How many of them have basic freedoms and fair elections where the losing party alliance/cabal/faction willingly surrenders power to the winning party/alliance/cabal/faction if the outcome of the election indicates that they should.
I’m not going to be the one to count which countries are okay and which aren’t; it’s your assertion. Anyway, you sure you want to stick to the “nothing good” part? Nothing the WHO or UNICEF does is good? The Kyoto Protocols are a bad thing?
Historically, gangster states have always been the norm. The United Nations has never been an elect group of angels. The idea has always been to get our thuggish co-world rulers together and hash things out instead of going to war and so forth.
I guess what I’m saying is, I think your standards are a little high for, you know, existing in the world. While there are PLENTY of member states in the UN which deserve no respect whatsoever, the institution itself does deserve respect, and as has been pointed out, some of its agencies actually do good, against all the odds.
I don’t think you understand the purpose of the UN. It is not to make each member nation a copy of the US and Great Britain - remember the Soviet Union was a founder. It is to provide some basic rules for the interaction of nations, and to provide a forum, with more teeth than the League of Nations, to prevent a breakdown like WW II. We’ve made it over 60 years without one, so I think the UN has succeeded in its basic objective quite well.
The Bush diplomatic straregy of only talking to people we like isn’t working out so well, is it?
As for global warming, the best is the enemy of the good.
I agree they don’t go far enough; I agree with this country’s leadership that China needs to be included. Are you saying that small steps aren’t worth taking? I also get the sense my other suggestions didn’t merit comment.
Aquila Be may be whooshing us, but in case not, I’ll just note quickly that the question of whether other planets in our solar system are warming has been discussed in recent threads, e.g. here and here.
Ignoring your rhetorical flourish on the Iraq imbroglio, it would be reasonable to define a gangster state as one that fails to conform to the standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Link
Among the few countries that voted against it were South Africa and Saudi Arabia.
Unfortunately, at the time of its founding, it was thought quite ok to admit gangster states to that organisation, to its ultimate detriment.
What successes are you talking about? Genocides are being carried out to this day without much interference from that pathetic organisation.
The UN has served to legitimise tyranny and corruption, even in its internal workings.
The only people Bush doesn’t want to talk to are countries like North Korea, whose people are in an abysmal condition, Iran, whose leaders openly and frequently advocate genocide and Cuba, a country that might see a better future once that decrepit dictator, Castro, finally dies.
That’s not to say that Bush has any moral sense. He is all too willing to consort with rulers of the most appalling regimes on Earth, like Arabia.
If Earth is going through a period of global warming then it is highly unlikely that the activities of mankind have had any influence and I don’t care how loudly tabloid scientists like Al Gore try to convince me that they know what they’re talking about.
Apart from the influence of the Malenkovich cycle, the sun is a variable star and small changes in its output can have large effects on Earth’s weather, as has been observed in a similar period of global warming currently taking place on Mars. science.nasa
China, India and Brazil and a whole basket of other countries would need to be included, assuming you believe complying with the Kyoto protocol will actually have an impact on that impossible to assess influence on global warming that human activities might have on climate.
From page 10 of a recent speech by Nigel Lawson who criticised the Kyoto protocol on a number of grounds LINK
As for me, I detest pollution on health, efficiency and moral grounds. I don’t need to believe a load of lies about global warming before taking action against it. At present, nuclear power looks the best and most manageable way to go.
As for the WHO, a mostly useful organisation such as that does not need a crazy parliament with a majority of criminal states, like the UN, to justify its existence.
