The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Ambrose Bierce

Perhaps not entirely the right winger one might suppose, in part because P. J. O'Rourke is a fan.

The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, University of Georgia, 2000, 2002.

Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

See also the definition of Land.

Or this.

Aborigines, n. 1. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize. 2. Considerate persons who will not trouble the lexicographer of the future to describe them.

I hear Howard Zinn cackling in the background.

Absolute, adj. . . . republics . . . are governed by chance.

Indeed.

Who could have anticipated the triumph of such brilliant liberal fabrications as the constitutional right to privacy and the Incorporation Doctrine, whose original but not quite only function was together to put a stop to state, federal, and local enforcement of Christian sexual morality?

Of course he was not thinking of that but of the dispersal of powers quite consciously intended to prevent anyone getting his way, very far, without a lot of others independently buying in.

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