Thread: Dane Shows Us why the Nationalist Right will Win

Originally Posted by calamity

Which is why the EU is doomed. People want their hard borders back.

Hard borders have basically never existed! Do you think the US border to Canada is "hard"? LOL anyone can walk over that and DO! The only times in recent "post ww2" history in Europe, where we have had "hard borders", is with East Germany and the Iron Curtain, and that was the other side making it hard. All we did was put up some barb wire and called that the border... they had guards and mine fields to keep people in.. that was a HARD border.

Originally Posted by calamity

Tell that to the guys busted smuggling EPO into France for the Tour De France back in 1998. Maybe they should have tried using a different route.

Yes they should have used a different route. They used an actual border crossing from Belgium to France. They could have just as well gone over a non manned border crossing or field in a remote area.

Again, most borders are nothing but a line on a map and maybe some poles in the ground. They are not manned 24/7 and never have been for the most part. This goes back centuries. There is no magical force preventing people going over in a field or a dirt road (OP shows that clearly) and no we do not have 10s of thousands of men and women guarding some massive wall on the borders.. never have and hopefully never will.

I am not against border checks at border crossings in Europe, as long as they do not prevent the legitimate movement of peoples and goods. But that is a far cry from demanding East Germany style border control, which is basically what you are doing.

Originally Posted by calamity

Aren't many of those run out of Taiwan and Hong Kong?

No.

The worst nationalists and racists I have ever encountered in business are the Japanese. No way a wide-eye ever gets to the very top levels in those corporations.

Then you're mistaken.

Originally Posted by PeteEU

Hard borders have basically never existed! Do you think the US border to Canada is "hard"? LOL anyone can walk over that and DO! The only times in recent "post ww2" history in Europe, where we have had "hard borders", is with East Germany and the Iron Curtain, and that was the other side making it hard. All we did was put up some barb wire and called that the border... they had guards and mine fields to keep people in.. that was a HARD border.

Originally Posted by calamity

Tell that to the guys busted smuggling EPO into France for the Tour De France back in 1998. Maybe they should have tried using a different route.

(edit: added note. This post will veer into J.Swift territory at the end. All, understand that that part is a critique of the general approach to terrorism that people tend to espouse these days, not a serious suggestion).


Maybe they should have.

Are you being serious or just yanking a chain or too? No country has anything like a completely monitored border. (OK, I don't know about Monaco, etc, but.....). It isn't financially plausible. If it became so, the marginal cost wouldn't match the marginal risk fought.

For example, the US has tens of thousands of miles of border including every twist and turn. Come to think of it, with twists and turns, it's probably 100,000+ (despite it being a few thousand across). One might cut it out by building one's walls a mile inland, but then one leaves open tunneling. Whatever one does, one is looking at a tremendous amount of territory that would need massive human surveillance, massive technological surveillance, and which would actually drive up the price of goods*. It'd be trillions and trillions and trillions to close our border, and Germany's would be less but still in the trillions.

Compare that to the monetary cost of terrorism.

Now for the non-monetary. Consider how many Americans were killed by terrrorism in the last 20 years, in the US. What is it? 4,000? A few hundred over 9/11? Compare that to the number of people killed by drunk drivers (about 10,000 a year, or 200,000 in that time). Cancer (590,000/year), (600,000 /year)


Over those 20 years:
Hearth Disease: 20,000,000 killed
Cancer: ~ 11,800,000 killed
Drunk drivers: 200,000 killed
Terrorism: 4,000 killed



What's my point?

My point is that we react in massive disproportion to the objective threat posed by terrorism as we do to things that kill vastly greater numbers of people. We propose massive intrusions on privacy and freedom to fight terrorism, but even less - rather than 10-fold or more - intrusions to combat the greatest killers. Freaking out over a border crossing that might even be fake is the least of the symptoms.

Our policies are moronic. If we're going to monitor private emails and texts, if we're going to wiretap people, if we're going to actually ban muslims from entering the states (whether or not from "terrorist" countries to be determined, the label itself in question...) then we should probably just straight-up ban added sugar and execute fat people.


If one threw out emotions and addressed things with cold logic, and if one worked from the starting position that our approach to terrorism is correct, then this is probably too sedate a suggestion. Persons possessing tobacco should be flayed alive, with 1/30th of the skin removed on the hour every hour. Drunk drivers should be drowned in alcohol, but slowly: a 'witch test' in vodka. And so on. Because remember, terrorism killed 4,000 people in 20 years here, and we're talking about two things that killed 20,000,000 and one that did 200,000.

Of course not. Let's incorporate some perspective into our emotionally-driven approach to terrorism.


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*I say that because the reason we don't have stronger immigration policies is the corporations that benefit from illegal labor downstream, where plausible deniability lies.