Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada speaking remotely at the UN’s event on financing the Sustainable Development Goals amid Covid-19. Secretary-General António Guterres, right, Sept. 29, 2020. The authors of this essay say that to build the post-pandemic planet, nations and people must understand the need for solidarity and humility to master the challenges ahead. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
The world order is no more.
President Trump attending the United Nations lunch for world leaders at last year’s annual opening debate of the General Assembly, in the pre-Covid-19 universe. It is unclear if he is physically attending this year’s session; if not, he will likely deliver his remarks by video, like other leaders. Some UN-watchers are expecting more harsh criticism, or worse, from him on the UN. LI MUZI/XINHUA POOL PHOTO
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meeting at the 2017 G-20 Hamburg summit. After Trump’s nearly four years as president, there is still no obvious reason he defers to Putin on major issues. It is a chief question that the United States faces as a country, but there are clues, the essayist writes. CREATIVE COMMONS
In Minsk, Belarus, the state apparatus prepares for yet another public protest, on Sept. 6, 2020, against the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Nine experts are to be voted on for the UN Human Rights Committee, which ensures such universal privileges as peaceful assembly. CREATIVE COMMONS
Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland, June 15, 2020, in Helsinki. One major gain for women since the 1995 Beijing conference on gender equality has been a rise in female representation in national legislatures. Only 21 countries, however, have female national executives, the author notes. LAURI HEIKKINEN/GOVERNMENT OF FINLAND
Finnish peacekeepers with the UN mission in Lebanon on patrol with the Lebanese Armed Forces along the Blue Line, June 23, 2020. The author writes that the recent renewal of the UN mission’s mandate was marked by rising tensions between the United States and other Security Council members, to little avail. PASQUAL GORRIZ/UN PHOTO
A recent “debate” on one of the largest discord servers. Atheists are now arguing that informal fallacies are valid arguments, so feel free to now use nothing but ad hominems, since informal fallacies are valid arguments. “What is the justification for knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics in your worldview.”
Atheist Reply: the single mocule dimension isn’t a contradiction.
This hilarious low IQ reply wasn’t a coherent counter example, argument or justification.
President Trump, joined by White House male senior staff members, announces an agreement of normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Aug. 13, 2020. The author of this essay argues that Israel and the UAE were already “quietly cooperating” for quite a while. JOYCE N. BOGHOSIAN/WHITE HOUSE PHOTO
Talking heads are showering Donald Trump with praise over his surprise unveiling of an agreement that he said would alter the Middle East landscape by building a diplomatic bridge between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
A Black Lives Matter protest in Philadelphia, June 2020. The UN’s top human-rights official must write a report within a year on systemic racism and violations of international human-rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law-enforcement entities. CREATIVE COMMONS
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia, left, with Marshall Billingslea, US envoy for arms control, in a tweet posted on June 22 by the latter after the first round of nuclear-arms bilateral talks in Vienna. The essayists say that Washington’s arms controllers “seem stuck in the unipolar worldview of the 1990s.”
