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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Deportations can be done easily and cheaply without any government involvement.

Require some proof of being legally in the US for opening a bank account. I highly doubt the banks don't know exactly who people are already. Make sure digital forms of payment as well as credit is impossible without legal paperwork.

Limit the time window that a Latin American driver's license is valid in the US and make Latin Americans registers when they start using that driver's license. Driving without a proper license should be punished.

In order to buy alcohol and cigarettes with a latin American passport there should be an American passport stamp in the passport.

Companies should be investigated for tax fraud if they hire illegals.

Make at least larger landlords verify the identity of their tenants.

Make it impossible to register illegals at schools, universities or other institutions.

When I was in the US I had to fill out information to register who I was when I stayed at a hotel. Make that process only go through for people legally in the US.

Create a miserable user mode for illegals in the US and they will leave. The US has millions of illegals because the US facilitates illegals in their country. Stop facilitating them and it will stop being fun to be an illegal in the US. Mexico is not Sudan, life there is not that bad.

Why is this seemingly so impossibly difficult to explain/implement to people? I genuinely don't understand unless people are using immigrants as a scapegoat to vent their rage upon.

Because the average voter is intensely stupid about these types of things. On the left you have fools cheering for images of burning Waymos and waving the Mexican Flag in US cities. On the right, the average Republican is at the level of Catturd, and they evaluate things based on what they see on Tiktok and Fox News. If they don't see armored goons manhandling immigrants then they think it's not happening at all. Trying to explain things like "employment incentives" to them will go in one ear and out the other.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply does not work.

The form envisioned by American's founders might have, except for the fatal problem latent in democracy which leads to a race to the bottom to expand the franchise for more votes. Inevitably this will include people who really have no business getting involved with policy decisions.

Then again our (American) system was explicitly designed for a 'moral and religious people' and Adams openly admits that without those elements it all falls apart.

I don't know. We were given something amazing and ruined it. That much is clear. Whether such a thing can ever arise again remains to be seen, but what we have now is not headed in a viable direction.

Democracy simply does not work.

still works better than other government systems

Citation needed. Or at least some kind of argument. You're just stipulating this as though it were fact.

Actually existing actual monarchies tend to produce lackluster economic growth while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes of their neighbors. Granted, the only place where you really see monarchy and demotism side by side is the arab world. But still; it's probably fair to say that monarchy tends to avoid the worst mistakes a government can make in ways that other forms of government do not, but is also not a magic bullet.

while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes

Strong disagree on both of those statements. Democracies are the most stable form of government in existence since they allow for peaceful transfer of power. Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America are notoriously unstable and chain coups like they're going out of style. More totalitarian states like Russia and China are more stable overall, and can seem even more stable than democracies... until they aren't. They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms. The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.

And autocracies make stupid moves all the time. Zero Covid? Also, the whole Communist flavor of autocracies from 1945-1991 was a major unforced screwup.

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There are several cases of countries speedrunning from mediavel to modern through a dictatorship, are there any success stories like that with democracy?

Also, your metric is rather confounded. It only makes sense to use it, if you assume all people in the world are fungible. The question is if these monarchies would fare better as democracies. Various recent experiments by the US cast a large doubt on that theory, in my opinion.