Useless UN

[dalem]

Maybe the good thing about UN is that they go where nobody else want to go.... and they save lives. Of course the USA/GB alliance go only where they have interest$ to defend.

They save lives.

And take bribes.

And have sex with children.

They should stick to digging wells and teaching people to read.

-dale

[dalem]

I don't disagree with you in that, i did not say that UN is the center of the universe; the fact that Indians and Americans improved their relations doesn't prove that UN should be bannished or something.
But, and try to understand my pov please, the you-trade-I-trade "system" finally, supports - gives more power to the strong country against the weaker country in the negociation. Get it?

Wow, you may have hit on something here - it's better to be strong than weak in negotiations.

Hmm...

I'll check my think tanks.

;)

-dale

[Confed999]

you guys in this forum keep saying the same phrases.

We're replying to the same "the UN is great, and truly effective" posts...

[gunnut]

you guys in this forum keep saying the same phrases. I mean, i was missing for for a month at least, and i read the same exact things.
1 UN are useless
2 It fills the pockets of tyrrans with money
3 UN are useless
4 It fills the pockets of tyrrans with money; etc etc...........zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ok, understood, i don't agree, but it's your pov.
Now, what are your suggestions, what is the alternative? Finally, the only real uselless thing going on, is your obsession about repeating how useless and "unfair" the UN are...

Dude, this thread is titled "Useless UN." What do you expect to find in here?

If you want us to contribute to, say, a reform of the UN, then start a thread titled "How can UN be useful?"

Otherwise, we'll keep going on and on about how useless the UN is in the "Useless UN" thread.

You are also free to check out hundreds of other threads that have absolutely nothing to do with UN.

[Bluesman]

Too bad that useless baggage Ellopian got booted. He, of all people, should read this. But it's enough for me to have the rest of the 'multi-lateralists' swallow their tongues when they read the impeccably-presented arguments from the acid-pen of Mark Steyn:

MISTER REFORM

A couple of years ago, I was asked a question about the United Nations and replied that it was a good basic axiom that if you took a quart of ice cream and mixed it with a quart of dog feces the result would taste more like the latter than the former. There was a useful example of that the other day from a leading Turtle Bay honcho. Now I confess I have a sneaking admiration for the more shameless transnational apparatchiks: Two years ago, you may recall, Sudan was elected to the UN Human Rights Commission at a time when the government’s proxies were busy slaughtering and gang-raping their way round Darfur. The last thing one needs when one’s got a hectic schedule of mass murder on one’s plate is a lot of tedious paper-shuffling committee meetings in New York, but Sudan’s ambassador, Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, gamely rose to the occasion by announcing, upon joining the Commission, that he was very concerned about human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

I gotta hand it to the guy. For the emissary of a blood-soaked genocidal psycho state, that’s pretty funny. But the danger, when you enroll the free nations and the thug states in the same club, isn’t that they meet each other halfway but that the free world winds up going two-thirds, three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Consider the speech the other day by Kofi Annan’s deputy. Who is he? Some bespoke apologist for some banana republic or Islamist basket-case? Not at all. He’s called Mark Malloch Brown and he’s one of those smooth-talking Brits. The bit in the speech that got everyone’s attention was when he argued that the reason the UN was so unpopular in America was that the moronic hayseeds in flyover country had fallen for the right-wing blowhards – or, as he put it, “much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.” He didn’t, in fact, say “Limbaugh” but “Lim-bow”, as in “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow-Wow”. A chap as important as Mr Malloch Brown can’t be expected to tune in a radio and actually listen to Rush in order to get his name correct: after all, he’s a lot busier than those dimwit yokels in the “heartland”.

Blaming their woes on talk radio isn’t all the UN’s learned from the Democrats. The Deputy Secretary General’s fellow speakers at this meeting included George Soros, who happens to be Mr Malloch Brown’s next-door neighbor and landlord. Mr Malloch Brown earns $125,000 a year, $120,000 of which he gives to Mr Soros as rent for his home, next to the gazillionaire’s own in Westchester County. When they entered into this relationship, Mr Malloch Brown was head of the UN Development Program, which works with Mr Soros on many multi-million dollar projects. The Deputy Secretary General insists there’s nothing “improper” in his mixing of his professional and personal lives and, indeed, by the ethical standards of the UN – which is to say the Oil-for-Fraud program, the Child-Sex-for-Food program, etc – there isn’t. Mr Malloch Brown is an international civil servant. Were he merely a national civil servant at Britain’s Department of Health or Transport, it would have been unthinkable for him to have rented a home for 96% of his salary from the chairman of Glaxo Smith Kline or Virgin Airways. But at the UN it’s not just thinkable but doable: when in Turtle Bay, do as the Ghanaians do. And Mr Malloch Brown is widely regarded as the agent of reform. Or, at any rate, “reform”.

The Deputy Secretary General’s speech was an artful one, arguing that, in a world where “new national security challenges basically thumb their noses at old notions of national sovereignty”, the US needs the UN. On closer inspection, what he means is that the UN needs the US – to supply money, troops, money, equipment, money, technology and money. In a complicated world, the US isn’t big enough to go it alone, but it is big enough to give everything it’s got to the UN, and in return the UN will hold meetings explaining why the US can’t go it alone or with anyone else. In a nicely Sudanese touch, Mr Malloch Brown announced that “my kids were on the Mall in Washington, demanding President Bush to do more to end the genocide in Darfur” but that the President couldn’t do more in Darfur without the UN.

Er, hang on. On Darfur, Bush has been impeccably transnational. He agreed to go the UN route and, as always happens, everybody’s dead.

Forget Darfur, and Iraq and Iran. We’re all men of the world here, we can all understand why certain powers might feel it was in their interest to be pro-Saddam or pro-genocide or pro-nuking Israel. Instead, take an issue on which the permanent members of the Security Council were in perfect harmony: the tsunami. Even the French aren’t pro-tsunami. And yet Malloch Brown’s permanent 24/7 lavishly funded humanitarian bureaucracy was useless. The only actual relief effort – you know, saving lives, restoring the water supply, providing shelter – was done by the US, Australia and a handful of others.

The United Nations is a September 10th organization. Five years on, to leave Iran or even Darfur in its hands is as ludicrous as Churchill and Roosevelt fretting over whether they had the League of Nations’ approval to launch D-Day. The urbane cynicism of Malloch Brown is very revealing: the problem with transnationalism is not what it does to the Sudanese and Ghanaians; it’s what it does to us.

[FlyingCaddy]

The UN is more than useless it is a hazard to our liberties. If the UN has its way they will outlaw personal firearm ownership and impose an income tax. This is all on the background of a movement to use location chip implants and the ever increasing War on Terror, which at some point looks like "the excuse to curb privacy."

[Confed999]

The UN is more than useless it is a hazard to our liberties. If the UN has its way they will outlaw personal firearm ownership and impose an income tax

Don't forget controling your freedom of speach.

[dalem]

the ever increasing War on Terror, which at some point looks like "the excuse to curb privacy."

The UN has little interest, as a body, in the WoT.

-dale

[Bluesman]

The UN has little interest, as a body, in the WoT.

-dale

Correct, and that statement may be taken even further: about half of the countries in the General Assembly use terrorism as a policy tool. Which is the point of the War on Terror: to stamp out the utility of state actors resorting to terror.

The UN's time has most definitely passed. It treats all nations as equals which is completely absurd. Saddam's Iraq chaired the Non-proliferation Committee? Egypt chaired, and now Sudan a voting member of, the Human Rights Committee? NO rational entity would EVER contemplate such things, but at the UN, it is a common occurrence. Indeed, it is PROCEDURE.

Nations are NEVER equal, NEVER, and to assume the fiction that they are is to have such an overwhelming flaw in the foundation of the structure is to accept the inevitable futility of ANY of the works produced therein.

Scrap it. If nations need to deal with each other, they may do so bilaterally, multilaterally, or through the good offices of a party neutral to the issue under discussion. But THIS monstrosity IS a part of the problem, and the posters that have noted that it is now a threat to human liberty are prescient: a transnational body, invested with power that over-arches the decisions made by sovereign states but in no way accountable for that responsibility will ALWAYS seek to control its 'subordinates'.

This must never be allowed to happen, and yet...it is even now being planned and discussed openly.

[-{SpoonmaN}-]

Correct, and that statement may be taken even further: about half of the countries in the General Assembly use terrorism as a policy tool. Which is the point of the War on Terror: to stamp out the utility of state actors resorting to terror.

The UN's time has most definitely passed. It treats all nations as equals which is completely absurd. Saddam's Iraq chaired the Non-proliferation Committee? Egypt chaired, and now Sudan a voting member of, the Human Rights Committee? NO rational entity would EVER contemplate such things, but at the UN, it is a common occurrence. Indeed, it is PROCEDURE.

Nations are NEVER equal, NEVER, and to assume the fiction that they are is to have such an overwhelming flaw in the foundation of the structure is to accept the inevitable futility of ANY of the works produced therein.

Scrap it. If nations need to deal with each other, they may do so bilaterally, multilaterally, or through the good offices of a party neutral to the issue under discussion. But THIS monstrosity IS a part of the problem, and the posters that have noted that it is now a threat to human liberty are prescient: a transnational body, invested with power that over-arches the decisions made by sovereign states but in no way accountable for that responsibility will ALWAYS seek to control its 'subordinates'.

This must never be allowed to happen, and yet...it is even now being planned and discussed openly.

I think you might be forgetting about the millions of lives the UN's organisations have saved through food-aid, vaccination programs, peacekeeping (there wouldn't be a single peacekeeper in Congo without the UN, because no one with the money to pay for them gives a **** whether those people live or die). The UN's flaws stem from the idiotic and selfish refusal of its constituent governments to relinquish any of their power no matter how beneficial it would prove. Perhaps all these problems could have been solved by forcing new members to conform to certain standards of democracy, human rights and responsible government before they were allowed to become members. The point is, unless you want to create a more empowered 'new United Nations', the UN is the best we have to work with. And don't forget, your country has done as much to ruin the UN as anyone else.

[Confed999]

there wouldn't be a single peacekeeper in Congo without the UN, because no one with the money to pay for them gives a **** whether those people live or die

Obviously that's false, or the troops still wouldn't be there. Peacekeeping is often just "problem delay" anyway.

[Officer of Engineers]

I think you might be forgetting about the millions of lives the UN's organisations have saved through food-aid, vaccination programs, peacekeeping (there wouldn't be a single peacekeeper in Congo without the UN, because no one with the money to pay for them gives a **** whether those people live or die). The UN's flaws stem from the idiotic and selfish refusal of its constituent governments to relinquish any of their power no matter how beneficial it would prove. Perhaps all these problems could have been solved by forcing new members to conform to certain standards of democracy, human rights and responsible government before they were allowed to become members. The point is, unless you want to create a more empowered 'new United Nations', the UN is the best we have to work with. And don't forget, your country has done as much to ruin the UN as anyone else.

I strongly suggest you look up the real facts. I will tell you straight up that the US is financially responsible for 80% of what you quoted. The UN pays ZERO. It is the member nations who pay and 80% of the peacekeeping ops is paid for by the US.

[-{SpoonmaN}-]

I strongly suggest you look up the real facts. I will tell you straight up that the US is financially responsible for 80% of what you quoted. The UN pays ZERO. It is the member nations who pay and 80% of the peacekeeping ops is paid for by the US.

The USA pays for the UN to do them because the USA needs the UN to get that stuff done. And the UN helps the USA, like in PGW1, where the UN's backing greatly improved the international public support for the Coalition. Take away UN backing and see that support crumble in the second Gulf War.
I would of course like to see Europe and China pulling their weight seeing as how they base their opposition to a lot of stuff the USA does on the lack of UN backing for it, when comically enough they do so little to support the UN.

[Confed999]

The USA pays for the UN to do them because the USA needs the UN to get that stuff done.

So then someone does care, at least a little...

[-{SpoonmaN}-]

K let me clear this up for you guys, my gripe is not with the USA, it's with all the UN members.