• Whenever you see a “Ten Commandments” monument, the first thing to check is whether it comes from the Bible or if, instead, it comes from the Fraternal Order of Eagles and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.
The two telltale signs are: 1) The Eagles/DeMille version is not enumerated and usually offers a decalog of 11 or 12 commandments; and 2) The Eagles/DeMille version uses a King James Version pastiche that garbles the “graven images” bit as “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.”
The newly installed Ten Commandments monument at the Rockwall County Courthouse in Texas is not the biblical Ten Commandments. It is the Fraternal Order of Eagles version.
You would think that it might matter to devout Christians intent on “bringing back the Bible” that this monument is something other than and different from the Bible. But it does not seem to matter to them. That is, at the very least, odd.
Given that Rockwall County is more than 60% Baptist, you might also think that people there would revere the central tenet of Baptists, which is the separation of church and state. But no. These are Southern Baptists and Texas Southern “Baptists” at that, and if they even slightly came to understand the implications of voluntary believers’ baptism they would reject it in a heartbeat and start practicing infant baptism the next day.
If you’re going to put up a monument with words from the Eagles then it’d be better to just go with the lyrics to “Desperado.” Or maybe just “Go Birds.” (I’d love to see that outside of a Texas courthouse.)
• This is a fascinating, depressing read from Lane Brown — “The Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.”
The algorithms are not algorithms — they’re advertising. “Clipping” campaigns and “narrative” campaigns and high-tech whisper campaigns of one form or another. Anything with an “algorithm” is at least partly payola.
What all of this amounts to isn’t just one problem but a stack of them, each feeding the next. Most people now encounter the world through algorithmic feeds built to warp reality, on platforms with every commercial incentive to keep users scrolling and very little incentive to distinguish genuine interest from astroturfed imitations. Into those feeds flows an unprecedented amount of undisclosed advertising engineered to resemble the improvised enthusiasm of human strangers. The platforms reward it with reach; traditional media picks it up and validates it. Meanwhile, as trust in journalism collapses and most of the actual reporting disappears behind paywalls, readers head straight for the comment sections, which seem more like the voice of the people than anything written by a reporter — except many of those commenters may not be people at all.
The good news is that this will all be over soon …, because something worse is coming to replace it.
This is part of why I prefer SEO-hostile headlines and summaries here. (“Search-engine optimization” for blogs became a fool’s errand after about 2012, when Google, Facebook, and Twitter all set out to kill the blogosphere of old. Why seek the attention of the algorithms intent on burying you?) And also part of why I like the no-algorithm, chronological feed of those you choose to follow format of Bluesky. Rejecting the algorithm is what gets Bluesky mocked by other platforms as a “bubble” — a “bubble” because it exists outside of the influence of those paid-for “algorithmic” advertising and propaganda campaigns.
After reading Brown’s piece, I’m guessing that the ubiquity of this “bubble” talking-point is not an organic development either.
• “We don’t help people because of who THEY are, we help them because of who WE are.” That’ll preach.
• Related to that … Donald Trump Jr. got married this weekend. His father did not attend the wedding, saying he was too busy.
As Heather Schwedel writes at Slate,* “It’s the kind of thing that might make you feel bad for Trump Jr., if he weren’t who he is.”
Yes, and there’s the rub — the complicated and complicating reality of what it means that “Hurt people hurt people.” Or that the unloved become unloving and unlovely. Don Jr. is a cruel, callous, corrupt, self-centered, destructive, predatory jerk. That is who and what he chooses to be. But it is also who and what he was taught and trained and forced to be by his cruel, callous, corrupt, self-centered, destructive, predatory jerk of a father. And every little bit we get a glimpse of the child Jr. once was — a child with every material and financial advantage in the world, but a also a child denied love by a manipulative, transactional, narcissistic father.
We have to keep that fact somewhere in the ledger because it is also true. It is not the only, or the most important true thing about Don Jr. who is a plundering, harmful, hateful spreader of hate who is actively using the considerable power and influence he has to promote massive, lethal injustice. First and foremost, people like him need to be stopped — full stop. Once that is accomplished — once he is no longer actively hurting others in worse ways than he was himself hurt — we can “feel bad” for him and perhaps seek to help him find the healing (and repentance) he desperately needs.
I’m reminded of the Red Cross’s insistence that the wounded are neutral parties entitled to care and healing — but only after they have ceased to be active combatants.
* (The Slate article is paywalled, but I read the quote from Schwedel via Charles Kuffner.)
• The title of this post comes from the Eagles’ “Desperado,” my favorite version of which is this one, from the Langley Schools Music Project, recordings from a series of elementary schools in British Columbia in the late 1970s. The singer is Sheila Behman, age 9.
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