prolix

Prolegomena To any Future Blogger Community, or ReAssembler, The Nimble Epicure: Essay Eleven

What exactly does applying to become a 9-1-1 Dispatcher for a large city Police Department have to do with being an epicure, a chess expert, an editor of a security magazine, and a parser of unusual English words? What does this have to do with phenomenology, or French Deconstructionism or Structuralism, German anthropology, fencing, demi glace, or vinology? Kind readers are invited to read on: I think of myself significantly eclectic, but our subject for today wins the blo read

That atheism meme

Shuggy tags me with this meme. I respond out of courtesy, rather than because I think I have anything useful to add. Q1. How would you define "atheism"? Obviously, as the belief that there is no god. However, this belief can be held with less than total certainty, and need not be one you regard as especially important or constitutive of one‘s identity. My biggest beef with many theists isn’t so much the substance of their belief - we all have strange ideas - as the vehemence with which they hold read

Thinking over Lil Wayne's 'Tha Carter III'

Last night, I walked into a record store and bought Lil Wayne's new album, Tha Carter III. It felt a little surreal. Wayne's fans have been thinking about this day through so many endless months of postponed release dates, mixtape teases, scene-stealing guest appearances, and leaks of varying quality; I sometimes think the only entity more absurdly, entertainingly prolix than Weezy himself is the blogosphere hivemind when it talks about Weezy. I'm certainly guilty of over-parsing the guy's pre read

Thinking over Lil Wayne's 'Tha Carter III'

Last night, I walked into a record store and bought Lil Wayne's new album, Tha Carter III. It felt a little surreal. Wayne's fans have been thinking about this day through so many endless months of postponed release dates, mixtape teases, scene-stealing guest appearances, and leaks of varying quality; I sometimes think the only entity more absurdly, entertainingly prolix than Weezy himself is the blogosphere hivemind when it talks about Weezy. I'm certainly guilty of over-parsing the guy's pre read

Whatever happened to the sin of hypocrisy?

Whenever a conservative gets caught in an embarrassing story - liberals are appalled at hypocrisy much more than the sin itself. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in the wake of the Larry Craig story, Since most on the Left think Craig’s alleged sexual liaisons are perfectly benign, they shouldn’t object. “Who are we to judge?” and all that. Rather, the Left claims it hates Craig’s hypocrisy, not his behavior. From Rush Limbaugh’s drug use to Bill Bennett’s gambling to the long list of R read