This comparison to unruly people grabbing free food and Iraqi looters is just plain stupid whether it was made by Time or by december.
To take someone’s hyperbolic description of a food-fight to try to condemn the UN takes that stupidity to a new level. december did exactly this. What strawman are you talking about Lib?
Libertarian, and the cafeteria at the UN building is not run by the UN.
Correct. Full text of the charter can be found here if anyone is interested.**
Que? How is entering into a contractual agreement with a third party “seeking or recieving instructions” with respect to his duties? The mandates on how the cafeteria will be staffed and how it will be run are one-directional. From the Secretary General TO the contracting firm. This statute gives him autonomy from state infrastructures which may try to force him to use a particular firm or comply with the contract laws in the host country. This means he is not responsible to the US department of labor to be sure he complies with affirmative action or the like. It places restrictions on who his SUPERIORS are, not who his underlings can be.
Again correct.**
Again que? In the presence of a strike, chaos often IS the hightest standard of efficiency possible. I’m not sure what caused the strike and what, if any, control the Secretary General had over the situation, but lobbing this whole thing at his feet seems a bit unfair. For all we know there was a contracting company who had served faithfully for years and there was no sign of issues and some manager on their side made a crappy decision to cut pay/benefits or in some other manner alienated the workforce. Strike ensues and the first the Secretary General knows of it is when no one shows up for work one day. People still have to eat, so he, having no staff to serve them, declares self-service to be the order of the day and offsets the inconvenience with the carrot of making everything free(he has no way to charge them anyway because the staff who know how to operate the cash registers are on strike). What exactly was his fault in this situation? It is every bit as likely, given the facts we currently have, as a situation where he was culpable. Even if he was culpable, do you suggest the Secretary General in charge of the Secretariat building will be making decisions on the rebuilding of Iraq? How many divisions does he have?**
Not interested in this debate really. All I was interested in doing was showing that, when discussing the UN’s batting average, incidents like this don’t belong in the “strike” column.
Enjoy,
Steven
No, but I would certainly hire an accountant who can’t sculpt. The two issues, keeping order in the cafeterias at the Secretariat building and keeping order in a war-torn country are completely apples an oranges. They’re handled completely differently with different people doing both the handling and overseeing the handlers. Why can’t you understand that?**
If this occurs then they’ll be wrong too.
Enjoy,
Steven
Funny how december has bowed out and yet Lib continues the stupid fight.
Lib, since that is the way you see it (and you seem to be the only one left) can you explain to me how a country like the USA, which made such a mess of its own presidential elections, would be qualified to organise elections anywhere? This seems much more relevant to me than a cafeteria strike in the UN.
Also, we have had threads about people being pigs at events where food and beverages were free. Does that mean the organizers are disqualified for whatever they do?
I’ve responded to your “debate”, mostly by saying it has fuck all to do with the topic at hand here. If you wish to debate that the UN has its faults, and if you wish to prove the past failures of UN peace keeping missions, have at it.
For some reason, you neglected to mention in that GD that a free UN luncheon gone bad because of a strike is somehow indicative of this failure to carry out decent peace keeping missions. Perhaps because the GD crowd would shove those arguments straight back up your ass, from whence they came?
I have but one word for you, sir.
WEASEL
Good night.
Sorry I missed your point. Let’s try again:
UN diplomats and employees have created messes in some of their missions, including
– permitting a massacre in Srebrenica,
– permitting rapes and physical attacks in a mental institution in Kosovo,
– permitting years of non-compliance by Iraq
– permitting the theft of money and support for terrorism in the West Bank
– permitting systematic rape in Sierra Leone
These are serious matters.
In this thread,we see UN diplomats and employees:
– permitting minor rioting and looting by themselves
This is not a serious matter, but it is indicative of the serious matters listed above. They all reflect bad morale – an attitude of not really caring.
Furthermore, since this minor rioting and looting is the opposite of the UN’s intent, many of us see the event as funny or ironic.
december, please provide evidence for your first list of five transgressions. Make sure the verb “permitted” is somehow justified by that evidence.
Then, prove to us that the cafeteria incident is somehow indicative of it.
“Funny” or “ironic” doesn’t cut it. Look at your thread title, and provide the necessary proof.
The cites are on the other thread in GD (except for Srebrenica, which you know about.)
“indicative” means “Pointing out; bringing to notice; giving intimation or knowledge of something not visible or obvious.” Or, in fine arts, it means “Suggestive; representing the whole by a part.”
In my judgment, this minor illustration of bad morale by UN employees at the UN cafeteria was suggestive. It gave an intimation of bad morale by UN employees in more serious settings. YMMV.
If you’re saying that this one incident doesn’t prove that the US would do a better job in post-war Iraq than the UN would, then I agree with you.
Let’s see. If the looting of the museum in Bagdad occurred on the watch of George Bush, then the US Government, especially one of Republicans, is a failure. They can’t even control some pissant group of rioters and thieves who stole all the silverware, er uh, treasures, yeah, that’s it, treasures in that museum. This is indicative of everthing that the US does when it tries to police the World. It sucks. It’s a failure.
december is expected. Lib must be bored.
Disappointing. This thread gets a 2.5 from the French judge. 
This is false and you know it is false because I pointed it out in the other thread you started. The U.N. helped end the systematic rape in Sierra Leone, and if you continue to say otherwise you are a liar.
Amazing enough, I knew what the word meant, december. I also knew your OP didn’t fall into the “fine arts” category.
Well, we tried. In various ways, you’ve said nothing more than words to the effect of:
“I think that a free luncheon, where some silverware was alledgedly removed from the cafetaria in a UN building after a personnel strike caused delays in the distribution of the free food, an incident for which I have one cite, which relies on a handful of unverified eye witnesses, is important as an analogy to the overall ethics of the entire United Nations, and the various peace keeping operations they are deployed in across the globe. Furthermore, I’ll go as far as to call the taking of free food “looting”, and I also won’t bother to verify whether the silverware was actually stolen, or merely borrowed because people had their dinner elsewhere because of capacity problems in the restaurant. To top it all off, I have no problem with suggesting that this is somehow similar to nationwide looting of national treasures, some millenia old, in post-invasion Iraq.”
My hat’s off to you, sir. You’re a class act.
I hope that Lib has some vaguely rational basis for the above assertions, and citations to why particular UN efforts were failures.
…to be honest, having been Functions Manager for Bellamys Parliamentary Caterers in New Zealand, it is easy to see how stories like these can get blowen out of proportion. I cannot, due to contract restrictions, discuss any particular incident, however, it was not uncommon to pick up the newspaper, read one of the “Human Interest Stories”, and go "WHAT THE FRELL? When did that happen?
Being the Parliamentary Caterer-we were always in the public eye-and it never took a lot to turn an incident where the “scones were a bit salty” to “guests were running from the restaurant, gasping for water”… and speaking of which-we should take the story cited in the OP with a healty grain of salt…
I think you’re lying. Actually, you hope the opposite. What you pretend not to know is common knowledge. But I recall now that you said you don’t watch the news. Go to Google and type “UN failure Rwanda Cambodia Bosnia” to get a few thousand hits for starters. Like this one: http://www.bard.edu/hrp/atrocities/intro.htm
There are many more. Do your own homework.
::splort::
I have done my homework Lib, my dear fellow, I have.
I also note that googling and getting hits is… well pretty fucking stupid.
I’m talking substance, in other words analysis: we can all point to wrinkles and failings, as noted in the GD thread, but where is the motherfucking benchmark. Life is not an utupia, although following your Libertopia threads it appears you have severe difficulties grappling with that.
In the case of the linked article, we have a focus on a few incidents, however what is the overall result.
Example, in Cambodia the country is clearly more stable and better off than it was before. There is a relative and absolute improvement on all indices. But the effort does fall far short of being perfect, or even pretty good benchmarked against an ideal democratic state. The open question however, has any country in similar circumstances from similar backgrounds been propelled into that state?
Turning to Bosnia, again the reconstruction effort now almost a decade later at least has achieved some degree of peace. Peace Keeping early on was a failure, but then as the analytical articles you can access argue, that was largely due to the UN forces not getting committments adequate to the job from anyone. The UN not being a magical entity, really depends on the committments from countries like the US. Of course at the time the US refused to get involved in any substantive way. Whose name gets the black mark then?
And so on.
Now if Lib wants to argue - actually argue - perhaps he can advance some intellectually respectable standards to judge this on.
Moronic. You think the US wasn’t involved in Bosnia? You think a million people being massacred is a UN success? You think the UN helped make the lives of Cambodians better? And you think you’ve contributed some sort of analysis here? Changing the questions, dodging the realities, and making stuff up does not constitute analysis. I give your homework an “F”.
Liberterian it is you against the whole world. Don’t you think there’s a chance your views might be mistaken? Well, I don’t know why I even ask seeing how your view of the world, as evidenced in other threads, is quite weird and that is putting it mildly.
At any rate, you are changing the topic and not answering my questions which I shall repeat here, not because I expect any coherent response but just to leave record of how you are ignoring and fudging and weaseling and not answering and generally making a fool of yourself.
Question #1: How does the incident of a chaotic cafeteria situation caused by a worker’s strike indicate the UN is not up to the task of doing its mission? This is the gist of the OP as reflected by
Question #2: If it follows that the UN should be disqualified from peacekeeping missions because of the incident, wouldn’t it follow with much more reason that the USA should be disqualified from organizing elections anywhere due to the fiasco of the last presidential election?
By this reasoning evrybody would be disqualified from everything. I am told Mother Theresa locked herself out of the house once.
Lib try to flail about so much, it’s unbecoming.
Nope, did not say that. On this I grant my terse comment above lacked clarity - I was thinking of december’s mention of the enclave collapse and the initial period. The US did not commit much in resources to Yugoslavia until the events of 1995. Indeed American conservatives were very much against the effort, and we were withholding funding to UN at the time.
You mean in Bosnia? Obviously not, however once sufficient resources were devoted, efforts turned to the better. Mixed bag, but clearly better than without.
Yes, in the framework of the conflict resolution they did.
No, Lib my dear, I highlighted your flailing about and lack of critical judgment.
Amusing, considering you are not even remotely qualified to grade me.