Comment by 3princip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3princip | Hacker News Reader

Good. This top-down world governance project needs to be abandoned. It's hegemony wrapped in a nice package of development aid (and military interventionism under the surface)

>there is a gap at the global governance level. Who's in charge of that? Where do you address yourself, you know?

What is it with the international elite, looking down at the world from their quaint old chateaus and cushy jobs, who believe all the worlds problems will be solved if someone could give them more money for their advice and add another layer of government/bureaucracy on top? Why is the ICRC pushing this agenda?

Stop it, firstly stop the interventionism! Military and economic. Stop bombing the ME, stop acting holier than thou and imposing this narrow globalist set of ethics onto the world. Stop trying to grab power and pretend it has some altruistic component. It's causing chaos.

These problems are not going to be solved by a world government.

Quite contrary to the opinion expressed in the article that Brexit and Trump are symptoms of a problem, I consider them symptoms of a public trying to stop these crazy globalist agendas.

What you call a top-down world governance project, I call a expansion in international co-operation after the disaster that was the first 2 World Wars.

That international cooperation has undoubtable made the world a safer place. It has seen the expansion of the middle class in BRIC. Between 1981 and 2005, poverty dropped from 84% to 18% in China, 80% to 42% in India, 17% to 8% in Brazil. Between 1990 and 2012 the average global life expectancy jumped by a full 6 years! Hell, if you lived in Liberia, it was 20 years!

Compared to the chaos of the first half of the 20th century (not to mention parts of the second half), the world is absolutely peaceful and a better place for just about everyone.

To be totally fair though that peace owes a big part of itself to the MAD concept and the fact that all the strongest nations worldwide have enough firepower pointed at each other with itchy fingers on the triggers to annihilate the planet 5 times over.

Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying that the hippies were wrong and we got a lot further by threatening each other than we ever did holding hands and singing songs.

Did the major nations of the world ever hold hands and sing songs? Has that actually been done? I'm not super up on my world history, but I don't remember that ever being a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations

>That international cooperation has undoubtable made the world a safer place. It has seen the expansion of the middle class in BRIC. Between 1981 and 2005, poverty dropped from 84% to 18% in China, 80% to 42% in India, 17% to 8% in Brazil. Between 1990 and 2012 the average global life expectancy jumped by a full 6 years! Hell, if you lived in Liberia, it was 20 years!

It's the withdrawal of colonialism (due to WWII exhaustion, national freedom movements, and political pressure) and the end of the 2 superpowers Cold-War peripheral collusions, that gave those countries a better chance to catch up and develop themselves.

Not some "international co-operation" coming top-down.

The "world elite" and "global governance" were also directly responsible for things like the elimination of smallpox.

I'm not sure either that ICRC people encouraging more of this is the problem or Trump vacillating between isolationism and threatening to "bomb the shit" out of countries represents anything that vaguely represents a solution.

Empires are great for wealth creation. America has constructed an empire-that's-not-an-empire through internationalist orgs like NATO, the IMF, the UN, etc.

Before we had Pax Britannica and Pax Romana. Now we have Pax Americana. But probably Pax Americana will go just like Pax Britannica and Pax Romana. I don't think we've reached the end of history yet.

> It has seen the expansion of the middle class in BRIC. Between 1981 and 2005

1981 - 2005, also known as the period when the US and Russia couldn't maintain their hegemony over B, I and C anymore.

> Good. This top-down world governance project needs to be abandoned.

Alright. How do we deal with global warming?

Shouldn't international laws and co-operation between nations, naturally develop into a global government?

Unless this world government is going to organize the biggest genocide in history (as the conspiracy goes), or implement (energy) austerity on a massive scale, I don't see what such an institution will do for climate change.

All it will achieve is the greater concentration of power in the hands of even fewer people.

The potential solutions that come to mind range from, on the pessimistic end, apocalyptic, to technological if we are to be optimistic. We'll either think our way out of the crisis with cleaner sources of energy, or nature will have it's way and our population will dwindle.

An effective carbon tax that goes to finance alternative energy tech seems like a pretty good start that can only be implemented with global consensus.

A tax that will be passed on to the consumer which will disproportionately affect the poor? It won't be people in Switzerland or Silicon Valley that will be materially affected by such a scheme.

Taxes are not the solution to every problem.

Taxes can be structured to not impact the poor and/or additional aid can be structured to offset the impact - much like income tax, or luxury tax, or inheritance tax.

>A tax that will be passed on to the consumer which will disproportionately affect the poor?

A tax on BS consumption won't "disproportionately affect the poor". The poor have vastly more basic needs to be concerned with a tax on all kinds of consumerist crap.

You know what else will disproportionally affect the poor? Global warming.

Or rich nations subsidizing nuclear power in the poor nations who are manufacturing stuff for them. We've effectively off-shored our manufacturing pollution.

The atmosphere and oceans are a common good, and it's hard to see how we'll stop polluting without enforceable agreements. And that means some entity has to do the enforcing.

Global warming denial seems to be an ideological necessity to the right-wing because they can't accept a problem exists that can only be solved by global governance. Witness the poster you're replying to, suggesting we accept human extinction rather than taxes and regulation.

>Witness the poster you're replying to, suggesting we accept human extinction rather than taxes and regulation.

Straw man or False dilemma?

Neither, unless you can propose a third option.

>The potential solutions that come to mind range from, on the pessimistic end, apocalyptic, to technological if we are to be optimistic. We'll either think our way out of the crisis with cleaner sources of energy, or nature will have it's way and our population will dwindle.

That was the original statement. To me, the fact that 'range' is included, means there's more than just two choices implied. I do believe it misrepresents the argument to suggest that there's only two 'extremes' of "taxes and regulation" or else "we go extinct."

So taxes and regulation are an "extreme". I call that extremist thinking.

>Alright. How do we deal with global warming?

In an ad-hoc manner? We have lots of global bodies like the UN, and numerous ad-hoc global treaties.

Global cooperation doesn't have to be global governance, and involve everything and the kitchen sink.

>Shouldn't international laws and co-operation between nations, naturally develop into a global government?

No, they shouldn't.

We have different cultures and different preferences in our different countries, we don't want powerful bully countries coercing us in what to believe, including countries so backwards as to still practice the death penalty or to think "welfare" is some dirty word.

Just because I have been seeing these a lot: where does this talk about the "globalist elites" come from? Is there an intellectual leader to this 'movement'?

Do you believe that this man, sitting in his Swiss chateau lamenting the lack of world government, is not part of the globalist elite?

>Is there an intellectual leader to this 'movement'?

No, there are just people thinking for themselves.

Sure, with exactly the same paranoid rhetoric at exactly the same time. /s

What exactly is "paranoid" about it?

Elite just means "the small minority of people with big power/wealth".

And "globalist elite" just means people in power in governments, multinationals, etc, that are in favour of an extension of their power and reach etc through global treaties, etc -- to the detriment of regional governments.

That's par for the course for having power, and how the world has been running since forever.

Except if you also think that 10 countries having 2/3rd of the world as slaves in their colonies up to merely 5-6 decades ago was also a "conspiracy theory" or "paranoid rhetoric".

In which case I salute the historical ignorance and naivete.

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