It is sobering to me to hear that a friend's mother was at a military speech which went long or she would have been at the shooting in Tucson.

The Post author manages to miss the point quite deftly. As a LJ almost immediately below yours in my list notes: "Nut jobs not only need little encouragement, I think they might benefit from a lot of discouragement".

There is a difference between "placing blame", especially before the facts are in, and sobering up & taking an event as a wake-up call. Even if by some stroke all the eliminationist rhetoric had nothing to do with this event, it should still be a reason for people to think long & hard about their hyperbole and overheated words because this is what it looks like in reality - is this what they *really* mean and really want to see in America? If not, step back from that brink.

If we are talking British idioms, I'm tempted to ask you if you know the phrase 'knocking shop'. I will use it in the US and then find it's obscure over there.

The Maier photos remind me (again) of how wonderful and powerful black and white photography can be.

the pingback for this was odd.

User jaylake referenced to your post saying: [...] st rhetoric more than a bit facile, but much of this column's point stands. (Thanks to .) Scale [...]

I am happy to be linked to and gratified to know it wasn't my rhetoric which was facile enough to merit specific comment.

Hahahaha. Sorry about that odd bit...

Violence in rhetoric, while unwelcome for reasons I need not preach to this choir, is nothing new. (I've been studying Roman history lately.) But violence isn't the scariest thing in print or on the airwaves. When a single person's - can you call it rhetoric when it is incoherent? - demonstrates an absence of the ability to imagine other people having feelings, emotions, and reasons, let alone a right to life, that's when the violence actually happens.

I am very afraid to live in a world in which many people have few contacts, in which people can live utterly separate lives in the same house, know almost nothing about coworkers, know no neighbors, attend no meetings of groups (church used to be one, but there are plenty of others), and are little more than numbers to any agency assigned to check in yearly or more often. Who will see which of us have lost our sense of the humanness of others?

I know taking a plate of muffins over to the new neighbors' won't solve the alienation of the Diamond Age, but it can't hurt, can it?

...brought to you by someone who had stayed up late watching "Rear Window" and was still awake when the first plane struck a tower in 2001. All I could think about the next day was the speech made by the balcony lady about how the little dog was a better neighbor than anyone else in the courtyard....