the Vagaries of Governing Governments

Friday, July 23, 2004


Another great page I've recently been introduced to:

http://www.upalliance.org/

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Great!  Sweet!  Nobody is ever deprived of their self-evident human rights again!  What a wonderful world!  We'd all better go join up!

What I think is great is that the Bill of Rights she proposes (which is never actually spelled out) is pretty much exactly like the one in the Constitution.  So we're obviously not getting anything new here.  The great new concept is that instead of only applying these Rights to the denizens of any one nation, they want to apply them to everyone in the world.

Here's the cool part.  What none of them seem to realize is that all these machinations are already in place.  There's a UN that's trying to call everybody's bluffs.  There's a World Court that's trying to keep everybody in line.

If they'd had the forethought to look around the world a little, they'd see that everything they propose already exists.  People (of course) have already come up with these ideas and are desperately trying to get them to work.  Only, you know, it's a little tough to get TWENTY BILLION people to all agree on anything, so they're having a rough go of it.  So a few people came up with the most ambiguous name they could, Universal Planetary Alliance, and after watching Enemy of the State and Conspiracy Theory, decided that national governments are just all evil and bent on power, and they have to go.  They don't care about human rights.  We've got to create a group that keeps these governments in line!

But then wait... they say they don't want One World Government?  Cause that would have too much power, and EEWW!! 1984! (cause really, who gets tired of referencing that book?  Nobody!) One World government would have too much control over everybody!

"Individuals, defending their own individual rights, are the only assurance against various forms of Coercive Collectivism..."  But what happens when you get a ton of individuals together to form a group that ensures the safety of all people within a given geographical area?  That's the very definition of a government... you hacks.

That's right, I busted out the personal slams.  Hacks!!

So instead of One World Government, instead of putting our shoulders down and making all these constitutions work the way they should, let's instead create an organization that goes around the entire globe and has power over all those governments.  Cause I'm sure we can get all the nations of the world to agree to be policed by this one group based in the mountains of Colorado.  One World Government would have too much centralized power, but ours won't.  We promise.  Cause we're based in the mountains of Colorado.

Instead of fixing what we have, we'll just create another agency to monitor.


And their mystical opponents... "Various Anti-Liberty People."  They've reared their ugly heads again!  Many people may not know this, but Various Anti-Liberty People are really behind all of the world's evils.  They're so secret that they cannot be referred to in any speech or statement except by that vague title!

Who hates Liberty?  Are there any Anti-Liberty groups anywhere?  Has anyone ever met a person who publishes flyers that say stuff like "I really need an oppressor!  I want someone to restrict my thoughts!  I want somebody to tell me what I can and can't do!  I want to be thrown in jail for no reason!"  Nobody says that shit.  Whenever a person or a group can't figure out what the problem is, they blame it on people who hate freedom or who are professed Anti-Liberty activists.

They post a couple of quotes on the page: one great one is from George W. Bush- "There ought to be limits to freedom."

I'm sure that's all he said!  I have no doubt that this sentence wasn't ripped from the middle of a speech and taken completely out of context!  I'm sure that he just jumped out of the chopper, saddled on up to the nearest reporter, poked a finger in his eye and drooled out "There ought to be limits to freedom!"  It's interesting that all the quotes they have bashing freedom are one sentence long, while all the quotes they have upholding their cause are a paragraph or more.  Gee, why's that?

They also have a great quote of Thomas Jefferson's they incorrectly attribute to Thomas Paine.  I think, though, it's very revealing that their explanation of what "Rightful Rights" are is just a giant page full of quotes.


It's a very bold document, their Mission Statement- prominently lost amid all the other text.

1.)  Definition and Advocacy of Primary Inalienable Sacrosanct Individual Human Rights.

Let's see how many adjectives we can put before the word "Rights."  And let's see how many we can get that mean the same thing.  Great that their first priority is defining those human rights, which they never do in their whole document.

2.)  The "Grass-Roots" Planetary Intelligence Processing Network. 

I sure hope they mean true Grass-Roots intelligence.  These massive computer networks we have are way too easy to skew and corrupt.  The power of the Individual is paramount here!  I'm talking about a giant web of millions of people on telephones with notepads!  It's BRILLIANT!  I just love it when people use terms like "grass-roots" without really thinking about what they mean.  As a note, when I follow the Intelligence Processing Network link, I reach a little paragraph that says,

"The UPA is here to help, whether you seek our counsel personally, or our help is needed by entire groups of people, or even nations."

We're going to come in whether you like it or not.  But not if you seek our counsel personally:

"Marcie, take a letter.  Dear UPA:  As Presidente of Mexico, I would like to invite your committee to judge conditions here in my sovereign nation.  I fear that my administration has dealt with illegal narcotics traffickers, oppressed people and illegally jailed others.  I fear that many of my citizens are not given a say in their own government as a result of my actions.  Please come to Mexico and aid in my ouster from power.  Love, Vicente Fox.  Thanks, Marcie.  I like that blouse you have on today."

(By the way, the title of that html page is "type document title here.")

3.)  Liberty, Justice, Population Reduction, and an Intelligence Network for Problem Solving.

I'm sure Fascists all over the world love those priorities.  I'm not trying to suggest that this may be a fascist group bent on world domination, no.  I'm just trying to say that everybody who's starting any kind of group ever uses exactly those same goals.  Everybody wants equality, everybody wants peace and justice.  I have to admit, though, that population reduction is pretty uniquely fascist.  I dunno what's up with that.  Well, no, it makes sense, cause we don't want to overpopulate the planet, right?  But man... do I have the right to have children, or not?  My rights!  My riiiiiiiights!


And then they quote Ayn Rand!  They MUST know what they're talking about if they quote Ayn Rand!  Atlas Shrugged and 1984 are two of the literary works people throw down when they want to feel elite and enlightened.  Everybody's read them.  They're not fringe, they're not undiscovered by the dumb teeming masses.  Read the books, they're good ones.  But everyone who quotes them plays it like a secret treehouse club where every member is up at the Mahatma Gandhi level.  Basing your elite image of yourself on the massive accomplishment of discovering Atlas Shrugged doesn't get you anywhere.  Well, it probably gets you up to the Al Sharpton level.

The only thing (cause there's only one confusing thing on this web page) that confuses me is that they don't want to become a 1984-style (GASP!) Big Brother group, but they want to force true liberty and justice for all.  So then how are you going to exert global control over all nations without becoming the Big Brother that you just said you hated?  Woohoo!


Idealism is great.  Idealism changes the world, really.  So what am I really knocking them for, then?  Having ideas?  Certainly not.  Imagining a world that's better for everyone?  That's a great concept!

No, I'm knocking them for being half-assed idealists.  For being lazy idealists.  For birthing their free humanity concept and then developing it by going through the supreme effort of publishing a single web page with blue text and a white background.  And basing the "organization" in the mountains of Colorado, conveniently close to where they already are!  But I guess when you think about it, Colorado might actually be the perfect place for their group, if only for the reason that their entire membership lives within an hour's drive of their proposed base-camp.  I'm sure that's why the League of Nations failed, really.  If only they could have figured out a better city to put the bunk beds in, we could have had world peace by now.

I'm bashing them for coming up with these great ideas that everyone in the history of mankind has already come up with and then not bothering to think past a few Thomas Jefferson quotes.  I'm not bashing them for thinking that a few idealist friends in Nowhere, USA can't make a difference - because they can - I'm bashing them for thinking that they can do it by parking a few trailers together and saying that the way to keep the governments of the world from dominating the people is to great a giant organization that dominates the governments.  Way to go.


But none of us really have anything to worry about.  So far, their organization has only progressed to the point that nobody knows they exist except other hacks on the internet writing about them in their weblogs.  What's ironic is that by writing this, I'll probably create more traffic to their site than if I'd just kept my ass shut.   Their main page counter is at 245.  I think that's including me.

posted by Scotty 2-shots at 4:53 PM