Memetic-Narrative 'Cool'-warfare
- Dr Bruce Long
- Jan 27, 2021
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 23, 2021
Put bluntly: one would think - intuitively and on a scientific basis - that if China had designed or manipulated the virus (as is alleged by Li-Meng Yan), they probably should have the best vaccine.
I have a PhD in philosophy and a Master of Philosophy in English (in the thesis for which latter resarch I coined 'informationist science fiction' as both a term and concept). I have a background in computer science (web software engineering and control systems) and do postgraduate research (current) in psychology, in which discipline I am a graduate student.
Why this apparently (embarrassingly, even) gratuitous blowing of my horn? For the purposes of this article, it is only to attempt to sell you, dear reader, my right to coin a further - and admittedly also somewhat gratuitous - term: 'cool warfare'. (It is also an effort to try to allay the epic impostor syndrome that I fight daily, but that is a story for another embarrassment on a different day).
So: 'cool war'. I know. It is awful. Yet - I cannot look away. I was going to use 'warm warfare' but, according to Google, Counterpunch beat me to it, and I like their use of that term, and dislike expanding the set of English homonyms in popular culture. Counterpunch do actual journalism, whereas I am a philosophy of information, cognitive science, and social psychology researcher with very limited journalistic ability. (Take heart, dear reader. What I lack in journalistic flair, discipline, understanding, panache, skill, and intelligence: I probably make up for with a really sound background in information theory and the philosophy of information, and some rock-solid analytic skills. Probably. My impostor syndrome is flaring up.)
What is cool war? Let's say it is memetic-narrative war designed to counter-fool you.
I warned you about my journalistic writing skills. No self-respecting journalist would dare toy with such a contraction. Well - okay; not without too much coffee, or possibly alcohol (I absolutely may - or may not - be calling into service cultural tropes about writers and inebriation.)
A philosopher, on the other hand, might mess with their own career by 'neologising' thus. As might a science fiction author naming a novum. Ahem. (Darko Suvin coughing and turning in his grave). I digress. Obviously.
Counter-fooling doesn't necessarily imply, nor entail, that you're being fooled to begin with by the first memetic narrative that got 'encoded at you' in the form of statements in articles in popular press, or similar sources. Nor is it necessarily the case that the counter-fooling article or sources consitute an encoding of actual information rather than pseudo information (Pseudo-information means - more or less - fiction. Mostly more.)
Maybe 'cool-warfare' is not that awful. I am warming to it. You can vote on how awful you think it is here:
'Counter-fool', or 'cool', war is clearly something that happens as part of, or in the context of, soft warfare in grey-zone great power conflicts (lets flex all of our soft-war, kultur-schpiel discursive, and rhetorical, muscles for the sheer hell of it). However, while I am making up new terms, I'll tentatively 'stipulate' that the term 'cool war' is restricted to publicly accessible propaganda and misinformation. So - cool war excludes things like hacking computer networks, interfering with voting systems, 'lawfare' or the use of legal means to wage war, economic and trade war, and diplomatic sanctions and expulsions.
Cool memetic warfare is all about using meme-countering opinions, views, speculations, open questions, and claims, as a means for getting one's memetic narratives to gain social-psychological traction, and to thereby affect the opinions and the behaviour of individual and group actors.
A recent pristine example of cool warfare in the popular press has come to light in the form of this article by Huizhong Wu (unsurpringly re-distributed by cool-war military industrial 'brink' tank, ASPI):
The first thing to notice about the linked article is that the last lines of the concluding paragraph contain the most important information:
China isn’t the only government to point fingers. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, trying to deflect blame for his government’s handling of the pandemic, said last year he had seen evidence the virus came from a Wuhan laboratory. While that theory has not been definitively ruled out, many experts think it is unlikely.
Allthough the article is mostly about vaccine effectiveness and alleged vaccine misinformation campaigns (cool war), this quote constitues what is probably the most valuable real, encoded information in it.
*Begin Theory-tech digression*
If you're having some trouble with this information-encoding stuff, it works like this. Information is not true or false. It is not alethic (truth apt) and bivalent (true or false and nothing in between). This means that information is what philosophers call a truthmaker, rather than a truthbearer.
Either you have some real information, or you don't. If you don't you may have something that looks like information, but is instead pseudo-information (like a hallucination, for example). If your statements or propositions encode real information, they are what we would usually call true. If they don't: they are what we would usually call false. I say 'usually', because with information truth can be proportional, and the logic of information is more likely to be based upon what is called non-classical paraconsistent logic, than upon classical bivalent logic. Evidently, however, that's a different article. The idea to keep in mind is that sets of statements that encode information - like articles - have varying degrees of truth depending upon how much actual information, versus pseudo-information, they encode, or embody.
*End theory-tech digression*
Independent molecular bioscientists have roundly rejected the allegations, findings, claims, and hypotheses of Dr Li -Meng Yan's COVID papers as not only weakly supported by questionable and even unscholarly and unscientific sources, but as unfounded, unethical, and wrongheaded.
The reader is encouraged to keep in mind that scientific theories are defeasible: they are expected to be partly, and even significantly, revised, or even debunked. However, the degree of revision - or even relegation to a round filing cabinet - depends on such things as how well grounded theories are in publicly-reproducible experimental results and hard data, and how powerful they are predictively with respect to natural phenomena (among other things).
Specialists in disciplines of molecular bioscience in the West - from a range of institutions including The University of Sydney and Johns Hopkins University - have roundly rejected the research article by Li-Meng as unreliable. They have done so on the basis of sound science and scientific discipline.
For convenience, here is a selection of information-encoding sources constituting scientific rejections of Li-Meng Yan's work (links to her own work follow further down):
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/04/16/COVID-19-statement-professor-edward-holmes-sars-cov-2-virus.html Social psychology and personal ideology matter: as information sources
Additionally, with respect to the reliability and quality of information source sets and scientific evidence: human associations matter. Especially in the context of social psychology, and where the psychology of religion, and of polity, are critical in terms of influence on the psychology of a human source.
It is trivially obvious that memetic-narrative construction in politics and the media is all about using psychological principles to influence the opinion of public influencers and policymakers, and of the general public. So it matters from both an informational, and social psychological perspective, that Li-Meng Yan is associated with, and supported by, a notorious producer of fake-news media-channel misinformation: Steve Bannon.
For convenience, here is a selection of sources covering that connection/association (I will stick to popular press and large media outlets for these, since that is Bannon's own domain):
Now of course there is always the narrative that Li-Meng Yan is a talented, righteous voice in the political and scientific wilderness (or soft war zone) risking all to fight the monstrous impositions of a massive autocratic, despotic, and evil force: the much maligned 中国共产党 (Communist Party of China.) Leaving aside the hyperbole: this narrative has to be considered as possibly partly informational, or information-encoding, or information-bearing. However, there are many facts and questions that bring this narrative into significant doubt as an informational, rather than pseudo-informational, narrative (one that encodes real information, rather than pseudo-information). I won't cover those in this post, for brevity's sake. However, apart from her association with Bannon (which could also arguably be an act of desperation), there are serious questions about Li-Meng's own motives with respect to defecting, US citizenship, and marital problems. As mean-hearted as this may seem: these facts obviously matter for a person making claims that might very well start, or contribute to starting, a global - or at least very large scale regional - hot war.
Too-cool war
Returning to main topic of the the article by Huizhong Wu. It contains some obvious cool-warfare moves. For example, regarding claims about the dangers of Western vaccines and the possible origins of the COVID-19 virus being at Fort Detrick in the US
“It’s very embarrassing” for the government, Fang said in an email. As a result, China is trying to raise doubts about the Pfizer vaccine to save face and promote its vaccines, he said.(https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/china-pushes-fringe-theories-pandemic-origins-virus-75464663 )
We wouldn't want to feel embarrassed, dear reader (and target of cool-warfare). We wouldn't want the Chinese governments' alleged embarassment to rub off on us by some kind of narratological magical process. That would be - embarrassing?
Moreover, says the article, even smart people are asking about this stuff, thus turning themselves into silly sausages, which is even more embarrassing:
Yuan Zeng, an expert on Chinese media at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, said the government’s stories spread so widely that even well-educated Chinese friends have asked her whether they might be true. (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/china-pushes-fringe-theories-pandemic-origins-virus-75464663 )
If we weren't getting quoted at by a media expert, this might be really worrying (perhaps a bioscientist might cause us pause, but a 'media expert' is probably not really cause for concern.)
Then there is the tried and true cool warfare tactic of putting words, perceptions, and motives in the mouth, and the mind, of one's target (sometimes called a caricature):
The Communist Party sees the WHO investigation as a political risk because it focuses attention on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/china-pushes-fringe-theories-pandemic-origins-virus-75464663 )
Do they? If you say so. You, with your, ahem, highly political US military-industrial funding. Oh - and your extremely ideologically - and religiously - charged 'research' inputs from the notorious mega-cult fundamentalist Adrian Zenz. The CPC probably doesn't think that they can do anything about such a focus occurring, and that they can only respond in kind.
Then there is the infamous table-turning with a blind eye tactic: "Oh look what they're allegedly (but probably not really) doing, and fail to notice we did this first, and actually."
The party wants to “distract domestic and international audiences by pre-emptively distorting the narrative on where responsibility lies for the emergence of COVID-19,” Wallis said. (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/china-pushes-fringe-theories-pandemic-origins-virus-75464663 )
Pre-emptively distorting the narrative? Where EVER did you get that idea from? (Note - that is a rhetorical and sarcastic question: the best kind.)
Superior scientific information delivers an - inferior vaccine??
(Note the very cool-warry double question mark. Also, however, note the following.)
What's perhaps most interesting - and most genuinely informative - about Huizhong Wu's article, is that it brings attention to the Chinese government's efforts to tout the effectiveness and quality of their vaccine. More significantly, it highlights the fact that the Sinopharm vaccine is less effective than Western mRNA based offerings.
This may well be an epic cool war own goal. There's a very good chance that it is. How so?
Here, there is a possible real elephant in the cool-war room. A much overlooked, yet very interesting question, is that of the comparative effectiveness of Western and Chinese vaccines.
Put bluntly: one would think - intuitively and on a scientific basis - that if China had designed or manipulated the COVID-19 virus (as is alleged by Li-Meng Yan), they probably should have the best vaccine.
Apparently - they don't. By roughly a minimum of 10% effectiveness. Apologies for the roughly, but it is still early days. However, we do have a lot of disparate and heterogeneous sources to go on. Effectiveness rates of the various available vaccines has been widely publicised. It has become reasonably clear (notwithstanding the possibility of revision due to further data or the effects of Western marketing) that, according to both Western and Chinese media and the WHO: Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford vaccine offerings are superior to the Sinopharm vaccine by approximately (at minimum) 10% efficacy.
Based on most preliminary data available and publicised (notwithstanding any marketing 'effects'), Pfizer, Oxford, and Moderna have reported 90-95% efficacy for their vaccines. Sinopharm's vaccine has repeatedly been assigned a maximum of about 86% efficacy with Sinovac recording as low as 50% efficacy (by no means bad as a vaccination outcome) according to reports from early adopter Brazil (source: Global Times https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1210863.shtml ).
Of course, were allegations about the Wuhan lab true, that China should inevitably have the best vaccine doesn't directly necessarily follow. Pfizer and Oxford labs and scientists may just be comparatively dauntingly effective. However, molecular bioscientists and labs with the ability to (allegedly) produce COVID-19 are presumably not scientific slouches. It might not directly follow that they would have superior information to work with and get an edge (not to mention a bank of existing very specific work), but it is by no means either unlikely, nor irrelevant, from an information theoretic, nor from a bio-scientific, perspective.
(An interesting adjunct point is that, if Western molecular bioscience expertise outstrips that of China so definitively, then Li-Meng Yan is arguably a less reliable authority than her Western critics and reviewers.)
Although the explanation could, feasibly, be that Western bioscience is just extremely good, or be related to the fact that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are mRNA vaccines (an advanced and previously untested technique): there is a known link between having better information about the structure and origins of a viral pathogen and the ability to produce effective vaccines. (See also https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-race-to-save-lives-comparing-vaccine-development-timelines/ and https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/vaccine-development-testing-and-regulation ).
The question then arises: If Chinese biowarfare labs did manipulate the virus, then why are their vaccines less effective? I'm clearly using some speculative cool-war(ish) moves of my own here. Yet - it should be clear to the reader that this matter of the inferiority (albeit not detrimental in medical terms) of the Sinopharm vaccine is not a non-issue, informationally and scientifically speaking.
Zoonotic Vs designed Vs eCigarettes
In cool-osing - a note about the Fort Detrick 'conspiracy theory'. In a strange and somewhat ironic turn of cool-warfare events: it is in fact too early to call it a conspiracy theory quite yet.
The allegations levelled at China and the Communist Party of China by Li-Meng Yan are specifically that the Wuhan lab re-engineered, or manipulated, the COVID virus as a bioweapon: that the virus is not a purely zoonotic, or purely a naturally evolved and adapted, virus that jumped species from bats to humans. The question of what happened at Fort Detrick includes the (speculative!) possibility of a different kind of vector for the virus. The possibilities are:
Detrick engineered as a bioweapon, and intentionally released, COVID-19 (or possibly a similar virus that causes pneumonia)
Detrick engineered as a bioweapon, and accidentally released, COVID-19 (or possibly a similar virus that causes pneumonia)
COVID-19 (or possibly a similar virus that causes pneumonia) originated in the US because of human e-cigarette use, and Detrick were investigating and lost control of lab protocols, possibly (but possibly not) worsening the epidemic
Even Chinese state media sources are not openly entertaining (1) without futher evidence, and almost assiduously avoid even stating it as an open question (its implications are more dire politically and ethically, and its premises therefore shakier, and it is thus less likely). They prefer to allude to (2) more directly. However, (3), or what I will call accidental commercial inception, is also being fielded as a possibility. (3) involves and entails neither zoonosis, nor bioweapons design. If (3) encodes predominantly real information (and that is FAR from clear, nor proven), then it's just very bad luck.
Cool war aside: Fort Detrick as a possible early interactor with COVID-19 is still a validly open question, and even US politicos have been asking for full transparency. Finally - if you don't like the term 'cool war', dear reader: that's cool. Consider it a rhetorical tool. (Contract that entire last sentence for groan value).
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