Who Stole My Razor? The Return of Pretension*

So you think it's easy being an internationally acclaimed Blogger? You think it's all Glory and no Guts? Well, you're wrong.

I'll be the first to admit it has it's advantages. I'm out here in cyberspace living the life, cranking out volumes of the sickest satirical content on the net, got a harem of hot females who do my spell checking for me, and tons of faithful Slicers who regard the Razor with an almost a spiritual admiration, believing (misguidedly) that the Lord carves these blogposts onto stone tablets before I upload them onto my site.

It's also true that I wholeheartedly enjoy the admiration that is heaped upon me whenever I log off the computer and venture out into the real world. That is why I try to be understanding when random Slicers stop by my house in the middle of the afternoon and wake me up from my nap to tell me how funny my blog is. It comes with the territory.

What I am having a hard time adjusting to is having my work stolen! I realize that with success comes drawbacks, but when I develop an entirely novel satirical approach and someone steals it, I get enraged. I now know how the good people at Kleenex feel. The term Kleenex has become ubiquitous to the point that it's often used to describe some of that recycled 1-ply crap that feels like 200-grit sandpaper. And the fine people at Xerox? It must suck to have a copy-righted brand name become synonymous with photo-copying and having to listening as secretaries worldwide drone on and on about "Xeroxing this" and "Xeroxing that" all the while using some inferior product.

So what event in the Blogosphere has my temper flaring like a pack of hemorrhoids? (Here) As I've mentioned to you before, I head over to NRO every morning to catch up on the overnight opinion news that has developed. Imagine my surprise when I saw NRO contributor Jonah Goldberg post this:

Ferguson’s Razor
October 16, 2010 10:54 A.M.
By Jonah Goldberg

Andy Ferguson takes a scalpel to Dinesh D’Souza. I think he overstates a couple things and understates some others, but it’s a very engaging read.

Correction: In the original version I wrote “overstates” twice. It’s been fixed above.
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Do you see what he did there? Ferguson's Razor? Takes a scalpel to? It would appear that so "So and So's Razor" is becoming synonymous with slicing and dicing someone on the Internet.

I beg to differ! I read the entire "engaging read" and am forced to agree with AbeFroman, who said, "I wouldn't exactly call that applying a scalpel." and then continued, "I found Ferguson's argument as unpersuasive as I find D'Souza's thesis uninteresting."

For clarity, Dinesh D’Souza wrote a book about Barrack Obama. The article that Mr. Goldberg refers to as a scalpel was actually a review of the book.

In an age where silence can be deemed complicity, I'm not going to sit back and let "The Razor" get mainstreamed into irrelevance. Going forward all misuse of the term "Razor", specifically with regard to e-viscerations** will be catalogued, violators will be scorned, and grudges will be held.

Those of you who think this might have been a harmless coincidence are encouraged to consider a couple of points. First, I know for a fact that Jonah Goldberg has been to the real Razor. I e-mailed him the link myself. Secondly, In spite of nearly 5 million terabytes of data available on the Internet, the Blogosphere is not nearly as big as you might think. The majority of our web traffic comes from other Bloggers (mainly looking for content to steal) and we are a self-policing group. Jonah has been caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar...

* While researching the Razor for my 100th Blog post retrospective, I realized that this site used to be a lot more pretentious. Today is the first step in returning it to its egotistical glory.

** E-visceration is a term I coined to describe the art of "satirically slicing someone up on the Internet". If I see people using or misusing this term without citing me and my Razor, I will sue them.