Recommendation: unqualified reservations

I have a new favourite blog and it is here. "Unqualified Reservations" (I wish I'd thought of that name first, it pre-emptively forgives its author so much) by Mencius Moldbug.

Some snippets: a formalist manifesto at 2Blowhards:

"...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.

...Surely, if anything ungood remains in the world, it can be vanquished by a gigantic, heavily armed mega-charity, with H-bombs, a flag, and 250 million serfs. In fact, it's actually rather astounding that, considering the prodigious endowments of this great philanthropic institution, it seems to do so little good.

...democracy is - as most writers before the 19th century agreed - an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we've seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought."

From The Mystery of Pacifism

"For example, one conflict that has been ongoing more or less since the founding of the postwar world is the Arab-Israeli war. One way to achieve peace in this conflict would be for the Israelis to leave Israel and live somewhere else - such as Guam, perhaps, or West Palm Beach. Another option is for the Israelis to conquer the Arab world plus Iran and compel its submission, installing military governors and teaching Hebrew in the schools, and eventually becoming the new ruling class, like the Manchu in the Qing Dynasty or the Mamelukes in medieval Egypt. And a third possibility is that the Arabs and Israelis could accept the current de-facto borders and leave each other alone.

Peace, in other words, is an ambiguous concept. Since everyone supports peace, claiming to support peace does not communicate information. It conceals information. Thus the mystery."

(Hat tip to EconLog, which I've also only just found and it turns out is also great. See e.g. econlog on The Waste of Recycling or What's wrong with revenge?)