I downloaded a manadarin linguaphone a few months ago, but have’nt had a chance to get to it.

The Chinese characters are a major, major hurdle.

Besides, crude and clunky translations of text to text are already widely available, and some "fixed" solutions for audio translation already exist in japanese airports.

Soon I suspect, language may no longer be a significant barrier. I’m gradually coming round to the view that realtime audio to audio translation may soon be widely available.

Imagine a wireless future where your PDA shunts your discussion partners comment off to the nearest super quantum server for translation, and fires the colloquial english back into your ear in a split second.

Am I crazy?

Brian, you ARE crazy. But this sounds like a very cool idea.

The problem with learning Chinese, for a foreigner, is the characters. You can’t teach yourself Chinese nearly as easily as you can teach yourself, say, Spanish... In classrooms it doesn’t matter, I suppose, but those of us who are out of school are far less likely to be able to learn Chinese than we are to learn some Spanish.

Brian, you ARE crazy. But this sounds like a very cool idea.

If you are the typical American nationalist that hangs out here, I wouldn’t be too pleased.

Real time instant language translation well explode the planets political life (currently compartmentalised in hermetically sealed national boxes) to an unprecedented degree.

Well obviously, real time language translation is unprecedented!!!

That is going to do far more harm to American global dominance than a few more million people learning manadarin.

Brian

If you are the typical American nationalist that hangs out here, I wouldn’t be too pleased.

So, anyone who does not suscribe to your globalism is a nationalist. In what sense? I’m not so much concerned with the soil as I am with the ideas. I look at global conditions and the world’s faith in multiculturalism at the cost of common sense, and I think we’re not there.

It’s strange, you criticize the war in Iraq and American "Imperialism," but no matter how your govt. is constructed, it
will be considered an attempt at Imperialism and a sign of cultural elitism. No matter what the value of the ideas that would support your regime, it would be considered without worth, arbitrary, and tyrannical because it would enforced be without the support or consent of at least some individually recognizable peoples or cultures. You talk about the devestation of war and the lives of the innocents lost. Yet you also criticize the UN for not having any bite. Law must have teeth Brian. When an entire culture rebels against the form the global regime takes, what do you do to them? Is it possible to imprison them for having no power over the political process which they are forced to endure? Is it possible to round them up when they have no political voice beyond dissent that has no effect? Is it possible to sanction them, when current events indicate these dissenting voices will come from poor third world countries? How will your regime ever be justified? Democracy takes a different form on the global scale. You call me a nationalist, but I’m afraid of the nationalistic tendencies your global regime will force on an entire world.

What aspects of the War in Iraq do you disagree with? Is it only the different character of law and war? If so, Iraq continually broke the peace accords after the Gulf War. The international community (including the U.S.) reacted, but to no avail (with the exception of mass starvation). So the violations continued without being hampered by "international law." What would your law have done?

All the points you make are excellent, and all are addressed in the federalist papers by Alexander Hamilton. I won’t post all that again, try federalist 15, I think it’s in there.

In a nutshell my views on the subject are :

1) Law must impinge on the individual, not on the nation state.

2) There must be consent of the governed.

3) There must be subsidiarity, that is to say issues are dealt at the relevant level : nation state, region, global.

4) There must be democracy, in some recognisable form, for inclusion in this global confederacy.

5) There must be binding economic contributions on the participating states, based on their GDP, and assistance for regions with GDP that falls below an agreed level.

Basically the EU writ large, with simpler political structures.

After maybe a hundred years of that, the nation state will dissolve, and we will have a planetary society. With essentially the same laws, rights, living standard etc.

Much as the US states, gradually over time lost their capacity for independent action, and were integrated into a single nation state.

We are in any event going in that direction anyway. We already have international bodies, structures and organisations, but none of these people are elected by the people.

A parliament for the planet is not a question of removing powers from nation-states or from their citizens, but of democratizing those powers that are already being wielded supranationally. We need a World Parliament, and all of its members should be directly elected.

Check out "spot" technology. It is rumored that Gates and gang will introduce a eye-glass oriented page translator by next Christmas.