The parasite annoys. It does not go away. It takes from you, its host, though it does not kill you, or else it will itself die. It can even be useful: it keeps you alert, it trains your defences, it prepares you for more dangerous enemies. It does to your body, to your mind and soul, or to society, what its more abstractly minded cousin from the same big Greek family, the paradox, does to your thinking.
Have we created a parasitic world?
Gad Saad speaks of parasitic ideas: “These are composed of thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, and mindsets that parasitize one’s ability to think properly and accurately.” They all start by rejection of some aspect of reality: “Postmodernism rejects the existence of objective truths; radical feminism scoffs at the idea of innate biologically-based sex differences; and social constructivism posits that the human mind starts off as an empty slate largely void of biological blueprints.” Acceptance of these premises creates a void, which is then colonized by the parasite, and this leads to strange behaviour.
Jonathan Pageau describes parasitic storytelling as a pattern of replacement, “where the main characters represented as the normative ones are killed or humiliated, inverted or replaced. The strangest versions of this are those characters who happily cede their place to others fitting in the intersectional world view. The strategy of those enacting these new story tropes is not so much for woke culture to give us new stories and characters but to deconstruct and ultimately take over existing cultural forms and stories from the inside. […] Contemporary woke activism is born out of a deliberately parasitic approach to being. The activist type understands that the current narratives are in some respect the vehicles of power and normativity. This plays out in the analogy between the human body and the body politic. And so, like a virus can destabilize the human body, so too the ideological parasite will destabilize the body politic.”
Jacob Siegel diagnoses parasitic discourse aimed at revolution: “What we are witnessing, in the rapidly transforming norms around race, sex, and gender, is not an argument at all but a revolution in moral sentiment. In all revolutions, the new thing struggling to be born makes use of the old system in order to overthrow it. At present, institutions like the university, the press, and the medical profession preserve the appearance of reason, empiricism, and argument while altering, through edict and coercion, the meaning of essential terms in the moral lexicon, like fairness, equality, friendship, and love.”
You know, fabricating a big lens, and then trying to see the whole world through this lens, is a very German thing to do. For example, I might complain about parasitic work. I have been working as a back-office risk modeller in the highly regulated banking industry, all the time feeding management, internal auditors, external auditors, supervisory authorities, and regulators – but then, the front-office traders making the money for the institution might be regarding me as the parasite. At some point, we have to stop viewing fellow human beings through the parasite lens.
But then… you browse the arXiv, the preprint repository for mathematics and the sciences. It offers a quick link to Covid-19 specific preprints. You will find around 700 preprints uploaded in 2022 alone (and this is without medicine and biology, which have their own repositories). Of these, at least 38 (to be listed below1) seem to be banging the disinformation drum: they start from the premise that certain propositions around Covid are dis- or misinformation, and they then dwell on data thus classified using some method from mathematics, statistics, or machine learning.
Are the authors parasitic on science, surfing the Covid wave with their own careers in mind?
Is Covid-the-social-construct parasitic on the authors, driving them to support the narrative?
Is something parasitic on me, making me waste time and energy on such musings?
Am I a parasite?
DisinfoMeme: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Meme Intentionally Spreading Out Disinformation
MiDAS: Multi-integrated Domain Adaptive Supervision for Fake News Detection
A Weakly-Supervised Iterative Graph-Based Approach to Retrieve COVID-19 Misinformation Topics
SciLander: Mapping the Scientific News Landscape
The synergy between two threats: disinformation and Covid-19
Exploring Generalizability of Fine-Tuned Models for Fake News Detection
The Drift of #MyBodyMyChoice Discourse on Twitter
A Holistic Framework for Analyzing the COVID-19 Vaccine Debate
The use of Data Augmentation as a technique for improving neural network accuracy in detecting fake news about COVID-19
Detecting COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories with Transformers and TF-IDF
User Experience Design for Automatic Credibility Assessment of News Content About COVID-19
CAVES: A Dataset to facilitate Explainable Classification and Summarization of Concerns towards COVID Vaccines
Monant Medical Misinformation Dataset: Mapping Articles to Fact-Checked Claims
CoVERT: A Corpus of Fact-checked Biomedical COVID-19 Tweets
QCRI's COVID-19 Disinformation Detector: A System to Fight the COVID-19 Infodemic in Social Media
Evaluation of Fake News Detection with Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models
"This is Fake News": Characterizing the Spontaneous Debunking from Twitter Users to COVID-19 False Information
Explainable Misinformation Detection Across Multiple Social Media Platforms
Are You Misinformed? A Study of Covid-Related Fake News in Bengali on Facebook
Healthy Twitter discussions? Time will tell
CoNTACT: A Dutch COVID-19 Adapted BERT for Vaccine Hesitancy and Argumentation Detection
Finding Clusters of Similar-minded People on Twitter Regarding the Covid-19 Pandemic
Automated clustering of COVID-19 anti-vaccine discourse on Twitter
Partisan Asymmetries in Exposure to Misinformation
Construction of Large-Scale Misinformation Labeled Datasets from Social Media Discourse using Label Refinement
From Hesitancy Framings to Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles: A Journey of Stance, Ontological Commitments and Moral Foundations
VaccineLies: A Natural Language Resource for Learning to Recognize Misinformation about the COVID-19 and HPV Vaccines
Identifying the Adoption or Rejection of Misinformation Targeting COVID-19 Vaccines in Twitter Discourse
Understanding Twitters behavior during the pandemic: Fake News and Fear
Moral Emotions Shape the Virality of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media
Evaluating the Efficacy of Facebook's Vaccine Misinformation Content Removal Policies
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and mega-influencers
Your Tweets Matter: How Social Media Sentiments Associate with COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the US
"Learn the Facts About COVID-19": Analyzing the Use of Warning Labels on TikTok Videos
Writing about COVID-19 vaccines: Emotional profiling unravels how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and vaccination campaigns
VaccinEU: COVID-19 vaccine conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian
Applying Machine Learning and AI Explanations to Analyze Vaccine Hesitancy
This is awesome--thanks for pointing this out.
The worst aspects of 'postmodernism' are, indeed, the insistence on social constructivism coupled, in a kind of unholy union, with the Manichean-esque mindset that whatever 'other' fact someone else brings up, it must immediately be disqualified and dismissed, lest said 'fact' spoils the social constructivist mind.
It's, of course, circular 'logic', but then again, such is life in our times.