No Place

Oh yeah, I still have one of these things, don’t I? The annoying thing about it is that it really doesn’t take long to write something. I mean, I just write the first rubbish that pops into my head, it’s not like I actually think about this stuff. And I actually enjoy writing things like this. Every time I do a post, I think I should do them way more often. Then... I don’t. Not really sure why. Just one of those things, I suppose, like how I occasionally get distracted by tinsel*.

Well, actually, there does exist a non-negligible subset of what I write that I simply get rid of because I’m not satisfied with it**. A big thing is that I generally disagree entirely with about 90% of what I write. Make of that what you will.

Well, that had nothing to do with anything, what other complete irrelevancies can I put in? Ooh, ooh, fox news on asexuals. I’d put in a link but I don’t think I really need to. It was about a month ago, but I really do think it’s worth mentioning.

Actually, it wasn’t too bad. Considering. If you are going to find and watch it, try a fun little game I’ve suggested before – imagine they’re talking about gay people. Remember, you translate no matter what tone someone’s talking in. So if someone makes a joke about how asexuals could be cured by their divine lovemaking, translate it into how they could bang the queer right out of that lesbian bitch. But said as a joke. Because that makes it better.

In fact, here’s a nice conversion chart for the things that don’t convert perfectly. It’s not perfect, but it’s a first attempt (I haven’t included things that can be translated with what I regard as no effort. So ‘we’ve had to invent this asexuality’*** comes out as ‘we’ve had to invent this homosexuality’)

What people say about asexuals	What they might say if they were talking about homosexuals.
All women are asexual	Well, you know how straight women love to experiment with each other. They’re not really lesbians, it’s just a way to lure in guys.
Asexual men are just a miscategorisation. They aren’t as hypersexed and objectifying as the social stereotype, so everyone (including themselves) ends up thinking they’re asexual.	Homosexual men are just a miscategorisation. They find it easier to make friends with guys, and they’re more comfortable around guys, so everyone (including themselves) assumes it’s a sexual thing.
Asexuals are represented. They had a slot on SNL/brasseye.	This is a straight translation, I’d just like you to imagine that level of representation for gay people  being defined as OK. I could probably find a hundred mainstream works with an open homosexual. I challenge you to find ten works not originally published on AVEN in which there’s an open ace.
There’s no interesting way of representing asexuals in the media. You’d just have to take out all the sexual content and it would be boring because there is no advertising technique that marketers could use that doesn’t involve offensively objectifying women****.	There’s no interesting way of representing gay people in the media. After all, there’s no way you could possibly have a gay character on television. That’s just ludicrous. The only thing that you could possibly do is have people selling things using attractive men instead of attractive women in advertising.
Asexuality must be great, you have so much more time to focus on other things.	Lesbianism must be great, because female-female relationships are so much purer, and they don’t have any power imbalances.
You’re just a late bloomer/you’re afraid to get close to other people/have you had your hormones checked/You won’t be happy as an asexual person/ you should try Viagra/you have issues with your parents/anything else which indicates that asexual people are really just repressed, neurotic, impotent, etc.	The Freudian view on homosexuality is the best parallel I can think of.
You must want to have sex with something/so you’re into trees.	There’s no such thing as homosexuality.
How do you know if you’ve never tried it?	Have you ever had sex with a guy/girl?
You’re just a closeted gay.	You’re straight really
You’re still going to get married and have children.	Sure you can be gay. Just do anything silly about it, like getting married and having children.

OK, that’s all I can think of right now. And/or all I can be bothered to do. So let’s talk about something more interesting. World government. Where the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were ful’d in the parliament of man, the federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, and the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

That didn’t actually have any relevance whatsoever to... anything, actually. But I really like Tennyson. The argument for World government is pretty simple, but it requires an understanding of social contract theory. I’ve done social contract theory before, but I feel like giving my explanation of Hobbes’ theory on it, because I can. I’ll put it all in one paragraph, so if you don’t want it, just skip the next paragraph. OK?

Still here? OK, then Hobbes. Imagine that everyone is given a stick. But not everyone’s stick is the same size. So, obviously, if someone else has something you want, and their stick is smaller than yours, you can just beat them with your stick and take it from them. But then you start to get worried. What if someone with an even bigger stick comes and takes your stuff? You won’t be able to do anything about it, because when someone’s swinging a tree at you, trying to hold them off with a branch is generally pretty ineffective. And even if you have the biggest stick of all, other people might gang up on you, in order to divvy up your stuff amongst themselves, and no matter how big your stick, you can’t take them all at once. Or they could take you by surprise, making your stick useless. Something has to be done. And everyone agrees that something has to be done – all of them are at risk. So you come to an agreement, saying this is what’s mine, this is what’s yours, and that noone is going to beat up anyone else. But you don’t have a way of enforcing that agreement, there’s no reason for people to actually follow it. You want other people to follow it, but no reason to follow it yourself. Which means that the whole agreement is really rather pointless. What we need is someone to enforce it. So we set up one person (or a group) as our ruler, and we all give them a little bit of stick, and we put it all together, so that they have a big enough stick to stop anyone from breaking the agreement. They can’t take advantage themselves, because their power derives from being given bits of everyone else’s sticks, and because if everyone ganged up on them, they would still be overwhelmed. And it’s in everyone’s interests to keep them in power unless they are misusing their power. So we end up with a government which, whatever else you might say about it, is better than the anarchy which we had before.

The thing is, there’s a pretty good metaphor here for the world. You model states as individual people. The problem is, what we don’t have is any kind of agreed power that each state has given up individual bits of its power to. Which means that we’re effectively stuck in the state of nature – war of all against all. By which I don’t mean that we’re literally at war with each other, exactly. I mean that countries manoeuvre constantly in order to get themselves as much benefit as possible, regardless of the effects on other countries. Or, in other words, ‘the first duty of any government is to its citizens’. In the absence of anything central to act as an authority, some balances have sprung up.

Firstly, there’s the fact that the most major powers might try to introduce themselves as such a central authority. Which has a nasty habit of going incredibly wrong, since you don’t have the consent of the governed, and you don’t have any agreement that everyone has accepted to govern according to. There tend to be other problems too, but that alone is enough to completely destroy any chanced they might’ve had of actually making things work, since either they’re not strong enough to police all of the rest of the world, or there’s noone strong enough to be any use in policing them. You really do need some kind of agreement, or it’s just not going to work – there’s a qualitative difference between everyone agreeing to act a certain way, and one person imposing upon them that they do so.

Then there’s the actual international governing bodies that are set up. Like the ICHR and the UN. They have, in some ways the opposite problem, in that they quite simply don’t have enough power. Everyone’s willing to agree that war is, in fact, quite probably A Bad Thing, people will agree on what the UN should do (broadly speaking, not specifics), but noone’s willing to actually give them any significant part of their sticks in order to allow them to do so.

Thirdly, you have a sort of balance of power thing. Noone really wants anyone to beat up too many other people, for the simple reason that if they do, they’ll get stronger, and then they might be able to beat us up (or just give us a bloody nose, make our lives a bit harder). This is probably the closest thing we do have to a working social contract thing, but it’s not really a good parallel. The problem is, it’s not the enforcement of a set of principles, it’s an expression of self interest. And it’s messy. You can slip through the cracks pretty easily. It tones down the level of the constant war, but there is no doubt at all that people are still at war.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with the enforcement of ethics by populations of countries. Now, to some extent, this is something that happens. People do to some extent enforce some kind of ethics on people. The problem here is perspective. You can distort things a lot with how you present the information – for example, the whole ‘Israel vs. Palestine’ issue. And even if there’s no spin, with the best will in the world people do not seem to care as much about the people who’re half a world away as those who’re next door. Or the ones who’re related to them. So we end up with things like the death of a single American soldier in Afghanistan – the death of someone who actually chose to risk their lives – is far more significant than the death of a completely innocent Afghan, who didn’t even get the choice of taking that risk. You end up with the rather weird attitude that some Americans have towards the IRA.

That was a bit of a warlike analysis. So let’s look at something a little more general. Benefits, let’s say. There are three reasons to give benefits that I can think of. Firstly, to keep the plebs happy, and the country stable. For some reason, noone seems to admit that this is the sole reason they’re  willing to waste their hard earned money helping out those layabout plebs. So next we’ve got the idea that it’s actually an investment. That social mobility is increased, and so the economy benefits enough that actually the benefits outweigh the cost of the benefits. That people are encouraged to spend more, and not be chronic savers*****. The problem is, that’s not really how the benefits system seems to be set up. I can think of a lot of arguments in favour of Universal healthcare^†.  That it would improve the economy is not, as far as I’m aware, one that has ever actually been used. The fact is that, although you do need a safety net, benefits exist which, it is generally agreed, we could probably cut a bit without damaging the economy (especially when you do things like cut taxes and encourage enterprise with the extra cash). And the fact is, our attitude towards it is completely wrong. The benefits system is quite simply not conducted on the basis of the idea that we should spend as little as possible to get the most economic benefit. Plus, the way people complain when you cut their benefits, they don’t seem to think that they were just there to help the economy. Which leaves us with one option: The idea that there is some kind of universal ‘minimum acceptable standard of living’. In which case, why on earth are we only giving benefits to people in our own country? It’s completely insane. There’s only one possible explanation – the minimum standard of living only applies to the people in this country. Those foreign bastards can just starve. Let them improve their own lot – I hear Swift had some suggestions there, actually.

In other words, we quite clearly can’t rely on citizen’s ethics, because even though they probably do genuinely care about what the right thing to do is, and helping other people, they also have a bit of trouble with the distance between ‘small’ and ‘far away’^††. My pain is more important than your pain, and the closer pain is to me, the worse it is. If we’re actually suffering from preventing the government from beating people with a stick, the rights of others suddenly seem a lot less important.

So we get countries with no central authority to control them, and constantly jockeying for position, very nearly regardless of what damage they do to other countries in the process. And things which are utterly unthinkable on a national scale with a government are now unthinkable without one. For example, if someone murders your wife, starting a large gang war in which hundreds die is probably not an acceptable response. If Archduke Franz-Ferdinand is killed, however, starting World War I seems to be... not reasonable enough, but a lot less of a problem. Even if someone goes on a random killing spree, admits to it, and then says they’re going to do it again, in a state with a police force, a revenge killing would still probably be frowned upon.  On an international scale, though, we have, for example, the War on Terror, and Operation Cast Lead.

I’m not commenting on the morality of these actions, exactly. There is a lack of a central authority, and that does change things. I’m saying that things happen on the international stage which wouldn’t on a national one. Killing, for example, is pretty uncommon one citizen to another, where it’s called murder, and pretty common one state to another, where it’s called war. The argument is that the changes brought by a central world government that does have some authority over all states would be, on average, advantageous.

Hmmm, I seem to have run out of stuff to say. Oh well. This was actually pretty hard to write. I now remember why when I was starting ‘On Democracy’ was split into parts. Part 2 of this will be about what a world government might look like, but that nearly three thousand words is all you’re getting for now.

*To be fair, though, it’s so shiny.

**And anyone who’s read what I’ve actually been willing to show people before can guess what that must be like.

***Actual. Bloody. Quote.

****What representation of asexual could you have that might be interesting and produce conflict? Well, just to state the most blindingly obvious thing I could possibly think of, how about sexual/asexual relationships? You don’t think there’s a little conflict there? There’s a lot more stuff I could come up with, including asexuality actually existing without being a major part of the plot, but if you really want an easy, obvious plot that I’m pretty sure just bout anyone should be able to come up with and write, there it is. Have fun.

*****This is, apparently, a massive problem in China at the moment, in that absolutely everyone is saving for a rainy day, since they don’t have a safety net. So noone is spending, and, well, you can just see what a complete mess the Chinese economy is at the moment.7

^†And, to be fair, a lot of arguments against it too, but that’s not really relevant right now.

^††Yes, I just put the intelligence of the citizenship on par with that of Dougal McGuire. It’s amazing the confidence I have in people, isn’t it?