Why do conservatives/Repubs hate the UN?

[BrainGlutton]

@MGibson

I agree with the first part but I’ve got to take exception to this. It was western states that first permitted women the right to vote not the feds, it’s been at the state level that homosexuals have been gaining the most progress with regards to marriage, discrimination, etc. not the federal level, and it was individual states that decided to loosen some of the laws regarding marijuana not the feds.

You could argue that none of these things had a direct effect on the government at the federal level. After all, the feds still enforce their drug laws regardless of what California or Arizona might have to say about it. I do think it’s been demonstrated that what happens on the state level can have a role in what happens on the national scene for good or bad (Prohibition for example).

I readily concede that a state sometimes can be in advance of the country as a whole in political progress, and that states can be breeding grounds for national political movements. I was merely trying to point out the folly of the assumption, so often invoked and so rarely examined by certain strains of conservatives, that small or state local government is inherently any less prone to tyranny or abuse of power than biggummint is. It ain’t, and a statement like Debaser so casually made in post #24 – “Local government and control is the least likely kind to be tyrranical, IMO” – is not only ignorant, it is quite astonishingly ignorant.

[Odesio]

@BrainGlutton

I was merely trying to point out the folly of the assumption, so often invoked and so rarely examined by certain strains of conservatives, that small or state local government is inherently any less prone to tyranny or abuse of power than biggummint is.

I’m with you on this. I remember there was a town that charged something like $5,000 for a permit for anyone to own a satellite dish. This permit was made way back when satellite dishes were huge eye sores but some poor guy got slapped with the $5,000 cost when he got one of those tiny dishes we use today. Then there are city councils that actively attempt to help businesses via zoning laws force themselves onto neighborhoods that don’t want them. Let’s not forget cities or towns in the past that have actively participated in or ignored the murder and harassment of black individuals.

Marc

[Sam_Stone]

@cmkeller

American Conservatives have this strange notion that those nations which deive their authority from the consent of the governed are morally superior to those which don’t, and bristle at the appearance of being “in the wrong” due to having been outvoted or condemned in resolutions supported primarily, if not entirely, by nations whose sense of right and wrong seem cockeyed to us.

Why is that a ‘strange notion’? That’s about as ‘strange’ as saying that freedom is morally superior to slavery.

Or put another way, why should a thug who just manages to kill and intimidate enough people to control a country suddenly a ‘statesman’ who deserves a vote on he direction of the world? The only difference between half the Arab dictators and Tony Soprano is that the Arab guys managed to put together a bigger crew and were more ruthless about killing whoever got in their way.

Moral authority for any state derives from the consent of the governed. We have to deal with dictatorships because they have power, but we should not hesitate to call them what they are or to place ourselves in a morally superior position.

[John_Mace]

@Sam Stone

Why is that a ‘strange notion’?

I think he was being facetious.

[Sam_Stone]

:smack:

I’m so used to seeing bizarre morally ambiguous statements lately that I can’t even recognize when it’s used facetiously any more. My apologies to cmkeller.