Parable about the UN

Imagine that the Unites States formed a Commission on Wife Beating. This commission was to be the main committee for the United States that would oversee arrests, information, education, and punishment for men who beat their wives. There was no other major organization that did this. This committee was made up of representatives from all the states, and was founded on the principle that all wives everywhere should be safe from abusive men.

That all sounds pretty noble, right?

So far, so good.

Now, this commission is working hard, and having lots of meetings, and working closely with law enforcement in the attempt to slowly curtail this national problem.

Then, a few months after the committee was formed blocks started emerge, and the political machinery starts to move. The southern states start to stick closely together. They refuse to let an investigation go on in their state because it would make them look bad as a a huge powerful voting block they can seriously impede any work in their states. So they focus all their energy and allow all the resources available to the committee to be used in making sure that all the attention goes to the northern states. No one can get any enforcement procedures going on in any other state.

But they are making some progress in some northern states.

Then a few months later there are rifts and other alliances that form. Some of the alliances are cultural, some racial, some religious, some economic, and some geographic. Before you know it New Jersey and California are the only states who are really under scrutiny. Because of this scrutiny the level of wife beating goes down. Not so much, because the commission is not all that powerful, but somewhat.

Wives are being murdered in Wyoming, and there are even special beaten-wife hospitals in Nevada. There is a sport that evolves in Texas whose main point is to see how many of your wife's fingers you can break with one hit of a baseball bat. But that gets ignored because of various racial and political wranglings.

And California is a rather large and powerful state, so nothing really happens there either. But New Jersey is tiny and no one really likes them anyway, so all of the committee's energies go in to attacking problems in New Jersey. Every husband in New Jersey, guilty or not, is under a microscope. When the committee is bored it just issues a warrant for some random husband in New Jersey.

Nothing really happened to the New Jersey husbands. But the state looks bad, and no one really wanted to marry men from New Jersey. Other states refused to do business with New Jersey based companies, and they all cited the overwhelming "evidence" the committee has to justify their discrimination against people from New Jersey.

After a while (to feminist screams of mysogeny) someone points out that there is something unfair going on. There are a lot of wives getting killed in other states who are getting ignored, while the New Jersey men are getting all the hassle. Moreover, doesn't this all point to a genuine problem? Should we not suspect that there is more going on then a desire to help wives? Doesn't this look like a way to get those loosers from New Jersey. After a while you would think that the point is not to help wives. If it was then they would be trying to help wives all over. More than that, you would start to doubt the veracity of any of their evidence. They seem to be just gunning for Jersey guys. Any incident in New Jersey is magnified so out of proportion because the committe has little to focus on and needs a constant outpouring of examples. Eventualy they even drop their pretexts and in a resolution declare that "living in Jersey makes men rapists".

Is an organization like that worth your trust? Would you, if you were interested in real justice, join such an organization?