On Aug 25, 2004, at 2:58 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
Yes, those kinds of lapses are really troubling and hard to understand.
Why are they hard to understand? Arabs are committing genocide. Europeans
want to be on the good side of Arabs. Who cares about black Africans?
OK, not hard to understand in the cynical frame, but hard to understand in the sense that by ignoring any genocides, hypocrisy is betrayed, and *in theory* the "leaership" of any given place shouldn't want to appear hypocritical.
It's not a perfect institution, but at the moment the entire planet is verging on slipping into balkanization -- a globe covered with nations engaged in petty squabbles for local and short-lived ascendancy.
And how in the world would the UN address that. Remember the UN is an organization of governments, and its first priority is best interest of those governments. Thus, human rights are simply paid lip service, and used as a political tool.
This is a good point. As it exists now the UN really isn't much of a much for anything, I'm inclined to agree. It's an interesting question, I think, to consider how something like a UN could exist, could have actual clout, and still not be intolerably totalitarian. Accord is always so much easier to have when everyone's of a like mind.
What can't work is the US acting as global cop. It'll make us all targets (we who live here, I mean, but Americans abroad as well); it'll bankrupt us economically; and it'll gain us nil for allies. And there's a danger of going too far in a moment of hubris; with Afghanistan there was *possibly* justification for a counterstrike; we swung right out into lunacy with the attack on Iraq.
The General Assembly is even worse, ignoring real genocide and focusing on
attacking un-PC ethnic groups.
Yes. It's almost identical to the US Congress.
The solution is not to unilaterally bomb the Enemy Of The Month.
While I agree that Iraq was a mistake, because the US wasn't prepared to
deal with the peace afterwards, that's really not a fair description of US
foreign policy over the last 15 years. Let's look at a better
intervention, in the Balkins.
Yeah, OK, that's a good point. Perhaps I should have said Enemy of the Decade, which would have covered Bush I as well and *his* (ahem) early pullout. (Or just "The CinC's Personal Sh*t List"...)
The solution *might be* to mobilize the will of nations to conform to the
UN charter and to give it enough enforcement power to make its edicts
carry some clout.
But, the will of the nations is not to do the right thing. Its to preserve
the self interest of the governments.
Also true; ideally national governments would come to understand that the best way to assure sovereignty is to behave in a circumspect fashion on the global stage. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
It's a damned mess, all of it. I've toyed from time to time with
formally renouncing my specieshood as h. sapiens and declaring myself a
bottlenosed dolphin instead. But they won't let me into any of their
club meetings!
Actually, its an opportunity to make hard moral choices. Bottlenosed dolphins do neither good nor evil; making no moral choices.
I don't make moral choices either, just ethical ones, and both good and evil are human-defined terms that refer to things which do not objectively exist.
-- WthmO
I've never held an opinion. I give them away freely. --
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