Originally published at: Wolves: Want to lead your pack? Get a parasite! | Boing Boing
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Infecting oneself with toxoplasma gondii becomes a thing with incels and white supremacists in 3…2…1…
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Quickly followed by Tucker and Jones hawking pills for it.
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Is that what is in this pill I have been hearing about?
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Resident Evil lied!
It’s the T-protozoan, not the T-virus, that will grant you great power and/or excess mortality.
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Maybe it’s why “catturd2” is already atypically well-placed among the reactionary elon-whisperers…
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Yep, this is pretty well established for how toxoplasmosis reproduces. However…
This has definitely not been established AFAIK and I would be surprised if anyone reputable is seriously proposing this. The Atlantic link given as reference seems to be broken so I can’t read it, but extrapolating anything from rodent brains to human brains is extremely fraught and unlikely to be true.
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I think a good analogy to the toxoplasmosis infection would be with lottery tickets…
Being infected basically makes beings compulsively buy lottery tickets. Like thousands at a time - enough so eventually they go bankrupt and die in poverty.
However, since most of the lotto tickets are now being purchased by infected creatures, you will find that most of the lotto winners have been infected.
So could you say - ‘hey being infected is good because it helps you win the lottery’? No. Buying tickets helps you win the lottery.
Being infected just makes you buy more tickets than is reasonable given the terrible terrible odds of actually winning.
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Nah. It’s more like being infected is good because you have more sex.
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ALPHA WOLF BRAIN POWER!
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Toxo has been a minor recurring theme for the Atlantic. although I’m not sure which article the poster is referring to. Some options:
Atlantic Magazine: How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
The Atlantic: Study: Cats and Self-Directed Violence By James Hamblin
And this one was new to me
The Atlantic: A Groundbreaking Study Is Good News for Cats—And People by Ed Yong
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IIRC the behavioural change has only been established with laboratory animals, with no evidence that T. gondii affects the behaviour of rodents in the wild.
Flegr’s group in Czechia have been pushing their theory that T. gondi alters human behaviour. They seem to run a lot of small-group studies, then publish any positive results.
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In other words, it’s likely all bullshit. Or catshit, I guess. If p-hacking was an Olympic sport, I’m sure they’d medal.
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it seems it’d be hard to tell.
the cdc has a conservative estimate of 11% of americans, and i’ve heard other numbers before of anywhere from 30-50%
In the United States it is estimated that 11% of the population 6 years and older have been infected with Toxoplasma. In various places throughout the world, it has been shown that more than 60% of some populations have been infected with Toxoplasma.
at those levels, i feel you’d have to wonder what is baseline behavior.
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Estimates of who’s been infected vary enormously from country to country. It might just be that the antibody test is worthless.
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T gondii was of course named after Gondor where it was discovered. Denethor’s infection goes a long way to explaining his erratic behaviour.
Toxoplasmosis is known to increase chances of human hosts impulsively shrinking themselves to cat-consumable size with a matter transmogrifier.
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By all rights, that’s how he-man should have ended
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Great band name!
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