Trope-a-Day: Manipulative Bastard

Manipulative Bastard: The right (or wrong) kind of professional memeticist (or related professions, such as lawyers – the technical term for one kind, for example is nomomach, freely glossable “war-lawyer”).  The Office of Warrior Philosophy, for example, is full of the militarized subspecialty of this, but it’s hardly the only profession that is.

(On the other hand, also somewhat necessary just because widespread awareness of memetics and its core techniques acts as a sort-of memetic immune system.  The equivalent of the “pick-up artists”, for example, suffered greatly from the “Ooh, who’s a cute little amateur meme-wrangler, then?” effect – which is not to say that the seducers have gone away, but it raises the level of the game considerably when you need the equivalent of a postgraduate education to sneak a loaded meme past the average person’s information-society-grade meme filters.)