The above story is about the Syrian civil war where children are being used as human shields, being raped, tortured, and murdered. Not cool right? If only we had an international body comprised of many countries around the world that we could use to put pressure on Syria to stop the violence. That would be easy right? Throw a few sanctions at them, maybe they will realize that being isolated in the world is a bad thing.
Well naturally being the good moral people that we are we tried exactly that. Unfortunately the United Nations is a giant bag of fuck. You see they have 193 member countries, and of those 15 are on the Security Council. Ten of those serve two year terms on a rotational basis and five are permanent members. The five permanent members are: The United States, The United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. These five members all have veto power.
I'll let that sink in for a minute.
Got it? No? Ok one more minute...
Ready? Good. So we have the United Nations whose job it is to make the world a wonderful place. We have a Security Council to make sure when some stupid country acts a fool, we slap their dick. Well that becomes difficult when you have five members with veto power, especially when some of the countries are diametrically opposed to one another. I could go on and on giving past examples of why this is stupid, or even just break it down logically, but then you would forget about the story up top about the Syrian civil war where children are being raped and tortured. So I will give you here the bottom paragraph from that story to chew on:
The US and UK have refused to rule out military intervention but appear wary of entering another conflict as they attempt to exit Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia and China have constantly warned against foreign interference and have already vetoed two UN security council resolutions that threatened sanctions against the Assad regime.
Take your time. Read it a couple times if need be. Russia and China refuse to even threaten Syria with sanctions! We are not even talking about invading or bombing, we are talking along the lines of stopping the exporting of goods to Syria. Yet Russia and China use their veto power to prevent us from doing even that.
Here is where some people get divided, including myself. Some people feel that as the last remaining "super power" (though I would argue China should be considered a super power) we should use our power to help those who cannot help themselves. Others think we should leave the world alone and concentrate more on helping our own people. I am somewhat a fan of both schools of thought. I feel that if we are going to exert our influence around the globe, we should gain from it in a much more direct form (read: yay imperialism!), however I also like to think that if a bunch of people still basing their lives on societal norms from the 10th Century want to kill each other, let 'er buck! The more of them that die, the less people there are to continue to threaten the security of every other person on Earth.
Since America has grown a big floppy vagina in the last half century or so, we are forced to reap the benefits of our global "big-brother-ness" in much more subtle or indirect ways. It is essentially political correctness on a global scale and it is bullshit.
Our continued allowance of Russia and China to stand in the way of sanctions on shitty countries (Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc...) is a tacit agreement to allow evil to flourish.
It is all fun and games until you see stuff like this. ^
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