... paying into an established international fund to finance a world government ...
They tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Didn't work.
Money was a serious problem yes, but the real problem was that they tried to have basically thirteen sovereign countries, and at the same time a national government,
The taxation power is intrinsic to the question of sovereignty. You cannot claim sovereignty in any practical, meaningful sense if you cannot tax. The two go hand-in-hand.
So the response is to insist that Islam has nothing to do with the problems that Islamists present us with,
I contend that Islam has has much to do with the problem of Islamism as Catholicism had to do with the problems of Fascism and Nazism, or that Atheism had to do with the problems of Soviet Communism, or that Protestantism had to do with the problems of American or South African apartheid.
That is to say: All cultures and religions carry within them the potential for authoritarianism, and most tend to have periods in history when they fall into it; none of them are special.
and to ignore any study whose results are not politically correct.
The concept is self-evidently absurd and racist on its face.
It is also based on
incompatible sets of data, which is basic to establishing scientific credibility.
And that's to say nothing of the
more fundamental problem with trying to "measure" intelligence -- as though it were some linear, ordinal trait like height -- in the first pace.
The great Stephen Jay Gould once criticized "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status."
If you're truly interested in objectivity, you gotta be asking yourself: Is this about being "P.C.," or is this about justifying privilege and oppression? Is this about the facts, or is it about trying to legitimize the current international social structure?
Is this about truth, or is this about power?
I don't think anyone has argued that the world is ready for a united government yet. Even those of us who would favor it generally argue it's a long-term goal to be reached after many social changes.
That's good enough for me.
A prime example of the sorts of things that have to change for a United Earth to come about would be the sorts of xenophobic and prejudiced statements you have made.
Except of course you can never, ever, be sure when a political conservative is being honest about what he or she wants, since truth is not a moral value for them.
That's false. But I guess you have to launch an
ad hominem attack when the facts aren't there for you.
No one who actually tries to argue that an entire nation of people can be smarter or dumber than others has any business making this response. Yours, sir, was the ultimate in
ad hominem attacks.
But, there again, I consider statements of yours like this:
And even then, my concerns stand about a too-distant government, responsive to so many billions of people that it would not reflect our culture, and might spend much of its energy transferring wealth from my part of the world to somebody else's in a grand leveling scheme.
And all I can think conclude, when I consider your attempts to assert that some people are "smarter" than "those" people, is that
stj was right:
A disunited Earth, so that war and poverty can preserve the privileges of a few? No thanks!
(Except of course you can never, ever, be sure when a political conservative is being honest about what he or she wants, since truth is not a moral value for them.)
