The need for world government
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That does not seem obvious to me at all. And I can't imagine a common set of governing principles acceptable to Iceland, China, Russia and the Taliban.
For example, looking at what is currently rocking the U.S., what would be the global policy on abortion?
What about the human rights of the unborn babies?
And who determines whether or not the unborn have rights? Rights are given by god, not some legislature.
Whose god? Allah? Buddha?
No, rights are natural, books with legends and stories have nothing to do with it, but their legal framework is provided by legislatures.
Legalizing slavery doesn't mean you're forced to own slaves.
Some folks believe certain actions are intrinsically immoral and no one should be allowed to do them.
So a human female and a human male copulate and they conceive something not-human? What species is it if it is not Homo sapiens? If it is not Homo sapiens, why does it apparently have human DNA (distinct from either the female and male that were involved)?
Why is it that when two humans copulate, they produce something not-human, but when every other mammal pairs copulate they produce something of the same species?
In your opinion when does it go from being not-human to being human? Is is gradual, on a spectrum? Or is it binary: at a certain point in development there is some characteristic that becomes present
The body inside her body is not hers. Unfortunately biology does not conform to our fantasyland.
Forcing those who are against this to pay a fine is against their will.
Or she was raped, or nobody taught her anything but religious abstinence bullshit and she didn't even know the ramifications.
> The body inside her body is not hers
So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.
I’m not talking about abstinence, plenty of birth control options are available. Men need to take more responsibility and wear a condom.
> So if you take that "body" inside her out of her, what happens to it? It dies unless it's the late stages (what, 6 months in?) It's entirely dependent on her to grow to become a human being.
Yes this is biology, and? If you ever had to visit a NICU you’ll see plenty of 20 some week old pre-mature babies (or “bodies” in your case) that are just as human as you and I. They are just in a different stage in life. They need food to survive, just like you and I. I have a 1 year old, he is dependent on me to grow and survive.
Abortion should be a a right regardless of the reasons. It’s not more of a right because the woman was raped. In both cases, they don’t want a thing growing in their uterus, no matter their reasons.
The real problem is, in my opinion: should we force a human to maintain another human against their will? What if we could extract the fetus and grow it in vitro instead of aborting it? In the same vein, does a parent legally have to be an organ donor for their child?
These are questions we can answer and debate on even if we disagree on whether a fetus is alive or not.
A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!
I know, a different opinion on a left wing dominant forum. It’s pretty wild.
> First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape.
I address this in another comment below.
> Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mother that had a miscarriage… the child was 100% going to die but as long as the fetus’ heart was beating they could not remove it and therefore the mover risked sepsis)
You’re citing very rare events to support the main issue which is the majority of abortions are out of convenience, which is where the main issue is.
For these rare events there can be middle ground found here.
> Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her. > A twisted example based on your comment: should be allowed to remove tumours? They have a slightly different DNA from the host therefore they are not “property” of the sick and therefore should be left there!
This is arguing the same point in my opinion. The tumor does not grow into a human. The tumor is not able to survive outside of the womb in a NICU as a human.
In Colorado you can get an abortion up to 9 months. There’s legislation trying to pass abortion allowance up to the moment of birth, and some have been recently successful in passing. Many states in the US allow abortions in 2nd trimester which is where a baby can survive outside the womb in a NICU.
But you are already doing that stating that abortion should be illegal altogether! You just set the threshold very early on!
I personally don't think we should have governments protecting lives or rights or anyone - therefore if abortion happens that's unfortunate but I wouldn't spend resources chasing that.
That said abortion is obviously murder and immoral, no matter how convenient it can be.
No, it’s not « obvious ». Many disagree on that, that’s kind of the whole point of the current debate.
And many pro-life folks say that you're killing a child. It's his/her body.
We don't allow parents to to kill 'inconvenient' child post-birth† so according to their argument neither should we pre-birth.
† Well:
* https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/euthanasia-and-n...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-birth_abortion
* https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/07/13/should-one-be-allo...
Just to be clear: are we talking about the pre-birth situation or the post-birth situation (as practice in the Netherlands)?
Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly.
You're right, that is silly. It is a silly, misleading straw-man argument.
Sentience isn't and never was the test. People in long-term comas still have rights.
Also, it's hard to define precisely, harder to test in new-born infants, who are not all that "wired up" anyway at the time of birth.
It's the fundamental point in the debate, so it's far from a trick question?
b) As Mr Buttigieg said, ""If it's that late in your pregnancy, then almost by definition, you've been expecting to carry it to term" - engage with that instead of repeating yourself?
c) As the other commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892643) says, this is a nonsense hypothetical
> One singular example of an abortion at 39 weeks where the mother didn't want the baby. I guarantee you can't actually find one even though you claim it exists
> It's the fundamental point in the debate
It is not, or should not be.
> believe there is a point ... shouldn't be allowed.
Again, should be a medical decision between patient and doctor, not a legal one, and not a numeric comparison.
But yes, the basic problem remains, humanity remains divided on very basic things. And enforcing unity would be ugly.
I don't think forcing my opinion on anyone who disagrees is correct, but then neither do I want others' opinions forced on me.
The rise (those damn Christians!) and fall (those damn Goths and Huns!) of Rome, the fall of Napoleon’s rule (those damn Russians!), the rise of Hitler (those damn Jews!), USA after Pearl Harbor (those damn Japanese!), downfall of Germany in 1945 (this damn war!), end of the Japanese imperial era (those damn bombs!) and the subsequent Americanization of Japan, fall of Great Britain’s monarchy after the war (those damn royalty!), the late 60’s major loss of civil liberties in the US (those damn blacks!), the entire Gaddafi affair (those damn clan monarchs / those damn Yankees!), USA becoming a surveillance state after 9/11 (those damn terrorists!), rise of the Taliban (those damn Yankees again!) …
See how silly you’re being? The parent comment already shared that large parts of the world have different values.
I’d be curious of your take when your proposed value isn’t chosen and there is no recourse.
Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.
> In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being.
In many other cases are humans legally required to literally risk their lives for another human being. Would you like me to give you examples?
> Corpses have more bodily autonomy than women after Dobbs.
I guess this is something US specific?
You have not addressed anything in the comment you're replying to. I think the right to abortion is the less bad of the two options, but I can also understand the people who say that abortion is murder. Can't you?
Is refusing to donate blood, bone marrow, etc, murder?
Is not mandating the donation of viable organs after death murder?
None of these things are required of people, in the name of bodily autonomy. None of these inactions are considered murder. And yet you expect women to donate their bodies for 9 months to something that is not yet a person, and take the very, very real risk of injury, permanent disability, or death, and the near-certainty that their bodies will never be the same again, to support what you call a human life.
The logic does not follow. It does not matter whether life begins at conception, at first heartbeat, at differentiated brain development, or at birth: In no case other than pregnancy is a human being societally expected or legally required to give even a part of their body to keep another human being alive, regardless of how safe the procedure may be.
And in the inverse, a few months ago I saw a lot users here arguing in favor of forcing Covid vaccinations against the person’s will to protect immunocompromised. Where do you stand on that?
The U.N. Human Rights Committee has a recent (2019) publication[1], "General comment no. 36, Article 6 (Right to Life)" that contains an entry that is relevant to this question.
Page two, item eight under "General Remarks":
"Although States parties may adopt measures designed to regulate voluntary termination of pregnancy, those measures must not result in violation of the right to life of a pregnant woman or girl, or her other rights under the Covenant. Thus, restrictions on the ability of women or girls to seek abortion must not, inter alia, jeopardize their lives, subject them to physical or mental pain or suffering that violates article 7 of the Covenant, discriminate against them or arbitrarily interfere with their privacy. States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion where the life and health of the pregnant woman or girl is at risk, or where carrying a pregnancy to term would cause the pregnant woman or girl substantial pain or suffering, most notably where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or where the pregnancy is not viable. In addition, States parties may not regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and girls do not have to resort to unsafe abortions, and they should revise their abortion laws accordingly. For example, they should not take measures such as criminalizing pregnancy of unmarried women or applying criminal sanctions to women and girls who undergo abortion or to medical service providers who assist them in doing so, since taking such measures compels women and girls to resort to unsafe abortion. States parties should remove existing barriers to effective access by women and girls to safe and legal abortion, including barriers caused as a result of the exercise of conscientious objection by individual medical providers, and should not introduce new barriers. States parties should also effectively protect the lives of women and girls against the mental and physical health risks associated with unsafe abortions. In particular, they should ensure access for women and men, and especially girls and boys, to quality and evidence-based information and education on sexual and reproductive health and to a wide range of affordable contraceptive methods, and prevent the stigmatization of women and girls who seek abortion. States parties should ensure the availability of, and effective access to, quality prenatal and post-abortion health care for women and girls, in all circumstances and on a confidential basis."
what would be the global policy on abortion?
What’s to stop this pattern from repeating at a greater scale?
Not that there is an air-tight guarantee that a government won't turn bad. But we currently have over a half dozen governments with nuclear weapons. On the whole, I'd rather just worry about one.
People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortunately, people also overestimate, gravely, the capacity of humanity to refrain from nuclear war. It has been less than a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we've come close to a nuclear conflict on several occasions.
If Austin can't make abortion legal, Texas can't make it illegal.
The citizens of Africa are victimized when Texas subsidizes oil production.
I'm not a fan of a world government, but a mechanism for dealing with the problems of sharing resources and dealing with free riders and the race to the bottom would be appreciated.
There must be some reason that global sports organizations so often attract corruption. I'm thinking of UEFA, FIFA and many of the other less well known sports associations - FIDE for chess etc, and many more. They usually don't have a democratic governance structure and let interests of the involved people entrench themselves.
I don't think total surveillance is enough.
2) Cultural differences will require that different populations operate and behave differently, you will never be able to put the same constraints on different cultures.
so you have local/regional government, responsible for local and regional policies. But global policies would be controlled by a global gov't.
In the EU we certainly have regional government, member state government and EU institutions. All of these are different shades of government and in some cases conflict with each other.
In some areas EU has been a boon - a "safety valve" where the member state government is put into a competitive system where it has to align itself with external expectations from the EU institutions. I.e. breaking up their monopoly power in that sense.
Some national governments want/wanted to completely control the sale of medicine, foods, alcohol etc and to some extent EU has broken up that control.
Moving country is not always easy
Yes. We would like to have a group of super smart people who can tell us what to do and we can just do that and everything will work out great. Unfortunately, such people don’t exist.
Sorry, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.
But I'm going to out on a limb and agree with the author. Not only that, we will most probably have a world government for many of the reasons mentioned, but mainly because after the next big war, it will become evident for everyone still alive that we can't have individual nations going on a rampage with nuclear weapons (biological weapons, etc take your pick) any more.
It will probably not look like a national government, it simply will enable the rule of law, globally. Which is what we need. Preferably before the next big war.
I think the trend should be the opposite more accountability by getting closer to the public. With all its faults, something I like about the UK system is the political accountability to constituents. MPs are required in their job description to defend their own constituents interests.
I'm not defending a "lean" state, I'm saying that mega-governments will eventually just view the world from the balcony of the megapolis ivory tower, since the bureaucratic weight of being present in all corners of the whole world would be too much.
You can see that in many developing and developed countries. You have a national government, in its own bubble in the capital and far-away corners of the country are invisible.
Decentralisation would be impossible, by definition, in a world gov, IMO.
PS: I'm not against pan-national orgs or efforts like the EU. The process of sitting around a table and discussing the big issues is essential, in my view. Even legal and economic harmonisation. I'm against Brexit, but if anything, a positive of Brexit is that it showed the EU is not a "government". There is an escape clause and people can leave it. How do you leave a "world government"?
However, world government doesn't make sense before more planets are settled, because no governent model is perfect yet and the best model we have so far is a competition between states as to which model should prevail.
Eg., you are a monarchy and your next king is a moron. Too bad, having democracy would have made this only temporary. You are a democracy and your country's media run by oligarchs found a way to rule by influencing masses. Too bad, if you had a king, he would imprison the oligarchs.
There will be cycles in model of government in foreseeable future, so it is premature to decide on the one government style yet, so it is dangerous to do one and only world govt yet. Wait for Musk to colonize Mars at least.
That's just as bad as a monarchy if not worst. At least the monarchy takes drastic decisions (some good, some bad) but has all the power so they'll be held responsible. Kings still risk being executed or assassinated.
Our governments keep saying they can't do anything because of the system and just keep pushing out laws that make life marginally worse for everyone over decades. Nobody even remembers politicians' name: they collectively risk way less than monarchs (who actually wield power, not expensive and useless stamp models, overpaid by the taxpayers, like the Queen of England)
Also a world government making decisions on "immigration" whose effects are distributed unevenly on its constituents. Look at Poland in the EU right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/59348337
"We could replace the war model with the policing model". How? Total fascism or weaker punitive measures? Also does the omission of one correlate strictly with the absence of the other? And over what time scale? Look up "Mediocristan" & "Extremistan" to get an understanding of how the urge to control from a top down level can blow up.
"we could institute the basic human right of mobility on the planet" some ecosystems cannot support free mobility.
It's high time that everyone gets onboard with this.
Also, Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 book has a fascinating fictional story about a company that uses AI to drive a new world order, back towards the center. It is both exceptionally hand-wavey but also not entirely unbelievable.
Not necessarily trying to make a point or anything, just thoughts that this article reminded me of.
One of the most urgent planetary problems right now is climate change, and the closest we have to world government are US and EU, the first denying and boicotting global measures against it since the 90s, the second taking back their pledges as they is some struggle in their gas and oil inputs.
Unless you have a god, aliens or a perfect AI (the usual saviors/unifiers in fiction, and we might be as far from the third than from the first one) as government, humans will still go for their own good, in their own scale, with big players pursuing their own benefit influencing whatever is in the global government.
He might arrive at an alternative conclusion.
We already see it in our local governments. We even see it in larger corporations. It's even visible, with decreasing rarity based on the size of group, in a building administration group or in a group of friends who pool money to do something.
This reasoning makes me think we should go to decentralisation and federation until the power being wielded is minuscole, ideally being limited only to your person and your private property.
There can be several iterations, the ultimate being a free society where individuals are the only structure and transactions are an voluntary (eg. No governments at all, private everything)
Also, isn't it better to have split testing?
The American Empire is run via these families through a distributed influence network of private companies, NGOs, think tanks and PACs [1]. Although made up of many entities, they are funded by the same few individuals. Thus, this is a very difficult system to reform without immense capital expenditure.
The countries which do not submit to this order are the designated public enemies (we have always been at war with Eastasia). Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea being the most prominent of these.
Disclaimer: I am a deeply committed conspiracy theorist who also believes in the Earth being flat, so please take everything I say as the ramblings of a kook (especially any hardworking federal employees perusing HN)!
1. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the...
I know that both Carl Bildt (Swedish politician) and Bard/Söderqvist (Swedish authors) have been thinking about this.
I’m not convinced though. There are so many Trumps, Erdogans, Orbans etc in the world and too many people who enable them.
If there is no competition between countries, governments tend to turn their despotic energies on their own citizens. There would be nowhere for Snowden or Assange to go. If your social credit score is ruined, it is ruined worldwide.
The military would be used to suppress the population. I'm very certain that a world government would turn into a Stalinist hell very quickly.
The EU isn’t (obviously) global, but has actually been pretty successful. I actually think it’s a pretty good model, but the emphasis would have to be more on global issues such as climate change than trade.
You can make all the snarky remarks you want, but if you were reincarnating right now as some random human and you learned that you reincarnated as a citizen of the EU, you would probably sigh in relief.
In my experience, the strongest criticisms of the EU come from outsiders who would prefer to impose their views and preferences on how Europeans should live, and on the role that Europe should play in the world stage -- a more subservient one.
House arrest several months a year, forced experimental vaccination, forbidden to heat house at winter, soon forbidden to use car, forced indoctrination of children, oposition parties banned or under surveillance, censorship, surveillance of private communications, overt racism and sexism...
My family has been through many regimes. Current one is not "free" or "tolerant". And it is not even prosperous, if young family can not afford house and children!
I do think about emigration from time to time, but despite all the problems, EU really is the most livable place on Earth.
Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world.
The Germans and the French were more than happy betting on Italian and Greek bonds which were junk-level and provided great yields. But, when in Greece's case the chickens came home to roost and their risk was about to materialize they forced a bailout program on the Greek people instead of allowing them to default. Having a country in the Eurozone defaulting their debt would have devastating impact on the Euro too, so there was double-whammy of incentives for the EU technocrats to bailout Greece.
After the Greek economy got devastated, mainly German companies entered the Greek market and obliterated the local competition, especially in the retailer industry with brands like Lidl coming in and undercutting the Greek businesses which had been around for decades. Moreover, they bought out a lot of those Greek businesses for a piece of bread and merged them with their own. So Greek people were essentially spending their bailout money buying products from the Germans. At the end of the day, Germany was moving money from one pocket to the other and also making interest on top of it. No EU technocrat bailed out Greece out of kindness.
Now of course, the propaganda machine will lament every day to the average Joe about how the lazy Italians and Greeks are stealing their money. So the 'annoyance' is understandable.
"AFAICT the Greeks trust the EU government a heck of a lot more than they trust their own."
False. They distrust them equally and for different reasons.
"Ask the Poles and Ukrainians about what they think about EU membership. By some metrics Poland is the fastest growing economy in the world."
I don't know Polish people and I don't know what their sentiment towards the EU is. The Ukranians have no idea what it is to be a member of the EU, they can't know from the outside. If just the fact that a country wants to join the EU is an indicator of how great the EU is, then the other way round is also true (UK, Switzerland and Norway not wanting to join, or several countries having a 'leaving' sentiment brewing within).