LeSving wrote:
I think society changes. Children literature in particular, is very much in the category of “best before xxx”. It may have lots of educational elements that is only “correct” in the time and in the society for which it was created.
I’m currently at the stage of reading quite a lot with my son, and I often find it quite alarming to re-read my childhood favourites through adult eyes. I’d forgotten how often the Famous Five solve their differences through fisticuffs, for example. Some of the racial stereotyping in Tintin is genuinely unpleasant. My impression though is that the most popular authors are generally very broad minded for their ages. The whole point of reading novels is to see a world through someone else’s eyes – and any writer of a book with more than one character must be a master of understanding other peoples’ perspectives if he or she is to be successful. This makes it particularly ironic when those who have seen further than those around them, are later vilified for not having seen far enough to satisfy the mores of the present day.
Project Gutenberg is full of forgotten Victorian children’s literature and … My goodness, is most of it bad.
And one wonders why comedy is no longer allowed to be funny.
Politics, religion, race, sexual preference, and many other areas are all becoming no go for a comedian, except for the brave. In the normal course of things jokes and stories would no longer be told because the public decided they were no longer funny. Nowadays its a group of people of like mind who try to decide what is funny and what is not on some sort of theory of political correctness but worse the comedian gets cancelled or worse, death threats.
The scan of the passport is to check the name/number against various criminal/terror databases, not to record an entry/exit.
I guess this must be the case, because the EU is so full of illegals (any large chunk of developed world would be) that putting in a system which 100% detects over-stays will generate so many positives that your “enforcement system” will immediately collapse.
Same with the UK, where passports were never stamped; not even at Gatwick. Yet the UK has the same max-residence stuff, in the foreign domicile department, etc. Actually I think the UK does use travel passport scans – at major airports – for foreign domicile monitoring purposes, circumstantially from some FD people I have known.
Why doesn’t the UK want to become a member of Schengen? It looks to me that this would solve all border problems.
Political hot potato. The UK likes to hang onto the concept of a “border”. And, to be fair, it is sort of doable if you are an island.
But seriously if you are in schengen you can forget any idea of a “border”; you have totally lost control. The reason Norway can do it is because almost nobody wants to go there except on a holiday (language, culture, weather, attitude to large numbers of refugees, etc). Other countries which are members are members because they de facto lost control already, decades ago, so they have nothing to lose.
Why doesn’t the UK want to become a member of Schengen?
It’s way more complicated, it’s a requirement for non-EU nationals by Schengen countries
Croatia & Ireland are in EU but not in Schengen, their nationals are not subject to EES (the two countries are not part of EES and Schengen)
Peter wrote:
But seriously if you are in schengen you can forget any idea of a “border”
Each Schengen member country has veto power over entry of any particular person into the whole space. Any person any Schengen country deems persona non grata, they unilaterally put it in the database (what one would call a “blacklist” until recently), and all Schengen border points will apply it and deny entry to that person, and all Schengen countries will deny Visa. So on the contrary, you get much, much collaboration in that persona non grata don’t even come close to your territory, unless you are the edges of the space.
E.g. Switzerland did this to 188 “high ranking” Lybian government people in December 2008 in joining Schengen:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8517642.stm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Libya_under_Muammar_Gaddafi#Schengen_Area_visa_ban
https://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2010/02/16/visualizza_new.html_1704366421.html
Peter wrote:
Other countries which are members are members because they de facto lost control already, decades ago, so they have nothing to lose.
That’s absolutely not true for e.g. Sweden and Finland. Or Cyprus, Iceland or the Baltic states. These countries joined because they support the idea of free movement.
Airborne_Again, the countries that joined the EU after Schengen entered the “acquis” (I think that was around 1997?), like e.g. Cyprus and the Baltic states don’t really have a choice. Either they accept to enter Schengen on some reasonable timescale (to implement the right police collaboration, connection to the right computer systems, etc) or they don’t enter the EU at all. It is part of the package deal.
Similarly “deeply integrated non-member associated states” like Iceland, Switzerland or Norway also have to accept the EU’s position that free flow of capital, goods and people (and services also?) are interrelated and that they cannot have one without the others. Like e.g. Switzerland when its population (was it in 2016?) voted to exit Schengen and the EU very firmly notified the Federal Council that if they exit Schengen they ipso facto also exit all other agreements giving them privileged access to the EU’s internal market in goods and services. So Switzerland didn’t exit Schengen in the end.
lionel wrote:
Similarly “deeply integrated non-member associated states” like Iceland, Switzerland or Norway also have to accept the EU’s position that free flow of capital, goods and people (and services also?) are interrelated and that they cannot have one without the others
That’s a strange way to view things. Iceland, Norway and (perhaps) Switzerland are all for free flow of capital, goods and people. Especially people, since the native women have too few kids 
(sounds strange or odd, but it’s a well known fact). What we (the majority) don’t like is the European Union. The last months the birth rate was an all time low, yet the number of people increased, in large part due to Ukrainian refuges.
Peter wrote:
Political hot potato. The UK likes to hang onto the concept of a “border”. And, to be fair, it is sort of doable if you are an island.But seriously if you are in schengen you can forget any idea of a “border”; you have totally lost control. The reason Norway can do it is because almost nobody wants to go there except on a holiday (language, culture, weather, attitude to large numbers of refugees, etc). Other countries which are members are members because they de facto lost control already, decades ago, so they have nothing to lose.
Where do you get your world information from? Both Norway and Finland have borders to Russia. The control on that border hasn’t exactly been lowered during the last 6 months. The borders to Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland has been literally non existent long before Schengen. Free movement of people long before EU. The exception is customs, which is still in place. Svalbard, a part of Norway, is not a part of Schengen. I can literally travel in and out of Schengen as much as I want (as can all other people members of a Schengen country for that matter)
I don’t get. If Schengen is such a big problem, the UK should either join, or stop whining.
Free movement of people long before EU.
Yes; that’s what I said. People can just walk across the border – even if there are border posts on the main roads.
the UK should either join, or stop whining.
Is the UK whining? It never wanted to join.
The issues we are discussing here are GA travel related. Getting back to the main topic, my guess is that eye scanning will be only at big airports, because the machines are not really portable AFAICS. And they aren’t going to pull port of entry status from all the GA ones… one hopes! France might do that, because there is little or no economic leverage to keep airports open to “foreigners”.
