Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 April 1
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April 1 edit
Does World Government Summit imply (unwittingly) a World Government? edit
Does the expression 'World Government Summit' have two possible reasonable parsings?
- (World Government) Summit, that is, a summit for the world government.
or
- World (Government Summit), an international summit about governance
Is the syntax ambiguous here? --Bumptump (talk) 22:36, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
- As the definition of summit is "an international meeting of heads of state or government", then probably not. If there were such a thing as a World Government, presumably somebody would have to be the head of state, who wouldn't need to attend a summit with him or herself. Alansplodge (talk) 23:00, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
- Well, it could be where the illuminati, Bilderberg Group, Freemasons, Jews and neo-Nazis meet to further their program. --Bumptump (talk) 00:16, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
- FWIW, where does this opposition to global governance come from? Whenever I looked deeply into it, the people who opposed it all seemed to be either religious fundamentalist fanatics, members of the John Birch Society, or free market fundamentalists who want zero regulation and no taxes. These people represent less than 1% of the planet yet they are standing in the way of social and political process. Why are the smallest minorities allowed to stand in the way of progress? Viriditas (talk) 08:36, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
- I mustn't WP:SOAPBOX, but diversity is vital for evolution, and I kind of expected that some academic would have raised this point in regard to the idea of a having single monoculture world government (though global governance seems to be a slightly different thing). Hence my question on the Humanities desk at the moment, inspired by this one. Card Zero (talk) 09:39, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
- FWIW, where does this opposition to global governance come from? Whenever I looked deeply into it, the people who opposed it all seemed to be either religious fundamentalist fanatics, members of the John Birch Society, or free market fundamentalists who want zero regulation and no taxes. These people represent less than 1% of the planet yet they are standing in the way of social and political process. Why are the smallest minorities allowed to stand in the way of progress? Viriditas (talk) 08:36, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
- It seemed such a good idea... What could go wrong? Global governance is only meaningful if there is some way of exerting pressure on concerned parties to bring them "in line", some (hopefully mild) form of coercion. Democracy is fragile, and the distribution of power in this world is unequal, between individuals and between state actors. Great power is not always used for the greater good. Global governance can be beneficial as long as it is democratically controlled and applied in a generous spirit of international solidarity, but there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. Absent international solidarity, it tends to consolidate or even increase power inequality. In the worst case, it could even devolve into an instrument in the hands of authoritarian world powers. Conversely, (justly applied) global governance is not necessarily in the best self-perceived interest of the most privileged, who may oppose any tendency towards more justice. Paranoia may play a role in the opposition, but, as the saying goes, just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get us. --Lambiam 11:42, 2 April 2022 (UTC)