But if art that is intended to be ugly, disturbing, and shocking is only art because it has some element of beauty in it contradicted by evoking some kind of distress, then what you are doing is creating a definition of beauty that is too broad to be useful.
For example, there is an artist who paints pictures of people hanging from meathooks. You could say this is art because people are somehow beautiful and this is contradicted by the sense of distress. Or what about performance artists like Mark McGowan who sat in a bathtub full of baked beans with 48 sausages strapped to his head and 2 chips stuck up his nose in order to 'advocate the consumption of the much maligned British breakfast'? I suppose we could say that there is some element of beauty in it if we look hard enough--maybe the beautiful aesthetic of the sausage hat?
The point is that if your definition of 'evokes a sense of beauty' is that broad, then you can apply it to everything, and therefore if art is that which evokes a sense of beauty, then everything is art. Deep as that may sound, from my point of view it makes both the concepts of 'art' and 'beauty' meaningless because they do not actually make any useful distinctions.
browser maturity
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· Score: 2, Interesting
doesn't it seem likely that we're reaching a point at which there are just not very many new things that can be done with browsers? most of what the web is about, including user interfaces, has now been integrated into the content of web pages themselves. the job of the browser is fairly straightforward, and browsers have been around long enough to learn to do that job well. i think to call it 'stagnation' implies that we should always expect constant innovation. but maybe browsers are just a tool that has reached maturity.
Art is anything which invokes a sense of beauty in the observer.
So then what about art which is intended to be ugly, or disturbing, or shocking? What about A Clockwork Orange? What about art that really is not beautiful at all, just visually interesting, like much abstract postmodern art? Are you saying none of these are art, because none of them are beautiful?
To say that art is characterised by beauty is to invoke an obsolete (i.e. romantic/neoclassical) definition of art. Art involves far more than beauty and often it does not involve beauty at all. Your definition is too narrow.
Last time I checked that is what a movie does as well.
No, that is what a Hollywood movie does. Hollywood movies (and Bollywood movies, and movies made anywhere where movies are made by an industry that churns them out in an attempt to maximise profits) are not art, they are simply formulaic shit that is intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator. By contrast, many, many films have been made that are very much art; they may not be popular, and in America they are certainly lumped into the category of 'foreign/arthouse' if they are ever imported at all, but they represent the true possibility of the film medium. Do not insult cinema by associating it with Hollywood.
What's more irritating than people painting things as black and white is people taking everything literally and not being able to handle exaggeration. I personally use exaggeration to make a point--for example, I might say, 'Geeks have no social skills' when obviously I am exaggerating, there are of course some geeks with social skills, but that goes without saying. Similarly when someone writes an article that is not a serious journal article and paints things as black and white, they are usually doing so for dramatic effect, and it is your own fault for being pedantic and not realising this.
Transport for London has had an online journey planner for a couple of years now where you can enter your starting location, time and destination and get directions using bus, underground, and mainline rail.
There are many, many cases of services that are answerable to and funded by a state and that are not subject to this kind of selective provision. Examples in the UK include the BBC and the NHS.
The way it works is that these services are managed not directly by politicians themselves, but by civil servants who are ultimately accountable to politicians, who are then ultimately accountable to the electorate. Because there is a public commitment that these services will be universally provided, and that no one can be excluded from them, there would be a public outcry if that were to happen, and that is why it doesn't happen. Governments work very well when the people do their job of holding governments accountable. It is mainly when people in government realise they will not be held accountable (for example, by an electorate which sees it as their 'patriotic duty' to support government policy whatever it may be) that government fails.
I imagine with wifi it would be quite easy to make a commitment not to exclude anyone. All you really have to do is allow anyone to access the network anonymously. If you're worried about government backtracking on this, well then it can be written into law which makes it harder for politicians to change, the same way the BBC charter is written into law.
I am not a liberal, and I want to help those who truly need it. There are certainly people out there who have the deck stacked against them and there is no reason we shouldn't collectively help them out.
But in the case of obesity, I really have a hard time believing that any more than a very small percentage of obese people actually have a disorder. If that was the case, then why has this 'disorder' only become a problem in the last 20 years or so? No. It is cultural/psychological.
The help these people need is therapy, cultural change, and to get off their arse and do something. Telling them they have a genetic predisposition will not help them at all. Pitying them will also not help them, it will only mean they respect themselves even less. The correct attitude to this problem is not, 'Oh, poor us, we are genetically predisposed to being fat', but rather 'We are going to get motivated to do something about it right now'.
I would gladly have tax money used to subsidise gym membership, nutrition education at school, and widespread bans on marketing of junk food. But ultimately it is the fat person's responsibility to solve their problem, regardless of any 'predisposition' that may or may not exist (the exception being the infintesimal percentage who actually have a disorder, and need medication--but there are so few of these that they are a completely different issue)
right. as if 10s of thousands have not died as a result of the abject poverty they are kept in by the feudal regime, not to mention the countless people victimised by the army and police every day, the journalists 'disappeared', tortured, etc. gyanendra should be tried for crimes against humanity. it's not just the maoists who think so now either--the political parties agree. hopefully soon gyanendra will be rotting in prison in the Republic of Nepal. sorry, you lose, fascist.
Dogmatic would be if the reporters adopted a bias toward one side of the story and stuck to it no matter who they interviewed. What British reporters--especially BBC reporters--do is treat everyone harshly. They try to put the interviewee under pressure in order to try to get them to defend their point of view. They play devil's advocate. In short, they do exactly what they ought to be doing: getting to the heart of the matter rather than simply let someone get away with saying things that others would challenge.
This is the same kind of culture that carries through to parliament, question time, etc., and it leads to a much healthier attitude toward government, authority, etc, i.e. one of scrutiny and unforgiveness. The way it should be.
Why quote the US constitution? The US is just one country out of 190, and its constitutional strictures don't inform us about universal human rights, only what rights are guaranteed by law in the US. If you want to talk about rights that have been agreed upon internationally, cite the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or if you want to argue that people have some kind of 'innate' right to freedom of association, then cite or argue philosophy. But a legal document pertaining to one particular country is of no relevance here.
Also being full and in the process of digestion causes your body temperature to rise, which makes you sleepy. Studies have been done that show that worker productivity generally falls in the hour or so after lunch and it is thought that this is because of sleepiness from increased body temperature.
Again, while we know that the San peoples were in sub-Saharan Africa prior to the Bantu migration, and their ancestors likely go back quite far in the past, we cannot conclude from this that there has been something we can classify as one long contiguous society going back some amount of time. Without a written history or a detailed knowledge of lifestyles 5000 years ago in the area, we cannot know how like or unlike San peoples today or 1500 years ago it was. It is a mistake to assume that there has been historical continuity over the millennia rather than the equally possible scenario that a great deal of (possibly dramatic) changes have occurred in San societies.
To live the same kind of lifestyle is not the same as to be the same society. Swedish people live a similar lifestyle to Norwegians and Danes (in many respects), and yet we class these as distinct societies. The same should go for tribal groups, including over time.
Hinduism is a body of religious and philosophical beliefs, as well as a family of cultural practices, but that is not the same as a society.
For example, would you say that Nepali Hindus are in the same society as Indian Hindus (bearing in mind that Nepali Hinduism is strongly mixed with Buddhism and older indigenous animistic religions)?
I also don't think it's defensible to say that the Indus Valley civilisation is just the same society as Indian society today, when the two are so dramatically different.
Let alone the fact that until outsiders (I believe it was Muslims but I'm not certain) applied the name 'Hindu' to people in India, there was not a concrete concept of Hinduism as a religion as opposed to simply the ways in which the various peoples of the subcontinent lived and the kinds of beliefs they had. After all, with the preponderance of sects, cults, philosophical schools, etc, it would be hard to define by anything other than 'family resemblance'. All of this is not to say it does not have a family resemblance; however that is a far cry from being one contiguous society.
In many ways Indian society as it exists today, in terms of its national borders as well as in terms of it social composition, is a direct result of its time under colonial rule, and has to be seen as a rather distinct, modern phenomenon, as compared with older societies that existed in India before. But even if we don't make such distinctions, I think it's silly to say that it's the same society as existed in the ancient Indus Valley. Particularly if the only criterion we use for this is that they share some amount of religious beliefs, which themselves have evolved greatly over the millennia (sure, we can say that Hindus are roughly all Vedic, but there is a lot of evolution that has gone on around that).
It is highly misleading to refer to Jews as forming some kind of global 'society'. They are a family of ethnic groups, religious beliefs, and cultures within which there is a great deal of variation. If you claim that e.g. orthodox Russian Jews are members of the same 'society' as reform Jews in New York or Ethiopian Jews etc then I think that is absurd. It's like saying that Catholic Americans of Irish descent who identify culturally as 'Irish' belong to the same society as people in Ireland. They share ethnicity, religion, and some cultural elements but it is not one society.
If on the other hand you are referring to ancient Jewish society, I think it is very difficult to classify this as one society as well. Many of the ancient societies in the Middle East including Semitic ones were tribal, and you cannot say they formed one big society for quite some time. Even if we take a very early date, like c. 1800 BC when the Bible apparently says that Abraham was born, that is less than 4000 years ago.
And there is no question that over the last 2000 years, Jews have been spread to the four corners of the world and no longer constitute anything like one society, if they ever did.
China is commonly estimated to have been unified around 2000 years ago, with records existing of (possibly concurrent) kingdoms in China going back to possibly 2000 BC.
Before and maybe during this time, there existed city states and small settlements, which given the size of the landmass were likely to be linguistically, culturally and ethnically diverse.
If you call that kind of entity a society contiguous with unified China, then you might as well call pre-historic Europe a society contiguous with the Roman Empire. However I think it makes more sense to make the distinction, and say that what we think of as Chinese civilisation today dates back either 2000 or at most 3500-4000 years.
Name any society that has survived more than 4000 years ever.
I assume what you mean by 'society' is not an ethnic group but a kind of recognisable contiguous social formation. Even this is hard to define--for example, did British society as we know it today begin in the dark ages, did it begin 1000 years ago or is it really so fundamentally different now to what it was then that we can't call it the same society?
But even if we forget this difficulty and just go by conventional definitions, for things like the Roman Empire or ancient Egypt, I think you would be hard pressed to find any society that has ever lasted more than 4000 years. For example, ancient Egypt as we think of it, i.e. as a unified state/civilisation, lasted from approximately 3200 BC to 332 BC, i.e. less than 3000 years. And despite the old European myth of an 'ancient Africa', most of the sub-Saharan African societies that existed at the time of colonisation were largely the result of migration of Bantu peoples starting in approximately the 2nd millennium BC making these societies at the very most 4000 years old, but in reality because of the lack of written history we have know way of knowing if there was much historical continuity in them at all, as opposed to changing through many phases.
The idea of civilisations that exist in recognisable form for very long periods of time is a myth. Human society is inherently unstable. Tribal groups as much as other kinds of society often destroy each other, or destroy the environment on which they depend through overexploitation. As far as anyone knows, there has just never really been a time when there have been societies that have lasted much more than 4000 years, and even the 3000 years of the Egyptian state is based on a very loose definition of a society when you consider the changes that occurred in Egyptian history.
Don't mean to nitpick, but if you are trying to claim that religion holds societies together for many thousands of years, I don't think the case can be argued on that basis.
But what is the point of throwing your weight behind a president you don't support? Why not do what people in a lot of other countries would do, and do whatever you can to make it impossible for him to govern? It seems to me that there is this myth that even if what they do is completely reprehensible to you, it is somehow serving the greater good of the country to let them get on with it rather than trying to actually play hardball in politics.
As far as I can tell most of your criticisms add up to 'UN bodies do something, but they do not do enough'. No one is arguing that the UN should be able to solve all the world's problems. The point is that they make a positive difference.
Of course that difference is commensurate with the political will of the member states--it cannot go beyond that, otherwise the UN loses its neutrality and its representative nature. That is where other organisations, like regional organisations, NGOs, the private sector, and individual governments have to step in to fill the gap. It is a natural limitation of a neutral organisation intended to represent everyone.
It also means that where there is not the political will to carry out particular projects, the UN cannot succeed--as you point out, WHO's malaria eradication campaign, or their attempts to wipe out polio e.g. in West Africa lately. But what is it you are saying? That because they cannot work miracles or solve problems perfectly, they should not exist? Regardless of the fact that WHO have not eradicated malaria or polio, they have contributed to reducing them, along with a variety of other diseases (e.g. leprosy). The same argument can be extended to the other bodies.
But this is one of the deep contradictions in the American mentality. On the one hand, they don't trust government as an abstract concept, but on the other hand, they believe in unquestioning allegiance to their government in all but exceptional cases (now is maybe an exceptional case). So for example, when there is a contested presidential election, rather than doing the logical thing and trying to work out who really won, even the opposition just says 'We have to respect him, he's our president now'. Because somehow, even though the government is the bad guy, it's also the great protecting patriotic good guy.
I think what's really at issue is that they don't trust things they don't understand, and they don't much understand other countries, let alone the UN. Particularly because the UN works on the basis of a co-operative mentality, whereas the American ideology of international relations works on the basis of an 'every man for himself' mentality.
No. If a bunch of governments get together and sign a treaty that says, 'We are all going to collect a tax on currency transactions within our own borders and then contribute it to a common fund', that does not constitute the formation of a government. Because it is a treaty, it is consensual, and they can pull out of it without anyone starting a war against them. And because there is no uber-government behind the agreement, no 'world police' or 'world army' are going to come in and 'enforce' the treaty.
The international community, including the International Court of Justice, works on the principle that most states see it as being in their long term interest to play by the rules (the US does not generally see it this way but they are an exception). It does not work on the basis that there is going to be some big organised force enforcing agreements--as is the case when there is a government. The two are completely different.
I'm sure you only called the UN a 'world government' as a rhetorical device, but unfortunately there are those who actually believe it is some kind of world government so the point sometimes need reinforcing.
The UN is an international organisation. It was never intended to be a government, it doesn't function as one. It is a (mostly) consensus-based body, because the point is that it is intended to be completely neutral and express the combined will of the countries of the world.
Before you tell me how the UN is pointless, just remember how many millions of people depend every day on the vital work of WHO (eradicated smallpox, takes care of outbreaks of diseases, etc), UNHCR (cares for literally millions of refugees), UNDP (funds vital development projects), WFP (delivers food aid to famine stricken areas), FAO (source of co-operation on agricultural development), UNIDO (shares technical knowledge for industrial development), UNEP (monitors environmental damage and provides expertise for solving environmental problems), UNESCO (funding restoration of cultural sites, making research grants etc). Not to mention all the others like ILO, UNICEF, ICJ, ICC, etc.
All that is what the UN does, and they do it in a way that no one else can. Why? Because they represent neutrality, they represent the authority of the peoples of the world, and by and large they do a damned good job of carrying out their mandate.
And then there's the General Assembly, which of course is a talking shop, but it's better to have a talking shop than none at all--it's a place for opinions to get aired, and a place for the international community to express its opinions.
NONE of this is any kind of 'world government'. It is the governments of the world, getting together to co-operate on solving some of humanity's biggest problems, and trying to work out their differences without having to resort to conflict. And while the headline-grabbing events are when this doesn't work (like with Iraq), the vast majority of the time it is actually very effective--you just don't see it on FOX News.
Now, you can be extremely dogmatic and tell me that anything done by anyone that isn't in the name of private enterprise is doomed to fail. But I challenge you to show how private enterprise would have filled all of the vital functions that the aforementioned UN agencies have filled over the last 50 years. And no, this is not a question of 'If you had waited long enough, the market would have done it'. Any longer wait and more people would have died of smallpox; any longer wait for refugee camps to be built and people die of cholera. And of course, there's not really any profit to be made in these situations anyway. That's when the international community simply says 'Right, let's solve it'. Consensually.
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But if art that is intended to be ugly, disturbing, and shocking is only art because it has some element of beauty in it contradicted by evoking some kind of distress, then what you are doing is creating a definition of beauty that is too broad to be useful.
For example, there is an artist who paints pictures of people hanging from meathooks. You could say this is art because people are somehow beautiful and this is contradicted by the sense of distress. Or what about performance artists like Mark McGowan who sat in a bathtub full of baked beans with 48 sausages strapped to his head and 2 chips stuck up his nose in order to 'advocate the consumption of the much maligned British breakfast'? I suppose we could say that there is some element of beauty in it if we look hard enough--maybe the beautiful aesthetic of the sausage hat?
The point is that if your definition of 'evokes a sense of beauty' is that broad, then you can apply it to everything, and therefore if art is that which evokes a sense of beauty, then everything is art. Deep as that may sound, from my point of view it makes both the concepts of 'art' and 'beauty' meaningless because they do not actually make any useful distinctions.
doesn't it seem likely that we're reaching a point at which there are just not very many new things that can be done with browsers? most of what the web is about, including user interfaces, has now been integrated into the content of web pages themselves. the job of the browser is fairly straightforward, and browsers have been around long enough to learn to do that job well. i think to call it 'stagnation' implies that we should always expect constant innovation. but maybe browsers are just a tool that has reached maturity.
Art is anything which invokes a sense of beauty in the observer.
So then what about art which is intended to be ugly, or disturbing, or shocking? What about A Clockwork Orange? What about art that really is not beautiful at all, just visually interesting, like much abstract postmodern art? Are you saying none of these are art, because none of them are beautiful?
To say that art is characterised by beauty is to invoke an obsolete (i.e. romantic/neoclassical) definition of art. Art involves far more than beauty and often it does not involve beauty at all. Your definition is too narrow.
Last time I checked that is what a movie does as well.
No, that is what a Hollywood movie does. Hollywood movies (and Bollywood movies, and movies made anywhere where movies are made by an industry that churns them out in an attempt to maximise profits) are not art, they are simply formulaic shit that is intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator. By contrast, many, many films have been made that are very much art; they may not be popular, and in America they are certainly lumped into the category of 'foreign/arthouse' if they are ever imported at all, but they represent the true possibility of the film medium. Do not insult cinema by associating it with Hollywood.
What's more irritating than people painting things as black and white is people taking everything literally and not being able to handle exaggeration. I personally use exaggeration to make a point--for example, I might say, 'Geeks have no social skills' when obviously I am exaggerating, there are of course some geeks with social skills, but that goes without saying. Similarly when someone writes an article that is not a serious journal article and paints things as black and white, they are usually doing so for dramatic effect, and it is your own fault for being pedantic and not realising this.
i didn't realise you were talking about married sex. thanks for the tip--one more reason for me never to get married..
Transport for London has had an online journey planner for a couple of years now where you can enter your starting location, time and destination and get directions using bus, underground, and mainline rail.
There are many, many cases of services that are answerable to and funded by a state and that are not subject to this kind of selective provision. Examples in the UK include the BBC and the NHS.
The way it works is that these services are managed not directly by politicians themselves, but by civil servants who are ultimately accountable to politicians, who are then ultimately accountable to the electorate. Because there is a public commitment that these services will be universally provided, and that no one can be excluded from them, there would be a public outcry if that were to happen, and that is why it doesn't happen. Governments work very well when the people do their job of holding governments accountable. It is mainly when people in government realise they will not be held accountable (for example, by an electorate which sees it as their 'patriotic duty' to support government policy whatever it may be) that government fails.
I imagine with wifi it would be quite easy to make a commitment not to exclude anyone. All you really have to do is allow anyone to access the network anonymously. If you're worried about government backtracking on this, well then it can be written into law which makes it harder for politicians to change, the same way the BBC charter is written into law.
I am not a liberal, and I want to help those who truly need it. There are certainly people out there who have the deck stacked against them and there is no reason we shouldn't collectively help them out.
But in the case of obesity, I really have a hard time believing that any more than a very small percentage of obese people actually have a disorder. If that was the case, then why has this 'disorder' only become a problem in the last 20 years or so? No. It is cultural/psychological.
The help these people need is therapy, cultural change, and to get off their arse and do something. Telling them they have a genetic predisposition will not help them at all. Pitying them will also not help them, it will only mean they respect themselves even less. The correct attitude to this problem is not, 'Oh, poor us, we are genetically predisposed to being fat', but rather 'We are going to get motivated to do something about it right now'.
I would gladly have tax money used to subsidise gym membership, nutrition education at school, and widespread bans on marketing of junk food. But ultimately it is the fat person's responsibility to solve their problem, regardless of any 'predisposition' that may or may not exist (the exception being the infintesimal percentage who actually have a disorder, and need medication--but there are so few of these that they are a completely different issue)
right. as if 10s of thousands have not died as a result of the abject poverty they are kept in by the feudal regime, not to mention the countless people victimised by the army and police every day, the journalists 'disappeared', tortured, etc. gyanendra should be tried for crimes against humanity. it's not just the maoists who think so now either--the political parties agree. hopefully soon gyanendra will be rotting in prison in the Republic of Nepal. sorry, you lose, fascist.
Dogmatic would be if the reporters adopted a bias toward one side of the story and stuck to it no matter who they interviewed. What British reporters--especially BBC reporters--do is treat everyone harshly. They try to put the interviewee under pressure in order to try to get them to defend their point of view. They play devil's advocate. In short, they do exactly what they ought to be doing: getting to the heart of the matter rather than simply let someone get away with saying things that others would challenge.
This is the same kind of culture that carries through to parliament, question time, etc., and it leads to a much healthier attitude toward government, authority, etc, i.e. one of scrutiny and unforgiveness. The way it should be.
Why quote the US constitution? The US is just one country out of 190, and its constitutional strictures don't inform us about universal human rights, only what rights are guaranteed by law in the US. If you want to talk about rights that have been agreed upon internationally, cite the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or if you want to argue that people have some kind of 'innate' right to freedom of association, then cite or argue philosophy. But a legal document pertaining to one particular country is of no relevance here.
Also being full and in the process of digestion causes your body temperature to rise, which makes you sleepy. Studies have been done that show that worker productivity generally falls in the hour or so after lunch and it is thought that this is because of sleepiness from increased body temperature.
Again, while we know that the San peoples were in sub-Saharan Africa prior to the Bantu migration, and their ancestors likely go back quite far in the past, we cannot conclude from this that there has been something we can classify as one long contiguous society going back some amount of time. Without a written history or a detailed knowledge of lifestyles 5000 years ago in the area, we cannot know how like or unlike San peoples today or 1500 years ago it was. It is a mistake to assume that there has been historical continuity over the millennia rather than the equally possible scenario that a great deal of (possibly dramatic) changes have occurred in San societies.
To live the same kind of lifestyle is not the same as to be the same society. Swedish people live a similar lifestyle to Norwegians and Danes (in many respects), and yet we class these as distinct societies. The same should go for tribal groups, including over time.
Hinduism is a body of religious and philosophical beliefs, as well as a family of cultural practices, but that is not the same as a society.
For example, would you say that Nepali Hindus are in the same society as Indian Hindus (bearing in mind that Nepali Hinduism is strongly mixed with Buddhism and older indigenous animistic religions)?
I also don't think it's defensible to say that the Indus Valley civilisation is just the same society as Indian society today, when the two are so dramatically different.
Let alone the fact that until outsiders (I believe it was Muslims but I'm not certain) applied the name 'Hindu' to people in India, there was not a concrete concept of Hinduism as a religion as opposed to simply the ways in which the various peoples of the subcontinent lived and the kinds of beliefs they had. After all, with the preponderance of sects, cults, philosophical schools, etc, it would be hard to define by anything other than 'family resemblance'. All of this is not to say it does not have a family resemblance; however that is a far cry from being one contiguous society.
In many ways Indian society as it exists today, in terms of its national borders as well as in terms of it social composition, is a direct result of its time under colonial rule, and has to be seen as a rather distinct, modern phenomenon, as compared with older societies that existed in India before. But even if we don't make such distinctions, I think it's silly to say that it's the same society as existed in the ancient Indus Valley. Particularly if the only criterion we use for this is that they share some amount of religious beliefs, which themselves have evolved greatly over the millennia (sure, we can say that Hindus are roughly all Vedic, but there is a lot of evolution that has gone on around that).
It is highly misleading to refer to Jews as forming some kind of global 'society'. They are a family of ethnic groups, religious beliefs, and cultures within which there is a great deal of variation. If you claim that e.g. orthodox Russian Jews are members of the same 'society' as reform Jews in New York or Ethiopian Jews etc then I think that is absurd. It's like saying that Catholic Americans of Irish descent who identify culturally as 'Irish' belong to the same society as people in Ireland. They share ethnicity, religion, and some cultural elements but it is not one society.
If on the other hand you are referring to ancient Jewish society, I think it is very difficult to classify this as one society as well. Many of the ancient societies in the Middle East including Semitic ones were tribal, and you cannot say they formed one big society for quite some time. Even if we take a very early date, like c. 1800 BC when the Bible apparently says that Abraham was born, that is less than 4000 years ago.
And there is no question that over the last 2000 years, Jews have been spread to the four corners of the world and no longer constitute anything like one society, if they ever did.
China is commonly estimated to have been unified around 2000 years ago, with records existing of (possibly concurrent) kingdoms in China going back to possibly 2000 BC.
Before and maybe during this time, there existed city states and small settlements, which given the size of the landmass were likely to be linguistically, culturally and ethnically diverse.
If you call that kind of entity a society contiguous with unified China, then you might as well call pre-historic Europe a society contiguous with the Roman Empire. However I think it makes more sense to make the distinction, and say that what we think of as Chinese civilisation today dates back either 2000 or at most 3500-4000 years.
Name any society that has survived more than 4000 years ever.
I assume what you mean by 'society' is not an ethnic group but a kind of recognisable contiguous social formation. Even this is hard to define--for example, did British society as we know it today begin in the dark ages, did it begin 1000 years ago or is it really so fundamentally different now to what it was then that we can't call it the same society?
But even if we forget this difficulty and just go by conventional definitions, for things like the Roman Empire or ancient Egypt, I think you would be hard pressed to find any society that has ever lasted more than 4000 years. For example, ancient Egypt as we think of it, i.e. as a unified state/civilisation, lasted from approximately 3200 BC to 332 BC, i.e. less than 3000 years. And despite the old European myth of an 'ancient Africa', most of the sub-Saharan African societies that existed at the time of colonisation were largely the result of migration of Bantu peoples starting in approximately the 2nd millennium BC making these societies at the very most 4000 years old, but in reality because of the lack of written history we have know way of knowing if there was much historical continuity in them at all, as opposed to changing through many phases.
The idea of civilisations that exist in recognisable form for very long periods of time is a myth. Human society is inherently unstable. Tribal groups as much as other kinds of society often destroy each other, or destroy the environment on which they depend through overexploitation. As far as anyone knows, there has just never really been a time when there have been societies that have lasted much more than 4000 years, and even the 3000 years of the Egyptian state is based on a very loose definition of a society when you consider the changes that occurred in Egyptian history.
Don't mean to nitpick, but if you are trying to claim that religion holds societies together for many thousands of years, I don't think the case can be argued on that basis.
But what is the point of throwing your weight behind a president you don't support? Why not do what people in a lot of other countries would do, and do whatever you can to make it impossible for him to govern? It seems to me that there is this myth that even if what they do is completely reprehensible to you, it is somehow serving the greater good of the country to let them get on with it rather than trying to actually play hardball in politics.
As far as I can tell most of your criticisms add up to 'UN bodies do something, but they do not do enough'. No one is arguing that the UN should be able to solve all the world's problems. The point is that they make a positive difference.
Of course that difference is commensurate with the political will of the member states--it cannot go beyond that, otherwise the UN loses its neutrality and its representative nature. That is where other organisations, like regional organisations, NGOs, the private sector, and individual governments have to step in to fill the gap. It is a natural limitation of a neutral organisation intended to represent everyone.
It also means that where there is not the political will to carry out particular projects, the UN cannot succeed--as you point out, WHO's malaria eradication campaign, or their attempts to wipe out polio e.g. in West Africa lately. But what is it you are saying? That because they cannot work miracles or solve problems perfectly, they should not exist? Regardless of the fact that WHO have not eradicated malaria or polio, they have contributed to reducing them, along with a variety of other diseases (e.g. leprosy). The same argument can be extended to the other bodies.
I don't really see your point.
But this is one of the deep contradictions in the American mentality. On the one hand, they don't trust government as an abstract concept, but on the other hand, they believe in unquestioning allegiance to their government in all but exceptional cases (now is maybe an exceptional case). So for example, when there is a contested presidential election, rather than doing the logical thing and trying to work out who really won, even the opposition just says 'We have to respect him, he's our president now'. Because somehow, even though the government is the bad guy, it's also the great protecting patriotic good guy.
I think what's really at issue is that they don't trust things they don't understand, and they don't much understand other countries, let alone the UN. Particularly because the UN works on the basis of a co-operative mentality, whereas the American ideology of international relations works on the basis of an 'every man for himself' mentality.
No. If a bunch of governments get together and sign a treaty that says, 'We are all going to collect a tax on currency transactions within our own borders and then contribute it to a common fund', that does not constitute the formation of a government. Because it is a treaty, it is consensual, and they can pull out of it without anyone starting a war against them. And because there is no uber-government behind the agreement, no 'world police' or 'world army' are going to come in and 'enforce' the treaty.
The international community, including the International Court of Justice, works on the principle that most states see it as being in their long term interest to play by the rules (the US does not generally see it this way but they are an exception). It does not work on the basis that there is going to be some big organised force enforcing agreements--as is the case when there is a government. The two are completely different.
I'm sure you only called the UN a 'world government' as a rhetorical device, but unfortunately there are those who actually believe it is some kind of world government so the point sometimes need reinforcing.
The UN is an international organisation. It was never intended to be a government, it doesn't function as one. It is a (mostly) consensus-based body, because the point is that it is intended to be completely neutral and express the combined will of the countries of the world.
Before you tell me how the UN is pointless, just remember how many millions of people depend every day on the vital work of WHO (eradicated smallpox, takes care of outbreaks of diseases, etc), UNHCR (cares for literally millions of refugees), UNDP (funds vital development projects), WFP (delivers food aid to famine stricken areas), FAO (source of co-operation on agricultural development), UNIDO (shares technical knowledge for industrial development), UNEP (monitors environmental damage and provides expertise for solving environmental problems), UNESCO (funding restoration of cultural sites, making research grants etc). Not to mention all the others like ILO, UNICEF, ICJ, ICC, etc.
All that is what the UN does, and they do it in a way that no one else can. Why? Because they represent neutrality, they represent the authority of the peoples of the world, and by and large they do a damned good job of carrying out their mandate.
And then there's the General Assembly, which of course is a talking shop, but it's better to have a talking shop than none at all--it's a place for opinions to get aired, and a place for the international community to express its opinions.
NONE of this is any kind of 'world government'. It is the governments of the world, getting together to co-operate on solving some of humanity's biggest problems, and trying to work out their differences without having to resort to conflict. And while the headline-grabbing events are when this doesn't work (like with Iraq), the vast majority of the time it is actually very effective--you just don't see it on FOX News.
Now, you can be extremely dogmatic and tell me that anything done by anyone that isn't in the name of private enterprise is doomed to fail. But I challenge you to show how private enterprise would have filled all of the vital functions that the aforementioned UN agencies have filled over the last 50 years. And no, this is not a question of 'If you had waited long enough, the market would have done it'. Any longer wait and more people would have died of smallpox; any longer wait for refugee camps to be built and people die of cholera. And of course, there's not really any profit to be made in these situations anyway. That's when the international community simply says 'Right, let's solve it'. Consensually.
Now take a time-out and go sit in the corner. You'd better behave or the terrorists will get you!