If Canada broke the treaty, in theory, the U.S. could lay claim to parts of Ontario and Quebec. And if America broke it, Canada could get parts of Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. So, basically, North American geography as we know it is contingent on this early 1800s treaty remaining in effect.
The podcast was from December -- an eternity ago in these interesting times -- and I don't know whether anything has changed since then.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/653-beyond-the-99-inv...
The podcast's transcript suggests that their source for this is https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/peace-arch-u.... The person confidently claiming that any closure of the park would result in catastrophe is an immigration lawyer, not a historian:
"Saunders said the treaty stipulates there could not be any boundaries or physical barriers erected on the northern border of the U.S. — and if either side violated that treaty — the boundaries revert back to pre-treaty."
Since the Treaty of Ghent restored the pre-War of 1812 borders of both the United States and Canada, this doesn't make any sense. Canadian historian C. P. Stacey states that the period after the War of 1812 actually saw more border fortification than the years before (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1840618).
I mentioned that the idea that a 19th century treaty keeps the US-Canada border demilitarized was a good story, but I think the truth is an even better one: that the border is demilitarized because both countries know that they can trust their neighbor. Let's hope it stays that way.
The northern border used to be so much more flexible and I don't see any real benefits from doing all this.
But i guess ticking “we did something” checkboxes keeps the paycheck deposits flowing.
Unfortunately the border actually needs to be more sealed.
Once again, borders doing what they do best: waste honest people’s resources.
yeah.. i get the feeling they learned from J6, and won't make those same mistakes again :(
> Haskell Free Library
Has zero to do with haskell the language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera...
I'm so glad both towns an other private donors pulled together to make this happen.
South Africa by contrast does not have open borders, and is currently going through another bout of violent xenophobia.
I don't think these two things are specifically related.
In the 90s, it was the norm for people in northern maine to cross into canada and vice versa, like weekly, to do certain shopping. We regularly took advantage of the low value of the Canadian dollar back then, and every grocery store in the US had daily Canadian customers.
Crossing the border was pretty much just agreeing that you weren't trafficking any specific produce. That's it.
Fort Kent, Maine is literally across a river from Canada. The bridge and border crossing is basically part of the town, and it was a normal daily thing to drive to the other side of the river and do something in Canada, like eat at the nice Chinese restaurant, "The Maple Leaf".
Every northern maine school had regular field trips across the border.
The two communities were basically one. There was no border. It was just a line on a map and a nod to your local friend who worked in the booth.
The southern border used to be similarly uncontrolled. The "Immigrants" and migrant workers who pick your produce have been a normal thing in US history forever. They wouldn't stay in the US, because the border was so lax they didn't expect any trouble coming back in the next time they need the paycheck.
The reaction to 9/11 was atrocious. All it did was kill already struggling communities in rural areas, hurt hardworking Americans, waste billions of taxpayer dollars on "Super duper important" airport scanners sold by a friend of the Bush admin, which then sat unused in a warehouse and we stopped using them entirely shortly after.
> Mr. Trump, tear down this door!
I don't expect the damage to be undone within my lifetime.
I suspect that Canada isn't fond of how Americans view guns, and I suspect that the US is not quite on board with blasphemy/hurty-words laws. I suspect the divergence will grow.
I'm putting this into my overflowing bucket of internet comments that doesn't "get" Canadians. Sorry to be curt but, since Canada-USA relations has been more at the forefront, I've seen too many comments that just "don't get it" and it riles me up each time.
They've had the 2nd amendment since their country was founded. It has no bearing on relations between the two countries, both at a micro and macro level.
We respect that they are their own country and have their own ways of doing things, which isn't even the same across each state. We respect US sovereignty over their own laws. It's the lack of respect for ours by the current US administration that is upsetting.
That's basically all its come down to. Oh, and the tariffs don't help either.
This library worked well for a hundred of year, and then the US government decided they wanted to invade Canada, wage an economic war, and needed to protect their border at all cost in case an invasion of migrants would come from... that library.
This whole administration is just vile, and are long past the point where there should have been an uprising. Just an absolute idiocracy. A worldwide pariah, spiralling down the toilet.
guns, jets, immigration sovereignty and a disinterest in peer pressure about it, similar combination of cultural influences, publicly traded central bank that just creates money and buys US tech stocks and produces dividends, ATMs that dispense $200, $500 and $1000 denominations and nobody batting an eye about it
just some tweaks to life that stand out to me, all the other normal stuff is cool too
only citizenship I would consider trying to marry into
Remind me again -- which country is it that demands to see the content of your social media feeds at the border, and then chooses to deport (or worse, detain) you based on what your feed says about their president and his thieving gang of companions?
Or detains and deports academics with green cards based on their stated opinions about what's happening in Gaza?
I could go on.
>Rima Hassan wrote online that she was "prevented" from coming to Canada in what she described as an attempt at censorship.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2242739/pro-palestin...
There's some bizarre pseudo-libertarian contingent out there that seems to genuinely believing that Canada is some place where we arrest people with Jordan Peterson books off the street and that the Ottawa "trucker" convoy was some sort of colour revolution brutally stamped out by a Communist Regime(tm).
(When actually if said "truckers" had tried what they did on the US side of the border, DHS would have just shot them, and the vaccination law that they were supposedly protesting was a law demanded by the US and the Trudeau gov't tried multiple times to have it delayed/deferred)
(1) Canada over-indexed on low skill immigration. High skill white collar professionals either directly immigrate to the US, immigrate to Canada with the intent to move to the US eventually or they stay in their own countries because COL in Canada's major economic centres is astronomical.
(2) Supply of doctors is artificially constrained by the governing bodies. It is much more difficult to become a physician in Canada vs the US. Salaries are also substantially lower. No surprise that the ratio of available doctors to patients is concerning.
The housing crisis in Canada is a complicated topic and I'm not informed enough to offer a summary of what led us to this mess. But this Wikipedia article [1] provides a good overview.
Not anymore, not right away anyway:
> The new terms allow each country to expel asylum seekers who apply for protection within 14 days of crossing the U.S.-Canada border between ports of entry.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/us-canada-ex...
Also QC for all it's local issues has largely been insulated from "over-immigration" due to the language requirements. If your only experience is there you may not be aware of the scale of the problem.
I'm not saying over-immigration has no downsides, clearly it did not help our overstrained system, but to say it caused it is to willfully blind ourselves to the structural issues that lead to these issues in the first place. i.e. they will never be fixed
>wants to immigrate there
>not by making an economical case that having you in the country will make them richer
>but by trying to marry a local
Real talk. You may want to delete this post before you actually do the citizenship by marriage thing, buddy. Marrying for the express intent of obtaining citizenship is generally considered citizenship fraud.
Maybe Canadian public opinion isn’t anti-gun, but the current government seems to be.
We're not anti-gun. Just anti the "only used explicitly for killing people" kind of gun.
I grew up and live in rural Canada. Rifles for hunting or farming are just part of life. Though the long gun registry did make them more of a hassle.
Why do you need a killing-person gun? What's that for?
That doesn't square with Canadian classifying tasers (purely defensive, non-lethal) and anti-materiel rifles as prohibited firearms. Not that those kinds of bans don't have some sort of legitimate public policy basis, but there's something else going on here.
Really? How?
Then you haven't been paying attention.
> South Africa by contrast does not have open borders, and is currently going through another bout of violent xenophobia.
Arguably a legacy of the time when it did.
I live here, I think I'd notice if events like the current Belfast riots happened on a more regular basis.
> Arguably a legacy of the time when it did.
I'm from there, so I'd be interested to know what time period that would be?
The island of Ireland has had pretty low immigration (not to mention not even having open borders in the sense usually meant by "Europe has open borders", other than between a pair of neighbouring countries with very strong cultural ties), if that's where you mean by "here" you may have been insulated from it. Where I was, while it didn't spill out into rioting (mostly) there was a palpable uptick in xenophobia when Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into the EU, and another with the 2015 migrant crisis (which ultimately lead to many of those open borders being closed, temporarily or "temporarily").
> I'm from there, so I'd be interested to know what time period that would be?
Pre-1902; one could haggle over the exact date depending on what one considers an open border.
My friends in Europe describe the situation differently
My guess you are naive but intra European racism was always a thing (easy example was Hitler). The EU tries to combat it and reduced definitely thanks to Erasmus, better weath of East Europe, well open borders but oh boy it still exists.
Then you start thinking maybe your mental or even physical burden could be lessened if you just had to deal with one cultural system or at least the previous number of ones you had to deal with. You start thinking maybe something like 1000 new Afghans would be a bit harder to deal with for you than 1000 new Frenchman. I don't think there's much stronger way of bringing about racism than actually getting to know and see other cultures, at a distance you can gloss over about anything as "we're all equal humans who should sing koombaya" but the rubber meets the road when your kid is trying to sleep for school and the local arabs have set up blaring calls to prayer at 2am.
People from any and all cultures do this, I have personally experienced it from black and white
> might be unhappy if you treat them all the exact same could
Depending on how you're going about this, you might find you'd be too, in their shoes?
> I don't think there's much stronger way of bringing about racism than actually getting to know and see other cultures
Then I think you need to go and have a real think about things. Also this sentiment is just not backed up by the data - if anything, more insular societies tend to be more racist/xenophobic than open ones. Ofc not everyone in either society shares the same sentiment, and for the open ones it depends on the cultures in question and how the integration is being handled. But in general it just sounds like you've opted for a more bigoted approach, which is your choice I guess.
It's actually mind blowing how effective AIPAC is. They managed to upset one of the most popular Republicans in the US house by a genius campaign at non-voting demented boomers by tricking them to believe probably the most conservative guy in the entire congress is secretly a Democrat.
Hah
Get off your arse and take lessons on protesting from the French.
The Citizens United decision virtually ensures that the average voter, even in aggregate, has nothing important to say. Shortly, one particular U.S. citizen will have a net worth of $1T; and this, more than anything will ensure that “We the People” are only noise, compared to the real signal.
Sir, I'm fleeing this country. The time to protest was 30 years ago. Or 70 years ago. Either way, it is well in the past. This country will need to crash and detox from its addiction to money before it can become a real democracy.
They might not be wrong about this, the president is known for siccing the department of Justice on his political enemies.
It’s not the heater itself, it’s everything else about them that is 10/10.
Seems like you just validated my point - a place without open borders is where a major outbreak of xenophobic violence is occurring, as opposed to mainland Europe.
> if that's where you mean by "here"
It's not, I live in Switzerland, which has one of the highest rates of migration in the EU
> there was a palpable uptick in xenophobia when Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into the EU
I'd be curious to know what this looked like at the time. Regardless, even if we accept it as an example, that doesn't set the rule or show a general causation between open borders and xenophobia
> Pre-1902; one could haggle over the exact date depending on what one considers an open border.
Omegalol - you might want to look up what modern day xenophobia in SA looks like (as well as the current socioeconomic situation) so you can see why that probably wasn't a concern pre-20th century
We know exactly what caused this outbreak of xenophobic violence, it's in direct response to a dramatically brutal attempted murder by an immigrant caught on video (one who had been granted a refugee visa, on legitimate grounds or otherwise). That's hardly an argument for open borders - if anything it's an argument for stricter screening of asylum seekers.
> I'd be curious to know what this looked like at the time.
A shift in sentiment, certain kinds of comments being heard more and more, ultimately Brexit.
> even if we accept it as an example, that doesn't set the rule or show a general causation between open borders and xenophobia
At a certain point you experience enough correlations that you have to trust the evidence of your own eyes.
If you follow this thread from the top, you'll see I didn't make the claim that open borders make things better; rather, the burden is for the opposing side to show that they make things worse. I would argue this hasn't been accomplished.
> A shift in sentiment, certain kinds of comments being heard more and more, ultimately Brexit.
Ah, you meant specifically in the UK (I thought across Europe in general, upon their entry). In that case, whether British people were already somewhat racist towards Eastern Europeans or became so as a result of freedom of movement sort of depends on who you ask. I suspect it was the former. And ofc now the UK is mourning the loss of said (white) Eastern Europeans as it's having to bring in an increased number of people from (non-white) Africa and India as a result of Brexit, especially in the care industry. For sure nothing will go wrong from here.
> At a certain point you experience enough correlations that you have to trust the evidence of your own eyes.
From my observation, the real underlying problems are economics and integration - when you have a ridiculously high unemployment rate (think 30%+) like in South Africa, the black South Africans direct that towards the the other Africans. When people from other cultures aren't integrated properly (think the UK, France, as opposed to Switzerland, Denmark maybe), you can get the same (i.e. what's happening in Belfast now).
In addition to the obvious fixes like Ranked Pairs voting, I'd say we need a Constitutional amendment bringing back independent agencies with their heads being directly elected rather than merely picked by whomever wins the presidential race. For example you shouldn't have to balance your guess of how you think one president will treat the ATF vs the NSF. Or the President shouldn't have any power over the Attorney General, as it's the Attorney General who should be prosecuting a criminal President, rather than merely being a lapdog in the criminal conspiracy. A race for each agency would also create focus on each agency head's actual results, rather than how the current guy is using a round-robin of all these different departments to create a tough-looking spectacle in one area, only to move on to another one when the actual results start becoming apparent.
We also need the right to recall for all national politicians, for obvious reasons.
If you want to single-load cartridges or pin to a 3 round magazine or whatever, have at it. Most of the argument still applies and especially the cheapness and parts availability and intercompatibility with mass after market options. Plus you'll be able to use a larger mag when target shooting. Another plus even if you don't care about magazine size is you can easily swap the barrel (actually upper receiver) without having to legally buy a new gun, so you can train with very cheap .22 ammunition using all the same ergonomics / muscle memory for when you hunt deer.
Do you think it makes sense that people that don't hunt would prefer for widely, easily accessible weapons to be largely less efficient at killing human beings? It feels like many gun owners and gun enthusiasts struggle to accept any compromise. And I won't say this is particular to them, I think most people have some pet regulatory peeve, but it sure makes it difficult to have conversations about it!
It's kind of antiquated to use a "rifle"-length barrel for intermediate cartridge nowadays. The military uses a 14.5" barrel as standard issue for the AR-15 type rifle, which is "handgun" length, and most intermediate cartridges are handier and lighter in a legally handgun sized barrel for targets within the range of what you're likely to see in wooded areas. This means to use the most practical intermediate cartridge lengths you actually legally have a handgun with a "brace" on it.
How do you think they got those in the first place though?
Where to?
Because unless you become a citizen of the country you are fleeing to (a process that, *IF* it is open to you, will take years), you will have even less rights to vote and protest than you do now.
That may be true. But there won't be the pretense that I'm living in the most free, democratic place on earth when I'm obviously not.
Anyway, voting and protesting seem to have zero impact, so it's hard to figure out what value to assign...
But your argument implies society was dysfunctional, and unrest made it functional.
I don't think we are actually disagreeing here
Midterms coming up and prosecuting an endless "war" that doubles gas prices, and not seeming concerned at all about the blowback?
What's up with that?
When he says that he has no reason to worry because the polls show everyone loves him, I think he genuinely believes that.
To which I would counterpoise -- self-defense from what? If your society is so degraded and broken that you need to be armed to the teeth you have much bigger problems than the government taking your handguns. That's a sign of a sick and broken society and individual firearms only make it worse. So "gun rights" is frankly the entirely wrong conversation.
Same with the whole thing of "well-armed militias" to defend from government. What? Do these people really think that a few sidearms and some ARs or whatever are going to deter an actual tyrannical regime by force?
That's simply not how any revolution has ever happened. They usually happen when governments lose legitimacy enough that the armed forces and police simply walk away from defending those in power. If you're in a shootout with the armed forces, you've already lost.
So, I also question the 2A people and what their actual motives are and who they intend to use the guns on.
Oh, and massive organization of voters and rabid progressive populist support.
President Trump, above all, is the clearest and most direct example of how you absolutely can get what you vote for in the US. Republicans did not want Trump and fought it as much as they could. They openly declared how bad he was and how stupid and how awful he would be, and it didn't matter. Because people voted.
Donald Trump is in flagrant violation of constitutional law constantly, again, and it doesn't matter because voters want it.
He should be in prison but it doesn't matter because voters wanted him, wanted his bullshit, and voted against anyone who got in their way.
And yet, losers will STILL insist that "voting doesn't matter" or "Blah blah money in politics"
All you gotta do is vote people.
More smart about politics and power in the Machiavellian sense.