j.r. leonard

Dude's Bad Tweet is interesting to me because historically speaking, this was the sentiment held by country folk against the city. The country was the site of production, & the city the site of consumption. Country made food, & city consumed it & extracted taxes at sword point.https://twitter.com/JacksonKernion/status/1192176586088255489 …

The city was seen throughout much of history as decadent, corrupt, extractive, oppressive -- producing nothing, consuming everything.

So if you're in a geography that's productive, & there is a geography that's unproductive & extractive & it takes taxes from you, the normal sentiment is to despise that extractive geography & its inhabitants. It's just that in the knowledge economy, some valences are reversed.

There are still a lot of country vs. city stereotypes that are the same as in antiquity, but the "producer vs. consumer" roles are switched.

Anyway, I'm not defending the Bad Tweets by any means. They were vile & deserving of the wide opprobrium they attracted. Just saying that on the narrow issue of "guy from productive geography reviles people from extractive geographies over taxes" is A Thing.

By way of footnotes, I am mainly thinking here with Richard Horsley's work on Paul and the Roman Empire. He goes into that Late Antique country/city dynamic a bit in much of his work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Horsley …