Outside in » Sentences

Sentences (#7)

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 13:28:17 +0000

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

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

Sentences (#6)

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 16:20:16 +0000

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.]

Sentences (#5)

admin — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 09:50:53 +0000

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.

Twitter cuts (#4)

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 04:12:58 +0000

This surely deserves immortalization:

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

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010

Sentences (#4)

admin — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 09:08:51 +0000

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.)

Sentences (#3)

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 04:43:41 +0000

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.)

Sentences (#1)

admin — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 15:04:42 +0000

(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.