
* The Cliffites, later IS, now disappeared I think
* The Spartacists
* The Freedom Socialist Party
* Probably others I’ve forgotten
They probably have a combined membership of about 500.
[I can’t think of any sentence which benefits from the use of “meme”]
That’s because you don’t understand the concept you are trying to discuss.
[…and for which any other existing word wouldn’t work far better.]
So what is your existing word that describes the same thing?
Oh that’s write, you don’t even know what you are describing hence you can’t offer any alternative terms!
I use “trot” to describe the irrational leftist who goes too far or demands purity. By no means do I use it to describe somebody who merely opposes Labor Unity in factional politics or has views to the left of the ALP on issues.
I have a similar term for people on the right who are similar but I don’t think William would let me post such language on this blog 😉
ShowsOn
You can’t seriously imagine that the number of hits a term attracts on a Google search means anything. As I say, had the Internet been widespread a couple of decades ago “zeitgeist” would have racked up a similar number. While “zeitgeist” has some limited application, it was grossly overused for a long time, when plenty of better more precise words existed.
You only have to scan back over the past several dozen posts here to see that the term “meme” has already generated confusion among those who claim to know what it means. That is not a good start for a new word.
Again, I’d be fascinated to see anyone here produce a sentence containing the word “meme” where that same sentence could not be rendered more easily and readily understood using existing words.
I’ll take the absence of such an example as a pretty good indication I might be right.
Religion is a meme.
Who said the Labor front bench is bereft of talent?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=30t1oRACphY
shellbell:
Sorty has that lawyer look about him. 🙂
[Religion is a meme.]
Raptor Jesus?
[ShowsOn
You can’t seriously imagine that the number of hits a term attracts on a Google search means anything. ]
It demonstrates the usefulness of the term to describe things! If it wasn’t useful, people wouldn’t use it much or at all!
[As I say, had the Internet been widespread a couple of decades ago “zeitgeist” would have racked up a similar number.]
Oh dear! This isn’t a dispute about the relative popularity of words, it is a dispute that the word “meme” is useful in describing a certain type of phenomena.
You have baseless asserted that you know of some existing word that describes exactly the same thing. Well WHAT IS IT?
[You only have to scan back over the past several dozen posts here to see that the term “meme” has already generated confusion among those who claim to know what it means. That is not a good start for a new word.]
That’s simply because people like you are too lazy to actually read the book where it was first used!
[Again, I’d be fascinated to see anyone here produce a sentence containing the word “meme” where that same sentence could not be rendered more easily and readily understood using existing words.]
I’ve already done so, but you seem to be completely oblivious to the explanation I have provided which perfectly demonstrates that you simply don’t know what the word means, and hence are completely confused!
MM o, yeh, that was a beaut rendering to the novel of so many of them memes’
[Oh FFS! If meme is a useless word, why does it have 450,000,000 hits on Google!]
same reason everyone watches australian idol (1) or
2) nobobody knows what it is so they have to look it up everytime someone mentions so they dont feel stupid
how many people have finished ulysees
Shows On
I stand to be corrected, but I don’t believe you have provided an example of the sentence I was requesting. I’m busy doing something else at the same time as this, so if you have produced such a sentence, I’d be grateful if you could copy it.
alias
“The use of the term “meme” is a meme.”
Rudd is starting to win this (boats).
Paul Murray on Sky wants to call it a draw 😆
Constructivism is a meme.
MM I’ve read Cryptonomicron. Good book, like all his others.
Kinky
I have read all of Ulysses but I gave up on Cryptonomicon.