Quote of the day 6th January 2023

“Boris Bondarev, until recently a Russian diplomat stationed at the UN, has explained how Putin has now ended up with everything he didn’t want. United democracies, tooled-up neighbours, a rejuvenated Nato: how could it go so wrong? But Putin’s dictatorial style, he said, means no one in Russia’s foreign service dares point out the flaws in his ideas. Just as it will be hard for any ambitious Chinese official to tell Xi Jinping that his vaccines don’t really work and that his flagship zero Covid idea has failed.

In the end, authoritarian regimes stumble because they are authoritarian. Without debate and dissent, it’s harder to spot and correct errors. The arguments and protests that make democratic politics so messy are a feedback mechanism. Without this feedback, governments end up embarking on – or wedded to – calamitous mistakes.

This has been a pretty miserable year for Britain – but Ukrainian courage has made it a good year, perhaps even a decisive one, for the free world. We now have the widest democratic alliance the world has seen and a few more reminders why democracy, for all of its flaws, remains the world’s least-bad option.”


(Frazer Nelson, article in the Spectator on the rivial of democracies, also quoted this weeks on the GUido Fawkes website.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more