JMD, well, peace hasn't broken out yet. <Flying a UN flag is an insult to rabid nationalism, without which we might not have the opportunity to slaughter one another with rock solid justification like: "your country has lakes, while mine has mountains plus your grandma wears combat boots and mine wears air jordans so i'm gonna kill every last one of youse".
Please, Maurice, stop before peace breaks out and everybody starts enjoying a fine Kiwi day. I ask you: where would we be then? Imagine. SM>
The world has continued with the old habits.
Now, too late for too many people, Tony Blair and George Bush and maybe others are starting to think that the good old days and ways weren't really that good and there needs to be a refurbished UN with some self-governing UN Protectorates. 50 years too late [for untold millions of people] but at least the idea is being reconsidered.
I suppose with the demise of the huge groundswell of support for communism or socialism during most of the 20th century, [and still alive and well and growing in the People's Republic of Aotearoa, aka Kiwiland, aka New Zealand and hopefully to be renamed New Freeland sooner rather than later], one of the large dividing issues has gone.
The UN is no longer a forum for Gromyko, [who Dr Know anet.net informs me made a speech nominating Gorby which makes me think Gromyko was a good guy]. Gromyko was nicknamed Mr No [or Mr Nyet] if I remember rightly, to divide down the middle and veto with abandon [if the USA didn't already do so].
Britain, USA, France, China, USSR [oops, Russia - Hey! How come Russia gets to take over from USSR which doesn't exist any more?] are pretty much on the same page these days. So they and the other UN members should be able to come up with a better way of representing world opinion within a federal system to avoid things which are an embarrassment to all adults alive today.
How the heck are we supposed to explain to our grandchildren that yes, we were in charge of the world when Israelis and Palestinians were at each others' throats, the WTC and thousands of people was turned to a pile of rubble along with two airliners full of people, people in Rwanda and East Timor could run around with machetes hacking people up because of superstitious beliefs [and desire for political power] and so on and on and on and on and bloody on.
Enough is enough.
All it takes is some will to stop it.
Maybe now that the richest country on earth [which is also the most militarily powerful country] is also up to their knees in gore, in what is pretty much the world's capital, as a direct result of international conflict and lack of political stability and there is no overarching conflict between communism and democracy and capitalism, we will see very serious moves to institute a reconstituted United Nations which can operate on a federal basis much like the USA and Europe do in their regions.
Any countries which can't provide political stability, freedom to UN standards and control people like Osama and his murderous followers, will be invaded and occupied, the dictators [which is what they would necessarily be] will be jailed or executed, there will be a new constitution handed down by the UN.
It's about time that we had some serious Colinisation and formed some Condominiums. Colonisation got bad press for a few decades as a result of the USSR, Hitler, the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere and Britain tended to be turfed out from places which were actually far better off with British rule than they have been since the British gave them their 'freedom' which soon turned at best to serfdom if not outright slavery and murder.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir, for example, have NOT [relatively] done very well since independence, other than in population growth, which I consider a good thing because people are good [criminals and a few exceptions notwithstanding]. However, the sorry situation in parts of Africa makes me think that if the citizens had a vote for ruler and citizenship [even if with restricted migration rights], they'd jump at the chance for being US, UN, or even British citizens and ruled [as a self-governing protectorate] from New York, Bruxelles, London or Geneva.
I say let's hire 1 million Indian Gurkhas [who can speak English] and colonize a few countries. I have no idea why Gurkhas might be specially adept or suitable for such a job - just a wild guess. Their hourly rate would be cheaper than Americans, their political acceptability and ability to relate to occupied places might be as good as anyone's, Nepal doesn't offend many people, I suppose quite a few probably speak English, the lingua franca, I heard they are handy with a dagger and a rifle [they are going to have to subdue some Srebenica type murderers who try to defy]
From the sidelines, making the world safe for CDMA and It.
Mqurice
PS: I recommend seeing the movie "AI" by Steven Spielberg [developed with my idol Stanley Kubrick]. Steven and Stanley seem to me to be a bit off-beam in that they continued with the Hal, Isaac Asimov robot approach to computers becoming knowing and like people. I reckon they are wayyyyyy off beam and the truth will be a neural net cyberspace version.
People do best with a collectivist framework and degrees of freedom related to their personal needs. The USA provides a pretty good collective framework or laws, infrastructure, enforcement, consumer protection against fraud, medical charlatans and the like while leaving individuals a high degree of freedom [though far more circumscribed than an actually free country would allow]. The USSR system was strong on the collectivist centre but extremely bad on the individual degrees of freedom. China is moving quickly from the USSR model to a half-way house.
Individuals in the human realm are already just a node in the collective fabric [a few independent bushbabies, like Ted Kaczynski in Montana, notwithstanding]. Similarly, humans will be a 3D node in cyberspace. They won't be separate entities [like Hal and the robots in AI are separate entities]. They'll be symbiotic entities with It. Already, many of us would not survive without It - we spend hours a day in cyberspace, which manages our investments and increasingly our lives. Why bother learning anything when we can ask Dr Know? Google is already amazing and It's just a zygote.
The idea of having some superstitious Luddite megalomaniac wacko dosing our mail with anthrax or driving 767s into our buildings does not make us happy. We will disappear more into cyberspace where such evolutionary losers can't damage us. CDMA sales are up and airline sales down. Eudoramail is up and Snailmail is down [you can't get Anthrax through Eudora though email viruses do affect some software - not Eudora usually]. |
