Comment on Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example
sonori@beehaw.org 1 month agoShow me a five meter high fence, and i’ll show you a six meter high ladder.
More seriously, if you want to catch people at the border, you do mainly need to have cameras, sensors and people monitoring it, and you then just need to send some guards out in a truck to go out and talk to the things that walk through it.
If their arn’t guards, then there is nothing to stop anyone with bolt cutters or a cutting tool coming along and getting through, or as the US found out, coming along and stealing parts of the unguarded fence in the middle of nowhere whenever the price for scrap metal got high enough to be worth the trip.
The only problems with this approach of just sending guards out is that it doesn’t look as imposing in stock footage, and that it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory and you have to talk to them and escort them back instead of pushing them away from a fence with your fingers in your ears saying I can’t hear you.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It’s a bit of a silly thought that because you can have a six meter tall ladder a five meter fence wouldn’t help in stopping people. Of course it helps and that’s the supposed function, help not stop everyone.
I don’t know what you know about Norwegian-Russian border but the fence is supposed to be part of the other things you mentioned.
sonori@beehaw.org 1 month ago
How does any easily cut through or driven over fence help at all, much less justify the significant expense? It doesn’t help stop people, or even particularly slow them down. You’re still relying on guards actually responding and getting out to meet them, now just with higher maintenance costs because there is a hole dozens of kilometers from anything else.
red@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Here’s something for you to think about when making these silly drive over the fence remarks:
sonori@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Neglecting the silliness of assuming that we were talking about where the road crosses the border, or alternatively showing a map where the Russian road parallels the border for sections and meaning it to show that no vehicle could even drive near to the border, surely what you said about the guards always knowing when someone is coming from kilometers away and being ready to meet them makes the case for a fence over the whole length worse, as it is evidently is and has not been needed for that purpose?
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 month ago
“How does making things harder help at all”. Gee, I wonder.
Well obviously, but now you also have a barrier to slow them down so those guards have more time to get there and make sure less people manage to get through. Again, the fence isn’t supposed to work alone but to compliment the other ways of stopping them/slowing them. You’re talking as if they’ve scrapped the border guards in favour of this instead of using this to make their work easier.
sonori@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Again fences are like cheap locks, they are creating a social barrier to tell people not to pass, not a way of significantly reducing the speed at which someone who wants to will take in doing so.
How many seconds do you think it takes a truck to drive through one, or prop a ladder up against one? What else, like anything else, could be built or funded with the cost of building these expensive signs?
If your going to spend massive amounts of money on securing a border, at least spend it on the things that actually have an impact, like more patrols and guard posts, not on expensive signposting.