Search
848 results for “pyOpenSci”
-
David A Kessler:
I have been monitoring the spread of #bird #flu, also known as #H5N1,
and discussing the situation with colleagues around the country.My concern is growing.
So far, there have been no reports of person-to-person spread of H5N1, though there have been 💥at least 55 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in the United States,
almost entirely among poultry and dairy workers.Those infections are presumed to be primarily the result of contact with animals.
In addition, a child in Alameda County in California with minor respiratory symptoms tested positive for H5N1 recently;
it is unclear how the child became infected.
There are likely other cases out there that are not being diagnosed.All of those cases have been mild.
⚠️But a teenager in British Columbia who was infected with the virus is now critically ill.
In this instance, too, it is unclear how the teenager became infected.But the virus showed signs that it had mutated in a way that could make it easier to transmit to another person.
If this is the case, the virus might then get enough of a foothold to begin human-to-human transmission.
Further mutations could evolve that would enhance attachment to human cells.
Until the British Columbia case, the recent bird flu infections in humans in North America had been limited to the eyes and nasal passages.
But H5N1 becomes deadly when the virus attaches to the lining of the lungs in the lower respiratory tract.
This virus has killed before.
⭐️In 1997, an outbreak of H5N1 in poultry in Hong Kong resulted in 18 animal-to-human infections and six deaths,
the first known fatal human infections.Then, in 2003, H5N1 appeared in wild birds in Asia.
Outbreaks followed in poultry and resulted in two deaths in people.
🔥As outbreaks continued to occur, the mortality rate surpassed 50 percent.
Here is where matters stand:
The most recent risk assessment from the Johns Hopkins Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, issued on Nov. 19,
listed the risk of infection to farm workers as high,and the risk of infection to people in contact with affected farm workers and animals as moderate.
The Hopkins report said that “while the immediate risk to the general public and health care workers is still currently low,
the long-term consequences of continued,
uncontrolled transmissions presents a high risk to all populations.”California has recently seen a significant rise in detections of H5N1 in dairy herds.
🆘Experts believe that animals at as many as half the dairy farms in California are infected.
👉That is why it is important to pasteurize milk,
which kills the virus. (All milk sold across state lines is pasteurized;30 states allow the in-state sale of nonpasteurized milk, which is labeled “raw.”)
Two states, Colorado and Pennsylvania, have agreed to test pooled milk from all farms before pasteurization to monitor spread.
🔸Bulk milk testing should be mandatory in all states with dairy farms to determine the full extent of the infection on these farms and also allow us to contain the virus.
As if to underline the importance of such a mandate, bird flu was detected in raw milk bought retail last Thursday from a dairy producer based in Fresno, Calif.
♦️Without mandatory testing, bird flu will continue circulating at farms across the country,
which substantially increases the risk that the virus mutates and evolves to allow a human-to-human transmission that will be hard to stop.♦️H5N1 has already shown a propensity to rapidly infect hundreds of herds and farms in the United States.
Since March, 616 dairy herds in 15 states have been infected with H5N1.
And since the onset of the outbreak in February 2022, H5N1 has been detected in poultry in 49 states, affecting a total of 111 million birds.
There has also been an increase in H5N1 detections in migratory and commercial birds in the European Union, Canada, Japan and South Korea, compared to 2023.
♦️What’s also worrisome is that our arsenal to fight back might not be up to the task.
An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that a mutation in people in Washington State who work as poultry cullers might ⚠️reduce the effectiveness of oseltamivir,
also known as #Tamiflu, in treating influenza A, a type of flu that includes H5N1 and many other subtypes.⚠️And a mutation found in a recent California case could potentially reduce the effectiveness of baloxavir marboxil, another drug used to treat influenza A.
In the case of #monoclonal #antibodies for use against the virus,
there are none commercially available at present.These lab-produced antibodies are designed to mimic the body’s immune response and directly target the virus.
-
Listen to this track by nu-easy-listening sensations and pop song context re-positioners The Mike Flowers Pops. It’s “Wonderwall”, a hit song that swept the nation, eventually appearing on the 1996 record A Groovy Place. The single is based on an earlier version by a little band you might remember called Oasis. The initial joke at the time was that the Manchester Britpop outfit had been the ones to cover The Mike Flowers Pops original, a supposedly lost late-1960s hit, and not the other way around.
The song had a significant impact in Britain. This was at least in part because the Oasis cut was so familiar, and perhaps even overfamiliar by 1995. The quirky novelty of the Mike Flowers Pops take had the song championed by morning shows on British radio and television, celebrating its place in the zeitgeist. At one point in the proceedings, the song actually overlapped with the Oasis version in the UK top ten in December of 1995. The Oasis original had slipped down to number seven while The Mike Flowers Pops cover overtook it to score the number two spot. That must have endeared (scan for sarcasm …) the Gallagher Brothers to it, royalty cheques notwithstanding.
Hearing a shadowy and earnest pop song from one of the world’s biggest bands re-interpreted so incongruously is what made it so funny. But beyond the tendency for British charts to celebrate novelty songs in general, there are other layers to consider that helped to make this song so well-liked and successful to the record-buying public of the mid-Nineties.
First, the song’s arrangement and musicianship really is superb. Sure, Mike Flowers (actually born Michael Roberts) and his musicians mug for the camera a bit in the video. But musically speaking, they really went for it with varied textures of brass and flutes and layered backing vocals that make it a detailed and lush recording. The command of musical phrases, sonic tropes, and slight tweaks to the chord structure inspired by a bygone age legitimately serve the material.
On this level, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this really was some obscure late-Sixties easy listening hit. It contains a level of musical precision that really sells it as a bona fide pop single that actually swings, man. Groovy. Novelty song or not, the musicians present this version of “Wonderwall” with great respect for the original Oasis song as a composition. It’s true that Flowers’ improbable haircut in the video is one of the stars of the show, pre-dating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tight Pants” schtick by decades. But, beyond the costuming, the comedy is chiefly found in undermining listener expectations, not in the playing or singing of it in contempt of its source.
Second, the song fitted in well with the Britpop age nearing the point of its apex by 1995. Of course in this case, there’s a twist. With an idealized 1960s in mind, instead of The Kinks and The Small Faces references, here we get Andy Williams and Englebert Humperdinck vibes instead. It all fed into the retro-cool aspects of what Britpop was all about with a bit of aural frommage thrown in for good measure. Generation X ate it up, applying as much of a generational propensity and appreciation for irony at it as it was giving out to us. Some critics didn’t get the joke. But really; who cares?
Besides all that and third, there were legitimate forces at work here that went beyond the comedy. One of them was that the sounds and approach found on this tune were very familiar to audiences in their twenties and early thirties by 1995. Easy listening music was everywhere when Generation X were children. It was on the radio. It was in malls. It was on TV variety shows and on greatest hits compilation commercials. It was certainly ensconced in parental record collections, with James Last and Herb Alpert records seemingly issued by governments as some kind of cultural mandate.
Dogeared and scratchy albums followed us into the Nineties in the form of charity shop bin-delvers looking for forgotten gems to sample on hip hop and trip hop albums. As we edged closer to the 21st century, the strains of easy listening sounds and aesthetics became mainstays of downtempo comedown tracks, and as artifacts of our memories of late Sixties and early Seventies sounds, fashions, and lifestyles. This was the world our parents called their own. By the Nineties, that world had largely faded away. Being Generation X, we derided it. But we also loved it, and even missed it.
That’s the thing with this song. It was and still is hilarious. But that’s because it was so familiar. This was not just because of how ubiquitous the Oasis song was by 1995. The Mike Flowers Pops cover contained as much affection for a world long gone as it did smart-assery in response to the then-present one. What better way to sum up the character of a generation straddling the blurry line between a fading twentieth century and an emerging twenty-first?
For more about the history and impact of The Mike Flowers Pops version of “Wonderwall” and on the rise of lounge music at the end of the twentieth century, take a look at this article on backseatmafia.com.
Enjoy!
https://thedeletebin.com/2024/10/28/the-mike-flowers-pops-play-wonderwall/
#90sMusic #BritPop #coverVersions #noveltySongs #TheMikeFlowersPops
-
Listen to this track by nu-easy-listening sensations and pop song context re-positioners The Mike Flowers Pops. It’s “Wonderwall”, a hit song that swept the nation, eventually appearing on the 1996 record A Groovy Place. The single is based on an earlier version by a little band you might remember called Oasis. The initial joke at the time was that the Manchester Britpop outfit had been the ones to cover The Mike Flowers Pops original, a supposedly lost late-1960s hit, and not the other way around.
The song had a significant impact in Britain. This was at least in part because the Oasis cut was so familiar, and perhaps even overfamiliar by 1995. The quirky novelty of the Mike Flowers Pops take had the song championed by morning shows on British radio and television, celebrating its place in the zeitgeist. At one point in the proceedings, the song actually overlapped with the Oasis version in the UK top ten in December of 1995. The Oasis original had slipped down to number seven while The Mike Flowers Pops cover overtook it to score the number two spot. That must have endeared (scan for sarcasm …) the Gallagher Brothers to it, royalty cheques notwithstanding.
Hearing a shadowy and earnest pop song from one of the world’s biggest bands re-interpreted so incongruously is what made it so funny. But beyond the tendency for British charts to celebrate novelty songs in general, there are other layers to consider that helped to make this song so well-liked and successful to the record-buying public of the mid-Nineties.
First, the song’s arrangement and musicianship really is superb. Sure, Mike Flowers (actually born Michael Roberts) and his musicians mug for the camera a bit in the video. But musically speaking, they really went for it with varied textures of brass and flutes and layered backing vocals that make it a detailed and lush recording. The command of musical phrases, sonic tropes, and slight tweaks to the chord structure inspired by a bygone age legitimately serve the material.
On this level, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this really was some obscure late-Sixties easy listening hit. It contains a level of musical precision that really sells it as a bona fide pop single that actually swings, man. Groovy. Novelty song or not, the musicians present this version of “Wonderwall” with great respect for the original Oasis song as a composition. It’s true that Flowers’ improbable haircut in the video is one of the stars of the show, pre-dating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tight Pants” schtick by decades. But, beyond the costuming, the comedy is chiefly found in undermining listener expectations, not in the playing or singing of it in contempt of its source.
Second, the song fitted in well with the Britpop age nearing the point of its apex by 1995. Of course in this case, there’s a twist. With an idealized 1960s in mind, instead of The Kinks and The Small Faces references, here we get Andy Williams and Englebert Humperdinck vibes instead. It all fed into the retro-cool aspects of what Britpop was all about with a bit of aural frommage thrown in for good measure. Generation X ate it up, applying as much of a generational propensity and appreciation for irony at it as it was giving out to us. Some critics didn’t get the joke. But really; who cares?
Besides all that and third, there were legitimate forces at work here that went beyond the comedy. One of them was that the sounds and approach found on this tune were very familiar to audiences in their twenties and early thirties by 1995. Easy listening music was everywhere when Generation X were children. It was on the radio. It was in malls. It was on TV variety shows and on greatest hits compilation commercials. It was certainly ensconced in parental record collections, with James Last and Herb Alpert records seemingly issued by governments as some kind of cultural mandate.
Dogeared and scratchy albums followed us into the Nineties in the form of charity shop bin-delvers looking for forgotten gems to sample on hip hop and trip hop albums. As we edged closer to the 21st century, the strains of easy listening sounds and aesthetics became mainstays of downtempo comedown tracks, and as artifacts of our memories of late Sixties and early Seventies sounds, fashions, and lifestyles. This was the world our parents called their own. By the Nineties, that world had largely faded away. Being Generation X, we derided it. But we also loved it, and even missed it.
That’s the thing with this song. It was and still is hilarious. But that’s because it was so familiar. This was not just because of how ubiquitous the Oasis song was by 1995. The Mike Flowers Pops cover contained as much affection for a world long gone as it did smart-assery in response to the then-present one. What better way to sum up the character of a generation straddling the blurry line between a fading twentieth century and an emerging twenty-first?
For more about the history and impact of The Mike Flowers Pops version of “Wonderwall” and on the rise of lounge music at the end of the twentieth century, take a look at this article on backseatmafia.com.
Enjoy!
https://thedeletebin.com/2024/10/28/the-mike-flowers-pops-play-wonderwall/
#90sMusic #BritPop #coverVersions #noveltySongs #TheMikeFlowersPops
-
Listen to this track by nu-easy-listening sensations and pop song context re-positioners The Mike Flowers Pops. It’s “Wonderwall”, a hit song that swept the nation, eventually appearing on the 1996 record A Groovy Place. The single is based on an earlier version by a little band you might remember called Oasis. The initial joke at the time was that the Manchester Britpop outfit had been the ones to cover The Mike Flowers Pops original, a supposedly lost late-1960s hit, and not the other way around.
The song had a significant impact in Britain. This was at least in part because the Oasis cut was so familiar, and perhaps even overfamiliar by 1995. The quirky novelty of the Mike Flowers Pops take had the song championed by morning shows on British radio and television, celebrating its place in the zeitgeist. At one point in the proceedings, the song actually overlapped with the Oasis version in the UK top ten in December of 1995. The Oasis original had slipped down to number seven while The Mike Flowers Pops cover overtook it to score the number two spot. That must have endeared (scan for sarcasm …) the Gallagher Brothers to it, royalty cheques notwithstanding.
Hearing a shadowy and earnest pop song from one of the world’s biggest bands re-interpreted so incongruously is what made it so funny. But beyond the tendency for British charts to celebrate novelty songs in general, there are other layers to consider that helped to make this song so well-liked and successful to the record-buying public of the mid-Nineties.
First, the song’s arrangement and musicianship really is superb. Sure, Mike Flowers (actually born Michael Roberts) and his musicians mug for the camera a bit in the video. But musically speaking, they really went for it with varied textures of brass and flutes and layered backing vocals that make it a detailed and lush recording. The command of musical phrases, sonic tropes, and slight tweaks to the chord structure inspired by a bygone age legitimately serve the material.
On this level, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this really was some obscure late-Sixties easy listening hit. It contains a level of musical precision that really sells it as a bona fide pop single that actually swings, man. Groovy. Novelty song or not, the musicians present this version of “Wonderwall” with great respect for the original Oasis song as a composition. It’s true that Flowers’ improbable haircut in the video is one of the stars of the show, pre-dating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tight Pants” schtick by decades. But, beyond the costuming, the comedy is chiefly found in undermining listener expectations, not in the playing or singing of it in contempt of its source.
Second, the song fitted in well with the Britpop age nearing the point of its apex by 1995. Of course in this case, there’s a twist. With an idealized 1960s in mind, instead of The Kinks and The Small Faces references, here we get Andy Williams and Englebert Humperdinck vibes instead. It all fed into the retro-cool aspects of what Britpop was all about with a bit of aural frommage thrown in for good measure. Generation X ate it up, applying as much of a generational propensity and appreciation for irony at it as it was giving out to us. Some critics didn’t get the joke. But really; who cares?
Besides all that and third, there were legitimate forces at work here that went beyond the comedy. One of them was that the sounds and approach found on this tune were very familiar to audiences in their twenties and early thirties by 1995. Easy listening music was everywhere when Generation X were children. It was on the radio. It was in malls. It was on TV variety shows and on greatest hits compilation commercials. It was certainly ensconced in parental record collections, with James Last and Herb Alpert records seemingly issued by governments as some kind of cultural mandate.
Dogeared and scratchy albums followed us into the Nineties in the form of charity shop bin-delvers looking for forgotten gems to sample on hip hop and trip hop albums. As we edged closer to the 21st century, the strains of easy listening sounds and aesthetics became mainstays of downtempo comedown tracks, and as artifacts of our memories of late Sixties and early Seventies sounds, fashions, and lifestyles. This was the world our parents called their own. By the Nineties, that world had largely faded away. Being Generation X, we derided it. But we also loved it, and even missed it.
That’s the thing with this song. It was and still is hilarious. But that’s because it was so familiar. This was not just because of how ubiquitous the Oasis song was by 1995. The Mike Flowers Pops cover contained as much affection for a world long gone as it did smart-assery in response to the then-present one. What better way to sum up the character of a generation straddling the blurry line between a fading twentieth century and an emerging twenty-first?
For more about the history and impact of The Mike Flowers Pops version of “Wonderwall” and on the rise of lounge music at the end of the twentieth century, take a look at this article on backseatmafia.com.
Enjoy!
https://thedeletebin.com/2024/10/28/the-mike-flowers-pops-play-wonderwall/
#90sMusic #BritPop #coverVersions #noveltySongs #TheMikeFlowersPops
-
The Mike Flowers Pops Play “Wonderwall”
Listen to this track by nu-easy-listening sensations and pop song context re-positioners The Mike Flowers Pops. It’s “Wonderwall”, a hit song that swept the nation, eventually appearing on the 1996 record A Groovy Place. The single is based on an earlier version by a little band you might remember called Oasis. The initial joke at the time was that the Manchester Britpop outfit had been the ones to cover The Mike Flowers Pops original, a supposedly lost late-1960s hit, and not the other way around.
The song had a significant impact in Britain. This was at least in part because the Oasis cut was so familiar, and perhaps even overfamiliar by 1995. The quirky novelty of the Mike Flowers Pops take had the song championed by morning shows on British radio and television, celebrating its place in the zeitgeist. At one point in the proceedings, the song actually overlapped with the Oasis version in the UK top ten in December of 1995. The Oasis original had slipped down to number seven while The Mike Flowers Pops cover overtook it to score the number two spot. That must have endeared (scan for sarcasm …) the Gallagher Brothers to it, royalty cheques notwithstanding.
Hearing a shadowy and earnest pop song from one of the world’s biggest bands re-interpreted so incongruously is what made it so funny. But beyond the tendency for British charts to celebrate novelty songs in general, there are other layers to consider that helped to make this song so well-liked and successful to the record-buying public of the mid-Nineties.
First, the song’s arrangement and musicianship really is superb. Sure, Mike Flowers (actually born Michael Roberts) and his musicians mug for the camera a bit in the video. But musically speaking, they really went for it with varied textures of brass and flutes and layered backing vocals that make it a detailed and lush recording. The command of musical phrases, sonic tropes, and slight tweaks to the chord structure inspired by a bygone age legitimately serve the material.
On this level, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this really was some obscure late-Sixties easy listening hit. It contains a level of musical precision that really sells it as a bona fide pop single that actually swings, man. Groovy. Novelty song or not, the musicians present this version of “Wonderwall” with great respect for the original Oasis song as a composition. It’s true that Flowers’ improbable haircut in the video is one of the stars of the show, pre-dating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tight Pants” schtick by decades. But, beyond the costuming, the comedy is chiefly found in undermining listener expectations, not in the playing or singing of it in contempt of its source.
Second, the song fitted in well with the Britpop age nearing the point of its apex by 1995. Of course in this case, there’s a twist. With an idealized 1960s in mind, instead of The Kinks and The Small Faces references, here we get Andy Williams and Englebert Humperdinck vibes instead. It all fed into the retro-cool aspects of what Britpop was all about with a bit of aural frommage thrown in for good measure. Generation X ate it up, applying as much of a generational propensity and appreciation for irony at it as it was giving out to us. Some critics didn’t get the joke. But really; who cares?
Type your email…
Subscribe to The Delete Bin
Besides all that and third, there were legitimate forces at work here that went beyond the comedy. One of them was that the sounds and approach found on this tune were very familiar to audiences in their twenties and early thirties by 1995. Easy listening music was everywhere when Generation X were children. It was on the radio. It was in malls. It was on TV variety shows and on greatest hits compilation commercials. It was certainly ensconced in parental record collections, with James Last and Herb Alpert records seemingly issued by governments as some kind of cultural mandate.
Dogeared and scratchy albums followed us into the Nineties in the form of charity shop bin-delvers looking for forgotten gems to sample on hip hop and trip hop albums. As we edged closer to the 21st century, the strains of easy listening sounds and aesthetics became mainstays of downtempo comedown tracks, and as artifacts of our memories of late Sixties and early Seventies sounds, fashions, and lifestyles. This was the world our parents called their own. By the Nineties, that world had largely faded away. Being Generation X, we derided it. But we also loved it, and even missed it.
That’s the thing with this song. It was and still is hilarious. But that’s because it was so familiar. This was not just because of how ubiquitous the Oasis song was by 1995. The Mike Flowers Pops cover contained as much affection for a world long gone as it did smart-assery in response to the then-present one. What better way to sum up the character of a generation straddling the blurry line between a fading twentieth century and an emerging twenty-first?
For more about the history and impact of The Mike Flowers Pops version of “Wonderwall” and on the rise of lounge music at the end of the twentieth century, take a look at this article on backseatmafia.com.
Enjoy!
#90sMusic #BritPop #comedy #coverVersions #noveltySongs #TheMikeFlowersPops
-
Listen to this track by nu-easy-listening sensations and pop song context re-positioners The Mike Flowers Pops. It’s “Wonderwall”, a hit song that swept the nation, eventually appearing on the 1996 record A Groovy Place. The single is based on an earlier version by a little band you might remember called Oasis. The initial joke at the time was that the Manchester Britpop outfit had been the ones to cover The Mike Flowers Pops original, a supposedly lost late-1960s hit, and not the other way around.
The song had a significant impact in Britain. This was at least in part because the Oasis cut was so familiar, and perhaps even overfamiliar by 1995. The quirky novelty of the Mike Flowers Pops take had the song championed by morning shows on British radio and television, celebrating its place in the zeitgeist. At one point in the proceedings, the song actually overlapped with the Oasis version in the UK top ten in December of 1995. The Oasis original had slipped down to number seven while The Mike Flowers Pops cover overtook it to score the number two spot. That must have endeared (scan for sarcasm …) the Gallagher Brothers to it, royalty cheques notwithstanding.
Hearing a shadowy and earnest pop song from one of the world’s biggest bands re-interpreted so incongruously is what made it so funny. But beyond the tendency for British charts to celebrate novelty songs in general, there are other layers to consider that helped to make this song so well-liked and successful to the record-buying public of the mid-Nineties.
First, the song’s arrangement and musicianship really is superb. Sure, Mike Flowers (actually born Michael Roberts) and his musicians mug for the camera a bit in the video. But musically speaking, they really went for it with varied textures of brass and flutes and layered backing vocals that make it a detailed and lush recording. The command of musical phrases, sonic tropes, and slight tweaks to the chord structure inspired by a bygone age legitimately serve the material.
On this level, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this really was some obscure late-Sixties easy listening hit. It contains a level of musical precision that really sells it as a bona fide pop single that actually swings, man. Groovy. Novelty song or not, the musicians present this version of “Wonderwall” with great respect for the original Oasis song as a composition. It’s true that Flowers’ improbable haircut in the video is one of the stars of the show, pre-dating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tight Pants” schtick by decades. But, beyond the costuming, the comedy is chiefly found in undermining listener expectations, not in the playing or singing of it in contempt of its source.
Second, the song fitted in well with the Britpop age nearing the point of its apex by 1995. Of course in this case, there’s a twist. With an idealized 1960s in mind, instead of The Kinks and The Small Faces references, here we get Andy Williams and Englebert Humperdinck vibes instead. It all fed into the retro-cool aspects of what Britpop was all about with a bit of aural frommage thrown in for good measure. Generation X ate it up, applying as much of a generational propensity and appreciation for irony at it as it was giving out to us. Some critics didn’t get the joke. But really; who cares?
Besides all that and third, there were legitimate forces at work here that went beyond the comedy. One of them was that the sounds and approach found on this tune were very familiar to audiences in their twenties and early thirties by 1995. Easy listening music was everywhere when Generation X were children. It was on the radio. It was in malls. It was on TV variety shows and on greatest hits compilation commercials. It was certainly ensconced in parental record collections, with James Last and Herb Alpert records seemingly issued by governments as some kind of cultural mandate.
Dogeared and scratchy albums followed us into the Nineties in the form of charity shop bin-delvers looking for forgotten gems to sample on hip hop and trip hop albums. As we edged closer to the 21st century, the strains of easy listening sounds and aesthetics became mainstays of downtempo comedown tracks, and as artifacts of our memories of late Sixties and early Seventies sounds, fashions, and lifestyles. This was the world our parents called their own. By the Nineties, that world had largely faded away. Being Generation X, we derided it. But we also loved it, and even missed it.
That’s the thing with this song. It was and still is hilarious. But that’s because it was so familiar. This was not just because of how ubiquitous the Oasis song was by 1995. The Mike Flowers Pops cover contained as much affection for a world long gone as it did smart-assery in response to the then-present one. What better way to sum up the character of a generation straddling the blurry line between a fading twentieth century and an emerging twenty-first?
For more about the history and impact of The Mike Flowers Pops version of “Wonderwall” and on the rise of lounge music at the end of the twentieth century, take a look at this article on backseatmafia.com.
Enjoy!
https://thedeletebin.com/2024/10/28/the-mike-flowers-pops-play-wonderwall/
#90sMusic #BritPop #coverVersions #noveltySongs #TheMikeFlowersPops
-
Donald Trump's campaign,
lacking the on-the-ground muscle to match Kamala Harris' team,
has been rolling out a strategy to target swing-state voters who've shown interest in Trump but often don't vote.Trump campaign training materials obtained by Axios offer an inside look into the strategy the ex-president's team is betting on
to turn out voters in Pennsylvania and at least six other key states.The big picture:
The materials describe the 2020 Trump campaign's reach-out efforts as "inefficient,"
and emphasize the campaign's priorities of reaching more "quality" contacts in its race to the Nov. 5 election.❌Trump's team is outgunned in sheer resources:
The campaign says it has about 27,000 top volunteers on the ground nationwide,
and "hundreds of thousands" more in various roles in battleground states.✅Harris' campaign claims to have 60,000 volunteers in Pennsylvania alone,
along with hundreds of thousands more in other key states.Trump's campaign has focused more on developing an
💥"election integrity" team of 175,000 #poll #workers and poll #watchers nationwide,
a program rooted in the ex-president's #false #claims of widespread #fraud in the 2020 election was fraudulent.Trump's campaign, like Harris', is supported by a constellation of #outside #groups that help provide additional canvassing and voter registration.
Trump's team includes thousands of volunteers outside the campaign who make calls, mail materials and engage voters on platforms such as TikTok.
The Trump campaign's internal materials
prioritize getting to "hard-to-reach, low-propensity voters"
— those who've shown interest in Trump by attending a rally, for example,
but aren't necessarily likely to show up at the polls.🔸The campaign's volunteers have been given a list of 25 "unreachable" and "sometimes" voters, with a goal of visiting at least 10 in person.
🔸As they contact and engage more unlikely voters, volunteers earn rewards.
Those include T-shirts and MAGA caps and "expedited" entry into Trump rallies, and a top prize for the most active volunteers: an invitation to a party at Mar-a-Lago or Trump's inauguration, along with being dubbed a "Trump Force Precinct Caption."https://www.axios.com/2024/09/14/trump-swing-state-voter-targets
-
Kvadrat – The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion Review
By Thus Spoke
Back in June 2021, when my Instagram page was fresh-faced and non-AMG-affiliated, I reviewed Kvadrat’s EP Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση. Struck by its mesmerizing blend of atmospheric, dissonant death and black metal, I bemoaned its truncated length as I was sucked in by what I then described as “a gripping black hole of sound.” With the vividness of this experience having faded into a memory of “that really great Greek EP,” everything came flooding back upon receipt of a DM from the (sole) individual behind Kvadrat, Ivan Agakechagias, asking if I wanted to review his upcoming debut. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion, “built to remind, provoke, traumatize and disturb, to fuel and awaken the nauseating sensations of uncertainty, alienation, hatred and pain” with artwork, drawn by Ivan himself, accompanying each track, is a plunge into the existential nightmare of being-in-the-world, and meaning, or lack thereof. As of course, all the best extreme metal is.1
The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion assertively cements Kvadrat’s signature voice in the scene, enhancing those most alluring, and crushing, aspects. Guitars don’t just resonate, they hum, even whistle, as they whip like icy wind in mournful, piercing melodies (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”). And melody is what makes this music so powerful. Melody in that pseudo-dissonant, urgent, mournful sense that draws itself up into spikes of biting drama and waves of washing catharsis that crash down into ferocious, blackened ire (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”). The propensity for compositions that endlessly undulate with a feeling of push and pull, driven by writhing percussion stop-starting and pacing, demonstrated in Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση, is here expanded on, as is how these tides of melancholic refrain lead the rhythmic convolutions into mesmerizing patterns. It’s bleak and it’s beautiful, and with a longer runtime than previously afforded, the album provides a longer, and deeper experience that is insidiously affecting.
Like the ancient Greek tragedies of aeons past, The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion plays out a drama of pensive mystery, rising, ebbing, then resurgent tension, and melancholic lamentation. With “Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος” opening the album with an intriguing play of gentle plucks, and closer “Ολική Αποσύνθεση” gradually building a delicate, ever-more-mournful melody, the remainder—save “Αμνησία”‘s cavernous, hair-raising inhale of unease—pulls a thread of nerve-wrecking, endlessly punishing intensity. The tremolo that comes to those opening and closing tracks, projecting the theme into a renewed acuteness and gravity, is like lightning licking the smoky ground. The long screams that bridge spidery chord progressions and torrential washes of guitar (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “4°C,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”) are little shivery breaths. And together with the push and pull created through the endless tumble and roll of percussion—shifting tempos breaking down in stripped-back echoes (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”), dropping down to heavy pulsing, and racing back up again to dbeat double-bass devastation (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”)—this creates a momentum that is violently addictive and compelling.
It was probably whilst hearing the title track (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”) for the second or third time that I realized what it was that holds the record back from complete perfection: reserve. While there are great, extended parts where the tragic dramatic elements interweave and rise together beautifully—”Ολική Αποσύνθεση”‘s first half is probably the highlight in this regard–there’s a sense in which it seems Kvadrat is teasing us. Beyond the most potent peaks of melodic and tension-releasing beauty (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”), the compositional waves in this storytelling ocean are more akin to the churning of agitated waters (“4°C”) or ripples on a deceptively still surface (“Αμνησία”). And it’s in the title track, where things threaten multiple times to break into floods of pathos—but never quite do—that the unbearable tension of the dissonant and semi-dissonant scales and circling drums is the most immediate. The thing is, what I condemn for being unsatisfying I ought perhaps to commend for representing, in musical form, that from which the album takes its name—an endless, placeless dysphoria.
To say that The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion succeeds is an understatement. It is a crowning glory of existential agony and dark beauty. And it’s a debut. Even though the compositions fall short of total devastation, there is more than enough time, both for them to grow obsessively in the mind, and for Kvadrat to release their future masterpiece. It should not stop anyone, least of all myself, from diving headlong into its depths.
Rating: Very Good
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Desolate Depths (EU)/Nuclear Winter (EU)/Total Dissonance Worship (US/ROW)
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 4th, 2024#2024 #35 #Apr24 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #BlackMetal #DeathMetal #DesolateDepths #DissonantBlackMetal #DissonantDeathMetal #GreekMetal #Kvadrat #NuclearWinterRecords #Review #Reviews #TheHorribleDissonanceOfOblivion #TotalDissonanceWorship
-
Kvadrat – The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion Review
By Thus Spoke
Back in June 2021, when my Instagram page was fresh-faced and non-AMG-affiliated, I reviewed Kvadrat’s EP Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση. Struck by its mesmerizing blend of atmospheric, dissonant death and black metal, I bemoaned its truncated length as I was sucked in by what I then described as “a gripping black hole of sound.” With the vividness of this experience having faded into a memory of “that really great Greek EP,” everything came flooding back upon receipt of a DM from the (sole) individual behind Kvadrat, Ivan Agakechagias, asking if I wanted to review his upcoming debut. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion, “built to remind, provoke, traumatize and disturb, to fuel and awaken the nauseating sensations of uncertainty, alienation, hatred and pain” with artwork, drawn by Ivan himself, accompanying each track, is a plunge into the existential nightmare of being-in-the-world, and meaning, or lack thereof. As of course, all the best extreme metal is.1
The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion assertively cements Kvadrat’s signature voice in the scene, enhancing those most alluring, and crushing, aspects. Guitars don’t just resonate, they hum, even whistle, as they whip like icy wind in mournful, piercing melodies (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”). And melody is what makes this music so powerful. Melody in that pseudo-dissonant, urgent, mournful sense that draws itself up into spikes of biting drama and waves of washing catharsis that crash down into ferocious, blackened ire (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”). The propensity for compositions that endlessly undulate with a feeling of push and pull, driven by writhing percussion stop-starting and pacing, demonstrated in Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση, is here expanded on, as is how these tides of melancholic refrain lead the rhythmic convolutions into mesmerizing patterns. It’s bleak and it’s beautiful, and with a longer runtime than previously afforded, the album provides a longer, and deeper experience that is insidiously affecting.
Like the ancient Greek tragedies of aeons past, The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion plays out a drama of pensive mystery, rising, ebbing, then resurgent tension, and melancholic lamentation. With “Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος” opening the album with an intriguing play of gentle plucks, and closer “Ολική Αποσύνθεση” gradually building a delicate, ever-more-mournful melody, the remainder—save “Αμνησία”‘s cavernous, hair-raising inhale of unease—pulls a thread of nerve-wrecking, endlessly punishing intensity. The tremolo that comes to those opening and closing tracks, projecting the theme into a renewed acuteness and gravity, is like lightning licking the smoky ground. The long screams that bridge spidery chord progressions and torrential washes of guitar (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “4°C,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”) are little shivery breaths. And together with the push and pull created through the endless tumble and roll of percussion—shifting tempos breaking down in stripped-back echoes (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”), dropping down to heavy pulsing, and racing back up again to dbeat double-bass devastation (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”)—this creates a momentum that is violently addictive and compelling.
It was probably whilst hearing the title track (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”) for the second or third time that I realized what it was that holds the record back from complete perfection: reserve. While there are great, extended parts where the tragic dramatic elements interweave and rise together beautifully—”Ολική Αποσύνθεση”‘s first half is probably the highlight in this regard–there’s a sense in which it seems Kvadrat is teasing us. Beyond the most potent peaks of melodic and tension-releasing beauty (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”), the compositional waves in this storytelling ocean are more akin to the churning of agitated waters (“4°C”) or ripples on a deceptively still surface (“Αμνησία”). And it’s in the title track, where things threaten multiple times to break into floods of pathos—but never quite do—that the unbearable tension of the dissonant and semi-dissonant scales and circling drums is the most immediate. The thing is, what I condemn for being unsatisfying I ought perhaps to commend for representing, in musical form, that from which the album takes its name—an endless, placeless dysphoria.
To say that The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion succeeds is an understatement. It is a crowning glory of existential agony and dark beauty. And it’s a debut. Even though the compositions fall short of total devastation, there is more than enough time, both for them to grow obsessively in the mind, and for Kvadrat to release their future masterpiece. It should not stop anyone, least of all myself, from diving headlong into its depths.
Rating: Very Good
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Desolate Depths (EU)/Nuclear Winter (EU)/Total Dissonance Worship (US/ROW)
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 4th, 2024#2024 #35 #Apr24 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #BlackMetal #DeathMetal #DesolateDepths #DissonantBlackMetal #DissonantDeathMetal #GreekMetal #Kvadrat #NuclearWinterRecords #Review #Reviews #TheHorribleDissonanceOfOblivion #TotalDissonanceWorship
-
Kvadrat – The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion Review
By Thus Spoke
Back in June 2021, when my Instagram page was fresh-faced and non-AMG-affiliated, I reviewed Kvadrat’s EP Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση. Struck by its mesmerizing blend of atmospheric, dissonant death and black metal, I bemoaned its truncated length as I was sucked in by what I then described as “a gripping black hole of sound.” With the vividness of this experience having faded into a memory of “that really great Greek EP,” everything came flooding back upon receipt of a DM from the (sole) individual behind Kvadrat, Ivan Agakechagias, asking if I wanted to review his upcoming debut. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion, “built to remind, provoke, traumatize and disturb, to fuel and awaken the nauseating sensations of uncertainty, alienation, hatred and pain” with artwork, drawn by Ivan himself, accompanying each track, is a plunge into the existential nightmare of being-in-the-world, and meaning, or lack thereof. As of course, all the best extreme metal is.1
The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion assertively cements Kvadrat’s signature voice in the scene, enhancing those most alluring, and crushing, aspects. Guitars don’t just resonate, they hum, even whistle, as they whip like icy wind in mournful, piercing melodies (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”). And melody is what makes this music so powerful. Melody in that pseudo-dissonant, urgent, mournful sense that draws itself up into spikes of biting drama and waves of washing catharsis that crash down into ferocious, blackened ire (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”). The propensity for compositions that endlessly undulate with a feeling of push and pull, driven by writhing percussion stop-starting and pacing, demonstrated in Ψυχική Αποσύνθεση, is here expanded on, as is how these tides of melancholic refrain lead the rhythmic convolutions into mesmerizing patterns. It’s bleak and it’s beautiful, and with a longer runtime than previously afforded, the album provides a longer, and deeper experience that is insidiously affecting.
Like the ancient Greek tragedies of aeons past, The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion plays out a drama of pensive mystery, rising, ebbing, then resurgent tension, and melancholic lamentation. With “Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος” opening the album with an intriguing play of gentle plucks, and closer “Ολική Αποσύνθεση” gradually building a delicate, ever-more-mournful melody, the remainder—save “Αμνησία”‘s cavernous, hair-raising inhale of unease—pulls a thread of nerve-wrecking, endlessly punishing intensity. The tremolo that comes to those opening and closing tracks, projecting the theme into a renewed acuteness and gravity, is like lightning licking the smoky ground. The long screams that bridge spidery chord progressions and torrential washes of guitar (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “4°C,” “Γυάλινα Μάτια”) are little shivery breaths. And together with the push and pull created through the endless tumble and roll of percussion—shifting tempos breaking down in stripped-back echoes (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”), dropping down to heavy pulsing, and racing back up again to dbeat double-bass devastation (“Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”)—this creates a momentum that is violently addictive and compelling.
It was probably whilst hearing the title track (“Η Φρικτή Δυσαρμονία της Λήθης”) for the second or third time that I realized what it was that holds the record back from complete perfection: reserve. While there are great, extended parts where the tragic dramatic elements interweave and rise together beautifully—”Ολική Αποσύνθεση”‘s first half is probably the highlight in this regard–there’s a sense in which it seems Kvadrat is teasing us. Beyond the most potent peaks of melodic and tension-releasing beauty (“Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος,” “Σηπτική Ανυπαρξία,” “Ολική Αποσύνθεση”), the compositional waves in this storytelling ocean are more akin to the churning of agitated waters (“4°C”) or ripples on a deceptively still surface (“Αμνησία”). And it’s in the title track, where things threaten multiple times to break into floods of pathos—but never quite do—that the unbearable tension of the dissonant and semi-dissonant scales and circling drums is the most immediate. The thing is, what I condemn for being unsatisfying I ought perhaps to commend for representing, in musical form, that from which the album takes its name—an endless, placeless dysphoria.
To say that The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion succeeds is an understatement. It is a crowning glory of existential agony and dark beauty. And it’s a debut. Even though the compositions fall short of total devastation, there is more than enough time, both for them to grow obsessively in the mind, and for Kvadrat to release their future masterpiece. It should not stop anyone, least of all myself, from diving headlong into its depths.
Rating: Very Good
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Desolate Depths (EU)/Nuclear Winter (EU)/Total Dissonance Worship (US/ROW)
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 4th, 2024#2024 #35 #Apr24 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #BlackMetal #DeathMetal #DesolateDepths #DissonantBlackMetal #DissonantDeathMetal #GreekMetal #Kvadrat #NuclearWinterRecords #Review #Reviews #TheHorribleDissonanceOfOblivion #TotalDissonanceWorship
-
Heya there! :TamakoWave:
The next #fanfic in the The sea is calling out to us series is entitled Love of the sea:Love of the sea
Looking back, it was when I was writing this fic that I really caught the fanfic #writing bug. It felt like it took for*ever* to write, but as we'll see with the 3rd entry (so far!) in this series I beat my own record there quite handily.... :AnkoBlush:
Nagisa and Kayano adjust to life with 3-E knowing their secret - and living with Irina and Mr. Karasuma of course, while Karma takes up scuba diving as he longs to breathe underwater himself.
Lord Uroko feels a headache starting.
Or, revenge of the plot bunny when I couldn’t stop writing “Longing for the sea” (read that fic first) :P
This fic chronicles Karma's relationship with the sea, through my most favourite of #sliceoflife lenses. One of the things that really fascinates me is sorta what-if SoL scenarios. Like what effect would having #ena have on someone? While Nagi no Asukara does touch on this, I wanted to explore it in significantly more depth - and thus this fic was born. 🌊
It does seem like there's a significant propensity of the #fandom in general to lean towards romance, which while I can appreciate this my interests lie in a distinctly different direction.
(psst, got any SoL fic recommendations? I chewed through 150K of BNHA (e.g. Deku D.O.) in the last 3 days and now I don't have anything else on the reading list :neocat_flush:)
#assassinationclassroom #naginoasukara -
I think the calculus of #RegisteredReports might have flipped in a #SurveillancePublishing APC-driven #OpenAccess world.
Subscription models meant that a journal could command a high price by being in high demand in a self-reinforcing cycle where since most libraries subscribed to them then they would have high readership, etc. Multiply that by the power of bundling or whatever. Libraries being a conduit could tell who read what and tailor subscriptions accordingly. actual loss of readership could impact subscription cost during negotiations, so null results are less attractive because they command fewer readers and citations and whatnot. publication bias ensues. the classic story.
in an APC world, where the profit is derived from authors willing to directly pay more for the attendant view count and citation, the registered report is instead more like a commitment to pay at some future time to publish. if the prices keep going up, the journal effectively invests in your need to publish as a security.
this is doubly perverse in a surveillance publishing system, where the publishers operate paper recommendation and rating systems linked to funding and employment decisions. in that case, they can just manufacture the view count and citation - and even literal "scientific value score" - as a function of APC price, so null results aren't even a problem since the exclusivity-prestige link is partially dissolved.
I wonder if causes for publication bias could have changed substantially enough that registered reports could backfire as a means of combating publication bias. Since the primary filter is the perceived importance of a piece of work - assuming the authors could pass some competency and design check normal to the field - which is most likely to be at least partially evaluated by the same system of self-fulfilling metrics used in the recommendation/scoring systems for funders and employers, they might directly reinforce hype cycles. couple that again with the prestige gradient model of APC pricing where one publisher owns many Journals at different prestige levels and can bounce you down the ladder to one with a lower but still high APC.
Journals then would then be effectively sorting papers by APC according to the propensity for views/citations, regardless of outcome. It's sort of a combination of payola and security. plz lmk where I'm missing something here bc not just trying to shit on the parade.
-
CW: Falwell not being very christian
Falwell’s Downfall: The Pool Boy’s Story - The Bulwark https://www.thebulwark.com/the-pool-attendants-version/
#ChristianHypocrisy
#ChristianGOP"In 2018, a real estate–related lawsuit in Miami attracted the attention of a Buzzfeed News reporter, who was intrigued to find then–Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. sharing his previously-reported ownership of a local hostel with a pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. That story marked the beginning of a yearslong scandal that culminated in Falwell—a major Donald Trump ally whose endorsement helped move the needle among evangelicals for the former president’s 2016 campaign—outed as a cuckold, a secret alcoholic, and a cynic about his professed Christian faith. Falwell resigned from Liberty University under pressure in August 2020, embarrassing the school’s board, who had offered Falwell a free reign and their unqualified support for more than a decade.
...making the Falwells’ denials even harder to believe. Granda himself is a likable and winning narrator of the scandal, frank and unforced in his interviews. Having been a supporting player in earlier versions of the story that centered on the prominent evangelical couple, Granda’s comments add nuance to the story and emphasize the significant power differential between himself and the Falwells. It is impossible, for example, to forget his youth: Granda was only 20 years old when he met them. What 20-year-old in Granda’s situation would have known what they were getting themselves into? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the couple knew just what they were doing when they invited him into their complicated lives.
In March 2012, Granda was working poolside at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami when, as he tells it, Becki Falwell, a guest who had been ogling him, asked him to come by her room later—and in case the purpose wasn’t clear enough, she mentioned that her husband would want to watch. Making arrangements from a blocked number later that day, Becki invited Granda to meet at a nearby Days Inn to make sure their liaison wouldn’t happen at the same hotel where their kids were staying. Granda alleges that Jerry was waiting with pants unzipped when Becki welcomed him into the room. The encounter would mark the beginning of an alleged six-year-long affair that saw Granda joining the family on vacations and becoming well known to the Falwells’ children, who unassumingly joked about Becki’s propensity for disappearing during their trips.
The relationship was a personal boon for Granda, who benefitted materially and socially from his connection to the Falwell family. He stayed at their Lynchburg farm, traveled frequently with them, and met numerous members of their larger circle. In September 2012, only six months after he first met Becki, Granda was on campus at Liberty when he met Donald Trump.
The aforementioned business deal, which gave Granda a 25 percent equity stake in the Miami hostel, would come about in 2013, the result of Falwell’s offers to help Granda financially and jumpstart his career. Details of Granda’s affair with Falwells were first hinted at when a local real estate broker refiled a previously dismissed claim in August 2017 against Granda’s stake in the hostel that named both Granda and Falwell.
At the time of the original filing two years earlier, the broker’s lawyer privately alleged to Granda that he had compromising photos of Granda and Becki, which led to Granda asking for help from Jerry, who reached out to Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s lawyer/“fixer.” Cohen intervened and took possession of the photos as a favor—he had known the Falwells since 2011—then called in the favor by pushing Falwell to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. Falwell would then become a staunch Trump ally and defender amid the latter’s moral crises, including the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, and he helped consolidate evangelical support for Trump’s campaign. Corben makes sure the viewer understands the import of this by heavy-handedly interspersing Falwell’s increasingly volatile remarks with footage of Trump’s scandalous actions and behaviors while in office, as though to say: See, evangelical hypocrisy is why we are at risk of losing our democracy!
While Falwell’s wholehearted embrace, under threat of scandal, of Donald Trump may have influenced the 2016 election, this focus on grand, simple narratives prevents Corben from entering more deeply into the strange and fraught realities of the Falwell story. These were especially apparent to those of us who were on campus to see how that story played out in real time."
-
CW: Falwell not being very christian
Falwell’s Downfall: The Pool Boy’s Story - The Bulwark https://www.thebulwark.com/the-pool-attendants-version/
#ChristianHypocrisy
#ChristianGOP"In 2018, a real estate–related lawsuit in Miami attracted the attention of a Buzzfeed News reporter, who was intrigued to find then–Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. sharing his previously-reported ownership of a local hostel with a pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. That story marked the beginning of a yearslong scandal that culminated in Falwell—a major Donald Trump ally whose endorsement helped move the needle among evangelicals for the former president’s 2016 campaign—outed as a cuckold, a secret alcoholic, and a cynic about his professed Christian faith. Falwell resigned from Liberty University under pressure in August 2020, embarrassing the school’s board, who had offered Falwell a free reign and their unqualified support for more than a decade.
...making the Falwells’ denials even harder to believe. Granda himself is a likable and winning narrator of the scandal, frank and unforced in his interviews. Having been a supporting player in earlier versions of the story that centered on the prominent evangelical couple, Granda’s comments add nuance to the story and emphasize the significant power differential between himself and the Falwells. It is impossible, for example, to forget his youth: Granda was only 20 years old when he met them. What 20-year-old in Granda’s situation would have known what they were getting themselves into? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the couple knew just what they were doing when they invited him into their complicated lives.
In March 2012, Granda was working poolside at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami when, as he tells it, Becki Falwell, a guest who had been ogling him, asked him to come by her room later—and in case the purpose wasn’t clear enough, she mentioned that her husband would want to watch. Making arrangements from a blocked number later that day, Becki invited Granda to meet at a nearby Days Inn to make sure their liaison wouldn’t happen at the same hotel where their kids were staying. Granda alleges that Jerry was waiting with pants unzipped when Becki welcomed him into the room. The encounter would mark the beginning of an alleged six-year-long affair that saw Granda joining the family on vacations and becoming well known to the Falwells’ children, who unassumingly joked about Becki’s propensity for disappearing during their trips.
The relationship was a personal boon for Granda, who benefitted materially and socially from his connection to the Falwell family. He stayed at their Lynchburg farm, traveled frequently with them, and met numerous members of their larger circle. In September 2012, only six months after he first met Becki, Granda was on campus at Liberty when he met Donald Trump.
The aforementioned business deal, which gave Granda a 25 percent equity stake in the Miami hostel, would come about in 2013, the result of Falwell’s offers to help Granda financially and jumpstart his career. Details of Granda’s affair with Falwells were first hinted at when a local real estate broker refiled a previously dismissed claim in August 2017 against Granda’s stake in the hostel that named both Granda and Falwell.
At the time of the original filing two years earlier, the broker’s lawyer privately alleged to Granda that he had compromising photos of Granda and Becki, which led to Granda asking for help from Jerry, who reached out to Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s lawyer/“fixer.” Cohen intervened and took possession of the photos as a favor—he had known the Falwells since 2011—then called in the favor by pushing Falwell to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. Falwell would then become a staunch Trump ally and defender amid the latter’s moral crises, including the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, and he helped consolidate evangelical support for Trump’s campaign. Corben makes sure the viewer understands the import of this by heavy-handedly interspersing Falwell’s increasingly volatile remarks with footage of Trump’s scandalous actions and behaviors while in office, as though to say: See, evangelical hypocrisy is why we are at risk of losing our democracy!
While Falwell’s wholehearted embrace, under threat of scandal, of Donald Trump may have influenced the 2016 election, this focus on grand, simple narratives prevents Corben from entering more deeply into the strange and fraught realities of the Falwell story. These were especially apparent to those of us who were on campus to see how that story played out in real time."
-
CW: Falwell not being very christian
Falwell’s Downfall: The Pool Boy’s Story - The Bulwark https://www.thebulwark.com/the-pool-attendants-version/
#ChristianHypocrisy
#ChristianGOP"In 2018, a real estate–related lawsuit in Miami attracted the attention of a Buzzfeed News reporter, who was intrigued to find then–Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. sharing his previously-reported ownership of a local hostel with a pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. That story marked the beginning of a yearslong scandal that culminated in Falwell—a major Donald Trump ally whose endorsement helped move the needle among evangelicals for the former president’s 2016 campaign—outed as a cuckold, a secret alcoholic, and a cynic about his professed Christian faith. Falwell resigned from Liberty University under pressure in August 2020, embarrassing the school’s board, who had offered Falwell a free reign and their unqualified support for more than a decade.
...making the Falwells’ denials even harder to believe. Granda himself is a likable and winning narrator of the scandal, frank and unforced in his interviews. Having been a supporting player in earlier versions of the story that centered on the prominent evangelical couple, Granda’s comments add nuance to the story and emphasize the significant power differential between himself and the Falwells. It is impossible, for example, to forget his youth: Granda was only 20 years old when he met them. What 20-year-old in Granda’s situation would have known what they were getting themselves into? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the couple knew just what they were doing when they invited him into their complicated lives.
In March 2012, Granda was working poolside at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami when, as he tells it, Becki Falwell, a guest who had been ogling him, asked him to come by her room later—and in case the purpose wasn’t clear enough, she mentioned that her husband would want to watch. Making arrangements from a blocked number later that day, Becki invited Granda to meet at a nearby Days Inn to make sure their liaison wouldn’t happen at the same hotel where their kids were staying. Granda alleges that Jerry was waiting with pants unzipped when Becki welcomed him into the room. The encounter would mark the beginning of an alleged six-year-long affair that saw Granda joining the family on vacations and becoming well known to the Falwells’ children, who unassumingly joked about Becki’s propensity for disappearing during their trips.
The relationship was a personal boon for Granda, who benefitted materially and socially from his connection to the Falwell family. He stayed at their Lynchburg farm, traveled frequently with them, and met numerous members of their larger circle. In September 2012, only six months after he first met Becki, Granda was on campus at Liberty when he met Donald Trump.
The aforementioned business deal, which gave Granda a 25 percent equity stake in the Miami hostel, would come about in 2013, the result of Falwell’s offers to help Granda financially and jumpstart his career. Details of Granda’s affair with Falwells were first hinted at when a local real estate broker refiled a previously dismissed claim in August 2017 against Granda’s stake in the hostel that named both Granda and Falwell.
At the time of the original filing two years earlier, the broker’s lawyer privately alleged to Granda that he had compromising photos of Granda and Becki, which led to Granda asking for help from Jerry, who reached out to Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s lawyer/“fixer.” Cohen intervened and took possession of the photos as a favor—he had known the Falwells since 2011—then called in the favor by pushing Falwell to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. Falwell would then become a staunch Trump ally and defender amid the latter’s moral crises, including the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, and he helped consolidate evangelical support for Trump’s campaign. Corben makes sure the viewer understands the import of this by heavy-handedly interspersing Falwell’s increasingly volatile remarks with footage of Trump’s scandalous actions and behaviors while in office, as though to say: See, evangelical hypocrisy is why we are at risk of losing our democracy!
While Falwell’s wholehearted embrace, under threat of scandal, of Donald Trump may have influenced the 2016 election, this focus on grand, simple narratives prevents Corben from entering more deeply into the strange and fraught realities of the Falwell story. These were especially apparent to those of us who were on campus to see how that story played out in real time."
-
CW: Falwell not being very christian
Falwell’s Downfall: The Pool Boy’s Story - The Bulwark https://www.thebulwark.com/the-pool-attendants-version/
#ChristianHypocrisy
#ChristianGOP"In 2018, a real estate–related lawsuit in Miami attracted the attention of a Buzzfeed News reporter, who was intrigued to find then–Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. sharing his previously-reported ownership of a local hostel with a pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. That story marked the beginning of a yearslong scandal that culminated in Falwell—a major Donald Trump ally whose endorsement helped move the needle among evangelicals for the former president’s 2016 campaign—outed as a cuckold, a secret alcoholic, and a cynic about his professed Christian faith. Falwell resigned from Liberty University under pressure in August 2020, embarrassing the school’s board, who had offered Falwell a free reign and their unqualified support for more than a decade.
...making the Falwells’ denials even harder to believe. Granda himself is a likable and winning narrator of the scandal, frank and unforced in his interviews. Having been a supporting player in earlier versions of the story that centered on the prominent evangelical couple, Granda’s comments add nuance to the story and emphasize the significant power differential between himself and the Falwells. It is impossible, for example, to forget his youth: Granda was only 20 years old when he met them. What 20-year-old in Granda’s situation would have known what they were getting themselves into? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the couple knew just what they were doing when they invited him into their complicated lives.
In March 2012, Granda was working poolside at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami when, as he tells it, Becki Falwell, a guest who had been ogling him, asked him to come by her room later—and in case the purpose wasn’t clear enough, she mentioned that her husband would want to watch. Making arrangements from a blocked number later that day, Becki invited Granda to meet at a nearby Days Inn to make sure their liaison wouldn’t happen at the same hotel where their kids were staying. Granda alleges that Jerry was waiting with pants unzipped when Becki welcomed him into the room. The encounter would mark the beginning of an alleged six-year-long affair that saw Granda joining the family on vacations and becoming well known to the Falwells’ children, who unassumingly joked about Becki’s propensity for disappearing during their trips.
The relationship was a personal boon for Granda, who benefitted materially and socially from his connection to the Falwell family. He stayed at their Lynchburg farm, traveled frequently with them, and met numerous members of their larger circle. In September 2012, only six months after he first met Becki, Granda was on campus at Liberty when he met Donald Trump.
The aforementioned business deal, which gave Granda a 25 percent equity stake in the Miami hostel, would come about in 2013, the result of Falwell’s offers to help Granda financially and jumpstart his career. Details of Granda’s affair with Falwells were first hinted at when a local real estate broker refiled a previously dismissed claim in August 2017 against Granda’s stake in the hostel that named both Granda and Falwell.
At the time of the original filing two years earlier, the broker’s lawyer privately alleged to Granda that he had compromising photos of Granda and Becki, which led to Granda asking for help from Jerry, who reached out to Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s lawyer/“fixer.” Cohen intervened and took possession of the photos as a favor—he had known the Falwells since 2011—then called in the favor by pushing Falwell to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. Falwell would then become a staunch Trump ally and defender amid the latter’s moral crises, including the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, and he helped consolidate evangelical support for Trump’s campaign. Corben makes sure the viewer understands the import of this by heavy-handedly interspersing Falwell’s increasingly volatile remarks with footage of Trump’s scandalous actions and behaviors while in office, as though to say: See, evangelical hypocrisy is why we are at risk of losing our democracy!
While Falwell’s wholehearted embrace, under threat of scandal, of Donald Trump may have influenced the 2016 election, this focus on grand, simple narratives prevents Corben from entering more deeply into the strange and fraught realities of the Falwell story. These were especially apparent to those of us who were on campus to see how that story played out in real time."
-
The thread about Marionville; the house that thread built and home to the unfortunate “Fortunate Duellist”
There’s an old Georgian villa in the east of Edinburgh called Marionville. It lends its name to the district, a few streets and a fire station. It’s your typical regular, 3-storey, 5-bay, 6-over-6 window, sandstone job and although it is quite a rarity in a largely 20th century part of town, at first glance it is otherwise unremarkable for Edinburgh.
Marionville. Cc-BY-SA Kim TraynorUnremarkable that is until you find out a little bit about the place’s history! It was built some time between the 1760s and 1780s by the Misses Ramsay of Old Lyon Close, milliners renowned in the burgh for their ribboned hats. When built it was called Viewfrith (as in a house where one could view the Frith, or Firth of Forth. On account of its occupants trade, it was scornfully nicknamed the Lappet Ha‘, lappet referring to the woven lacework that was common in Georgian women’s hats. Ha’ for ball; the house that lappet built. The misses Ramsay saw out their days in their fine house and its gardens, and in October 1780 it was noted as being for sale:
Sale notice for Viewfrith, Caledonian Mercury, October 16 1780About 1786 it passed to one James Macrae of Holmains Esq. who liked to be known as Captain Macrae on account of his service in the 6th Dragoon Guards (Irish Carabiniers), a Hanoverian cavalry regiment. By accounts he was both a sophisticated, cultured charmer and an arrogant, pompous “Goth“. It was Macrae who renamed the house, calling it for his wife, Maria Cecile le Maistre.
Uniforms of horsemen of the Irish Carabiniers (6th Dragoon Guards)Captain Macrae had a quick temper and an overinflated sense of his own status. He was nicknamed the “fortunate duellist” on account of his propensity to call for satisfaction and on not being dead as a result. He practised by firing at a barber’s block kept specially for the purpose, or so John Kay caricatured him.
“The Fortunate Duellist”: caricature of Captain Macrae with an inset image of him practising duelling with the barber’s block, from “Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings” by John Kay, 1799The Macraes soon built up a reputation as a home of the “gayest private theatricals, perhaps in Britain“. Being wealthy and aspirational with tastes “gay and fashionable” they had a 150-seat private theatre built, complete with stage, curtain and scenery in the house where the couple themselves took the starring roles. The great and the good of Edinburgh were invited and the shows were a hot ticket in town, being well reviewed in the papers. The Scots Magazine and Caledonian Mercury were full of gushing praise for them.
Edinburgh Advertiser, May 9 1789Maria Macrae was the daughter of the Swedish ambassador’s wife and had spent time in Paris with her cousins. It was there she got a taste for the private theatricals of the time and it was she who was chiefly responsible for reproducing them at Marionville. The Macrae’s inner circle was a centre of Georgian high fashion in Edinburgh, the women wore head-dresses so tall that they had to “sit on the carriage floor” and the men wore “bright coats with tails to their heels” and “wigs with great side curls“. The innermost of their circle were the Ramsays (no relation to the Misses), Sir George Ramsay of Bamff, 6th Baronet and his wife, Eleanor Fraser. They were “warmly attached and intimate” with the Macraes.
An engraving of Marionville in happier times from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant.So all was good. Everyone was happy and Marionville was the place to be seen around town. Macrae was highly regarded in the right circles, but his pomposity and temper would be his unravelling. An example of this was when a messenger of the law tried to arrest his cousin, the Reverend John Cunningham, Earl Glencairn, at a private party in Drumsheugh House. Macrae was outraged that a common man would insult a gentleman, and threw the messenger over the stairwell. When it later came to light that Cunningham was a debtor who had refused all chance to settle his obligations and that the messenger had been gravely injured, Macrae made an apology and paid compensation of 300 guineas to settle the matter.
And then we come to the fateful night of April 7th 1790. Captain Macrae had been out at the Theatre Royal, which stood on Shakespeare Square, opposite the General Register Office and where the General Post Office would later be built. Being a gentleman, he was helping a lady to get a chair to convey her home (this meant a sedan chair; at this time were still the principal form of public transport of choice for the moneyed classes around town). He had secured the lady her chair when a liveried footman appeared on the scene and seized one of the poles of the chair to reserve it for his mistress. The outraged Macrae rapped the impertinent servant’s knuckles with his cane.
The Theatre Royal on Shakespeare Square, the corner of Princes Street, North Bridge, Leith Street and what is now Waterloo Place. John Le Conte, 1857. Credit; Edinburgh City LibrariesThe footman, not to be cowed, denounced Macrae as a scoundrel and punched him in the chest. Macrae responded by striking him across the head with his cane. An almighty fracas ensued, sucking in passers-by on both sides. Somehow the conflict was defused and the lady was spirited to safety in another chair. And there it might have ended until Macrae was made aware that the footman in question was an employee of his dear friend, Sir George Ramsay.
A Georgian cartoon of a drunken gentleman fighting with a coachman and footman. Isaac Cruikshank, 1809. © The Trustees of the British MuseumAnd so, the following day Macrae sought out Ramsay at his place of business. His friend informed him that the servant in question was recently engaged by his wife and he felt that he had no hand in the matter. Macrae insisted that he would therefore apologise to the lady at once. Hurrying to the Ramsay’s house on St. Andrew Square, he found her sitting for an up and coming your artist, one Henry Raeburn. Theatrically going down on one knee, Macrae begged forgiveness for having chastised her servant. And there it would have ended. But…
A few days later at Marionville, an anonymous letter arrived stating that Macrae had meddled with the “Knights of the Shoulder Knot” (the name given to footmen for their elaborate uniforms) and they would have their revenge for the insult to their brother. The footman in question, James Merry, took the matter further by making it known he would take legal proceedings against his assailant for the injuries he had suffered. Piqued, Macrae wrote to Ramsay and demanded that the man be put in his place and discharged. For whatever reason, Ramsay declined to satisfy his friend and their relationship quickly soured as the two engaged in a protracted series of increasingly intemperate letters. This culminated in Macrae having his messenger inform Ramsay that he was not a gentleman, but a scoundrel!
Georgian caricature of a foppish, arrogant footman. George Moutard Woodward, 1799. © The Trustees of the British MuseumThat was that! Macrae had overstepped the mark for sure, Ramsay was a proper gentleman, with a title, not someone you could go around insulting. The intermediary, one Captain Amory, arranged a meeting of both parties in Bayle’s Tavern at which “rough epithets were exchanged“. The outcome was inevitable and satisfaction was demanded by Macrae. But he let it be known that he considered Ramsay the challenger, for refusing to deal with his servant.
The time and place was set for the shore outside of Musselburgh at noon the next day. What better place to settle your differences than in the cool sea breeze of the Honest Toun? And so it was that the next day the two gentlemen, each with another in tow as second, met at Wards Inn off of the Musselburgh Links. A surgeon, Benjamin Bell, was sensibly arranged for.
Benjamin Bell (left), following a different duelist on his way to Musselburgh to settle a score. Bell must have been the go-to man for calling to a duel. The woman heading the other way is a salter, carrying her load in a basket, supported by a leather strap around her head. From John Kay’s caricatures, Vol. 2. Credit; Edinburgh City LibrariesA parlay took place to see if things could be settled amicably, without either side losing face. Macrae demanded that if Ramsay dismiss his servant he would apologise profusely for all that had followed and consider it closed. Ramsay demanded an apology first, before any further progress could be made. Both sides were intransigent. The seconds which each side had brought as counsel declined further compromise and the course of action was now set. Each man took a pistol from a pair and made his way to the allotted spot on the Links. Each then walked 14 paces away from the other and the duel commenced. Ramsay shot first and nicked the collar of his late friend, grazing the neck. Macrae did not miss and Ramsay was mortally wounded. Macrae would later claim that he had planned to shoot high and miss on purpose, but was so outraged that Ramsay had not deliberately missed and had drawn blood that he decided to settle the matter once and for all by not missing. For a sure shot like Macrae, the outcome was inevitable.
“The Duel”, a cartoon in the style of Kay by amateur Edinburgh artist J. Jenkins in 1805. CC-BY 4.0 National Library of ScotlandThe deed done, Macrae was suddenly remorseful and had to be convinced to leave his dying friends’ side by Ramsay’s second, Sir William Maxwell. Edinburgh society was outraged and it was Macrae, the lower status gentleman that they squarely blamed for this calamity. Being a proper class scandal, the detail was all printed at the time (then, as now, controversy was good for sales) and Macrae was immortalised as “The Fortunate Duellist” by Edinburgh caricaturist John Kay. By trade Kay was a barber, so the story of the practice target may have appealed to him as much as the chance to satirise events.
Facing a potential murder charge, Macrae abandoned Marionville and his family and fled to Paris accompanied by his second, Captain Amory. They took up lodgings in the Hôtel de la Dauphine. A summons soon arrived from Edinburgh to return and face the law. Ignoring it, both were declared outlaws and consigned themselves to live out their days in exile. To add insult to Macrae’s injury, 2 years later the Sheriffs awarded damages and compensation to the footman for his original injuries, which were paid from Macrae’s estate in his absence. Macrae stayed in Paris until the coming of the French revolution compelled his to flee further, this time to Altona in Italy. He had hoped that the passage of time would allow him to return home to Marionville, but society and the law were resolved against it.
And so it was that the gayest house in town fell into “an air of depression and melancholy such as could barely fail to strike the most unobservant passenger“. It was advertised as being to let in 1793 and the following year it was for sale. Macrae was soon forgotten by the chattering classes of Edinburgh. That is until 1814, when publisher Robert Chambers relates that “a gentleman of my acquaintance was surprised to meet him one day in a Parisian coffee house“. “The wreck or ghost of the handsome, sprightly man he had once been.” “The comfort of his home, his country and his friends, the use of his talents to all these, had been lost, and himself obliged to lead the life of a condemned Cain, all through the one fault of a fiery temper“.
Captain Macrae, late of Marionville, died alone in Paris on the 16th January 1820, 30 years an exile from his home, wife and 2 children. “Captain Macrae was a strange character. To those of his own class a tyrant and bully. To those below him he was kind and obliging”. At this time his old house was in the possession of a Mr and Mrs Dudgeon although it was for sale again shortly after, the new owner being Walter Stirling Glas, esq. The house was repeatedly for sale and let throughout the 19th century. A flick through some old Post Office directories enlightens us that from approximately 1858 to 1869, it was being used by Dr. Guthrie’s “Original Ragged Industrial School” .
In 1932, Marionville was purchased by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St. Andrews for use as the manse for St. Ninian’s & Triduana’s Church, which was built in the grounds at this time. Its last occupant before the church took it over would appear to be one Miss W. Crawford Brown and the house was sold back into private use within the past few years. The church, which was never actually completed to the intended design, is surprisingly the work of that most British of British architects, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (of red telephone box and Battersea power station fame).
St. Ninian’s & Triduana’s R.C. church in the grounds of Marionville.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
https://rizomatica.noblogs.org/2020/10/parretti-necessita-della-diminuzione-dellorario-di-lavoro/
Necessità della diminuzione dell’orario di lavoro
Le società più sviluppate si trovano di fronte le conseguenze di due dinamiche distinte:
lo sviluppo economico capitalista e
lo sviluppo dei bisogni umani.
Osserviamo le due dinamiche:
Esiste un processo per cui parte delle merci prodotte vanno ad aumentare il capitale esistente e questo permette, a sua volta, di produrre una maggiore quantità di merci.
Inoltre parte del lavoro sociale è dedicato a sviluppare conoscenze e tecniche che determinano una continua crescita della produttività e quindi la società è capace di produrre con la stessa quantità di capitale una maggiore quantità di merci.
Tale crescita della produttività dipende dalle risorse, ad essa dedicate, ma soprattutto dal livello di istruzione dei lavoratori stessi.
Quando questo aumento della produttività induce, a sua volta, una crescita dell’istruzione, il suo ritmo di crescita diventa esponenziale(1).
Allora, se questa capacità di produrre, a parità di capitale e lavoro, un valore sempre maggiore, non è accompagnata dalla crescita, nella stessa percentuale, di reddito speso per la soddisfazione dei bisogni, la crescita del capitale diventa impossibile perché il capitale esistente già sarebbe sufficiente a produrre più di quanto richiesto ed il capitale aggiuntivo diventerebbe inutile.
Da questo deriverebbe l’impossibilità di accumulazione del capitale e dei profitti e quindi la crisi del capitalismo.
Allora, la crescita del reddito, proporzioneale alla crescita della produttività, della maggioranza dei membri della società, cioè dei lavoratori, diventa la condizione necessaria al funzionamento stesso del sistema economico.
Esiste un’altra dinamica sociale, simultanea ed indipendente da quella appena descritta, per cui, man mano che le persone riescono a soddisfare i loro bisogni, cioè ad avere un reddito che permetta loro di acquistare i beni ed i servizi necessari a soddisfarli, maturano nuovi bisogni, la cui soddisfazione richiede un reddito sempre maggiore. Quindi una crescita del reddito determina una crescita dei bisogni, la cui soddisfazione implica, a sua volta, la necessità della crescita del reddito da spendere per la loro soddisfazione.
Ma quando le persone sono riuscite a soddisfare i loro bisogni primari, cioè quelli definiti dall’apparato sensoriale e pulsionale umano, geneticamente determinato, maturano nuovi bisogni in modo più lento per due ragioni:
1) una di natura economica: prima di spendere totalmente un maggiore reddito disponibile, le persone tendono a mantenerne una parte in forma precauzionale, come assicurazione contro possibili eventi negativi, che possano rendere insicura la soddisfazione futura dei bisogni primari. Ciò implica che la crescita di nuovi bisogni e la loro soddisfazione tende ad essere minore della crescita del loro reddito e quindi una parte sempre maggiore del reddito aggiuntivo viene risparmiata e la propensione marginale al consumo diminuisce al crescere del ritmo di crescita del reddito.
2) un’altra di natura psicologica: le persone devono prima osservare e sperimentare che esiste un modo più conveniente per soddisfare i bisogni preesistenti o un modo di soddisfare dei bisogni, prima non soddisfatti, e solo allora riescono a cambiare i propri comportamenti.
In altri termini, i nuovi bisogni emergono quando le persone intravedono la possibilità di soddisfarli e nuove forme di soddisfazione di bisogni già esistenti vengono adottate solo quando intravedono la convenienza di adottare i nuovi comportamenti, che le nuove forme di soddisfazione comportano.
Questo implica che, per far emergere nuovi bisogni ed introdurre nuovi soddisfattori, è necessaria un’attività di promozione degli stessi, altrimenti il processo di sviluppo e soddisfazione dei bisogni diventa estremamente lento.
Queste due dinamiche determinano un fenomeno paradossale, un aumento dei bisogni minore dell’aumento della capacità di soddisfarli(2).... (continua)
#lavoraremeno #redistribuzione #crisi #abbondanza #disoccupazione #consumi -
DATE: May 13, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Class background influences whether genetic predisposition for intelligence drives you left or right
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-class-alters-the-genetic-pathways-of-political-ideology/
A person’s economic political views are shaped by their genetic predisposition for cognitive performance interacting with their childhood social class. People with a higher genetic likelihood for cognitive performance tend to adopt left-wing policies if they grew up poor, and right-wing policies if they grew up wealthy. The research was published in Political Psychology.
Understanding differences in economic policy preferences is a primary goal of political science. Traditional models in political economics assume that individuals will support policies that benefit them financially. In a strictly theoretical system where flat taxes are redistributed equally, anyone earning below the average income should want complete redistribution, while anyone earning above the average should oppose it. While real political systems are messier, the fundamental dynamic generally holds.
Low-income earners tend to benefit from proportional taxation and redistribution, while high-income earners bear the costs. In recent years, researchers have found that genetics also influence political behavior. Studies using various methods have documented genetic overlaps with political preferences. This overlap means that ideological preferences partially share the same genetic architecture as other measurable traits.
Since our distant ancestors did not have modern tax systems or mass political parties, evolutionary forces could not have shaped economic ideology directly. Genetic effects on these preferences must operate through intermediate traits, which scientists call endophenotypes. Some researchers proposed that cognitive performance might act as one of these intermediate traits.
The results of previous studies on cognitive performance and economic ideology, however, have been wildly inconsistent. Some studies showed a positive link between cognitive ability and economic conservatism. Other studies found a negative link, and some found no connection at all.
Rafael Ahlskog, a researcher at the Department of Government at Uppsala University in Sweden, thought these contradictory results could be reconciled. He proposed a gene-environment interaction. This occurs when a specific genetic factor behaves differently depending on the environment surrounding the individual.
Ahlskog theorized that cognitive performance does not push a person toward a specific political ideology on its own. Instead, cognitive capacity helps people analyze complicated policy packages and accurately deduce their own class interests. Modern economies feature vast arrays of diverse taxes, regulations, and benefit programs. Evaluating how these policies interact requires analytical effort.
By applying these conceptual frameworks, the study connects the theories of classical economics with modern genetics. People who find it easy to perform the mental calculations required to navigate tax proposals will optimize their policy preferences. Those who find it more difficult might answer policy questions more randomly, or they might rely on social cues not strictly tied to their personal class background.
In addition to this, political science maintains a long-standing theory regarding the impressionable years in human development. This theory states that environmental influences on attitudes are most potent during late adolescence and early adulthood. After this period, political preferences tend to stick. Based on this, Ahlskog suggested that the perception of one’s class interest is shaped primarily by the relative economic standing of their parents during these formative years.
To test these ideas, Ahlskog analyzed data from a large sample of fraternal twins from the Swedish Twin Registry born between 1943 and 1958. Fraternal twins are siblings born at the same time who share, on average, half of their genetic sequence. Using within-family differences among fraternal twins provides an excellent natural experiment for behavioral researchers.
Researchers value within-family sibling designs because comparing two people from the broader population introduces confounding variables. Between two random strangers, a genetic correlation might be skewed by regional ancestry differences or by the environmental impacts of their parents’ genes. Fraternal twins share the exact same family environment, and their genetic differences result purely from the random shuffling of DNA during conception.
Because of this randomization, systematic downstream differences in sibling behavior have a causal interpretation. Researchers can confidently conclude that the genetic difference caused the behavioral difference, rather than an unmeasured environmental factor.
To conduct the analysis, Ahlskog utilized variation in a genetic measure called a polygenic index. A polygenic index is an individual-level predictor of a specific trait that is based entirely on a person’s DNA. Geneticists build these indices by identifying thousands of tiny DNA variations known as single nucleotide polymorphisms that correlate with a target trait. The index used in this study summarized each twin’s genetic propensity for cognitive performance based on previous large-scale genomic discoveries.
He combined this genetic data with the twins’ responses to an extensive survey conducted by the Swedish Twin Registry between 2009 and 2010. The survey included a detailed battery of over thirty political preference questions. Participants rated policy proposals on a five-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Ahlskog isolated twelve items specifically dealing with economic ideology, such as opinions on taxation, welfare distribution, the public sector, and government regulation.
To measure family socioeconomic standing, Ahlskog utilized Swedish registry data covering the twins’ parents. He calculated a relative affluence score by comparing the parents’ income and education levels to other adults in their specific local parishes. This provided a localized measure of class background. Sociologists have found that people typically compare their economic status to their immediate neighbors rather than the national average.
When looking at the average effect across the entire sample, the genetic measure for cognitive performance had no impact on economic conservatism. The effect size appeared as practically zero. Without looking deeper, this might seem like a simple lack of an effect.
When Ahlskog factored in the family’s socioeconomic background, the average null effect broke apart to reveal two distinct, opposing trends. Among children raised in relatively poorer families, a higher genetic index for cognitive performance caused more left-wing economic views. These individuals favored higher taxation and wealth redistribution.
Among children from affluent backgrounds, the effect reversed entirely. A higher genetic index among these privileged individuals caused more right-wing views. They favored market reliance and reduced welfare spending. The genetic factor altered how individuals optimized their political views based entirely on their childhood class.
In the scientific taxonomy of gene-environment interactions, researchers often distinguish between dimmer effects and lens effects. A dimmer effect happens when a change in the environment alters the magnitude of a genetic influence, making it stronger or weaker. A lens effect happens when the environment actually changes the direction of the genetic influence. Ahlskog’s findings represent a rare, robust example of a lens effect for a socially relevant behavior.
The researcher also controlled for the twins’ adult income and education levels. The environmental interaction held up even when accounting for later-life resources. This suggests the genetic influence operates specifically on the early-life formation of class identity, not simply on a voter’s current bank account balance.
As a placebo test to verify his theory, Ahlskog applied the same analytical models to social ideology. Social ideology involves cultural and moral issues, such as immigration, criminal justice policy, and animal rights. Unlike economic ideology, there is no direct personal financial benefit to optimizing social preferences based on household class.
In this test, he found that a higher genetic index was naturally associated with lower social conservatism across the board. The effects operated in parallel for both the rich and the poor. There was no interaction based on socioeconomic background.
The study features a few limitations and caveats. The genetic predictor is a noisy measurement that only captures a fraction of the actual heritable traits for cognitive performance. Comparing genetic differences within local twin pairs amplifies this measurement noise even further. As a result, the reported effects are likely much smaller than the actual biological impact.
The geographical and historical realities of the respondent group also matter. The individuals in this sample grew up in Sweden during the middle of the twentieth century, a period defined by the rapid expansion of the modern welfare state. Class-based politics and labor movements were highly salient in their daily lives.
The findings might look completely different in populations where economic ideology is not the primary dividing line in public debate. In political environments where left-wing economic positions are championed by socially conservative populists, the class dynamics could manifest in alternate ways. Finding out which specific political relationships are affected by changing social cultures will require further study.
Ultimately, the findings demonstrate that genetic influences on political behavior are highly contingent on social environments. An effect that appears to be mathematically zero on average can obscure shifting dynamics beneath the surface. This heavy dependency on outside environmental factors functions as a strong argument against genetic determinism.
The study, “Class, genes, and rationality: A gene-environment interaction approach to ideology,” was authored by Rafael Ahlskog.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-class-alters-the-genetic-pathways-of-political-ideology/
-------------------------------------------------
DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: http://subscribe-article-digests.clinicians-exchange.org
READ ONLINE: http://read-the-rss-mega-archive.clinicians-exchange.org
It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GeneticsAndPolitics #CognitivePerformance #GeneEnvironmentInteraction #ClassBackground #EconomicIdeology #LeftWingRightWing #TaxPolicy #WelfarePolicy #PoliticalPsychology #TwinStudy
-
Fantasyland
Non-specific Fantasy World Map (credit: http://freefantasymaps.org/The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Gollancz, 2004 (1996).Dark Lord (dread lord). There is always one of these in the background of every Tour, attempting to ruin everything and take over the world. He will be so sinister that he will be seen by you only once or twice, probably near the end of the Tour. Generally he will attack you through MINIONS (forces of Terror, bound to his will), of which he will have large numbers. When you do get to see him at last, you will not be surprised to find he is black […] and shadowy and probably not wholly human. He will make you feel very cold and small. […]
In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland Diana Wynne Jones created an imaginary tourist’s guidebook to a generic world where magic is a given — in fact the kind of world conjured up for almost any example of the epic fantasy genre you can name. Think Middle Earth, Narnia, Earthsea or, less familiarly, the Old Kingdom, Prydain, Zimiamvia or Pellinor. Jones imagines them all perhaps as aspects of Fantasyland, though it’s clear that the Disney version is not really what she has in mind. As pretty much all fantasy is predicated on conflict leading to some sort of resolution the nemesis of each world is thus nearly always some incarnation of a Dark Lord. It’s hard to think of any dread adversary who doesn’t conform in some way to Jones’ description, their motivations exactly those of Milton’s Satan:
One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.But a Dark Lord alone does not a Fantasyland make.
Redrawn map based on that in the first Vista edition (credit http://dianawynnejones.wikia.com/wiki/File:Tough-guide-fantasyland-map.png)Jones’ Tough Guide, like any genuine Rough Guide to our world, lists places as well as people, concepts as well as concrete (and not so concrete) objects. Open any page at random and you will find no end of examples of fantasy tropes and clichés: from prophecy (“used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule…”) to inns (they “exist in TOWNS and CITIES, but seldom outside them, except at crossroads that are miles from anywhere”), from dwell (“used throughout the Tour meaning to live somewhere. The inhabitants are always Dwellers“) to sex (“obligatory at some stage in the Tour. The Rules differ according to whether you are male or female…”). All entries are recognisable to a greater or lesser extent, and for any fantasy writer worth their salt they can be a useful corrective to lazy writing, should they choose to aim at original plots, characters and situations.
Then there is the MAP. All guidebooks have them, and this one is no exception. “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.” The Tough Guide‘s map is weird and wonderful, until you realise that it’s our outline map of Europe — with north at the bottom. This is the author’s way of saying that most epic fantasy is basically a topsy-turvy version of life in medieval Europe. The map is peppered with ‘unpronounceable’ names or barely disguised familiar placenames, usually with ominous descriptions. Some versions of this map are based on the first Vista paperback, but the Gollancz edition has both additional and alternative names on its map, redrawn by Dave Senior. An assiduous reader will have fun winkling out the original source of these aberrations.
But rely on the map at your peril. Nothing is as it seems, and where there is nothing on the map it seems there is inevitably something unexpected. Not only is this evident in the maps one sees as a frontispiece in most epic fantasies, DWJ is very specific about their failings: some placenames “may be names of countries, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell […] there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places.” Her conclusion? “The Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get.”
Fantasyland (http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/a-history-of-epic-fantasy-part-5.html)As soon as she was embarked on the Tough Guide Diana must have been thinking of writing narratives set in this landscape. But how to incorporate a spoof born of familiarity and no little affection in stories which, while mocking the conventions of the genre, also reflected her sense of responsibility towards her audience? Two years after the original Tough Guide she produced Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), and two years after that came Year of the Griffin (2000). In these — to put it bluntly — she excoriated those who wielded power and extracted profit from the general population or who showed a narrow-mindedness where education and creativity are concerned. Don’t expect Victorian morality tales, however; these are subtle fairytales in which, while magic is normal, fine though flawed individuals learn life lessons, most wrongs are eventually righted and a devastated world starts on the road to rebuilding and some kind of happily-ever-after.
But the Tough Guide harboured the germs of a slightly darker vision under its breezy exterior. In an earlier review of the 1996 paperback I gave the impression that this was principally a tongue-in-cheek spoof, and indeed this was the general assessment (Terry Pratchett called it “an indispensable guide for anyone stuck in the realms of fantasy without a magic sword to call their own”). Nevertheless DWJ had always been aware of the fantasy writer’s propensity to play God in their created universe — though she would have argued that it’s actually humans who attribute human creativity to their various deities — and to order characters, situations and events according to their arbitrary will. In Dark Lord she portrays the sinister offworlder Roland Chesney (perhaps a denizen of our own world) fashioning Fantasyland into a giant theme park for earth-based package tourists. Here he forces the unwilling local inhabitants to act out epic fantasy roles such as wizard guides, mercenaries, bards, thieves, starving villagers, enchantresses and so on. After four decades, the strain on Fantasyland and its peoples is proving not only hugely burdensome but also unsustainable, not to forget immoral.
We all know the Roland Chesneys of our world. Whether they are on the more benign end of the spectrum (perhaps DWJ was thinking of Walt Disney and his own Fantasyland) or, less benign, like the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, they peddle entertainment on a global scale while seeking to maximise profits and to acquire the greatest monopoly the law allows. Their rapacious greed outweighs any true concern for the common man, and they may well choose to devastate a planet rather than relinquish any power. These days they may, indeed, govern countries.
For some readers of the Tough Guide in its various manifestations such sombre thoughts mayn’t cast any shadows: this is about magic, isn’t it, make-believe, and we all know that it doesn’t exist, don’t we? This Gollancz hardback includes — instead of the occasional antique illustrations of the Vista paperback — rather more jokey line drawings by Douglas Carrel. Fine in themselves, they remind me a little of the cartoons, by the likes of the UK’s Josh Kirby, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. But then, we all know by now that underneath the veneer of Pratchett’s sense of the ridiculous there lurked a lot of suppressed anger and subversive polemic. As with Pratchett’s writings, if you scratch the surface of Jones’ writing you’re likely to find rather more than you bargained for.
First posted 2nd June 2017 with this note: “This is the last of a short series of posts on Diana Wynne Jones: the first was by Tamar Lindsay on Fantasyland’s Dark Lord, and the second was a repost of a review of a collection of that author’s non-fiction writings. DWJ (born 16 August 1934, died 26 March 2011) was an intelligent as well as prolific writer of mainly fantasy for readers of all ages.” Now reposted for #MarchMagics2026.
#dianaWynneJones #Fantasyland #maps #MarchMagics2026 #TerryPratchett #TheToughGuideToFantasyland -
Fantasyland
Non-specific Fantasy World Map (credit: http://freefantasymaps.org/The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Gollancz, 2004 (1996).Dark Lord (dread lord). There is always one of these in the background of every Tour, attempting to ruin everything and take over the world. He will be so sinister that he will be seen by you only once or twice, probably near the end of the Tour. Generally he will attack you through MINIONS (forces of Terror, bound to his will), of which he will have large numbers. When you do get to see him at last, you will not be surprised to find he is black […] and shadowy and probably not wholly human. He will make you feel very cold and small. […]
In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland Diana Wynne Jones created an imaginary tourist’s guidebook to a generic world where magic is a given — in fact the kind of world conjured up for almost any example of the epic fantasy genre you can name. Think Middle Earth, Narnia, Earthsea or, less familiarly, the Old Kingdom, Prydain, Zimiamvia or Pellinor. Jones imagines them all perhaps as aspects of Fantasyland, though it’s clear that the Disney version is not really what she has in mind. As pretty much all fantasy is predicated on conflict leading to some sort of resolution the nemesis of each world is thus nearly always some incarnation of a Dark Lord. It’s hard to think of any dread adversary who doesn’t conform in some way to Jones’ description, their motivations exactly those of Milton’s Satan:
One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.But a Dark Lord alone does not a Fantasyland make.
Redrawn map based on that in the first Vista edition (credit http://dianawynnejones.wikia.com/wiki/File:Tough-guide-fantasyland-map.png)Jones’ Tough Guide, like any genuine Rough Guide to our world, lists places as well as people, concepts as well as concrete (and not so concrete) objects. Open any page at random and you will find no end of examples of fantasy tropes and clichés: from prophecy (“used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule…”) to inns (they “exist in TOWNS and CITIES, but seldom outside them, except at crossroads that are miles from anywhere”), from dwell (“used throughout the Tour meaning to live somewhere. The inhabitants are always Dwellers“) to sex (“obligatory at some stage in the Tour. The Rules differ according to whether you are male or female…”). All entries are recognisable to a greater or lesser extent, and for any fantasy writer worth their salt they can be a useful corrective to lazy writing, should they choose to aim at original plots, characters and situations.
Then there is the MAP. All guidebooks have them, and this one is no exception. “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.” The Tough Guide‘s map is weird and wonderful, until you realise that it’s our outline map of Europe — with north at the bottom. This is the author’s way of saying that most epic fantasy is basically a topsy-turvy version of life in medieval Europe. The map is peppered with ‘unpronounceable’ names or barely disguised familiar placenames, usually with ominous descriptions. Some versions of this map are based on the first Vista paperback, but the Gollancz edition has both additional and alternative names on its map, redrawn by Dave Senior. An assiduous reader will have fun winkling out the original source of these aberrations.
But rely on the map at your peril. Nothing is as it seems, and where there is nothing on the map it seems there is inevitably something unexpected. Not only is this evident in the maps one sees as a frontispiece in most epic fantasies, DWJ is very specific about their failings: some placenames “may be names of countries, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell […] there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places.” Her conclusion? “The Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get.”
Fantasyland (http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/a-history-of-epic-fantasy-part-5.html)As soon as she was embarked on the Tough Guide Diana must have been thinking of writing narratives set in this landscape. But how to incorporate a spoof born of familiarity and no little affection in stories which, while mocking the conventions of the genre, also reflected her sense of responsibility towards her audience? Two years after the original Tough Guide she produced Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), and two years after that came Year of the Griffin (2000). In these — to put it bluntly — she excoriated those who wielded power and extracted profit from the general population or who showed a narrow-mindedness where education and creativity are concerned. Don’t expect Victorian morality tales, however; these are subtle fairytales in which, while magic is normal, fine though flawed individuals learn life lessons, most wrongs are eventually righted and a devastated world starts on the road to rebuilding and some kind of happily-ever-after.
But the Tough Guide harboured the germs of a slightly darker vision under its breezy exterior. In an earlier review of the 1996 paperback I gave the impression that this was principally a tongue-in-cheek spoof, and indeed this was the general assessment (Terry Pratchett called it “an indispensable guide for anyone stuck in the realms of fantasy without a magic sword to call their own”). Nevertheless DWJ had always been aware of the fantasy writer’s propensity to play God in their created universe — though she would have argued that it’s actually humans who attribute human creativity to their various deities — and to order characters, situations and events according to their arbitrary will. In Dark Lord she portrays the sinister offworlder Roland Chesney (perhaps a denizen of our own world) fashioning Fantasyland into a giant theme park for earth-based package tourists. Here he forces the unwilling local inhabitants to act out epic fantasy roles such as wizard guides, mercenaries, bards, thieves, starving villagers, enchantresses and so on. After four decades, the strain on Fantasyland and its peoples is proving not only hugely burdensome but also unsustainable, not to forget immoral.
We all know the Roland Chesneys of our world. Whether they are on the more benign end of the spectrum (perhaps DWJ was thinking of Walt Disney and his own Fantasyland) or, less benign, like the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, they peddle entertainment on a global scale while seeking to maximise profits and to acquire the greatest monopoly the law allows. Their rapacious greed outweighs any true concern for the common man, and they may well choose to devastate a planet rather than relinquish any power. These days they may, indeed, govern countries.
For some readers of the Tough Guide in its various manifestations such sombre thoughts mayn’t cast any shadows: this is about magic, isn’t it, make-believe, and we all know that it doesn’t exist, don’t we? This Gollancz hardback includes — instead of the occasional antique illustrations of the Vista paperback — rather more jokey line drawings by Douglas Carrel. Fine in themselves, they remind me a little of the cartoons, by the likes of the UK’s Josh Kirby, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. But then, we all know by now that underneath the veneer of Pratchett’s sense of the ridiculous there lurked a lot of suppressed anger and subversive polemic. As with Pratchett’s writings, if you scratch the surface of Jones’ writing you’re likely to find rather more than you bargained for.
First posted 2nd June 2017 with this note: “This is the last of a short series of posts on Diana Wynne Jones: the first was by Tamar Lindsay on Fantasyland’s Dark Lord, and the second was a repost of a review of a collection of that author’s non-fiction writings. DWJ (born 16 August 1934, died 26 March 2011) was an intelligent as well as prolific writer of mainly fantasy for readers of all ages.” Now reposted for #MarchMagics2026.
#dianaWynneJones #Fantasyland #maps #MarchMagics2026 #TerryPratchett #TheToughGuideToFantasyland -
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
Photo by Patrick Fore on UnsplashIt feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
###
As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
#culture #DerekThompson #EncyclopædiaBritannica #EncyclopediaBritannica #EricHavelock #history #JoeWeisenthal #JoshuaMeyrowitz #literacy #MarshallMcLuhan #media #orality #politics #Technology #WalterOng -
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
Photo by Patrick Fore on UnsplashIt feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
###
As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
#culture #DerekThompson #EncyclopædiaBritannica #EncyclopediaBritannica #EricHavelock #history #JoeWeisenthal #JoshuaMeyrowitz #literacy #MarshallMcLuhan #media #orality #politics #Technology #WalterOng -
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
Photo by Patrick Fore on UnsplashIt feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
###
As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
#culture #DerekThompson #EncyclopædiaBritannica #EncyclopediaBritannica #EricHavelock #history #JoeWeisenthal #JoshuaMeyrowitz #literacy #MarshallMcLuhan #media #orality #politics #Technology #WalterOng -
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
Photo by Patrick Fore on UnsplashIt feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
###
As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
#culture #DerekThompson #EncyclopædiaBritannica #EncyclopediaBritannica #EricHavelock #history #JoeWeisenthal #JoshuaMeyrowitz #literacy #MarshallMcLuhan #media #orality #politics #Technology #WalterOng -
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
Photo by Patrick Fore on UnsplashIt feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
###
As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
#culture #DerekThompson #EncyclopædiaBritannica #EncyclopediaBritannica #EricHavelock #history #JoeWeisenthal #JoshuaMeyrowitz #literacy #MarshallMcLuhan #media #orality #politics #Technology #WalterOng -
Dearest Knoxville,
On Wednesday, February 25, 2026, the Knox County Commission held it's monthly meeting. The gathering had attracted quite a crowd this month, most of whom were there to hear and/or protest Commissioner Fox's presentation on "A Christian's Biblical View of Illegal Immigration", and some of whom spoke out in either support or disgust. One of the most striking moments, to my mind, came at the end of the presentation, when Fox was asked a question by Junior Commissioner Oriana Hall:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.
It was an incredible exchange, given the implications. When questioned directly on whether arrival in this land, to which Columbus was not native, spoke to his lack of belonging on this land, Commissioner Fox deliberately refused to accept that framing. But in implying that Columbus belonged here, Fox ascribes authority to make the decision of who belonged on the land either to himself or, more likely, Columbus. Whatever the case, this authority is a right reserved for the owners of the land, who were, in fact, native to it.
Unless, of course, it is understood that those native to the land did not own the land, and instead it was freely available for those with the power to take it. This appears to be Commissioner Fox's understanding of reality. In the English language, we have a word for objects taken under such an understanding. That word is thievery.
Now, while it must be said that the peoples indigenous to this continent have suffered much greater offenses at the hands of those who stole their land, I'd like to focus on the theft itself for a moment. Or rather, the Knox County Commissioner defending his right to benefit from it. You see, in processing what was said at the meeting, it struck me as odd that the Knox County residents who spoke out in support of Fox's view of immigration, many of whom professed to being in his district and having voted for him, for the most part spoke of their concerns of immigrants in the community taking public resources that should rightfully go to our "actual neighbors". They were arguing theft, spurred on by a Commissioner who had just aligned himself with thieves.
The assembly heard about overcrowded and underfunded schools, strained healthcare services, unpaid taxes and overworked law enforcement. In fact, Commissioner Fox had withdrawn a resolution—previously scheduled to be voted on at this meeting—to encourage the Knox County Sheriff's Department to work more closely with ICE after the Sheriff argued he simply lacked the resources to make it happen. There certainly seem to be some aggrieved parties here in Knoxville. So, who is to blame for the siphoning of our communities resources?
Well, if we were to ask Commissioner Fox, who, as previously discussed, aligns himself with thieves, he would argue that it is the people who exist in our community without authorization. In fact, he did, in a presentation that lasted 30 minutes, and revealed more about him than it did about any Christian's Biblical view on immigration.The Presentation
Intro
Fox began by quoting President Trump:Fox: "The first duty of American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
So how would the Commissioner have us protect American citizens?Fox: To me, this issue of illegal immigration is a simple matter of governance. We have a federal law that provides for: Who can come to this nation? Who can reside here? Who can visit, and who can't? And these laws should be enforced, not only by the federal government, but, to the extent possible, state governments and county governments. We must make Knox County, the state of Tennessee, and the United States inhospitable to people who are not supposed to reside here according to our immigration laws, so that they will return.
He would have us work with a federal agency whose "enforcement" operations quite obviously have more to do with race than law. Considering that the living Word of God makes no provision for a "racially pure" ethnostate that ICE is clearly pursuing, I can say with certainty that these intentions are not divine. They are lawless and immoral. They are the intentions of a thief.
Fox went on, asserting that opponents of this immigration crackdown are not people who associate themselves with Christianity. He cast that blanket assumption directly over no one, considering the only critics that he brought up by name all night, Matthew Nance and Jonathan Haskell. He then went on to bring up specific passages of Scripture he wanted to clarify.Leviticus 19:33
Fox: You have this principle drawn out of Scripture, from the Old Testament, and because of this principle the conclusion is: "Well, the United States shouldn't enforce it's borders. It's not 'being kind to the foreigner', and anyone who wants to be a citizen in the US, or just reside here, must be welcome and allowed to do so, and Christians should rise up against laws to the contrary, because otherwise you're not being a faithful Christian.
This statement came at the beginning of this section. Before he even started discussing the first passage, he brought up four premises he wished to argue the veracity of, in an effort to fight the strawman of: "If the Old Testament, specifically, demands kindness to foreigners, we must have completely open borders".The Premises
I. The United States is a Christian nation
The Commissioner declared this premise to be true, citing the existence of his strawman calling for open borders based on the Old Testament, the "reliance on the protection of divine Providence" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution dated with "the Year of our Lord". He also cited the following, from former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story:In fact, every American colony, from it's foundation down to the revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, (if, indeed, that state be an exception) did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, in some form, the Christian religion.
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
Seemingly under the impression that the Constitution makes no substantial reference to religion at all, Commissioner Fox argued that although the Knox County official website makes no mention of the Tennessee Vols football team, the government's support of the team was evident in it's culture. Likewise, the culture of the Revolutionary period was a Christian culture, and the Constitution they drafted is inherently Christian in nature.
To state the obvious, this is untrue. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies had an official state religion: Christianity. What Story describes is not cultural, but institutional. If the founding father's had wanted a Christian nation, they would not have amended the Constitution to the contrary.II. God's Word, the Bible, provides no limiting principles to the passages addressing hospitality to the alien
Fox started discussion of this premise by pointing out that Scripture says God established the idea of nations and borders, stating that, in the creation of nations, God was exercising his divine rights. Inherent in their creation was the right to secure their borders.
This is false. Nations came about as a natural occurrence in societal development. Here is the Scripture pertaining to the establishment of nations:These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. 2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5 From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.
- Genesis 10:1-5
In any case, I do wan to expound upon divine rights. By their nature, divine rights cannot be claimed by any mortal human. Humans may be subject to a divine calling, but that calling must be interrogated by the followers of the divinity being invoked. When Commissioner Fox claims a Christian nation's divine calling to brutally police it's borders, that calling must be interrogated by those called to "a royal priesthood" in 1 Peter 2:9. Namely, other Christians.
In invoking the Moabites and Canaanites as examples of exclusion, Commissioner Fox revealed ignorance of our shared sacred text. The Son of our shared God is descended from Ruth and Rahab, Moabite and Canaanite of Jericho, respectively.
In arguing that critics of this federal wave of racial violence wish to return to Old Testament law, Commissioner Fox purposefully mischaracterizes the argument so that he, in turn, may return to Old Testament law. Of notable concern is his assertion that God calling on Israel to eradicate nations in the Old Testament, exercising his divine right, gives modern nations the inherent right to decide who exists within its borders. Here is one of the passages he was discussing:When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you,
2 and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.
3 “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.- Deuteronomy 7:1-3
Here is what the Commissioner said:Fox: Those nations were so depraved that God ordained their destruction through the instrumentality of ancient Israel...because he didn't want them to be infected by the utter depravity of those nations. But obviously, the people from those nations could not reside in the nation of Israel. What can we extrapolate from this?...It's just inherent that a country can make laws about who can reside, who can even be inside the country itself.
This is a genocidal argument pretending not to have a target. Our elected leaders are not divine. Furthermore, the life of Christ is the New Testament against which any interpretation of God's will must be measured, and in my understanding of John 3:16, Christ does not discriminate against anyone seeking to enter the Kingdom of God.III. As a modern Christian nation, the United States must follow the pattern (laws) of ancient Israel
It was already past the ten minute limit that Commission Chair Gina Oster had given Commissioner Fox when he began to argue against this particular strawman. At that point, Oster interrupted and graciously offered him another three minutes, maximum. When the Commissioner questioned the Chair's authority to impose a time limit at all, Senior Deputy Law Director Mike Moyers was called upon to shed light on Commission Rules.Moyers: I believe that the time that any person is given to speak, including public forum, is at the discretion of the Chair.
Frustrated, Commissioner Fox threatened to continue his presentation in future meetings, Ultimately, he was allowed to carry on to completion, seventeen minutes later. To be fair, there were a couple of short interruptions later.IV. Laws creating borders and restricting immigration go beyond the boundaries God made for just government, and Christians should oppose them and are not bound to obey
Commissioner Fox quickly declared this premise untrue, and unilaterally declared federal immigration law to be just without engaging in any sort of examination. I'll use the opportunity to remind you: borders and nations arose as a natural part of human development. Debate about whether they are still necessary in the modern day, and to what extent, is reasonable.
In arguing that Christians must obey immigration law, Commissioner Fox implied that "being kind to foreigners" and "being a good neighbor" is against immigration law. It is not. Neither is non-participation in the voluntary 287(g) contract program. Neither is reforming our convoluted legal immigration pipeline. As it stands, our immigration laws are Kafkaesque.The Good Samaritan
Fox began discussion of this parable by classifying the traveler as a "Crime Victim". In describing him as such, Fox ascribed knowledge to the Samaritan that he simply does not have. The Samaritan cares for the traveler without knowing whether his assailant was a criminal or a Centurion.
Commissioner Fox then uses that "Crime Victim" classification to argue that immigration leads to the death of citizens, and therefore the Good Samaritan parable applies to the victims of immigration.Fox: So, here's Pierce Corcoran. Now, Pierce Corcoran, according to illegal immigration activists, he's not our neighbor. He's just some guy that was born here, and grew up here. Here's who they define as our neighbor. This is the guy that killed Pierce Corcoran when he drove the wrong way and hit him head on, and killed him. Supposedly this is who we're supposed to show mercy to. This is who we're supposed to show compassion to. This is who we're supposed to show justice to.
What happened to Pierce Corcoran was a tragedy. The fact that Francisco Franco-Cambrany was never tried, as the Corcoran family wished, was another. But the use of Pierce's story by Commissioner Fox, to dehumanize undocumented immigrants as an entire people group, was a disgrace.
At this point, Knox County Commissioner Shane Jackson chimed in with a question:Jackson: Are we supposed to show mercy and justice to a family that lives here in Knoxville that is supporting their family, working, and obeying our laws?
Fox: Well, I'm gonna get to who we should show justice and mercy and compassion to. And yes, we should show justice and mercy and compassion to our fellow citizens. When these laws are not enforced properly, they lead to tragedy. They lead to people being killed. And you are not showing justice and mercy and compassion to your fellow citizen, your actual neighbor, when you advocate against them and thwart the enforcement of immigration laws.
Fox went on to point out other deaths involving immigrants. Needless to say, Fox's openly racist behavior is not a Biblical approach to immigration at all. Apart from being hateful, it was also deceptive. In singling out crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he made no mention of crime rate statistics reported by the US Department of Justice.Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide...Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
- Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice
Instead, the Commissioner cited the TNDAGC Immigration Report, saying that undocumented individuals have a greater propensity to commit crime. However, he misrepresents the data, claiming that 2,183 undocumented immigrants committed violent crimes in 2025. Said report lists the number of charges brought against violent offenders last year, but not the number of offenders itself. There were a total of 2,183 charges of violent offense brought against an unknown number of individuals, all of whom must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Only 39% of the total number of offenders reported, which was 11,340, could be tracked through the Tennessee justice system. Of the 4,412 cases included in the report, of both violent and nonviolent offenders, 352 (8%) have been dismissed outright, 321 (7.2%) have seen the charges dropped, and 2,281 (51.7%) remain open. Only 1232 people( 27.9%) included in this report have plead or been found guilty of any charge so far.
Due diligence is due for a reason. You may argue that we cannot be certain that Commissioner Fox was being purposefully deceitful in his presentation What I can say is that, in citing population data from the Migration Policy Institute, he included in his definition of "illegal aliens", quote:...those who entered the country without authorization and visa overstayers, as well as individuals who hold a liminal (or “twilight”) status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as well as those with a pending asylum application.
For the record, this data, along with data from the American Immigration Council, which he also cites, were the first two results, in my search at least, for Tennessee immigrant population data. However, the AIC data is a lower, more current number that does not include people who are actively jumping through the hoops of our legal system. It would have been more accurate to use that data, and would have produced a higher crime rate. It appears to me, in using the MPI data, Commissioner Fox reveals his priorities.
The Commissioner went on to state what he says is the end goal of immigration law:Fox: People are saying: "Well, if there was only some way that we could keep criminal illegal aliens out, that would be an ideal situation". In other words, try to know who's coming in and out of our country. Kind of like this lady here, the anti-ICE activist, who proudly announced, without any self-awareness: "We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming in and out of our neighborhoods". This was in Minneapolis, and I say, yes. We want to do that for the whole country. We want to know who's coming and going, in and out of our country.
Pointing to ICE's dragnet, that trespasses rights spelled out in both the First and Fourth Amendment, as ideal immigration policy is certainly a choice, but it's not one he wanted us to dwell on.
Commissioner Fox quickly moved on to cartel exploitation of migrants unable to navigate our contorted immigration pipeline, as drug mules and/or sex slaves. He suggested that we should cut off immigration, instead of either fixing the pipeline or holding the true criminals accountable. We could, of course, simply do both of those things. His argument assumes the impossibility of a functional pipeline, and the immutable impotence of our justice system to pursue justice.
Fox then accused undocumented immigrants of stealing houses from documented individuals, blaming them for a failure of public policy, to which he has at least one personal claim. He goes on to state that the victim in the Good Samaritan parable was deserving of neighborly treatment because he had not violated any laws, here revealing that he believes kindness should be reserved for the legally innocent.Fox: Remember, the victim in the Good Samaritan parable, he broke no laws. He was minding his own business. He was just walking through the nation of Israel. He was not in violation of any immigration laws, he was not invading Israel, he was just attacked by robbers. So this conclusion, this Good Samaritan example, is inapposite. It's an invalid conclusion. It does not apply to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are not our neighbors.
Christ's forgiveness of the criminal crucified beside him (Luke 23:39-43) stands in contrast with this attitude, as does historical context, leading Commissioner Shane Jackson to once again interject with a question.Jackson: Commissioner Fox, is the moral story of the Good Samaritan, isn't it more about treating others, who you hate, or dislike, as your neighbor? Because, you know, the basis of the Good Samaritan is Samaria, they were a sect of Judaism at the time, and they were hated because they thought they were the Chosen ones. So Samaritans were disliked, and the point of the Good Samaritan, I believe, is that, it is about treating others that you don't like, or that you would hate, or dislike, as your neighbor.
Fox: Well, there's something called ordo amoris and ordo caritatis, and these are orders of love and orders of charity, and you should be providing love and charity, first, to the people who are closest to you. And then, to the people in your community, and then to the people in your nation...What you're really doing, if you insist on thwarting the laws of the United States, when it comes to immigration, you're rolling the dice with the lives of your actual neighbors.
When Commissioner Fox cites "ordo amoris", he echoes Vice President JD Vance and trillionaire Elon Musk in arguing scarcity. They believe empathy can only go so far, and they claim authority to declare how far that is. That claim is invalid, as that authority belongs to the voting public. In insisting that undocumented immigrants cannot be cared for, they operate as thieves.Jackson: Do you not think you might be misinterpreting what the other side is arguing? That my side, the other side is arguing that it's a Christian perspective of: How do we enforce our law in a Christian manner, and treat others with kindness?...
Fox: We enforce it by deporting people, and returning them. what other choice is there? By enforcing it. That is the Christian thing to do.
Jackson: But should we also provide food for those who are hungry? And shelter for those who are-
Fox: No. We should not enable people to live here illegally. The answer to that is no. That's not being compassionate to your actual neighbors. Because if you do that, then you're going to attract people to come here. It needs to be inhospitable, so people have a disincentive—a deterrent—from coming here. Because America is for Americans. It's not for illegal aliens.
In seeking to assign "actual neighbors" in our community, Fox attempts to imbue a culture of othering into Knoxville that cannot go unchecked. In saying "America is for Americans" and arguing against a path to amnesty, he insinuates that immigrants are, by their nature, un-American. In his mind, there are those that deserve The Land of Opportunity, and those who do not.The Sheep and Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
In discussing the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), Commissioner Fox claimed that the passage refers only to interactions with Christians. One Christian group who treat needy Christians uncharitably (the goats) and another who behave in a Christ-like manner (the sheep). Having argued scarcity in an age of unbridled avarice, either Fox believes immigrants cannot be his brothers and sisters in Christ, or he is admitting to being a goat.
He then offered a conclusive summary of his presentation and offered to take any further questions. After a few moments, Junior Commissioner Hall presented hers:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.TL;DR
Knox County Commissioner Andy Fox is a white "Christian" nationalist. The idea of a "Sin of Empathy" is easy enough to tie to white supremacy and "Christian" nationalism, but if there was any doubt on what Fox is, a supporter's citation of Germany's AfD in declaring remigration to be the future will have erased it. He believes America belongs to the white "Christian" alone, for white is the Chosen race and "Christianity" the only valid religion. Anyone looking for honest solutions for their troubles would do well to avoid his suggestions, fueled, as they are, not by a sincere devotion to Christ, but by hatred.
Perhaps, instead, we should interrogate our government's relationship with the trillion-dollar man who led DOGE to gut the federal Department of Education. What ever happened to all the money on that wall of receipts? Or maybe we start closer to home, with Governor Bill Lee pushing for an expansion to a school voucher program that already dilutes our state's ability to support public schools, despite the loss of federal support. These thieves do not have the answers, for indeed they are the problem.
Drawing strength from God's will, with love enough to share,
Josiah Fernandez
#Knoxville #LocalPolitics #Apolitycse #WhiteChristianNationalism -
Dearest Knoxville,
On Wednesday, February 25, 2026, the Knox County Commission held it's monthly meeting. The gathering had attracted quite a crowd this month, most of whom were there to hear and/or protest Commissioner Fox's presentation on "A Christian's Biblical View of Illegal Immigration", and some of whom spoke out in either support or disgust. One of the most striking moments, to my mind, came at the end of the presentation, when Fox was asked a question by Junior Commissioner Oriana Hall:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.
It was an incredible exchange, given the implications. When questioned directly on whether arrival in this land, to which Columbus was not native, spoke to his lack of belonging on this land, Commissioner Fox deliberately refused to accept that framing. But in implying that Columbus belonged here, Fox ascribes authority to make the decision of who belonged on the land either to himself or, more likely, Columbus. Whatever the case, this authority is a right reserved for the owners of the land, who were, in fact, native to it.
Unless, of course, it is understood that those native to the land did not own the land, and instead it was freely available for those with the power to take it. This appears to be Commissioner Fox's understanding of reality. In the English language, we have a word for objects taken under such an understanding. That word is thievery.
Now, while it must be said that the peoples indigenous to this continent have suffered much greater offenses at the hands of those who stole their land, I'd like to focus on the theft itself for a moment. Or rather, the Knox County Commissioner defending his right to benefit from it. You see, in processing what was said at the meeting, it struck me as odd that the Knox County residents who spoke out in support of Fox's view of immigration, many of whom professed to being in his district and having voted for him, for the most part spoke of their concerns of immigrants in the community taking public resources that should rightfully go to our "actual neighbors". They were arguing theft, spurred on by a Commissioner who had just aligned himself with thieves.
The assembly heard about overcrowded and underfunded schools, strained healthcare services, unpaid taxes and overworked law enforcement. In fact, Commissioner Fox had withdrawn a resolution—previously scheduled to be voted on at this meeting—to encourage the Knox County Sheriff's Department to work more closely with ICE after the Sheriff argued he simply lacked the resources to make it happen. There certainly seem to be some aggrieved parties here in Knoxville. So, who is to blame for the siphoning of our communities resources?
Well, if we were to ask Commissioner Fox, who, as previously discussed, aligns himself with thieves, he would argue that it is the people who exist in our community without authorization. In fact, he did, in a presentation that lasted 30 minutes, and revealed more about him than it did about any Christian's Biblical view on immigration.The Presentation
Intro
Fox began by quoting President Trump:Fox: "The first duty of American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
So how would the Commissioner have us protect American citizens?Fox: To me, this issue of illegal immigration is a simple matter of governance. We have a federal law that provides for: Who can come to this nation? Who can reside here? Who can visit, and who can't? And these laws should be enforced, not only by the federal government, but, to the extent possible, state governments and county governments. We must make Knox County, the state of Tennessee, and the United States inhospitable to people who are not supposed to reside here according to our immigration laws, so that they will return.
He would have us work with a federal agency whose "enforcement" operations quite obviously have more to do with race than law. Considering that the living Word of God makes no provision for a "racially pure" ethnostate that ICE is clearly pursuing, I can say with certainty that these intentions are not divine. They are lawless and immoral. They are the intentions of a thief.
Fox went on, asserting that opponents of this immigration crackdown are not people who associate themselves with Christianity. He cast that blanket assumption directly over no one, considering the only critics that he brought up by name all night, Matthew Nance and Jonathan Haskell. He then went on to bring up specific passages of Scripture he wanted to clarify.Leviticus 19:33
Fox: You have this principle drawn out of Scripture, from the Old Testament, and because of this principle the conclusion is: "Well, the United States shouldn't enforce it's borders. It's not 'being kind to the foreigner', and anyone who wants to be a citizen in the US, or just reside here, must be welcome and allowed to do so, and Christians should rise up against laws to the contrary, because otherwise you're not being a faithful Christian.
This statement came at the beginning of this section. Before he even started discussing the first passage, he brought up four premises he wished to argue the veracity of, in an effort to fight the strawman of: "If the Old Testament, specifically, demands kindness to foreigners, we must have completely open borders".The Premises
I. The United States is a Christian nation
The Commissioner declared this premise to be true, citing the existence of his strawman calling for open borders based on the Old Testament, the "reliance on the protection of divine Providence" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution dated with "the Year of our Lord". He also cited the following, from former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story:In fact, every American colony, from it's foundation down to the revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, (if, indeed, that state be an exception) did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, in some form, the Christian religion.
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
Seemingly under the impression that the Constitution makes no substantial reference to religion at all, Commissioner Fox argued that although the Knox County official website makes no mention of the Tennessee Vols football team, the government's support of the team was evident in it's culture. Likewise, the culture of the Revolutionary period was a Christian culture, and the Constitution they drafted is inherently Christian in nature.
To state the obvious, this is untrue. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies had an official state religion: Christianity. What Story describes is not cultural, but institutional. If the founding father's had wanted a Christian nation, they would not have amended the Constitution to the contrary.II. God's Word, the Bible, provides no limiting principles to the passages addressing hospitality to the alien
Fox started discussion of this premise by pointing out that Scripture says God established the idea of nations and borders, stating that, in the creation of nations, God was exercising his divine rights. Inherent in their creation was the right to secure their borders.
This is false. Nations came about as a natural occurrence in societal development. Here is the Scripture pertaining to the establishment of nations:These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. 2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5 From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.
- Genesis 10:1-5
In any case, I do wan to expound upon divine rights. By their nature, divine rights cannot be claimed by any mortal human. Humans may be subject to a divine calling, but that calling must be interrogated by the followers of the divinity being invoked. When Commissioner Fox claims a Christian nation's divine calling to brutally police it's borders, that calling must be interrogated by those called to "a royal priesthood" in 1 Peter 2:9. Namely, other Christians.
In invoking the Moabites and Canaanites as examples of exclusion, Commissioner Fox revealed ignorance of our shared sacred text. The Son of our shared God is descended from Ruth and Rahab, Moabite and Canaanite of Jericho, respectively.
In arguing that critics of this federal wave of racial violence wish to return to Old Testament law, Commissioner Fox purposefully mischaracterizes the argument so that he, in turn, may return to Old Testament law. Of notable concern is his assertion that God calling on Israel to eradicate nations in the Old Testament, exercising his divine right, gives modern nations the inherent right to decide who exists within its borders. Here is one of the passages he was discussing:When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you,
2 and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.
3 “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.- Deuteronomy 7:1-3
Here is what the Commissioner said:Fox: Those nations were so depraved that God ordained their destruction through the instrumentality of ancient Israel...because he didn't want them to be infected by the utter depravity of those nations. But obviously, the people from those nations could not reside in the nation of Israel. What can we extrapolate from this?...It's just inherent that a country can make laws about who can reside, who can even be inside the country itself.
This is a genocidal argument pretending not to have a target. Our elected leaders are not divine. Furthermore, the life of Christ is the New Testament against which any interpretation of God's will must be measured, and in my understanding of John 3:16, Christ does not discriminate against anyone seeking to enter the Kingdom of God.III. As a modern Christian nation, the United States must follow the pattern (laws) of ancient Israel
It was already past the ten minute limit that Commission Chair Gina Oster had given Commissioner Fox when he began to argue against this particular strawman. At that point, Oster interrupted and graciously offered him another three minutes, maximum. When the Commissioner questioned the Chair's authority to impose a time limit at all, Senior Deputy Law Director Mike Moyers was called upon to shed light on Commission Rules.Moyers: I believe that the time that any person is given to speak, including public forum, is at the discretion of the Chair.
Frustrated, Commissioner Fox threatened to continue his presentation in future meetings, Ultimately, he was allowed to carry on to completion, seventeen minutes later. To be fair, there were a couple of short interruptions later.IV. Laws creating borders and restricting immigration go beyond the boundaries God made for just government, and Christians should oppose them and are not bound to obey
Commissioner Fox quickly declared this premise untrue, and unilaterally declared federal immigration law to be just without engaging in any sort of examination. I'll use the opportunity to remind you: borders and nations arose as a natural part of human development. Debate about whether they are still necessary in the modern day, and to what extent, is reasonable.
In arguing that Christians must obey immigration law, Commissioner Fox implied that "being kind to foreigners" and "being a good neighbor" is against immigration law. It is not. Neither is non-participation in the voluntary 287(g) contract program. Neither is reforming our convoluted legal immigration pipeline. As it stands, our immigration laws are Kafkaesque.The Good Samaritan
Fox began discussion of this parable by classifying the traveler as a "Crime Victim". In describing him as such, Fox ascribed knowledge to the Samaritan that he simply does not have. The Samaritan cares for the traveler without knowing whether his assailant was a criminal or a Centurion.
Commissioner Fox then uses that "Crime Victim" classification to argue that immigration leads to the death of citizens, and therefore the Good Samaritan parable applies to the victims of immigration.Fox: So, here's Pierce Corcoran. Now, Pierce Corcoran, according to illegal immigration activists, he's not our neighbor. He's just some guy that was born here, and grew up here. Here's who they define as our neighbor. This is the guy that killed Pierce Corcoran when he drove the wrong way and hit him head on, and killed him. Supposedly this is who we're supposed to show mercy to. This is who we're supposed to show compassion to. This is who we're supposed to show justice to.
What happened to Pierce Corcoran was a tragedy. The fact that Francisco Franco-Cambrany was never tried, as the Corcoran family wished, was another. But the use of Pierce's story by Commissioner Fox, to dehumanize undocumented immigrants as an entire people group, was a disgrace.
At this point, Knox County Commissioner Shane Jackson chimed in with a question:Jackson: Are we supposed to show mercy and justice to a family that lives here in Knoxville that is supporting their family, working, and obeying our laws?
Fox: Well, I'm gonna get to who we should show justice and mercy and compassion to. And yes, we should show justice and mercy and compassion to our fellow citizens. When these laws are not enforced properly, they lead to tragedy. They lead to people being killed. And you are not showing justice and mercy and compassion to your fellow citizen, your actual neighbor, when you advocate against them and thwart the enforcement of immigration laws.
Fox went on to point out other deaths involving immigrants. Needless to say, Fox's openly racist behavior is not a Biblical approach to immigration at all. Apart from being hateful, it was also deceptive. In singling out crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he made no mention of crime rate statistics reported by the US Department of Justice.Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide...Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
- Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice
Instead, the Commissioner cited the TNDAGC Immigration Report, saying that undocumented individuals have a greater propensity to commit crime. However, he misrepresents the data, claiming that 2,183 undocumented immigrants committed violent crimes in 2025. Said report lists the number of charges brought against violent offenders last year, but not the number of offenders itself. There were a total of 2,183 charges of violent offense brought against an unknown number of individuals, all of whom must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Only 39% of the total number of offenders reported, which was 11,340, could be tracked through the Tennessee justice system. Of the 4,412 cases included in the report, of both violent and nonviolent offenders, 352 (8%) have been dismissed outright, 321 (7.2%) have seen the charges dropped, and 2,281 (51.7%) remain open. Only 1232 people( 27.9%) included in this report have plead or been found guilty of any charge so far.
Due diligence is due for a reason. You may argue that we cannot be certain that Commissioner Fox was being purposefully deceitful in his presentation What I can say is that, in citing population data from the Migration Policy Institute, he included in his definition of "illegal aliens", quote:...those who entered the country without authorization and visa overstayers, as well as individuals who hold a liminal (or “twilight”) status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as well as those with a pending asylum application.
For the record, this data, along with data from the American Immigration Council, which he also cites, were the first two results, in my search at least, for Tennessee immigrant population data. However, the AIC data is a lower, more current number that does not include people who are actively jumping through the hoops of our legal system. It would have been more accurate to use that data, and would have produced a higher crime rate. It appears to me, in using the MPI data, Commissioner Fox reveals his priorities.
The Commissioner went on to state what he says is the end goal of immigration law:Fox: People are saying: "Well, if there was only some way that we could keep criminal illegal aliens out, that would be an ideal situation". In other words, try to know who's coming in and out of our country. Kind of like this lady here, the anti-ICE activist, who proudly announced, without any self-awareness: "We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming in and out of our neighborhoods". This was in Minneapolis, and I say, yes. We want to do that for the whole country. We want to know who's coming and going, in and out of our country.
Pointing to ICE's dragnet, that trespasses rights spelled out in both the First and Fourth Amendment, as ideal immigration policy is certainly a choice, but it's not one he wanted us to dwell on.
Commissioner Fox quickly moved on to cartel exploitation of migrants unable to navigate our contorted immigration pipeline, as drug mules and/or sex slaves. He suggested that we should cut off immigration, instead of either fixing the pipeline or holding the true criminals accountable. We could, of course, simply do both of those things. His argument assumes the impossibility of a functional pipeline, and the immutable impotence of our justice system to pursue justice.
Fox then accused undocumented immigrants of stealing houses from documented individuals, blaming them for a failure of public policy, to which he has at least one personal claim. He goes on to state that the victim in the Good Samaritan parable was deserving of neighborly treatment because he had not violated any laws, here revealing that he believes kindness should be reserved for the legally innocent.Fox: Remember, the victim in the Good Samaritan parable, he broke no laws. He was minding his own business. He was just walking through the nation of Israel. He was not in violation of any immigration laws, he was not invading Israel, he was just attacked by robbers. So this conclusion, this Good Samaritan example, is inapposite. It's an invalid conclusion. It does not apply to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are not our neighbors.
Christ's forgiveness of the criminal crucified beside him (Luke 23:39-43) stands in contrast with this attitude, as does historical context, leading Commissioner Shane Jackson to once again interject with a question.Jackson: Commissioner Fox, is the moral story of the Good Samaritan, isn't it more about treating others, who you hate, or dislike, as your neighbor? Because, you know, the basis of the Good Samaritan is Samaria, they were a sect of Judaism at the time, and they were hated because they thought they were the Chosen ones. So Samaritans were disliked, and the point of the Good Samaritan, I believe, is that, it is about treating others that you don't like, or that you would hate, or dislike, as your neighbor.
Fox: Well, there's something called ordo amoris and ordo caritatis, and these are orders of love and orders of charity, and you should be providing love and charity, first, to the people who are closest to you. And then, to the people in your community, and then to the people in your nation...What you're really doing, if you insist on thwarting the laws of the United States, when it comes to immigration, you're rolling the dice with the lives of your actual neighbors.
When Commissioner Fox cites "ordo amoris", he echoes Vice President JD Vance and trillionaire Elon Musk in arguing scarcity. They believe empathy can only go so far, and they claim authority to declare how far that is. That claim is invalid, as that authority belongs to the voting public. In insisting that undocumented immigrants cannot be cared for, they operate as thieves.Jackson: Do you not think you might be misinterpreting what the other side is arguing? That my side, the other side is arguing that it's a Christian perspective of: How do we enforce our law in a Christian manner, and treat others with kindness?...
Fox: We enforce it by deporting people, and returning them. what other choice is there? By enforcing it. That is the Christian thing to do.
Jackson: But should we also provide food for those who are hungry? And shelter for those who are-
Fox: No. We should not enable people to live here illegally. The answer to that is no. That's not being compassionate to your actual neighbors. Because if you do that, then you're going to attract people to come here. It needs to be inhospitable, so people have a disincentive—a deterrent—from coming here. Because America is for Americans. It's not for illegal aliens.
In seeking to assign "actual neighbors" in our community, Fox attempts to imbue a culture of othering into Knoxville that cannot go unchecked. In saying "America is for Americans" and arguing against a path to amnesty, he insinuates that immigrants are, by their nature, un-American. In his mind, there are those that deserve The Land of Opportunity, and those who do not.The Sheep and Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
In discussing the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), Commissioner Fox claimed that the passage refers only to interactions with Christians. One Christian group who treat needy Christians uncharitably (the goats) and another who behave in a Christ-like manner (the sheep). Having argued scarcity in an age of unbridled avarice, either Fox believes immigrants cannot be his brothers and sisters in Christ, or he is admitting to being a goat.
He then offered a conclusive summary of his presentation and offered to take any further questions. After a few moments, Junior Commissioner Hall presented hers:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.TL;DR
Knox County Commissioner Andy Fox is a white "Christian" nationalist. The idea of a "Sin of Empathy" is easy enough to tie to white supremacy and "Christian" nationalism, but if there was any doubt on what Fox is, a supporter's citation of Germany's AfD in declaring remigration to be the future will have erased it. He believes America belongs to the white "Christian" alone, for white is the Chosen race and "Christianity" the only valid religion. Anyone looking for honest solutions for their troubles would do well to avoid his suggestions, fueled, as they are, not by a sincere devotion to Christ, but by hatred.
Perhaps, instead, we should interrogate our government's relationship with the trillion-dollar man who led DOGE to gut the federal Department of Education. What ever happened to all the money on that wall of receipts? Or maybe we start closer to home, with Governor Bill Lee pushing for an expansion to a school voucher program that already dilutes our state's ability to support public schools, despite the loss of federal support. These thieves do not have the answers, for indeed they are the problem.
Drawing strength from God's will, with love enough to share,
Josiah Fernandez
#Knoxville #LocalPolitics #Apolitycse #WhiteChristianNationalism -
Dearest Knoxville,
On Wednesday, February 25, 2026, the Knox County Commission held it's monthly meeting. The gathering had attracted quite a crowd this month, most of whom were there to hear and/or protest Commissioner Fox's presentation on "A Christian's Biblical View of Illegal Immigration", and some of whom spoke out in either support or disgust. One of the most striking moments, to my mind, came at the end of the presentation, when Fox was asked a question by Junior Commissioner Oriana Hall:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.
It was an incredible exchange, given the implications. When questioned directly on whether arrival in this land, to which Columbus was not native, spoke to his lack of belonging on this land, Commissioner Fox deliberately refused to accept that framing. But in implying that Columbus belonged here, Fox ascribes authority to make the decision of who belonged on the land either to himself or, more likely, Columbus. Whatever the case, this authority is a right reserved for the owners of the land, who were, in fact, native to it.
Unless, of course, it is understood that those native to the land did not own the land, and instead it was freely available for those with the power to take it. This appears to be Commissioner Fox's understanding of reality. In the English language, we have a word for objects taken under such an understanding. That word is thievery.
Now, while it must be said that the peoples indigenous to this continent have suffered much greater offenses at the hands of those who stole their land, I'd like to focus on the theft itself for a moment. Or rather, the Knox County Commissioner defending his right to benefit from it. You see, in processing what was said at the meeting, it struck me as odd that the Knox County residents who spoke out in support of Fox's view of immigration, many of whom professed to being in his district and having voted for him, for the most part spoke of their concerns of immigrants in the community taking public resources that should rightfully go to our "actual neighbors". They were arguing theft, spurred on by a Commissioner who had just aligned himself with thieves.
The assembly heard about overcrowded and underfunded schools, strained healthcare services, unpaid taxes and overworked law enforcement. In fact, Commissioner Fox had withdrawn a resolution—previously scheduled to be voted on at this meeting—to encourage the Knox County Sheriff's Department to work more closely with ICE after the Sheriff argued he simply lacked the resources to make it happen. There certainly seem to be some aggrieved parties here in Knoxville. So, who is to blame for the siphoning of our communities resources?
Well, if we were to ask Commissioner Fox, who, as previously discussed, aligns himself with thieves, he would argue that it is the people who exist in our community without authorization. In fact, he did, in a presentation that lasted 30 minutes, and revealed more about him than it did about any Christian's Biblical view on immigration.The Presentation
Intro
Fox began by quoting President Trump:Fox: "The first duty of American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
So how would the Commissioner have us protect American citizens?Fox: To me, this issue of illegal immigration is a simple matter of governance. We have a federal law that provides for: Who can come to this nation? Who can reside here? Who can visit, and who can't? And these laws should be enforced, not only by the federal government, but, to the extent possible, state governments and county governments. We must make Knox County, the state of Tennessee, and the United States inhospitable to people who are not supposed to reside here according to our immigration laws, so that they will return.
He would have us work with a federal agency whose "enforcement" operations quite obviously have more to do with race than law. Considering that the living Word of God makes no provision for a "racially pure" ethnostate that ICE is clearly pursuing, I can say with certainty that these intentions are not divine. They are lawless and immoral. They are the intentions of a thief.
Fox went on, asserting that opponents of this immigration crackdown are not people who associate themselves with Christianity. He cast that blanket assumption directly over no one, considering the only critics that he brought up by name all night, Matthew Nance and Jonathan Haskell. He then went on to bring up specific passages of Scripture he wanted to clarify.Leviticus 19:33
Fox: You have this principle drawn out of Scripture, from the Old Testament, and because of this principle the conclusion is: "Well, the United States shouldn't enforce it's borders. It's not 'being kind to the foreigner', and anyone who wants to be a citizen in the US, or just reside here, must be welcome and allowed to do so, and Christians should rise up against laws to the contrary, because otherwise you're not being a faithful Christian.
This statement came at the beginning of this section. Before he even started discussing the first passage, he brought up four premises he wished to argue the veracity of, in an effort to fight the strawman of: "If the Old Testament, specifically, demands kindness to foreigners, we must have completely open borders".The Premises
I. The United States is a Christian nation
The Commissioner declared this premise to be true, citing the existence of his strawman calling for open borders based on the Old Testament, the "reliance on the protection of divine Providence" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution dated with "the Year of our Lord". He also cited the following, from former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story:In fact, every American colony, from it's foundation down to the revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, (if, indeed, that state be an exception) did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, in some form, the Christian religion.
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
Seemingly under the impression that the Constitution makes no substantial reference to religion at all, Commissioner Fox argued that although the Knox County official website makes no mention of the Tennessee Vols football team, the government's support of the team was evident in it's culture. Likewise, the culture of the Revolutionary period was a Christian culture, and the Constitution they drafted is inherently Christian in nature.
To state the obvious, this is untrue. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies had an official state religion: Christianity. What Story describes is not cultural, but institutional. If the founding father's had wanted a Christian nation, they would not have amended the Constitution to the contrary.II. God's Word, the Bible, provides no limiting principles to the passages addressing hospitality to the alien
Fox started discussion of this premise by pointing out that Scripture says God established the idea of nations and borders, stating that, in the creation of nations, God was exercising his divine rights. Inherent in their creation was the right to secure their borders.
This is false. Nations came about as a natural occurrence in societal development. Here is the Scripture pertaining to the establishment of nations:These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. 2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5 From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.
- Genesis 10:1-5
In any case, I do wan to expound upon divine rights. By their nature, divine rights cannot be claimed by any mortal human. Humans may be subject to a divine calling, but that calling must be interrogated by the followers of the divinity being invoked. When Commissioner Fox claims a Christian nation's divine calling to brutally police it's borders, that calling must be interrogated by those called to "a royal priesthood" in 1 Peter 2:9. Namely, other Christians.
In invoking the Moabites and Canaanites as examples of exclusion, Commissioner Fox revealed ignorance of our shared sacred text. The Son of our shared God is descended from Ruth and Rahab, Moabite and Canaanite of Jericho, respectively.
In arguing that critics of this federal wave of racial violence wish to return to Old Testament law, Commissioner Fox purposefully mischaracterizes the argument so that he, in turn, may return to Old Testament law. Of notable concern is his assertion that God calling on Israel to eradicate nations in the Old Testament, exercising his divine right, gives modern nations the inherent right to decide who exists within its borders. Here is one of the passages he was discussing:When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you,
2 and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.
3 “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.- Deuteronomy 7:1-3
Here is what the Commissioner said:Fox: Those nations were so depraved that God ordained their destruction through the instrumentality of ancient Israel...because he didn't want them to be infected by the utter depravity of those nations. But obviously, the people from those nations could not reside in the nation of Israel. What can we extrapolate from this?...It's just inherent that a country can make laws about who can reside, who can even be inside the country itself.
This is a genocidal argument pretending not to have a target. Our elected leaders are not divine. Furthermore, the life of Christ is the New Testament against which any interpretation of God's will must be measured, and in my understanding of John 3:16, Christ does not discriminate against anyone seeking to enter the Kingdom of God.III. As a modern Christian nation, the United States must follow the pattern (laws) of ancient Israel
It was already past the ten minute limit that Commission Chair Gina Oster had given Commissioner Fox when he began to argue against this particular strawman. At that point, Oster interrupted and graciously offered him another three minutes, maximum. When the Commissioner questioned the Chair's authority to impose a time limit at all, Senior Deputy Law Director Mike Moyers was called upon to shed light on Commission Rules.Moyers: I believe that the time that any person is given to speak, including public forum, is at the discretion of the Chair.
Frustrated, Commissioner Fox threatened to continue his presentation in future meetings, Ultimately, he was allowed to carry on to completion, seventeen minutes later. To be fair, there were a couple of short interruptions later.IV. Laws creating borders and restricting immigration go beyond the boundaries God made for just government, and Christians should oppose them and are not bound to obey
Commissioner Fox quickly declared this premise untrue, and unilaterally declared federal immigration law to be just without engaging in any sort of examination. I'll use the opportunity to remind you: borders and nations arose as a natural part of human development. Debate about whether they are still necessary in the modern day, and to what extent, is reasonable.
In arguing that Christians must obey immigration law, Commissioner Fox implied that "being kind to foreigners" and "being a good neighbor" is against immigration law. It is not. Neither is non-participation in the voluntary 287(g) contract program. Neither is reforming our convoluted legal immigration pipeline. As it stands, our immigration laws are Kafkaesque.The Good Samaritan
Fox began discussion of this parable by classifying the traveler as a "Crime Victim". In describing him as such, Fox ascribed knowledge to the Samaritan that he simply does not have. The Samaritan cares for the traveler without knowing whether his assailant was a criminal or a Centurion.
Commissioner Fox then uses that "Crime Victim" classification to argue that immigration leads to the death of citizens, and therefore the Good Samaritan parable applies to the victims of immigration.Fox: So, here's Pierce Corcoran. Now, Pierce Corcoran, according to illegal immigration activists, he's not our neighbor. He's just some guy that was born here, and grew up here. Here's who they define as our neighbor. This is the guy that killed Pierce Corcoran when he drove the wrong way and hit him head on, and killed him. Supposedly this is who we're supposed to show mercy to. This is who we're supposed to show compassion to. This is who we're supposed to show justice to.
What happened to Pierce Corcoran was a tragedy. The fact that Francisco Franco-Cambrany was never tried, as the Corcoran family wished, was another. But the use of Pierce's story by Commissioner Fox, to dehumanize undocumented immigrants as an entire people group, was a disgrace.
At this point, Knox County Commissioner Shane Jackson chimed in with a question:Jackson: Are we supposed to show mercy and justice to a family that lives here in Knoxville that is supporting their family, working, and obeying our laws?
Fox: Well, I'm gonna get to who we should show justice and mercy and compassion to. And yes, we should show justice and mercy and compassion to our fellow citizens. When these laws are not enforced properly, they lead to tragedy. They lead to people being killed. And you are not showing justice and mercy and compassion to your fellow citizen, your actual neighbor, when you advocate against them and thwart the enforcement of immigration laws.
Fox went on to point out other deaths involving immigrants. Needless to say, Fox's openly racist behavior is not a Biblical approach to immigration at all. Apart from being hateful, it was also deceptive. In singling out crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he made no mention of crime rate statistics reported by the US Department of Justice.Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide...Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
- Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice
Instead, the Commissioner cited the TNDAGC Immigration Report, saying that undocumented individuals have a greater propensity to commit crime. However, he misrepresents the data, claiming that 2,183 undocumented immigrants committed violent crimes in 2025. Said report lists the number of charges brought against violent offenders last year, but not the number of offenders itself. There were a total of 2,183 charges of violent offense brought against an unknown number of individuals, all of whom must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Only 39% of the total number of offenders reported, which was 11,340, could be tracked through the Tennessee justice system. Of the 4,412 cases included in the report, of both violent and nonviolent offenders, 352 (8%) have been dismissed outright, 321 (7.2%) have seen the charges dropped, and 2,281 (51.7%) remain open. Only 1232 people( 27.9%) included in this report have plead or been found guilty of any charge so far.
Due diligence is due for a reason. You may argue that we cannot be certain that Commissioner Fox was being purposefully deceitful in his presentation What I can say is that, in citing population data from the Migration Policy Institute, he included in his definition of "illegal aliens", quote:...those who entered the country without authorization and visa overstayers, as well as individuals who hold a liminal (or “twilight”) status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as well as those with a pending asylum application.
For the record, this data, along with data from the American Immigration Council, which he also cites, were the first two results, in my search at least, for Tennessee immigrant population data. However, the AIC data is a lower, more current number that does not include people who are actively jumping through the hoops of our legal system. It would have been more accurate to use that data, and would have produced a higher crime rate. It appears to me, in using the MPI data, Commissioner Fox reveals his priorities.
The Commissioner went on to state what he says is the end goal of immigration law:Fox: People are saying: "Well, if there was only some way that we could keep criminal illegal aliens out, that would be an ideal situation". In other words, try to know who's coming in and out of our country. Kind of like this lady here, the anti-ICE activist, who proudly announced, without any self-awareness: "We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming in and out of our neighborhoods". This was in Minneapolis, and I say, yes. We want to do that for the whole country. We want to know who's coming and going, in and out of our country.
Pointing to ICE's dragnet, that trespasses rights spelled out in both the First and Fourth Amendment, as ideal immigration policy is certainly a choice, but it's not one he wanted us to dwell on.
Commissioner Fox quickly moved on to cartel exploitation of migrants unable to navigate our contorted immigration pipeline, as drug mules and/or sex slaves. He suggested that we should cut off immigration, instead of either fixing the pipeline or holding the true criminals accountable. We could, of course, simply do both of those things. His argument assumes the impossibility of a functional pipeline, and the immutable impotence of our justice system to pursue justice.
Fox then accused undocumented immigrants of stealing houses from documented individuals, blaming them for a failure of public policy, to which he has at least one personal claim. He goes on to state that the victim in the Good Samaritan parable was deserving of neighborly treatment because he had not violated any laws, here revealing that he believes kindness should be reserved for the legally innocent.Fox: Remember, the victim in the Good Samaritan parable, he broke no laws. He was minding his own business. He was just walking through the nation of Israel. He was not in violation of any immigration laws, he was not invading Israel, he was just attacked by robbers. So this conclusion, this Good Samaritan example, is inapposite. It's an invalid conclusion. It does not apply to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are not our neighbors.
Christ's forgiveness of the criminal crucified beside him (Luke 23:39-43) stands in contrast with this attitude, as does historical context, leading Commissioner Shane Jackson to once again interject with a question.Jackson: Commissioner Fox, is the moral story of the Good Samaritan, isn't it more about treating others, who you hate, or dislike, as your neighbor? Because, you know, the basis of the Good Samaritan is Samaria, they were a sect of Judaism at the time, and they were hated because they thought they were the Chosen ones. So Samaritans were disliked, and the point of the Good Samaritan, I believe, is that, it is about treating others that you don't like, or that you would hate, or dislike, as your neighbor.
Fox: Well, there's something called ordo amoris and ordo caritatis, and these are orders of love and orders of charity, and you should be providing love and charity, first, to the people who are closest to you. And then, to the people in your community, and then to the people in your nation...What you're really doing, if you insist on thwarting the laws of the United States, when it comes to immigration, you're rolling the dice with the lives of your actual neighbors.
When Commissioner Fox cites "ordo amoris", he echoes Vice President JD Vance and trillionaire Elon Musk in arguing scarcity. They believe empathy can only go so far, and they claim authority to declare how far that is. That claim is invalid, as that authority belongs to the voting public. In insisting that undocumented immigrants cannot be cared for, they operate as thieves.Jackson: Do you not think you might be misinterpreting what the other side is arguing? That my side, the other side is arguing that it's a Christian perspective of: How do we enforce our law in a Christian manner, and treat others with kindness?...
Fox: We enforce it by deporting people, and returning them. what other choice is there? By enforcing it. That is the Christian thing to do.
Jackson: But should we also provide food for those who are hungry? And shelter for those who are-
Fox: No. We should not enable people to live here illegally. The answer to that is no. That's not being compassionate to your actual neighbors. Because if you do that, then you're going to attract people to come here. It needs to be inhospitable, so people have a disincentive—a deterrent—from coming here. Because America is for Americans. It's not for illegal aliens.
In seeking to assign "actual neighbors" in our community, Fox attempts to imbue a culture of othering into Knoxville that cannot go unchecked. In saying "America is for Americans" and arguing against a path to amnesty, he insinuates that immigrants are, by their nature, un-American. In his mind, there are those that deserve The Land of Opportunity, and those who do not.The Sheep and Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
In discussing the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), Commissioner Fox claimed that the passage refers only to interactions with Christians. One Christian group who treat needy Christians uncharitably (the goats) and another who behave in a Christ-like manner (the sheep). Having argued scarcity in an age of unbridled avarice, either Fox believes immigrants cannot be his brothers and sisters in Christ, or he is admitting to being a goat.
He then offered a conclusive summary of his presentation and offered to take any further questions. After a few moments, Junior Commissioner Hall presented hers:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.TL;DR
Knox County Commissioner Andy Fox is a white "Christian" nationalist. The idea of a "Sin of Empathy" is easy enough to tie to white supremacy and "Christian" nationalism, but if there was any doubt on what Fox is, a supporter's citation of Germany's AfD in declaring remigration to be the future will have erased it. He believes America belongs to the white "Christian" alone, for white is the Chosen race and "Christianity" the only valid religion. Anyone looking for honest solutions for their troubles would do well to avoid his suggestions, fueled, as they are, not by a sincere devotion to Christ, but by hatred.
Perhaps, instead, we should interrogate our government's relationship with the trillion-dollar man who led DOGE to gut the federal Department of Education. What ever happened to all the money on that wall of receipts? Or maybe we start closer to home, with Governor Bill Lee pushing for an expansion to a school voucher program that already dilutes our state's ability to support public schools, despite the loss of federal support. These thieves do not have the answers, for indeed they are the problem.
Drawing strength from God's will, with love enough to share,
Josiah Fernandez
#Knoxville #LocalPolitics #Apolitycse #WhiteChristianNationalism -
Dearest Knoxville,
On Wednesday, February 25, 2026, the Knox County Commission held it's monthly meeting. The gathering had attracted quite a crowd this month, most of whom were there to hear and/or protest Commissioner Fox's presentation on "A Christian's Biblical View of Illegal Immigration", and some of whom spoke out in either support or disgust. One of the most striking moments, to my mind, came at the end of the presentation, when Fox was asked a question by Junior Commissioner Oriana Hall:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.
It was an incredible exchange, given the implications. When questioned directly on whether arrival in this land, to which Columbus was not native, spoke to his lack of belonging on this land, Commissioner Fox deliberately refused to accept that framing. But in implying that Columbus belonged here, Fox ascribes authority to make the decision of who belonged on the land either to himself or, more likely, Columbus. Whatever the case, this authority is a right reserved for the owners of the land, who were, in fact, native to it.
Unless, of course, it is understood that those native to the land did not own the land, and instead it was freely available for those with the power to take it. This appears to be Commissioner Fox's understanding of reality. In the English language, we have a word for objects taken under such an understanding. That word is thievery.
Now, while it must be said that the peoples indigenous to this continent have suffered much greater offenses at the hands of those who stole their land, I'd like to focus on the theft itself for a moment. Or rather, the Knox County Commissioner defending his right to benefit from it. You see, in processing what was said at the meeting, it struck me as odd that the Knox County residents who spoke out in support of Fox's view of immigration, many of whom professed to being in his district and having voted for him, for the most part spoke of their concerns of immigrants in the community taking public resources that should rightfully go to our "actual neighbors". They were arguing theft, spurred on by a Commissioner who had just aligned himself with thieves.
The assembly heard about overcrowded and underfunded schools, strained healthcare services, unpaid taxes and overworked law enforcement. In fact, Commissioner Fox had withdrawn a resolution—previously scheduled to be voted on at this meeting—to encourage the Knox County Sheriff's Department to work more closely with ICE after the Sheriff argued he simply lacked the resources to make it happen. There certainly seem to be some aggrieved parties here in Knoxville. So, who is to blame for the siphoning of our communities resources?
Well, if we were to ask Commissioner Fox, who, as previously discussed, aligns himself with thieves, he would argue that it is the people who exist in our community without authorization. In fact, he did, in a presentation that lasted 30 minutes, and revealed more about him than it did about any Christian's Biblical view on immigration.The Presentation
Intro
Fox began by quoting President Trump:Fox: "The first duty of American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
So how would the Commissioner have us protect American citizens?Fox: To me, this issue of illegal immigration is a simple matter of governance. We have a federal law that provides for: Who can come to this nation? Who can reside here? Who can visit, and who can't? And these laws should be enforced, not only by the federal government, but, to the extent possible, state governments and county governments. We must make Knox County, the state of Tennessee, and the United States inhospitable to people who are not supposed to reside here according to our immigration laws, so that they will return.
He would have us work with a federal agency whose "enforcement" operations quite obviously have more to do with race than law. Considering that the living Word of God makes no provision for a "racially pure" ethnostate that ICE is clearly pursuing, I can say with certainty that these intentions are not divine. They are lawless and immoral. They are the intentions of a thief.
Fox went on, asserting that opponents of this immigration crackdown are not people who associate themselves with Christianity. He cast that blanket assumption directly over no one, considering the only critics that he brought up by name all night, Matthew Nance and Jonathan Haskell. He then went on to bring up specific passages of Scripture he wanted to clarify.Leviticus 19:33
Fox: You have this principle drawn out of Scripture, from the Old Testament, and because of this principle the conclusion is: "Well, the United States shouldn't enforce it's borders. It's not 'being kind to the foreigner', and anyone who wants to be a citizen in the US, or just reside here, must be welcome and allowed to do so, and Christians should rise up against laws to the contrary, because otherwise you're not being a faithful Christian.
This statement came at the beginning of this section. Before he even started discussing the first passage, he brought up four premises he wished to argue the veracity of, in an effort to fight the strawman of: "If the Old Testament, specifically, demands kindness to foreigners, we must have completely open borders".The Premises
I. The United States is a Christian nation
The Commissioner declared this premise to be true, citing the existence of his strawman calling for open borders based on the Old Testament, the "reliance on the protection of divine Providence" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution dated with "the Year of our Lord". He also cited the following, from former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story:In fact, every American colony, from it's foundation down to the revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, (if, indeed, that state be an exception) did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, in some form, the Christian religion.
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
Seemingly under the impression that the Constitution makes no substantial reference to religion at all, Commissioner Fox argued that although the Knox County official website makes no mention of the Tennessee Vols football team, the government's support of the team was evident in it's culture. Likewise, the culture of the Revolutionary period was a Christian culture, and the Constitution they drafted is inherently Christian in nature.
To state the obvious, this is untrue. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies had an official state religion: Christianity. What Story describes is not cultural, but institutional. If the founding father's had wanted a Christian nation, they would not have amended the Constitution to the contrary:~:text=Congress%20shall%20make%20no%20law%20respecting%20an%20establishment%20of%20religion%2C").II. God's Word, the Bible, provides no limiting principles to the passages addressing hospitality to the alien
Fox started discussion of this premise by pointing out that Scripture says God established the idea of nations and borders, stating that, in the creation of nations, God was exercising his divine rights. Inherent in their creation was the right to secure their borders.
This is false. Nations came about as a natural occurrence in societal development. Here is the Scripture pertaining to the establishment of nations:These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. 2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5 From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.
- Genesis 10:1-5
In any case, I do wan to expound upon divine rights. By their nature, divine rights cannot be claimed by any mortal human. Humans may be subject to a divine calling, but that calling must be interrogated by the followers of the divinity being invoked. When Commissioner Fox claims a Christian nation's divine calling to brutally police it's borders, that calling must be interrogated by those called to "a royal priesthood" in 1 Peter 2:9. Namely, other Christians.
In invoking the Moabites and Canaanites as examples of exclusion, Commissioner Fox revealed ignorance of our shared sacred text. The Son of our shared God is descended from Ruth and Rahab, Moabite and Canaanite of Jericho, respectively.
In arguing that critics of this federal wave of racial violence wish to return to Old Testament law, Commissioner Fox purposefully mischaracterizes the argument so that he, in turn, may return to Old Testament law. Of notable concern is his assertion that God calling on Israel to eradicate nations in the Old Testament, exercising his divine right, gives modern nations the inherent right to decide who exists within its borders. Here is one of the passages he was discussing:When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you,
2 and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.
3 “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.- Deuteronomy 7:1-3
Here is what the Commissioner said:Fox: Those nations were so depraved that God ordained their destruction through the instrumentality of ancient Israel...because he didn't want them to be infected by the utter depravity of those nations. But obviously, the people from those nations could not reside in the nation of Israel. What can we extrapolate from this?...It's just inherent that a country can make laws about who can reside, who can even be inside the country itself.
This is a genocidal argument pretending not to have a target. Our elected leaders are not divine. Furthermore, the life of Christ is the New Testament against which any interpretation of God's will must be measured, and in my understanding of John 3:16, Christ does not discriminate against anyone seeking to enter the Kingdom of God.III. As a modern Christian nation, the United States must follow the pattern (laws) of ancient Israel
It was already past the ten minute limit that Commission Chair Gina Oster had given Commissioner Fox when he began to argue against this particular strawman. At that point, Oster interrupted and graciously offered him another three minutes, maximum. When the Commissioner questioned the Chair's authority to impose a time limit at all, Senior Deputy Law Director Mike Moyers was called upon to shed light on Commission Rules.Moyers: I believe that the time that any person is given to speak, including public forum, is at the discretion of the Chair.
Frustrated, Commissioner Fox threatened to continue his presentation in future meetings, Ultimately, he was allowed to carry on to completion, seventeen minutes later. To be fair, there were a couple of short interruptions later.IV. Laws creating borders and restricting immigration go beyond the boundaries God made for just government, and Christians should oppose them and are not bound to obey
Commissioner Fox quickly declared this premise untrue, and unilaterally declared federal immigration law to be just without engaging in any sort of examination. I'll use the opportunity to remind you: borders and nations arose as a natural part of human development. Debate about whether they are still necessary in the modern day, and to what extent, is reasonable.
In arguing that Christians must obey immigration law, Commissioner Fox implied that "being kind to foreigners" and "being a good neighbor" is against immigration law. It is not. Neither is non-participation in the voluntary 287(g) contract program. Neither is reforming our convoluted legal immigration pipeline. As it stands, our immigration laws are Kafkaesque.The Good Samaritan
Fox began discussion of this parable by classifying the traveler as a "Crime Victim". In describing him as such, Fox ascribed knowledge to the Samaritan that he simply does not have. The Samaritan cares for the traveler without knowing whether his assailant was a criminal or a Centurion.
Commissioner Fox then uses that "Crime Victim" classification to argue that immigration leads to the death of citizens, and therefore the Good Samaritan parable applies to the victims of immigration.Fox: So, here's Pierce Corcoran. Now, Pierce Corcoran, according to illegal immigration activists, he's not our neighbor. He's just some guy that was born here, and grew up here. Here's who they define as our neighbor. This is the guy that killed Pierce Corcoran when he drove the wrong way and hit him head on, and killed him. Supposedly this is who we're supposed to show mercy to. This is who we're supposed to show compassion to. This is who we're supposed to show justice to.
What happened to Pierce Corcoran was a tragedy. The fact that Francisco Franco-Cambrany was never tried, as the Corcoran family wished, was another. But the use of Pierce's story by Commissioner Fox, to dehumanize undocumented immigrants as an entire people group, was a disgrace.
At this point, Knox County Commissioner Shane Jackson chimed in with a question:Jackson: Are we supposed to show mercy and justice to a family that lives here in Knoxville that is supporting their family, working, and obeying our laws?
Fox: Well, I'm gonna get to who we should show justice and mercy and compassion to. And yes, we should show justice and mercy and compassion to our fellow citizens. When these laws are not enforced properly, they lead to tragedy. They lead to people being killed. And you are not showing justice and mercy and compassion to your fellow citizen, your actual neighbor, when you advocate against them and thwart the enforcement of immigration laws.
Fox went on to point out other deaths involving immigrants. Needless to say, Fox's openly racist behavior is not a Biblical approach to immigration at all. Apart from being hateful, it was also deceptive. In singling out crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he made no mention of crime rate statistics reported by the US Department of Justice.Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide...Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
- Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice
Instead, the Commissioner cited the TNDAGC Immigration Report, saying that undocumented individuals have a greater propensity to commit crime. However, he misrepresents the data, claiming that 2,183 undocumented immigrants committed violent crimes in 2025. Said report lists the number of charges brought against violent offenders last year, but not the number of offenders itself. There were a total of 2,183 charges of violent offense brought against an unknown number of individuals, all of whom must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Only 39% of the total number of offenders reported, which was 11,340, could be tracked through the Tennessee justice system. Of the 4,412 cases included in the report, of both violent and nonviolent offenders, 352 (8%) have been dismissed outright, 321 (7.2%) have seen the charges dropped, and 2,281 (51.7%) remain open. Only 1232 people( 27.9%) included in this report have plead or been found guilty of any charge so far.
Due diligence is due for a reason. You may argue that we cannot be certain that Commissioner Fox was being purposefully deceitful in his presentation What I can say is that, in citing population data from the Migration Policy Institute, he included in his definition of "illegal aliens", quote:...those who entered the country without authorization and visa overstayers, as well as individuals who hold a liminal (or “twilight”) status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole, or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as well as those with a pending asylum application.
For the record, this data, along with data from the American Immigration Council, which he also cites, were the first two results, in my search at least, for Tennessee immigrant population data. However, the AIC data is a lower, more current number that does not include people who are actively jumping through the hoops of our legal system. It would have been more accurate to use that data, and would have produced a higher crime rate. It appears to me, in using the MPI data, Commissioner Fox reveals his priorities.
The Commissioner went on to state what he says is the end goal of immigration law:Fox: People are saying: "Well, if there was only some way that we could keep criminal illegal aliens out, that would be an ideal situation". In other words, try to know who's coming in and out of our country. Kind of like this lady here, the anti-ICE activist, who proudly announced, without any self-awareness: "We are literally creating a place that we know who's coming in and out of our neighborhoods". This was in Minneapolis, and I say, yes. We want to do that for the whole country. We want to know who's coming and going, in and out of our country.
Pointing to ICE's dragnet, that trespasses rights spelled out in both the First and Fourth Amendment, as ideal immigration policy is certainly a choice, but it's not one he wanted us to dwell on.
Commissioner Fox quickly moved on to cartel exploitation of migrants unable to navigate our contorted immigration pipeline, as drug mules and/or sex slaves. He suggested that we should cut off immigration, instead of either fixing the pipeline or holding the true criminals accountable. We could, of course, simply do both of those things. His argument assumes the impossibility of a functional pipeline, and the immutable impotence of our justice system to pursue justice.
Fox then accused undocumented immigrants of stealing houses from documented individuals, blaming them for a failure of public policy, to which he has at least one personal claim. He goes on to state that the victim in the Good Samaritan parable was deserving of neighborly treatment because he had not violated any laws, here revealing that he believes kindness should be reserved for the legally innocent.Fox: Remember, the victim in the Good Samaritan parable, he broke no laws. He was minding his own business. He was just walking through the nation of Israel. He was not in violation of any immigration laws, he was not invading Israel, he was just attacked by robbers. So this conclusion, this Good Samaritan example, is inapposite. It's an invalid conclusion. It does not apply to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are not our neighbors.
Christ's forgiveness of the criminal crucified beside him (Luke 23:39-43) stands in contrast with this attitude, as does historical context, leading Commissioner Shane Jackson to once again interject with a question.Jackson: Commissioner Fox, is the moral story of the Good Samaritan, isn't it more about treating others, who you hate, or dislike, as your neighbor? Because, you know, the basis of the Good Samaritan is Samaria, they were a sect of Judaism at the time, and they were hated because they thought they were the Chosen ones. So Samaritans were disliked, and the point of the Good Samaritan, I believe, is that, it is about treating others that you don't like, or that you would hate, or dislike, as your neighbor.
Fox: Well, there's something called ordo amoris and ordo caritatis, and these are orders of love and orders of charity, and you should be providing love and charity, first, to the people who are closest to you. And then, to the people in your community, and then to the people in your nation...What you're really doing, if you insist on thwarting the laws of the United States, when it comes to immigration, you're rolling the dice with the lives of your actual neighbors.
When Commissioner Fox cites "ordo amoris", he echoes Vice President JD Vance and trillionaire Elon Musk in arguing scarcity. They believe empathy can only go so far, and they claim authority to declare how far that is. That claim is invalid, as that authority belongs to the voting public. In insisting that undocumented immigrants cannot be cared for, they operate as thieves.Jackson: Do you not think you might be misinterpreting what the other side is arguing? That my side, the other side is arguing that it's a Christian perspective of: How do we enforce our law in a Christian manner, and treat others with kindness?...
Fox: We enforce it by deporting people, and returning them. what other choice is there? By enforcing it. That is the Christian thing to do.
Jackson: But should we also provide food for those who are hungry? And shelter for those who are-
Fox: No. We should not enable people to live here illegally. The answer to that is no. That's not being compassionate to your actual neighbors. Because if you do that, then you're going to attract people to come here. It needs to be inhospitable, so people have a disincentive—a deterrent—from coming here. Because America is for Americans. It's not for illegal aliens.
In seeking to assign "actual neighbors" in our community, Fox attempts to imbue a culture of othering into Knoxville that cannot go unchecked. In saying "America is for Americans" and arguing against a path to amnesty, he insinuates that immigrants are, by their nature, un-American. In his mind, there are those that deserve The Land of Opportunity, and those who do not.The Sheep and Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
In discussing the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), Commissioner Fox claimed that the passage refers only to interactions with Christians. One Christian group who treat needy Christians uncharitably (the goats) and another who behave in a Christ-like manner (the sheep). Having argued scarcity in an age of unbridled avarice, either Fox believes immigrants cannot be his brothers and sisters in Christ, or he is admitting to being a goat.
He then offered a conclusive summary of his presentation and offered to take any further questions. After a few moments, Junior Commissioner Hall presented hers:Hall: When Christopher Columbus came, was he not treated with kindness?
Fox: I don't know. Christopher Columbus was not part of this presentation.
Hall: Would he not be considered an alien?
Fox: He was considered an explorer.TL;DR
Knox County Commissioner Andy Fox is a white "Christian" nationalist. The idea of a "Sin of Empathy" is easy enough to tie to white supremacy and "Christian" nationalism, but if there was any doubt on what Fox is, a supporter's citation of Germany's AfD in declaring remigration to be the future will have erased it. He believes America belongs to the white "Christian" alone, for white is the Chosen race and "Christianity" the only valid religion. Anyone looking for honest solutions for their troubles would do well to avoid his suggestions, fueled, as they are, not by a sincere devotion to Christ, but by hatred.
Perhaps, instead, we should interrogate our government's relationship with the trillion-dollar man who led DOGE to gut the federal Department of Education. What ever happened to all the money on that wall of receipts? Or maybe we start closer to home, with Governor Bill Lee pushing for an expansion to a school voucher program that already dilutes our state's ability to support public schools, despite the loss of federal support. These thieves do not have the answers, for indeed they are the problem.
Drawing strength from God's will, with love enough to share,
Josiah Fernandez
#Knoxville #LocalPolitics #Apolitycse #WhiteChristianNationalism