Robert D. Kaplan from Waste Land


"In truth, order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone. The Weimar Republic, because it lacked the requisite order, ultimately became a threat to freedom, despite the explosion of the arts that it fostered. Human nature being what it is, order must remain the paramount political virtue. Without it there is no one, as Hobbes says, to adjudicate right from wrong, to separate the guilty from the innocent, so not only is there no freedom but no justice. These are the central realizations of classical conservatives (who prefer stability to illusions of progress) from which all other realizations emanate. Obviously, individual freedom involves a certain amount of messy disorder, especially in a mass democracy like that of the United States. But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a secure, stable, and orderly political system where the rules are adhered to."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Gerard Baker comment in The Times is quite absorbing. You will find many of the themes I have been 'barking' about (Baker-barker) against the woke left and ID politics for the last decade. Of course, I have extended these criticisms as a critique of what I call "the degeneracy" of the West for which bourgeois elites are almost entirely responsible. What Baker leaves out is perhaps the most important salient bit: social degeneracy has been exploited by Western elites as a means to distract their populace from the diversion of social resources to global capitalist accumulation - which has further enriched these Western elites, yes, but at the fearsome deleterious cost of empowering other authoritarian elites that now endanger our own institutions and civilisation. Trump would be ahead even without God  By Gerard Baker Rapturous Republicans are capitalising on a realignment of US politics, and Democrats have only themselves to blame Thursday July 18 2024, 9.00pm,  T...
Read more
Image
  Act now to stop a flood of climate refugees Extreme heat and rising sea levels could displace millions, and they’ll quickly become our problem Roger Boyes @rogerboyes The Earth is heating up and wildlife is on the move to higher, cooler ground. Deer, rabbits and beavers are moving into the Arctic. Butterflies once common in Mexico are now more likely to be spotted in Canada. And human beings are shifting, too. Climate migration en masse is the big bogeyman that will keep border security at the top of the agenda for decades, and not just for hard-right alarmists. It’s already happening, of course. A breakdown of the nationality of small boat refugees this year shows Afghans, Eritreans, Iranians, Syrians and Sudanese topping the list. All have their political fears, all want to better their lives but most also form the advance guard of the great climate exodus. The Afghans are fleeing the Taliban of course but also the sizzling weather that is causing severe drought and flash flood...
Read more
Image
  China’s Property Crisis Enters a Dangerous New Phase A China Vanke Co. property development in Nanjing, China, in Sept. 2024. Photographer: Fang Dongxu/VCG/Getty Images Risks grow as authorities are forced into a first mainland rescue and iconic Hong Kong developer New World’s bonds sink into distress.  By  Bloomberg News 12 February 2025 at 9:00 am AEDT Updated on 12 February 2025 at 7:18 pm AEDT Save Translate It was the moment China’s leaders finally blinked. After four years of standing by as property developers like  China Evergrande Group  spiraled into default, Communist Party officials decided in late January that China Vanke Co. — one of the country’s last surviving real-estate giants — was, for now at least, too big to fail. With Vanke’s bond prices collapsing and its warning of a first annual loss of a record $6.2 billion, officials from the developer’s hometown in Shenzhen stepped in to take operational control and shore up funding. ...
Read more