Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4 (With English subtitles)
But, as someone who grew up less than 100 meters from this border, I'm pretty sure this stuff actually happens all over.
I just imagine the guards opening the gate for a little girl with a school satchel. The bollards which held the gate are still there.
I was born in Switzerland. I was smuggled to France when I was a few days old so my parents could take me home. I got a passport a few months later, with a baby photo. I went to school in Switzerland, 20 minutes from the house. I had to take my passport to school, though we had a "frontalier" card that we'd show in the car windscreen so we'd rarely be stopped by border guards. It was a Schengen external border until 2007, though!
There are many stories of people getting stuck at that border for forgetting their ID, or phones connecting to the wrong transmitter causing people to get 3000 EUR phone bills for roaming data. My first kiss was on that border though, so I have quite fond memories of it!
The problem of growing up there is that I can't be Swiss - my parents weren't resident. I can't be French either - I wasn't born there. So my passport is British by descent. Children cannot be British from me, because I wasn't born in the UK. If I wanted to continue living in Geneva, children would be stateless.
That started me on a long journey of trying to find a new country. I went off to university, and proceeded to live in the UK, USA, Switzerland, Taiwan, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Austria, Netherlands, China, and India. In 2013 I decided that I wanted to move to New Zealand, but the process of moving here has been so slow (getting work experience in Taiwan, waiting 2 years for a case officer to evaluate my SMC visa, finding a new job that pays enough to satisfy Immigration), means that I only just got residency at age 31. (Children born in NZ can now be citizens, which will allow me to get married in future). Hopefully by age 36 I'll finally have a passport and a country to really call home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Bangladesh_encla...
However India-Bangladesh has enclaves of a higher nesting order.
Once Britishers came, Bengal was separated from the rest of India along their borders of their territories.
It looks like a very French first name and a very Dutch last name. Is that common in Belgium? Is there a significant overlap between the linguistic communities of Belgium?
> Man Bites Dog is an intensely disturbing movie that, despite having frequent moments of dark humor, is shockingly violent and very difficult to watch.
With 74% on RT, which is pretty good. I already have conflicting emotions from this. The descriptions evoke the spirit of Bret Easton Ellis' stuff.
What I've seen of French film violence tends to be cinematic in an off-putting way, but perhaps that's only post-2000s explosion of movie tricks.
Where did you grew up and are you still regularly there?
Ps. If it's near, here's something unique about the neighborhood: https://www.google.com/amp/s/sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/20...
Will have to see if it is streaming somewhere..
I've seen a number of people in my extended social circles do varying combinations of A and B, but still eventually losing because of a failure to do C, because they don't want to be confrontational or whatever.
(I am specifying "in the US" because I'm fairly sure this is related to common law. Countries operating under other traditions may not see this effect. However in common law, there's a certain element of having to be able to "defend" your property in order for it to be yours.)
Despite not having lived on the farm for 25 year my mom and dad are often brought out to help settle dispute regarding property lines.
Technically everything is mapped out and moving a post or plowing a wrong part of the field doesn’t change ownership, but some of the maps are old and reference point are no longer where they once where.
(This is getting complicated and challenged due to the fact suburbs are popping up nearly everywhere and totally useless land may now be worth money.)
In the case above simply demolish whatever the guy built. He tries to sue in civil court and fails because he had no right to build there.
Here in Germany, he would be issued a demolition order by the court that, in case of non-compliance, will be enforced even with armed police if deemed necessary. On top of that the affected party can sue him for damages.
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/GkGJm/nabotvist-paa-ne...
Not because some war was imminent, but because of very practical reasons: Belgian police could only reach that piece of Belgium by boat; so "exchanging it with NL" was the easiest, because the Dutch police could just drive there.
It makes me happy to see that we're down to "practical exchanges of land" from centuries of war over the most silly pole, church or "slight".
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2112869-nederland-krijgt-belgisch-sch... Dutch only, sorry.
It's one of the reasons that the area is extremely popular for smuggling.
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/36230/201...
What was happening was that the cigarettes were being sold as export items (so little/no Canadian tax paid), exported to the American side, then smuggled back into Canada via the Canadian side.
If it is in, presumably, French territory now, why can't some French resident roll it back?
Even funnier are the so-called line houses along the USA/Canada border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jogger-who-a...
Now I'm sure if you landed and somehow were talked to by the border police and didn't have a passport you'd be pretty screwed, but honestly thats pretty unlikely to happen. I know an old couple set in their ways who to this day just boat across the river sans passport for a favourite restaurant.
If you go here and search for "B street, Blaine WA" and right click in google maps, look at the latitude, the actual 49th parallel is considerably south of what is enforced in practice. Much of Blaine, and a very long strip all the way to the great lakes, is actually in Canada...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/B+St,+Blaine,+WA+98230,+US...
Although from a European perspective, the post 9/11-state of that border also seems somewhat depressing…
How do you even measure that effectively? Aren’t the stones more than hundreds of meters away from each other?
edit: for example, can I do that as well with minimal equipment (e.g. with just a phone)?
Or, if you can identify where a stone has been moved from and to, you can use the pre-installed iOS app 'Measure', which always gives you a number to the nearest cm over this distance.
The border was likely digitized a decade or two ago. Someone noticed the stone didn't match the database.
I tried this at home and it turns out that easily available GPS devices have huge amounts of error, especially without unobstructed line of sight like in woods. I left a phone on a stump recording a walking trail, and it wandered around multiple tens of meters. There is value in what the surveyors do :) Although I guess they would use markers like this as references, so unless they crosscheck with multiple markers and fancy GPS they could make mistakes too.
Edit: and the whole while the GPS receiver is reporting a misleading "5ft" or similar accuracy.
I always figured they were mostly symbolic. At least I hope, because the local loggers have moved Germany about 30 meters into Luxemburg by uprooting a stone.
So if the farmer takes the stone and tractors it to East Russia, did the farmer accomplish more than Napoleon?
Frankly, if he doesn't get rapped on the knuckles it's a guarantee that other folks will try the same thing.
Borders should be changed via treaty and diplomacy not by some un-educated moron deciding to take matters into his own hands. That only encourages border conflicts.
https://www.wistv.com/story/13784677/dispute-over-north-caro...
https://hutchenslawfirm.com/blog/creditors-rights/north-and-...
To be fair they are living so close to the frontier that my cellphone picks up the Belgian cell network in their house...
I don't remember how this was resolved. I guess it thankfully just doesn't matter that much anymore, these days.
(For the uninitiated https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/stabbing-oranges-an...)
During the beginning of the pandemic, it brought about some truly bizarre situations: https://www.thebulletin.be/coronavirus-store-dutch-border-ha...
A few years ago someone got the idea that it was of Important Historical Interest and so moved it further down the path. It's not clear whether this moved the "actual"* border since they didn't place it in the same orientation. Somehow the misorientation annoys me more than moving it.
* "actual" gets quotation marks as the denoted territories no longer exist, though the cities by those names do.
The legal system would probably side with us, but it's a pain.
This is probably my favorite story to date of how a squabble over where to temporarily store some cut lumber escalated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/djci7p/how_i_go...
Be sure to read all 4 parts!
May I introduce you to the town of Baarle-Hertog? A town that is not only split between the Netherlands and Belgium but inside the Netherlands with Belgium owning most of the town with Dutch fragments inside it. Some houses have a Dutch as well as a Belgian address.
You can see some examples here, with the numbers and type of landmarks (apparently there are 1010 stone marks, other types of marks are wet marks for example, like rivers and lakes): https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_tro%C3%A7os_da_raia_(...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivenza#Claims_of_sovereignty
This is all geo referenced against the OSGB coordinate system.
I could see interesting challenges in doing this for international borders where both countries use different coordinate systems and projections for their mapping, and the potential for slithers of no-mans-land. I guess at a certain point, you need to refer back to what's on the ground, as over decades the land erodes from the sea, and rock formations collapse and shift as the earth moves etc. The definition of location gets far easier when you have satellites offering precision navigation and timing!
Likewise, the exact location of borders between properties is usually ill-defined. Only borders that have gone through a painstaking process of surveying and registering (usually after a dispute or on a new build) are exactly defined. Usually, when you move into a new house, you have a fence around your property, and the boundary is generally assumed to be inside the fence (with conventions for whose land the fence sits on that aren't always followed).
Adverse possession makes it more complicated. A neighbour decided to put up a new fence, and weren't nice about it. I stipulated (in line with the law) that no part of the new fence could be placed on my property (except parts under the ground surface). They decided to put the fence in the "wrong" way round, with the vertical posts on their property, and the fence attached on their side of the posts, effectively giving me sole access to the area of land in-between their fence posts. If I were to sell my house, the new owner would be quite reasonable in assuming that that land was theirs. After the requisite time, I could apply to have the land legally registered as mine, although the new laws mean that the neighbour would be informed and given a chance to "evict" me from the land - they would have to tear down their fence and rebuild it the right way round so that I don't have sole access to it any more. In this way, adverse possession effectively resets the boundary to where the actual fence is in practice every now and again, which means that the land registry doesn't need to store exact boundary locations.
The white area being roads and non-registered land (mainly stuff that hasn't sold for decades and roads).
It's great, I can find a unique owner for any bit of field I have a question about, the size of the plot, etc.
The downside is that to get a copy of the actual entry in the register (to see who owns it and any covenants on the property there are), you have to pay £3. The entire process is digital and automated, IMO it should be free, but I suppose it's not a terrible price.
You'd think location via GPS or similar framework was easy but it's not nearly as easy as you'd think. Among other things, the land is moving. Both continental plates and then also local features like river beds. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TX--Fku9NQ
“Follow river such and so, then on that one field of farmer Jones turn left until the tree, turn right and walk in a straight line to that pointy rock, then walk back to the river etc. etc.”?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_border_r...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_river_borders_of_U.S._...
Like this hilarity: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.1205633,-89.1155927,15z
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea