Generous anger

I will follow James Bow’s lead in thanking Jack for letting all of us serve as guest bloggers in his absence. I will also take James Bow’s suggestion and mention what brought me here as a reader.

I found TPRS a long time ago, and it quickly became one of my must-reads. I liked the layout (although James Bow made it a ton better… thanks, James), I liked the humor, I liked the fact that I tended to agree with Jack most of the time (our scores on the Political Compass turned out to be very close), but what I liked most of all was the sense I got that here was a man who had what Orwell (in his famous essay on Dickens) called “generous anger.”

“He is laughing,” wrote Orwell, “with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity… [he] is always fighting against something, but [he] fights in the open and is not frightened… [he] is generously angry.”

Jack paid me the honor of blogrolling me and making me the “TPRS Site of the Day” way back on 24 September 2002. Good lord, that was just over three years (and, for me, two URLs) ago. So I’ve been a TPRS fan for quite a while. I hope it’ll be around for many years to come. Maybe Jack’s not quite a Charles Dickens, but he’s one of the very best of the liberal bloggers.