Podcast | Plagued by Information Bombs and Actor Sovereigns’ Costumes

I thought we’d start off with a bit of plague. That’s a joke. We’re actually going to start with a bit of Disinfolklore about a plague. A non-existent plague, in my humble opinion. We’re going to look at the plague story as a story, as an item of Disinfolklore, which is what all this is about.

A story, not a pathogen

It’s been a very busy week.

In the first week of October a story went around the world. A laboratory in Siberia. A worker taken ill. A test tube, perhaps. Very graphic. All of us can remember test tubes from school. I’d be surprised if they even use test tubes these days.

Pneumonia, as someone quipped. Let’s just hope Donald doesn’t work out there’s a P in pneumonia. We’ll never hear the end of it. That’s a play on his Democrats thing, and the B at the end of dumb. If he finds out there’s a P at the beginning of pneumonia, perhaps plague, he will never stop plaguing us with his pneumonic plays on words.

Two hundred people under observation. A hospital closed. All units of Disinfolklore. Then a denial, another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a second case, reported. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a cover-up, alleged. Another unit of Disinfolklore.

Then all the anti-vaxxers, who suddenly seem to care. They didn’t care about Covid. In fact they thought Covid was a conspiracy. Now they are tweeting like crazy about a plague. A non-existent plague, that is.

Within three days the President of the United States had offered russia help. I predicted that a couple of days before it happened. Structurally, this struck me as an alibi. russia built it to provoke exactly this kind of reaction from friendly countries. He said he’d call Putler about it.

So this episode is not really about bacteria. I don’t do epidemiology here. I don’t do fact-checking. That’s not what Disinfolklore is about.

Look at the wording of the people whose job is to be careful. The State Department is “monitoring the situation”. The CDC is monitoring “reports”. The World Health Organisation is following up on “the reported death”, and asking for clarity on “media reports” of a second case.

Appeal for volunteers!

The main reviewer of a submitted draft journal article I have co-authored requested that I find human coders to see if the findings of archetypes in stories can be replicated.