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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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It's old now, but I wonder if anyone remembers the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I haven't watched it in probably 15-20 years, but a major plotline from it is that the intelligence services essentially meme an assassination attempt of a prominent politician into reality.

In the first season, it's a combination trying to meme the assassination of a corrupt police chief, lead primarily by a retired military corrupt politician ("General Secretary" in the dub, probably a mistranslation of cabinet secretary). ((It's also marginal as an example of a Stand-Alone Complex. The original hacker Laughing Man did exist, and the protagonists meet him; the lack of a true original comes from him discovered the underlying conspiracy of his time thanks to either an accident or someone airdropping a file on him, and because the violent actions the Laughing Man archetype developed after the original friendly kidnapping were a result of said cabinet secretary trying to play up the 'bad acts' and the Laughing Man logo getting used everywhere... as it did in real life.))

It's the second season where intelligence services other than Section 9 are involved; the Individual Eleven manifesto (which doesn't actually exist as a written text) is somewhere between an invasive meme and a straight-up brain-computer virus built to force those with certain traits into a murder-suicide plot targeting the Prime Minister, masterminded by a high-level incredibly annoying Central Intelligence Service bureaucrat.