Talk:Curtis Yarvin/Other quotations

2006

 * […] historically, most social unrest has been the result of an oversupply of bored intellectuals. Many societies have achieved long-term stability by funneling young men with clerical aptitudes into absorbing but irrelevant pursuits.
 * "Moral sentiments and Material Interests", Gene Expression (September 30, 2006)


 * […] heterodoxy is not without obligations, and one of them is to respond to extraordinary levels of invective and slander in dulcet tones of the utmost calmness and restraint.
 * "Moral sentiments and Material Interests" (October 3, 2006)


 * The present always seems gigantic and absolute. Dispelling this illusion is the task of the philosopher.
 * "Moral sentiments and Material Interests" (October 4, 2006)


 * The tendency of both cancer and the state is to grow. And you don't cure cancer by reforming it.
 * "Moral sentiments and Material Interests" (October 6, 2006)


 * People in our heavily indoctrinated intellectual universe are very used to living with a high level of cognitive dissonance—pragmatism just tells them that there are no simple answers.
 * "Moral sentiments and Material Interests" (October 11, 2006)


 * Why people assume it's obvious that North America needs a central government is quite beyond me.
 * "Redesigning the U.S. Map", 2Blowhards (October 22, 2006)


 * Hominids crave status, status is power, and power is responsibility.
 * "Advertising to Kids", 2Blowhards (October 23, 2006)


 * Powerful people always see themselves as bearers of a heavy and unpleasant burden.
 * "Advertising to Kids"

2007

 * Dignity demands mystery.
 * "The NYTBR Section and Fiction 3", 2Blowhards (January 10, 2007)


 * Property rights, to me, are just a way to keep people from fighting over property.
 * "Liquidity As Information", interfluidity (January 16, 2007)


 * […] civil strife is not the result of the rich denying their goods to the poor. It is the result of some of the rich offering some of their goods to some of the poor, in order to shape them into a political weapon.
 * "Liquidity As Information" (January 17, 2007)


 * In general, the goal of symbolic violence is to figure out who would win in an unrestricted fight to the death. As long as the results of these promcesses are identical, there is no incentive for either party to deviate from the symbolic convention.
 * "Liquidity As Information" (January 18, 2007)


 * Another symbolic way to resolve a battle, for instance, might be to simply count the number of soldiers who show up on each side. […] It is no surprise that when you try to impose democracy on a country in which some faction believes that a real civil war will produce better results, the symbolic restraints tend to evaporate.
 * "Liquidity As Information"


 * The state, freed of its mystical trappings, be they theistic, demotistic, or whatever, is simply a large corporation.
 * "Liquidity As Information"


 * When you hear someone talking about "creating social change" or the like, they are scheming for power.
 * "The Price of Muscle-Flexing", 2Blowhards (January 30, 2007)


 * Any shared interest defines an alliance, whether or not the allies intend it.
 * "The Price of Muscle-Flexing"


 * Someday, perhaps when Hamburg is a free city again, there will be a movement to destroy every architectural trace of the disastrous and discredited twentieth century. Including its pathetic last gasps in the early twenty-first.
 * "Our Shared and Planned Future", 2Blowhards (March 1, 2007)


 * In general, Western governments manage public opinion not by sending racists, libertarians, fascists, and fundamentalists (i.e., dissidents) to treatment centers in Alaska, but by subsidizing a large and comprehensive system of official and quasiofficial education and publishing that inculcates appropriate thinking from cradle to grave. This educational system is increasingly important and powerful in Western society. It dictates an increasingly narrow range of "acceptable" policies which the political system, which is increasingly symbolic and meaningless, must live within. And it assigns the social status of individuals in a way that resembles nothing so much as Peter the Great's Table of Ranks.
 * "Steven on Leni", 2Blowhards (March 16, 2007)


 * […] a democracy is a society ruled by scholars, just as a monarchy is ruled by soldiers or a plutocracy by merchants. Since there is no objective difference between a scholar and a priest, of course, you can look at it that way as well.
 * "Steven on Leni"


 * There's a reason intelligence and wisdom are separate stats in D&D.
 * "Steven on Leni" (March 18, 2007)


 * Architecture, as always, reflects the ugliness, corruption, and inhumanity of the society in which it exists.
 * "San Francisco Defaces Itself", 2Blowhards (March 25, 2007)


 * Power in human societies is inseparable from responsibility: you gain power by demonstrating to others that you are sincerely concerned about solving problems. No problems, no power.
 * "Roberts and Easterbrook", 2Blowhards (April 11, 2007)


 * Ethnic minorities are ideal as cadre, for the same reason that the Ottoman Janissaries selected and reared mainly Christian boys. Children of the powerless classes have no reason to defect. They will be your most loyal warriors. This is why, if you're young, smart, and black, your ticket in life is written.
 * "Roberts and Easterbrook"


 * The US has not one, but two, competing executive branches: executive A, a democratically elected "political" system symbolized by the White House, and executive B, a "nonpartisan" civil service which is isolated from "politics".
 * "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online", 2Blowhards (April 12, 2007)


 * The set of people who support or oppose a proposition is quite unrelated to its validity. So, even, are their motivations.
 * "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online"


 * […] in the Western system of society as it now stands, it is possible to corrupt an entire field of science.
 * "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online" (April 13, 2007)


 * […] the creation and distribution of information in general—what one might call, as a whole, "education"—has a role in the present Western structure of power that is perhaps best comparable to the influence of the military in Wilhelmine Germany.
 * "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online"


 * Politics appear wherever the resolution of a conflict is unclear. As long as it's clear to everyone who owns what, both in tangible objects and intangible rights, and no one can get ahead by violating this rule, politics will not appear.
 * "England R.I.P.?", 2Blowhards (April 18, 2007)


 * […] in an ideal legal system, there is no dispute whose resolution is not unambiguously dictated before the fact.
 * "England R.I.P.?"


 * Political conflict is a sine qua non of both democracy and war. Therefore, if the equation of conflict and uncertainty is correct, eliminating uncertainty makes democracy unnecessary and war impossible.
 * "England R.I.P.?"


 * Sure, America's industries have rotted, large parts of her cities have been destroyed and abandoned, the dollar has been debased to near worthlessness and is propped up only by the irresponsible monetary policies of Third World despots, the military cannot defeat a few ragtag brigands, unarmed barbarians wander freely across the borders, politics is a circus with no actual power, the country is oppressed by hordes of moralizing bureaucrats, atrocious crimes are ubiquitous and generally unpunished, etc., etc. All of this is absolutely normal. It is the same pattern of events that most declining civilizations have followed. But we have amazing SUVs, the Internet, and enormous flat-screen TVs. This is new. It is genuinely different. It breaks the pattern.
 * "England R.I.P.?" (April 19, 2007)


 * In fact, if there is anything that makes me optimistic at all, it's that both liberal and conservative movements are so utterly bereft of plausible leadership and intellectual honor that there has to be some way to get rid of both of them at the same time.
 * "England R.I.P.?"


 * […] the thing about the satire of power is that it's never actually funny. It has this mocking, hateful tone that simulates humor, it can be even be experienced as humor by people who lack that natural faculty, but it fails because it's predictable.
 * "England R.I.P.?" (April 20, 2007)


 * This is the story I was raised on. Hordes of ignorant, racist, God-crazed peasants, allied with giant, corrupt multinational corporations, are poised to crush the tiny sparks of intellectual life that have sprung up […] in the beleaguered retreats of life, love, and thought that are the impoverished cities of Cambridge and Berkeley. Against all odds, a few daring freethinkers, socially conscious environmentalists, and responsible civil servants defend the arts and sciences and other faint, flickering flames of human progress, and speak out for the rights of the downtrodden, who at any minute could be crushed under the iron heel of the Corporate Beast, or lynched in droves by the zombie minions of Karl Rove.
 * "England R.I.P.?"


 * The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.
 * "The Mencius Vision", 2Blowhards (April 22, 2007)


 * It strikes me that if everyone is a pacifist and then one person decides not to be a pacifist, he will wind up ruling the world.
 * "The Mencius Vision"


 * Formalism says: let's figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a little fancy certificate. Let's not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence.
 * "The Mencius Vision"


 * So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it's trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills. To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it.
 * "The Mencius Vision"


 * The planet is big enough for governments to be like restaurants.
 * "The Mencius Vision" (April 23, 2007)


 * A formalist foreign policy is based on creating clear and rational disincentives to potential attackers.
 * "The Mencius Vision"


 * Taxation is not theft. It's more like rent. Why do you send a rent check to your landlord every month? What does he do in exchange for this service? Typically, not much at all. Why does he own the building? Why should it matter to you? Libertarians, for some reason, are perfectly happy with this relationship on a small scale, but offended by it on a large scale.
 * "The Mencius Vision"


 * The Western university system in the twentieth century is fatally compromised by its involvement with power. It makes no more sense to extend implicit trust to state-directed institutions which study economics and politics than to ask oil companies to fund our study of climate change.
 * "The Mencius Vision" (April 24, 2007)


 * Unfortunately, prosperity and education often seem to make it more, not less, possible for very strange ideas about the world to flourish.
 * "Why do atheists believe in religion?", Unqualified Reservations (May 2, 2007)


 * Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalism. Even in the heyday of Pio Nono the intellectual diversity of the Catholic Church was probably a good bit higher.
 * "He who refuses does not repent", Unqualified Reservations (May 2, 2007)


 * If you took Harvard in 2007, put it in a time machine, and sent it back to 1907, the Harvard of 1907 would have no trouble in classifying it. And "diverse" probably wouldn't be the first word in their report.
 * "He who refuses does not repent"


 * Representative democracy is a limited civil war in which the armies show up, get counted, but don't actually fight.
 * "The BDH-OV conflict", Unqualified Reservations (May 7, 2007)


 * Democracy, like all conventions of limited war, is fragile. It's hard to establish and easy to destroy.
 * "The BDH-OV conflict"


 * If neo-Nazis were as influential as neo-Communists, San Francisco would have an Albert-Speer-Straße.
 * "BDH-OV conflict"


 * Of course, it is simply human nature that people are more likely to be appalled by the crimes of their enemies, and excuse or ignore the crimes of their allies.
 * "BDH-OV conflict"


 * I know it's unfashionable, but I think there's still a place for hate in this world, especially if it is expressed honestly and directly.
 * "Bad Poem of the Week: "Vanitas Mundi" by Robin Ekiss", Unqualified Reservations (May 9, 2007)


 * It is much harder to reveal people as religious fanatics when they don't believe in God, but they may act in just as fanatical a way.
 * "Two kinds of repeaters", Unqualified Reservations (May 9, 2007)


 * As a formalist, I define power as the ability to change the rules, or to clarify them when no rules exist.
 * "The iron polygon: power in the United States", Unqualified Reservations (May 12, 2007)


 * One of the best features of the current US regime, and one of the worst, is that it's much easier to prevent change than to create change. The compromise is generally the status quo. But if some deus ex machina could remove one of the opposing power centers, or point one in a new and unopposed direction, we'd see instant and explosive change.
 * "The iron polygon: power in the United States"


 * Perhaps the most important fact about power is that the powerful are almost always sincere. They honestly believe they are doing good. Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir.
 * "The iron polygon: power in the United States"


 * Having power means you have a choice.
 * "The iron polygon: power in the United States"


 * Behind every movement there is a beautiful truth, and Nazism is no exception. This does not contradict the heinous crimes of the Nazis—it explains how they could happen.
 * "BDH-OV conflict" (May 13, 2007)


 * There is no such thing as "self-government". Government is an organization that acts. So is Starbucks. Starbucks is not a democracy. It does not even pretend to be a democracy. It reports to its CEO, who reports to its board, who reports to its shareholders. But if Starbucks were organized exactly in the same way as the US Federal Government, if it had elections every four years in which all its customers voted, would you describe your Starbucks experience as "self-coffee"?
 * "Political sanity in one easy step", Unqualified Reservations (May 13, 2007)


 * One good way, probably the best way, to compare the quality of two systems of government is to set them up next door to each other, and look at the migration flow between them.
 * "Idealism is not great", Unqualified Reservations (May 15, 2007)


 * […] morality is at bottom an emotional reaction. It is not a tradition. It is an aspect of human biology.
 * "Our planet is infested with pseudo-atheists", Unqualified Reservations (May 16, 2007)


 * […] the most murderous tend to be those that spend the most time obsessing about right and wrong.
 * "Our planet is infested with pseudo-atheists"


 * Basically, what formalism boils down to is the proposition that governments are a form of property as legitimate as every other, and that the whole tradition of thought that associates personal liberty with popular sovereignty is a blind alley. Personal liberty is an emergent property, I believe, of any efficiently-run state which is internally secure.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq", Unqualified Reservations (May 16, 2007)


 * The sine qua non of any state is internal security. You can't even think about external security until you control your territory.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq"


 * One cannot arrest an invading army.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq" (May 17, 2007)


 * […] any policy that makes "urban guerrilla" activity more likely to succeed makes it more likely to happen.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq"


 * […] the power to impose martial law at any time and for any reason is an essential element of sovereignty, because without it sovereign property cannot be secured.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq"


 * Sovereign formalism relies on interests, not rites, to align the government of a country with the goals of its beneficiaries and its residents.
 * "The iron polygon: power in the United States"


 * A terrorist […] is a fascist who is out of power. A fascist who is in power has to worry that others will duplicate his feat, and thus cannot abandon his murderous ways.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq" (May 19, 2007)


 * Unenumerated freedoms are emergent properties of an absolute sovereign, who has no incentive to restrict "victimless crimes" or other behavior in which the interactions of his subjects do not interfere. In other words, they emerge naturally as a consequence of mutual interests.
 * "UR's plan to fix Iraq"


 * The point of formalism is to minimize violence. The mechanism is to make the outcome of conflicts over scarce resources predictable. This prevents people from engaging in behaviors whose goal is to change the allocation of resources, something hominids are all too good at.
 * "The magic of symmetric sovereignty", Unqualified Reservations (May 21, 2007)


 * […] if you don't have security, you don't have property.
 * "Popularchy: rule of the People", Unqualified Reservations (May 21, 2007)


 * […] if sovereignty is clearly defined and secured, many if not all of the problems we associate with unlimited government go away—because these problems are actually caused by uncertainty about who owns the government.
 * "Popularchy: rule of the People"


 * […] it is not difficult at all to refute the idea of limited government. There is no deductive reason to think that this design should work. There are no historical cases in which it has worked. The idea simply makes no sense at all. Yet all believe in it.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism", Unqualified Reservations (May 23, 2007)


 * Property does not actually disappear. It becomes murky. It is the source of constant tension. It is informalized. It seeps deep into committees whose workings are obscured even to their members. When we ask who controls the United States, the only possible answer is that it's very complicated. The same answer applies to, say, the Gambino family.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism"


 * […] the best way to defend property rights is to admit that they are morally and legally arbitrary, and that they only serve a practical purpose.
 * "The magic of symmetric sovereignty"


 * The entire concept of absolute monarchy was a fiction. It was a legal formality completely at variance with reality. This makes it no different from, say, Germany claiming to own Poland.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism"


 * The growth of the US from the Constitution as it was ratified to its present state as a de facto world government is perhaps the greatest achievement of cancerous organizational expansion ever […]
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism"


 * If there is one thing I would drop from the Western intellectual heritage, it is this constant search for evil and evildoers.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism"


 * […] the problems with the US are not the result of the fact that its powers are more extensive than they should be. They are the result of the fact that it abuses its powers. And this is the result of the fact that the US is, by corporate standards, profoundly malstructured and mismanaged.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism"


 * You can practice what Czesław Miłosz called kitmān, not only rejecting the whole ridiculous circus, but deriving real visceral pleasure from the exercise of pretending to conform with it.
 * "The unlikely appeal of nonidealism", Unqualified Reservations (May 23, 2007)


 * Imposing exit costs is the kind of thing that is done by desperate, failing states—typically Communist. It is the factory equivalent of saving money by not buying lubricant, or selling off the robots and welding by hand.
 * "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism" (May 24, 2007)


 * It is strange how, when you scratch a libertarian, you find a socialist.
 * "Good government as good customer service", Unqualified Reservations (May 27, 2007)


 * […] it makes about as much sense to get your climatology from Exxon as to get your political science from the state.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies", Unqualified Reservations (May 29, 2007)


 * The general modus operandi of the Progressive movement in attaining power was to cause problems, then appoint themselves to fix them.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies"


 * […] the problem with all the "conservatives" of today is that they exist in order to be strawmen.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies" (May 31, 2007)


 * Forget today's conservatives. They are simply not worth arguing with. They are the product of an adaptive environment which systematically rewards stupidity.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies"


 * I see government as a very natural form of property. I just believe it is a business and should be run like one.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies"


 * […] anyone who assumes that nothing good was lost when the Third Reich was smashed has an awfully Manichaean worldview.
 * "The Democrats: party of lies


 * […] I define justice as "the accurate application of the law".
 * "Principles and platitudes", Unqualified Reservations (June 4, 2007)


 * It's hard for me to escape the general conclusion that conservatism is a losing cause. In fact, I think it plays more or less the same role that the Generals did for the Globetrotters. The name of the game is American public opinion, and American public opinion on any issue you can name in 2007 is far—really, really far—to the left of where it was in 1957.
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias"", Unqualified Reservations (June 7, 2007)


 * I have never heard any conservative suggest that the American political system is fundamentally and incurably anticonservative. Presumably, considering the trend of the last fifty years—heck, the last two hundred years—you'd think this thesis might occur to someone. But no. Of course, conservatives believe in America, so why would it?
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias""


 * This is exactly why conservatives keep losing. They see their problems as solvable. True, they never seem to get solved. But it can't hurt to keep trying, can it? Well, actually, it can, because it maintains the illusion that the game is competitive.
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias""


 * […] the concept of "bias" only makes sense if you have an absolute coordinate space of "objectivity" which can serve as a reference point for the relative terms liberal and "conservative." Since there is no such coordinate system, since objective in practice just means "mainstream" and the mainstream is the product of human history, not some divine and inexorable force, the very concept of "bias" assumes and promotes a misconception.
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias"" (June 8, 2007)


 * […] there is no reason to think mainstream public opinion, at least on matters political, has anything to do with reality—and there is every reason to think that its inexorable progress toward the left is an inevitable epiphenomenon of democracy.
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias""


 * You can't even start to compare the achievements of African-American culture in the second half of the twentieth century to those of the first. If you told anyone in 1957 what The Fillmore or Third Street would look like in 2007, he'd assume that Strom Thurmond had been running the country for the last thirty years.
 * "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias""


 * […] a hallmark of democracy is that it programs its voters to believe in it.
 * "Separation of information and security", Unqualified Reservations (June 10, 2007)


 * Over the last fifty years, Time magazine has become as stupid as its audience. The unfortunate fact is that anyone in 2007 who reads Time, or any magazine like it—yes, even The Economist—is simply not right in the head.
 * "A short history of ultracalvinism", Unqualified Reservations (June 12, 2007)


 * If people want to hurt each other, no formal social structures can stop them. The point of an engineering approach to law and politics is to give them as few incentives, and as many disincentives, to mayhem as possible.
 * "Friction in theory and practice", Unqualified Reservations (June 20, 2007)


 * Now of course there is a very good reason democracies are prosperous. They are prosperous because what we call democracies are in fact theocracies or ideocracies, and these forms of government are quite effective when it comes to internal security. The relationship between internal security and prosperity should be obvious.
 * "Friction in theory and practice" (June 21, 2007)


 * […] dissidents in the West today cannot win by firing up a mob. They can only win by convincing young smart people, who will otherwise be convinced by the numerous extremely convincing official sources of information that are constantly competing for access to their tender eyes and ears.
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat", Unqualified Reservations (June 21, 2007)


 * I mean, is it any surprise that Ivy League schools are acting, in effect, as ultra-Calvinist seminaries? Isn't that exactly what they were founded as?
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * The American political system consistently promotes the most idiotic, backward, and ridiculous "conservatives" it can find.
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * * […] conservatism amounts to treating cancer with antibiotics. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but do the results contradict it?
 * "Some objections to ultracalvinism", Unqualified Reservations (June 23, 2007)


 * The problem is not Christianity. The problem is that if there is a vacuum of power, Christianity will evolve into its communist-cult form and try to seize it. This can only be cured, in my opinion, by eliminating the vacuum of power.
 * "Some objections to ultracalvinism"


 * The realization that when you dilute the theistic content of Christianity, it actually becomes more potent and dangerous, is a difficult one for most atheists.
 * "Some objections to ultracalvinism"


 * It makes about as much sense for the state to fund economics research as it does for Philip Morris to fund research into the effects of tobacco […]
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat" (June 24, 2007)


 * […] just about all European governments of the nineteenth century were far more efficient and effective than those of today.
 * "The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective", Unqualified Reservations (June 26, 2007)


 * The secret of government is that government is incredibly boring. Government has three proper tasks: (a) enforcing the law, (b) collecting taxes, and (c) defending itself. There is no (d), and if there was it certainly wouldn't include caring what people thought. Once a state embarks on a career of managing the psychology of its subjects, the abyss is never far away.
 * "The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective"


 * There is no plot. The Illuminati are not involved. The miracle of evolution is that its results are indistinguishable from the product of an intelligent designer. Or, in this case, an intelligent conspirator.
 * "Cryptocalvinism, slightly tweaked", Unqualified Reservations (June 26, 2007)


 * […] we live in such a pacifist society that any deviation from absolute pacifism strikes us as remarkably bellicose.
 * "Cryptocalvinism, slightly tweaked", Unqualified Reservations (June 27, 2007)


 * Classical liberals in the nineteenth century regularly used France as the example of what they didn't want to be. But if they had a time machine that let them see 2007, they'd forget everything bad they ever said about Napoléon III.
 * "The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective" (June 29, 2007)


 * Public opinion throughout history has seldom varied from the opinions of those with access to the pulpit […]
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * Trying to convince academics that democracy is bad is like trying to convince a lion to be a vegetarian. Democracy is the source of the universities' power.
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * When you describe not the actual structure of power, but what it should be, what it once was, etc., etc., you remove your capacity to formalize the reality and condemn it to the murky world of informal power.
 * "Friction in theory and practice"


 * […] tyranny as we know it is more a phenomenon of insecurity than of security. A perfectly secure ruler has no incentive, for example, to restrict freedom of speech. Any disutility imposed on his or her subjects has the same effect on the Laffer curve as taxation, and a rational absolute ruler will prefer the latter.
 * "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action", Unqualified Reservations (July 2, 2007)


 * […] the problem with the conservative movement is that they have no strategy for attracting elites. They put their hopes in democracy, they fail, and they wonder why. Conservatism in anything like its present form can never, ever be cool, and this is fatal.
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * The Western states are stable in a way the Soviets could only have dreamed of. They would have loved, for example, to be able to have loyal opposition parties. But they did not dare.
 * "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat"


 * […] the idea of nationalism was essentially an attack on Europe's hereditary aristocracy, which was very much a transnational elite. A Spanish aristocrat had far more in common with a Russian aristocrat than with a Spanish shepherd.
 * "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States", Unqualified Reservations (July 5, 2007)


 * Most—if not all—of the successful revolutionary movements in the twentieth century are really best seen as paramilitary appendages of political movements. […] No politics, no problem.
 * "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States"


 * The missionary impulse is fundamentally satisfying because it is a power drive. It is clientism and patronage. To give is to feel powerful and noble.
 * "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this", Unqualified Reservations (July 7, 2006)


 * Segregation was an ugly thing, but history may yet conclude that it was a lesser evil than "diversity"—especially as the latter's story is not yet fully told.
 * "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this"


 * Africa cannot be fixed, at least certainly not using the only remedy I can imagine working on it, until Western missionary politics as a whole is abolished.
 * "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this" (July 9, 2007)


 * […] I believe the only effective way to deal with the universities is the Henry VIII treatment. That is, unconditional abolition and confiscation. The endowments and campuses can be treated as rough compensation for the vast streams of subsidies the universities have received since 1945.
 * "My Navrozov moments", Unqualified Reservations (July 11, 2007)


 * Why do people fight? They fight because they think they can win. The British Empire even in the first half of the twentieth century was clearly in a state of decay, at least from the perspective of people who actually believe in violence, which is most people at most times in history. The Ottomans were in a state of decay as well, but at least it didn't involve a terminal case of Christianity.
 * "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this" (July 14, 2007)


 * The chutzpah of blaming colonialism for the troubles of postcolonialism is pretty unbelievable.
 * "Conrad reviews Africa Addio", Unqualified Reservations (July 27, 2007)


 * […] "global leadership" is exactly what it says it is. It's about ruling the world.
 * "Samantha Power rules the world", Unqualified Reservations (July 28, 2007)


 * The sort of xenophilia […] is absolutely unique to universalists. It is purely Christian in nature. Nothing like it has ever been seen in any other culture in history.
 * "Samantha Power rules the world" (July 30, 2007)


 * Universalism indeed contains all the ingredients it needs to genuinely destroy civilization, as it and its ancestors have already done in many countries.
 * "Universalism and original sin (guest post by Michael S.)", Unqualified Reservations (July 31, 2007)


 * […] the virtues tend to emerge when you suppress the vices, and this can only be done by a culture that provides disincentives for the latter. The sine qua non of civilization, in other words, is punishment.
 * "Universalism and original sin (guest post by Michael S.)" (August 1, 2007)

2008

 * In any battle between employees and customers for informal profits, the employees are bound to win.
 * "When I was a moron", Gene Expression (February 8, 2009)


 * In fact, USG is wildly profitable. It just hides its profits as expenses, via an extremely cumbersome system for allocating the artificial labor […] which is the currency in which it pays its owners. This system is called the "budget process". It must be seen to be believed.
 * "When I was a moron"


 * You might say the Third World was "liberated", much as, when one is hungry, one liberates a chicken.
 * "Maybe there's a cheaper way...", 2Blowhards (March 4, 2008)


 * The US should shut down its entire foreign policy. It should close and sell its embassies, phase out its subsidies to its money-losing client states, bring its military home, and make it very clear that its nuclear umbrella protects only its own head.
 * "Maybe there's a cheaper way..."


 * […] scientific government is a political perpetual-motion device. It cannot exist, it has never existed, and it will never exist.
 * "Your generation was more violent", Gene Expression (June 23, 2008)


 * It's a little difficult to say that America has no national interests in Iraq when your side has spent basically the last century arguing that, as Woodrow Wilson put it, the American flag is the flag of humanity.
 * "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon", 2Blowhards (September 10, 2008)
 * Paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson.


 * Progressives throughout the century have always pitched the hardest ball they can get away with. They have always believed in winning by any means necessary. And in the cases where their victories have been absolute, in their wake has come nothing but destruction, disaster, and death.
 * "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ...", 2Blowhards (October 7, 2008)


 * Progressivism is a ruthless, power-hungry death cult, just like Nazism. Someday the two will be remembered in the same breath.
 * "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."


 * When the government wants to attack some group or ethnically cleanse it, what it does is to withdraw the effective protection of the law.
 * "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."


 * What's sad about Russia is that it's had a double whammy: seventy-five years of communism, and ten years of democracy. Now it's recovering from both. Give Putin a few years—you may just be asking him for a loan.
 * "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..." (October 9, 2008)


 * […] talk about "inequality" is always intended as a threat of violence, and it always acts that way. The message is: the poor are envious, and if they get more envious we may just not be able to control them. Pay us off, we'll pay them off, and everything will be fine.
 * "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."

2009

 * The abolitionists, of course, having spent the first fifteen years of their crusade arguing that the North was morally obliged to divorce the South, shifted instantly to the position that the South was legally barred from divorcing the North. This maneuver cannot come as a surprise to any historical student of the Puritan, whose supple conscience has so often out-Jesuited the Jesuits themselves.
 * "City upon a Hill", Gene Expression (January 1, 2009)


 * The ability of the modern liberal to produce tears over Gaza, vaguely wistful regret over Dresden, and bloody foam at the mouth over Atlanta is remarkable. I will never cease to wonder at the number of moral absolutes that can coexist amicably within a single skull.
 * "City upon a Hill" (January 2, 2009)


 * There is a very simple and banal reason that twentieth-century economists focused so much on the problem of overproduction and underconsumption. The reason is a political one. Any technique for goosing production is also a technique for getting votes. The result is a political system addicted to unstable and eventually ineffective techniques for maximizing spending, which are constantly collapsing as economic actors find ways around them.
 * "Rethinking subsidized finance", interfluidity (March 7, 2009)


 * Hitler and Stalin were unimaginable in the nineteenth century. What was new in the twentieth? Democracy.
 * "Wars we know", Gene Expression (August 16, 2009)