Bloggers From The United States

"For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army."

"Progressives have created a vast set of puppet cultures which enable them to describe their monoculture as a multiculture."

"A good test for whether or not anything should continue to exist: if it didn't exist, would anyone invent it?"

"[F]ar from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture."

"If we want to end the era of chaos, democracy, and revolution, we need to deal squarely with the poisonous legacy of the Puritans."

"Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not."

"Law is impartial by definition. If it's not impartial, it's not law."

"Fairness is unachievable. Any distribution of rights will be perceived by someone as unfair. If it starts as equal, it will not long remain so. If you try to set it back, you can only do so by breaking the law."

"Democracy was not a movement of peasants and artisans. It was a movement on behalf of peasant and artisans. Communism was not a movement of workers. It was a movement on behalf of workers. Civil rights was not a movement of African-Americans. It was a movement on behalf of African-Americans. If the only people who had supported these movements were the designated sufferers themselves, none of us would ever have heard of any of them."

"The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable."

"Limited government simply has no motivation to stay limited. And so it doesn't."

"Corruption in Third World countries is a case of the formalist pattern trying to reemerge. A Third World government, far more than ours, is a system for distributing dividends, which even in the worst countries on earth are nontrivial. It is just a hellaciously intricate and absurdly informal system."

"The usual pattern is that tyrannies depend on supporters whose lawlessness they have to ignore, and whose depredations they are not powerful enough to formalize."

"The fact that governments are useful to the inhabitants of their territory is a purely secondary and emergent property. They need to be useful, because a government that does not provide at least basic security will not find itself with any rents to collect."

"The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary."

"From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government, but what the government does. Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."

"The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to."

"One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now."

"The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power."

"Of course, since the government is sovereign, it can break its own laws any time it likes. But it will not do this unless it has a good reason, because the value of a lawless state is much lower than that of a lawful one."

"You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail."

"Democracy means that popular opinion controls the state; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the state."

"[P]ublic opinion in a democracy is a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects—albeit inaccurately, imperfectly, and often quite reluctantly—the views of the governing elite. To be fair, it also has a certain filtering effect which discourages some of the nuttiest intellectual fads, if only because they can be positively incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been to Harvard."

"The permanent contest for political power that democracy creates is an extreme case of limited war, in which no weapons at all are allowed, and battle is resolved by counting heads."

"A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers. Since the former tend to outnumber the latter, a political formula is, if not absolutely essential, an excellent way to cut down on your security costs."

"[T]he university, which was established as a refuge whose purpose was to pursue truth without regard for the opinions of the world, has become a power center whose purpose is to impose its own opinions on the world."

"[T]he tradition to which most sophisticated Westerners of 2007 conform is best seen as a sect of Christianity."

"[A] free, prosperous democratic society is like a person who's so strong and healthy he can take a dose of arsenic every day—or at least, every four years—and still survive, sort of. The free, prosperous democratic society might be remarkably unfree and unprosperous compared to an undemocratic society that never took the arsenic, but so few of the latter survived the last two centuries that we have no basis for comparison."

"Unless you are one hundred and seven years old and a veteran of the Austrian Landwehr, you probably associate democracy with peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. Since I associate democracy with war, tyranny, destruction and poverty, we certainly have something to talk about."

"[T]he undemocratic, tyrannous societies are not those which failed to take the democratic arsenic, but those which took it and found it fatal."

"Everyone who spins a myth claims to be debunking one."

"[I]f there is any constant in history, it is that philosophers are very bad at predicting the future. Even when the policies they propose are followed, the results tend to be quite different from predictions."

"The Western world certainly has all the physical and human tools it needs to restore civilization in the Third World and resume the work of Lord Cromer. But it lacks the legal and political tools, and until it has those it shouldn't even try. As in Vietnam, it ends up just handing victories to its adversaries, who use the result as simply one more piece of evidence that demonstrates their invincibility."

"I'm quite happy to be an anti-intellectual, actually. It is the modern equivalent of anticlericalism, and it is long overdue. One can oppose specific institutions without opposing thought in general. In fact, sometimes it is even necessary."

"The charge that universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today […] strikes me as essentially accurate."

"Iraq simply cannot be governed by a military effort, no matter how technically advanced, well-trained, and well-funded, that thinks of itself as a combination of a SWAT team and the Salvation Army."

"The temptation to reform, rather than abandon, the adaptive fiction is omnipresent."

"[M]ost of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the state."

"All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system."

"[W]e have long since learned that offering any resistance to any kind of a mob is incompatible with our great American tradition of civil liberties."

"Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it the hard way."

"[T]he law itself is arbitrary—a product of history, just like all other distributions of property. We support it because it's stable, and we like stability."

"The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear. The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't."

""Why, when, and how to abolish the United States", Unqualified Reservations (July 3, 2007)."

"A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?"

"If you taught chemistry at a university, you taught chemistry at a university which had a chief diversity officer, a department of African-American Studies, etc, etc. You knew what these people were. You knew what these people did. At least, you knew that whatever it was, it was not scholarship. You said nothing. What kind of servant of truth are you, sir? You served not truth, but the Party. Sign the form, sir."

"[P]lenty of perfectly stable and peaceful societies […] have been governed by a ruling caste which was culturally distinct from the body of the population."

"Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits."

"The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security."

"[T]he moderate ideas of one generation are the extremist ideas of its parents, and the whole system shifts gradually over time."