this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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The US has supported or started many pointless wars, but that we have never negotiated for peace or avoided war is not accurate. One example is that the US, as part of the UN, participates in peacekeeping efforts across the world.
So, you know that 'one world government' is a thing that terrifies a lot of religious conservatives because they think it means the antichrist and the end of the world, right? The language thing is difficult too. From what i recall the most common language worldwide is Spanish, with 2.5-3 billion people speaking it, which means 5 billion or so people would have to learn Spanish, or we'd have to pick some other language and even more people would have to learn that. (EDIT: oops, English is #1 followed by Mandarin. I somehow confused Spanish with Catholicism)
I agree that nationalism is harmful, but overall it would be very, very difficult to persuade every country in the world to give up their language and national identity. Also, as central planning doesn't work very well, any world government would have to be segmented to provide effective governance for regions, which would mean basically... like now... each region has it's own government.
Most likely the reasonable thing to do would be to try to encourage countries to work together peacefully, rather than try to abolish nations.
Is the most common language really Spanish? I thought it might be Mandarin.
Yeah, I looked it up and I am way off! It’s actually…. (drumroll) English at about 19% followed by Mandarin with 13, then Hindi at about 8%.
You mean to tell me that 60% of the world speaks “other”?
Apparently. Here is a list, sourced from the CIA World Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
The top 10 add up to about 65%, with the last several having about a 3.5% share each.
I think the scariest thing about a world government isn’t some daft prophecy about the antichrist but that if it turned tyrannical there’d be very little anyone could do about it. Power inevitably corrupts and to say otherwise is wishful thinking; we’d have created the ultimate power and therefore the ultimate source of corruption, imagine the world government underwent a palace coup and we ended up with a regime like Stalin’s or Mussolini’s but you couldn’t even flee it as a refugee or hope for foreign intervention.
Balances of power rather than monopolies on it are probably best in my opinion.
Esperanto enters the chat, saying things no one understands