An aphoristic gem from ‘Rasputin‘ (buried somewhere in here):

Moldbug isn’t a Neoreactionary in the same way that Christ wasn’t a Christian.

From a dear friend, whose anonymity I would protect with my life. On the phenomenon of fertility panic among late 30s (early 40s!) childless professional women in the West:

This is an educated person with a PhD, they know better than some teenager in the middle ages.

[Discuss.]

Half a sentence this time, from Charles Hugh-Smith. It’s rare for me to agree with anything quite this much:

… deflation is the natural result of a competitive economy experiencing productivity gains.

(He continues: “isn’t this the ideal environment for innovation, enterprise and consumers? Yes, it is.”)

According to the Outside in definition, deflation is the basic signature of capitalism. It’s the politically-undirected (i.e. spontaneous) distribution of positive externalities from sound economic order. Inflation — or mere deflation-suppression — is the unambiguous signal that something very different is going on.

ADDED: Related.

This surely deserves immortalization:

A reactionary is someone who, encountering a fence with no obvious purpose, electrifies it.

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010

This exquisite Scott Alexander sentence probably bends my rules in various directions (but January is going to be a tangled (or dynamically unstable) month in any case):

It seems neither uncommon nor unexpected that if you charge a group with eliminating an evil that’s really hard to eliminate, they usually end up mildly tweaking the evil into a form that benefits them, then devoting most of their energy to punishing people who complain.

(The whole — long — post is a masterpiece of Scott Alexanderness. Read it alongside Ligotti, and the cross-echoes are notable. Extreme liberals are horroristic maniacs who haven’t yet given up for good.)

The protagonist of Thomas Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done dreams of revenge, possessed by “constantly recycled scenarios in which Domino had his day”:

And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

(Soon.)

(VPN isn’t working, for some reason, which makes almost everything impossible. No trawling about on the Internet, or twittering, today. In frustration, I’m initiating a new series — it’s ‘Quotes notes’ but decadently devoted to pure style. Feel free to consider it throat-clearing.)

Not necessarily single sentences, but no more than three (as a preliminary rule). First off, from Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist (p.52):

He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.