Second thought, Lileks steals one of my quirks (being of course, the lengthy and mostly digressive parenthetical statement within a post (though he fails to add the further quirk of a subparenthetical clasue))
Here's his parenthetical, it's a doozy (should that term be retired? not like anyone remembers a Duesenberg, or associate that name with luxury and top-notchedness anymore, my very best Hot Wheels was a Duesenberg, mainly cause it was many grams heavier than any other Hot Wheel, so it was best at crashing in to things and building up speed going down those cool red white and blue tracks Mattel sold in the 70s), read the whole post for the context:
(It may indeed indicate a contrapositive view from the orthodoxy, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently conservative – sometimes the opposing argument to a conservative idea isn’t liberal at all, but gets defined as such because the person who holds the idea is identified as liberal. And vice versa. That’s why so much of our debate has little to do with competing ideas of how to organize society, and ends up being a debate between statists who have differing priorities about the application of state power. He said, tendentiously.)
It's funny because it's true. The positions inartfully described as "liberal" and "conservative" on a wide range of issues aren't actually in opposition to each other, they are merely fights over turf and where the government's money should be spent (without any thought as to the source of that government money).
But that doesn't mean elections don't matter, they do, and that doesn't mean that one party isn't better than the other (despite all its faults, the GOP is still preferable to the DEMs, in most cases, but some DEMs suck less than others, and some Republicans suck harder than their Democratic opponent (see George Allen)).
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