We Are In Agreement

A Million Stories in the Naked City

Conor Freisdorf has a great post here on the American Scene.

It made me miss New York (lately everything seems to make me miss New York). He describes a young man walking city streets, sometimes sober, often drunk, and listening to the Velvet Underground....eerily familiar.

In LA you shuttle from home to work, work to friends, friends to home, home to work...usually in cars, rarely (as compared to other cities) face-to-face with

"paths you might’ve taken were there only time to take them all. If only a man could live ten lives, you think to yourself, standing in autumn on an outdoor Brooklyn subway platform,"

I miss brushing shoulders with the rich or destitute or crazy or beautiful or plain all in the same morning, all in the same subway car.

New York exhausts you, its swiftness, its callousness. But in a way it keeps you young, slows time down, forces your mind to process millions of bits of flooding information.

Here your routine is cached, you can avoid new experiences ... brain unstimulated.

New York is cooler than LA.

Sweet, they answered my question

This Guy Looks Pretty Cool

Is that a riding switch?

Representative Steve King is insane

Rep. Steve King: ACORN scandal bigger than Watergate

Related: Alan Grayson's recent deuce in the capital men's room more destructive than Kissinger's secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos.

I <3 Pitchfork

I don't care what you say, it's a great resource, and without them I wouldn't have discovered Phoenix.

Girlfriend

Daniel Larison is a daily must-read

Especially yesterday's dismantling of Tom "Suck on This" Freidman's Muslim-call-to-arms (note that Freidman is neither Muslim, nor willing to pick up arms).

As he did late last month, Friedman is carelessly reproducing pan-Islamist ideas as part of his own effort at looking for red herrings because he doesn’t want to “look inward.” In his case, the red herring is the lack of Muslim outrage. Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them. It could be that large numbers of these people appear indifferent or quiescent not because they approve of the atrocities or fear the jihadists who commit them, but simply that they are indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands.

Daniel Larison Mainpage on The American Conservative

John Birch Society to co-sponser 2010 CPAC

This is great,in 1964 W. F. Buckley wrote of JBS:

How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points . . . so far removed from common sense? That dilemma weighs on conservatives across America. . . . The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.

And now they're co-sponsoring CPAC.

Sarah Palin has shifted the center of the Republican party so far to the right that Oliver North is suspect.

I must say it would be nice not to have an opposition party of fucking psychos.