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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.

If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.

Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".

If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it,

If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)

Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.