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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

The UN is an absolute farce.

I see a group of countries trying to work together. As this is a massive coordination effort and the participants all want different things, it can only go slow. As with every governmental entity, there probably is some waste. But the alternative is each country for himself, so I rather have the UN.

> But the alternative is each country for himself, so I rather have the UN.

That's a false dichotomy. The alternatives includes giving each country an equal standing without a veto, votes proportional to the population, or even fully direct democracy by every person in the world, and a million other alternatives I could think of if given an afternoon.

It's absolutely logically valid to think that international coordination is valuable but that the UN is a poor solution for this, and is blocking off a better solution. Recall also that before the UN we had the League of Nations, which had a similar mission but an even worse implementation, and there's a wide consensus that it's good that it was replaced.

> That's a false dichotomy. The alternatives includes giving each country an equal standing without a veto, votes proportional to the population, or even fully direct democracy by every person in the world, and a million other alternatives I could think of if given an afternoon.

These are certainly alternatives but they would take what’s basically an acceptable-ish arrangement and turn it into what’s effectively a world government, and that’s completely untenable.

If liberal secular democracies that respected free speech and private property rights were the order of the day, we might be able to set something like that up, but not in today’s world with today’s leaders, and the UN has to account for all of those differences. That’s why the UN feels unsatisfying and why it will never “lead” the world.

But that's the thing - the UN just accepts its strongest members doing things that go against its founding charter and can do nothing about it. At some point the the center just cannot hold.

If the UN actually had any teeth, then it’s the UN that would be targeted and destroyed by its strongest members.

The UN only survives because it is toothless, and the permanent seats of the UNSC are essential to guaranteeing buy-in from members that otherwise wouldn’t allow it to exist.

Why do you think the charter of the UN says that all the power is invested in the security council and each of the great powers have a veto there?

It's almost as if the UN is the creation of the Great Powers, as a meeting ground where they can coordinate their actions, and is not intended to be some authority that tells the great powers what to do.

I don't know where these people learned alternate histories of the UN as being some kind of force that can keep nations in check.

It was never intended to play that role, and the UN Charter forbids it explicitly.

The real problem with the UN is that it is obsolete even for the role it was empowered to play, because with the advent of videoconferencing and abundant communication, it simply has no meaningful role to play. What it has become now is a jobs program where well connected people can obtain diplomatic posts and party in New York while not paying any parking tickets. That's literally all the UN is right now.

Each person is a point, each nuke is 1000000 points, I'm too lazy to add points for batlecruisers, tanks and drones. The vote is proportional to log(points). Does this change the composition of the Security Council too much?

What kind of fantasy UN are you imagining? You understand that there are countries in the UN that are explicitly dedicated to the annihilation of other countries, right? How do you envision these countries all working together and WTF would that look like?

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