Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - What are the ringing sucesses of the United Nations.

irateplatypus · 11-10-2004, 09:00 AM

mr. mephisto,

it's obvious to me that the UN has a bureau, committee, task force, bank and fund for every noble cause in the world. what isn't apparent is whether the eloquently worded mission statements and a helluva lot of money have translated into real growth among the poorest of nations. all this talk of the poor nations getting poorer... yet that has been one of the missions of the UN and it's surrogate organizations for 50 years. much of the world has not seen improvement economically since the UN's inception. even for the part that has, it would be difficult to draw correlations to UN policies that enabled such growth.

one of your posts listed a lot of regulatory roles of the UN. it's quite a stretch to say that w/o the UN those regulations (that have proven helpful) wouldn't have been made otherwise. that's like saying no terrorists would have been arrested without john ashcroft as attorney general because without an attorney general... how could we prosecute terrorists? well, hell... that's circular thinking. it's ashcroft's job to arrest terrorists like it's the UN's role to make regulatory decisions. simply stating that they have done their respective jobs make no critical observation about how well they're doing them or whether those decisions would have been made more effectively and cheaply by other means.

bottomline: i'm know the UN has done some good things. however, it has been given an enourmous amount of resources and i judge that the world has received very little return for the investment. in some areas (emergency humanitarian aid, third world assistance, economy of resources, fiscal transparency) failures are clearly observable. in their successes there is reason to believe similar achievements could be made other means. it's difficult to prove that the UN is worthwhile on it's own record while there is no other metric by which we can gauge its success.

11-10-2004, 09:00 AM	#34 (permalink)
irateplatypus can't help but laugh Location: dar al-harb	mr. mephisto, it's obvious to me that the UN has a bureau, committee, task force, bank and fund for every noble cause in the world. what isn't apparent is whether the eloquently worded mission statements and a helluva lot of money have translated into real growth among the poorest of nations. all this talk of the poor nations getting poorer... yet that has been one of the missions of the UN and it's surrogate organizations for 50 years. much of the world has not seen improvement economically since the UN's inception. even for the part that has, it would be difficult to draw correlations to UN policies that enabled such growth. one of your posts listed a lot of regulatory roles of the UN. it's quite a stretch to say that w/o the UN those regulations (that have proven helpful) wouldn't have been made otherwise. that's like saying no terrorists would have been arrested without john ashcroft as attorney general because without an attorney general... how could we prosecute terrorists? well, hell... that's circular thinking. it's ashcroft's job to arrest terrorists like it's the UN's role to make regulatory decisions. simply stating that they have done their respective jobs make no critical observation about how well they're doing them or whether those decisions would have been made more effectively and cheaply by other means. bottomline: i'm know the UN has done some good things. however, it has been given an enourmous amount of resources and i judge that the world has received very little return for the investment. in some areas (emergency humanitarian aid, third world assistance, economy of resources, fiscal transparency) failures are clearly observable. in their successes there is reason to believe similar achievements could be made other means. it's difficult to prove that the UN is worthwhile on it's own record while there is no other metric by which we can gauge its success. __________________ If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. ~ Winston Churchill