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Comment by changoplatanero | Hacker News Reader

I’m all for reducing our military spending but wouldn’t support giving it to the UN. Why would the UN be better at spending it than congress?

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That's my position. I don't want to give the UN money (look how dysfunctional and corrupt the WHO is), but I do want military spending to go down. Why make it more politically difficult than it needs to be. What's the benefit of coupling reductions in military spending with giving more money to the UN... These are totally unrelated things and coupling them needlessly achieves nothing.

In what way is the WHO “dysfunctional and corrupt”? Everyone I know with ideas like that seems to have a very questionable world view.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/world-health-organization...

Child sex abuse, for starters

That's like throwing away Congress because Matt Gaetz exists. There may or may not be good reasons to abolish Congress, but Matt Gaetz alone ain't it.

Matt Gaetz is a single person. The linked article shows that this was an institutional problem at the WHO involving corrupt management. So the analogy is flawed. Also the sex abuse isn't the only thing wrong with the WHO.

Yes. If they are to be decoupled, I'd rather give the peace dividend to Elon Musk.

> look how dysfunctional and corrupt the WHO is

[citation needed] - but like, an actual one. I know this is a popular conspiracy theory at the moment.

One was provided already by another poster. I don't even need to give more because that should be sufficient.

But if you want to dig further, you should look at the timeline of the WHO's actions and see how slow they were to recommend masks, recommend border closures, and declare a pandemic, then ask yourself if they helped or hurt our efforts to contain COVID throughout 2020. No citation is needed for that, it's all in the public domain - their press conferences and their Twitter.

I don't think any of what you are saying here amounts to any sort of corruption.

Read the article. The management of WHO covered up sexual abuse, up until an investigative journalist blew it open. Yes, they are a deeply corrupt organization.

That's not corruption as it pertains to their objectives though. That's a crime, one that should be punished, obviously. It doesn't have anything to do with the primary objectives of the WHO, especially not as it pertains to for instance COVID. Corruption would be, hypothetically, taking payoffs or bribes to avoid doing their jobs. You have not, and nor has anyone else here, offered evidence of corruption.

Well I just read the definition of corruption as dishonesty for gain, and this cover-up fits the bill.

Even if they don't fit that definition, they're a broken and grossly incompetent organization that covers up their own criminality, with no mechanism for accountability.

How else do you think a singer of Chinese military propaganda songs got in there, with literally no qualifications? After the CCP's good friend Tedros was elected he made Xi's wife as well as Xi's good buddy Robert Mugabe WHO goodwill ambassadors (the latter was removed again after an international outcry). Not sure how much more obvious it could get. Imagine it was the 1940s and the WHO hired Eva Braun.

It's hard to justify any of the un budget. All of its committees and bureaucracies seem compromised, if not outright corrupt. I'll keep my money at home, where there's at least a minimal chance of accountability.

The UN exists because the alternative is a series of international crises caused by people having literally no idea how to talk to their counterparts.

Let it not be forgotten that some of the finest wires of the Cold War came down to the delays in international diplomatic communications between Washington DC and Moscow due to the need to relay messages via embassies.

People have gotten so used to an international power structure with high speed communications and well defined diplomatic channels that they mistake the purpose of these organizations for their effectiveness. The alternative is a lot worse.

The above is not true. It was not speaking to each other that caused world war 2. It was Mr. Chamberlain talking to Mr. Hitler and believing him that caused the problem.

It was also the League of Nations failing to live up to it's principles when Japan invaded Manchuria.

The UN was a dream to try and resolve things in a multi-laterial world, and sometimes early on was effective (See Korea). after the debacle of the Korean War (Moscow boycotting rather then using their veto), the progress in the cold war was almost always bilateral. (not always though).

In it's current form, it's useful - but I think the WTO / World Bank and the Red Hotlines have been far more useful.

They never mentioned anything about World War 2. They are talking about the Cold War. The nuclear crisis between US and Russia. And I think they are right because I believe they set up a direct line between Moscow and DC right after that conflict ended.

Which had nothing to do with the UN.

Yeah and this might be too obvious to spell out but can we really expect the UN to be efficient when its purpose is to coordinate organisations that themselves are neither efficient nor willing to cooperate much of the time.

Isn't the only way to make UN more efficient to make nation states more efficient?

The "high level diplomats from each country meet each other" part of the UN budget is a tiny fraction of their overall spending.

Being worse at spending military dollars could be a good thing.

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