Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

James, James, James. How Could You?

I love James Lileks. He's probably my favorite (and most prolific) syndicated columnist. I read The Bleat daily, and follow his Backfence and Newhouse columns. In fact, James invented what has become for me a favorite expression, "striver":
Right before I woke up I dreamed I had an assignment: write a bad feature story in the style of the New York Times. When I woke I had the last sentence still in my head; I stumbled next door to the studio, woke up the Mac, and typed this sentence:

Over in the field, a hound was hunched over excreting a "striver," the local’s term for the hard, elegantly tapered stools for which the wild dogs are renowned.

I recounted this dream to my buddy Bill, the copy editor who sits a few feet away from me at work, and we agreed that a "striver" would be the new term for a piece of writing that was painstakingly crafted, produced with some difficulty, and was an absolute piece of crap.
How can you not love a man whose mind works like that?

But in today's Bleat James commits a grievous error. A nearly unpardonable sin.

He spelled "Tucson" wrong.

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