I spent a couple years working for a company in Calgary, with a staff mostly from the US, and this was a recurring concern. It's not a thing that just started for Chelsea Manning.
No doubt! Absolutely true! We were ultimately acquired by an American company, and American immigration rules caused problems for the Canadians. My point isn't that Canada is distinctively bad; it's that this story has nothing the hell to do with Chelsea Manning.
>this story has nothing the hell to do with Chelsea Manning
I mean, no need to debate it, who knows, but I think you're exaggerating your certainty. It's possible that this has an additional political dimension, even though similar things can happen without it.
I don't think I'm exaggerating at all. Canada routinely bars entry to convicted felons from the US. Manning is famously a felon. This is what irritates me about this story; the people making the most noise about it don't care at all about the ordinary ex-convicts that Canada bars, just this celebrity.
This is a weird special pleading argument. Chelsea Manning is literally a celebrity, and that is entirely because of actions she undertook that resulted in a 35-year prison sentence. It's not a value judgement about the sentence (I'm glad Obama commuted it). It's a simple statement of fact.
How can you say I didn't justify a distinction when you compared her to "ordinary" ex-convicts, which sounds like non-celebrities?
The issue is not double standards, the issue is disagreement on what attributes are salient.
Just pretend the first two sentences of my previous comment aren't there. I don't care if you agree. The rest of it stands by itself. It's abstract and not related to these events.
Your original complaint was just "why do people only care about who they care about?" I wanted to communicate how tautological I found it.
Indeed. People are talking themselves in knots about how “unprogressive” it is that Manning is denied entry. Canada and the US recognize each other’s judicial systems, and Manning was convicted of a serious crime that has not been expunged. There is a process by which people can seek a special entry and Manning has used that while this appeal was underway. It seems like she’s trying to have CBSA declare her conviction unjust, which I feel is unjust itself. That’s not the purpose of the border service.
How would people feel if someone convicted of insider trading, an arguably much more “victimless” crime than espionage, tried the same thing? I suspect the same people who argue for Manning to be admitted would argue against the hypothetical inside trader. The only just approach is to apply the standard fairly to all people.
>The only just approach is to apply the standard fairly to all people
Surely everybody agrees with that, for everything, except that it communicates absolutely nothing about what is fair and uniform.
I have no idea whether someone convicted of insider trading would be barred, or whether they should be, or whether the average person would want them to be.
It always strikes me as weird when someone gives an example of something that they assume everybody agrees on, and it is something that surely 99.99% of the world has never thought of even once.
