Justice as fairness: we can do better than we are

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by betenoire

Side note: Canada actually doesn't -have- any laws about abortion. No, I mean it. There are no laws on the books about abortion at all. No rules about how or where or when or at what point during pregnancy. All abortion is legal in Canada, full stop. I could get an abortion at 9 months pregnant if I felt like it (and could find a doctor willing to go along with it, but that's another story).

And this is precisely the point I was making. Sure, deep blue-state me would be perfectly happen adopting Canada's lack of laws governing abortion. Deep red-state someone else would have a BIG problem with it. Deeply Catholic Nicaraguans would probably have a *gigantic* problem. And woe betide the person who tried to take that away.

But anyway, no. I have no interest in EVER merging with any country in North America. I'm not even okay with the US and Canada becoming one country. Not even a little bit okay. We're fine, thanks. We do not need to join forces with you. We're very likely better off -not- joining forces with you.

The whole EU thing, I get. A little. I do think that, for example, Belgium and France have more in common than not and so certainly have a better shot at making it work than the US and Mexico do. Maybe Canada and the US have as much in common and Belgium and France do - maybe. But I just don't see it working for us.

I think that two minutes after the accord merging everything from the Arctic to Antarctic was signed, there would be screams about Western cultural imperialism as we imposed our legal and cultural mores on nations down south.

[qutoe]
For starters the US is, to my understanding, pretty stoked about being independent from England. And we LIKE that the Queen is our (mostly symbolic) "head of state". We're good with it. It's part of our heritage. How do you reconcile that between two countries? [/quote]

You don't. I mean, I think that for the most part Americans are pretty neutral about the whole monarchy thing but I don't see us adopting Her Majesty as our head of state (and, quite honestly, I do rather like that our head of state and our head of government are embodied in the same person).


Cheers
Aj