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I'm not praising anything. Yes US foreign policy sucks. I'm pointing out historically a balance of power has been even worse. There are too many possible points

I'm not praising anything. Yes US foreign policy sucks. I'm pointing out historically a balance of power has been even worse. There are too many possible points of failure. Discuss with your favorite frontier LLM. Ideally idk I'd like a much stronger UN or something, with federal power over member states.

lazide 1y ago
Who would run such a UN? And why wouldn’t they be worse - and what would you be able to do about it, if they were? And don’t forget, regardless of the title, for anything to get done there inevitably is one man who is making decisions/breaking ties somewhere. I can’t think of anyone that the various factions could actually trust to do that without screwing over at least (or more!) half of them.
- Herring 1y ago
  Who runs your local police force? What do you do if they suck? It's really not that hard to implement a good setup, but yeah the hard part is convincing multiple countries to give up a bit of sovereignty. Might take another world war.
  - lazide 1y ago
    If my local police force sucks, they impact me and the other local voters, so they tend to be somewhat easy to fix (as long as we can all agree they suck). Or at least I only have my fellow local idiots to blame. What happens when the person who chose them is in Beijing, and everyone in my entire country doesn’t want them there? But they still got a global majority? Typically that’s the kind of thing a lot of people die over.
    - Herring 1y ago
      Yeah multiply this situation x1M and you understand why a balance of power is unstable. To make a civilized society work, people can't pull out guns when they disagree. You sue, or you figure out how to communicate/negotiate, or you just live with it. Any of those are better than war, and a good setup will have plenty of avenues like that.
      - lazide 1y ago
        I think we both have wildly different life experiences. The only way a real UN would work is with even more violence. The ‘under the boot forever’ type. The world would need a Qin to have even half a chance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang]. Because what happens - when like the US is now discovering - the courts are useless? And you don’t even have your own guns to protect your rights?and what someone else has decided to do is your destruction?
        Herring 1y ago
        Did you ever find it weird that it's the pro-gun pro-rights republicans that are attacking the courts? Americans have some very weird thinking over guns. I think if they were taken away, they'd have to work harder at getting along with other people (esp women, minorities, china), and therefore get better at it. It's really not a coincidence that it's the pro-gun Americans who killed Roe v Wade. Their ancestors owned slaves. They love to say it's about "rights", but it's clearly not.
        lazide 1y ago
        The courts don’t work in China or Russia either. It doesn’t surprise me that those capable (and willing!) of defending themselves would rugpull everyone else if it gave them what they wanted. What surprises me is how everyone else sits back and lets them and refuses to actually take action to defend themselves, while going ‘woe is me, why won’t anyone do something’. And acting surprised that the people they’ve been screaming are going to do bad things actually do bad things. It’s embarrassing. Just like you are apparently advocating for a dictator to ‘save us’, from…. ourselves? Or something? At least the Trumpers are transparently doing it for personal gain, near as I can tell you’re just doing it for some kind of do gooder fantasy? They tend to be even worse, in practice.
        Herring 1y ago
        Read the article. The world moves on & paths around damage. At the end of the day Trump won the popular vote. This country has been headed that way for a long time - http://web.archive.org/web/20210723035356/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/how-stop-minority-rule-doom-loop/618536/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210723035356/https://www.theatl... Americans won't listen to sense, so it's a lot easier to move to Europe than to start another Civil War. And for the record I'm advocating something like a worldwide federal system. You think that's a dictatorship because that's how your mind works. There are hundreds of good examples, but you tunnel vision on two exceptions. Nothing I can do about that bit of damage except to move on from this conversation.

lazide 1y ago

Who would run such a UN? And why wouldn’t they be worse - and what would you be able to do about it, if they were? And don’t forget, regardless of the title, for anything to get done there inevitably is one man who is making decisions/breaking ties somewhere. I can’t think of anyone that the various factions could actually trust to do that without screwing over at least (or more!) half of them.

Herring 1y ago
Who runs your local police force? What do you do if they suck? It's really not that hard to implement a good setup, but yeah the hard part is convincing multiple countries to give up a bit of sovereignty. Might take another world war.
- lazide 1y ago
  If my local police force sucks, they impact me and the other local voters, so they tend to be somewhat easy to fix (as long as we can all agree they suck). Or at least I only have my fellow local idiots to blame. What happens when the person who chose them is in Beijing, and everyone in my entire country doesn’t want them there? But they still got a global majority? Typically that’s the kind of thing a lot of people die over.
  - Herring 1y ago
    Yeah multiply this situation x1M and you understand why a balance of power is unstable. To make a civilized society work, people can't pull out guns when they disagree. You sue, or you figure out how to communicate/negotiate, or you just live with it. Any of those are better than war, and a good setup will have plenty of avenues like that.
    - lazide 1y ago
      I think we both have wildly different life experiences. The only way a real UN would work is with even more violence. The ‘under the boot forever’ type. The world would need a Qin to have even half a chance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang]. Because what happens - when like the US is now discovering - the courts are useless? And you don’t even have your own guns to protect your rights?and what someone else has decided to do is your destruction?
      - Herring 1y ago
        Did you ever find it weird that it's the pro-gun pro-rights republicans that are attacking the courts? Americans have some very weird thinking over guns. I think if they were taken away, they'd have to work harder at getting along with other people (esp women, minorities, china), and therefore get better at it. It's really not a coincidence that it's the pro-gun Americans who killed Roe v Wade. Their ancestors owned slaves. They love to say it's about "rights", but it's clearly not.
        lazide 1y ago
        The courts don’t work in China or Russia either. It doesn’t surprise me that those capable (and willing!) of defending themselves would rugpull everyone else if it gave them what they wanted. What surprises me is how everyone else sits back and lets them and refuses to actually take action to defend themselves, while going ‘woe is me, why won’t anyone do something’. And acting surprised that the people they’ve been screaming are going to do bad things actually do bad things. It’s embarrassing. Just like you are apparently advocating for a dictator to ‘save us’, from…. ourselves? Or something? At least the Trumpers are transparently doing it for personal gain, near as I can tell you’re just doing it for some kind of do gooder fantasy? They tend to be even worse, in practice.
        Herring 1y ago
        Read the article. The world moves on & paths around damage. At the end of the day Trump won the popular vote. This country has been headed that way for a long time - http://web.archive.org/web/20210723035356/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/how-stop-minority-rule-doom-loop/618536/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210723035356/https://www.theatl... Americans won't listen to sense, so it's a lot easier to move to Europe than to start another Civil War. And for the record I'm advocating something like a worldwide federal system. You think that's a dictatorship because that's how your mind works. There are hundreds of good examples, but you tunnel vision on two exceptions. Nothing I can do about that bit of damage except to move on from this conversation.