Continuity
The tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom — of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It’s just that, in this case, that world of words isn’t a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series — it’s U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it’s like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain’s origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.
(First saw this in Boing Boing but didn’t actually get around to reading it till Sumana posted about it. Sometimes I’m tempted to just give up attribution…)
Is there a blogger etiquette on attribution? I think you have to cite only where you read it, and count on that source to link back to where they saw it, etc. Also think it makes more sense to link to the actual permalink, instead of just the main blog URL. Think I'll devote a post to that myself soon...
Posted by CT on May 8 2004 07:14