See Plato’s five regimes.

Definitely. Autocracies always end up being poorly run. Any system that concentrates all authority in a single ruler is going to have some pretty bad outcomes. Even if the dictator really was the smartest guy in the country, instead of merely the most ruthless, even geniuses make bad decisions from time to time. Autocrats quickly find themselves surrounded by yes men. This is how you end up with boneheaded ideas like Mao’s backyard steel production or Stalin embracing Lysenkoism.

When the cost to try something is virtually zero, you don’t have to try very hard. If only one in ten thousand people will fall for a scam, then millions of attempts will still get you thousands of successes.

We’re talking politics, not objective reality.

Politics is not about having white papers on your website.

Impossible. You can’t have tests like that for candidates or voters. You just end up reinventing literacy tests.

Most European countries actually do in a limited fashion. Countries that have signed the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness grant automatic citizenship at birth to people that would otherwise be born stateless.

More countries should adopt birthright citizenship. It has a lot of utility to it. It prevents the formation of a multigenerational undocumented underclass and greatly assists in the assimilation of immigrants into the broader culture. It’s simply a fact of life that some immigrants will enter a country illegally. And while it is bad enough that they may live the rest of their lives in hiding, it’s even worse when people are born into that condition. You can end up with generation after generation, people with little to no ties to their “homeland,” living as a permanent underclass because they lack citizenship.

It’s also a protection against some forms of tyranny and oppression. A favorite tool of tyrants is to strip citizenship from their victims. They’ll sometimes go back generations and declare decades-old immigration cases as fraudulent or invalid. Look at the Rohingya genocide, where the Myanmar government declared an entire minority group to be illegal immigrants. Having a hard rule that says, “if you were born here, you have citizenship,” prevents these tactics from being used on anyone except actual immigrants. Tyrants can still target immigrants, but their children are protected.

If I can pick my execution method, I’m going with the Gallagher method. You know those giant hydraulic hammers they use for driving big foundation poles into the ground? Just stick my head under one of those. It’s messy as hell, but it’s almost certainly the least painful way to go. You literally cannot feel pain it happens so quickly.

It will at least be quicker!

I think the death penalty should be brutal and violent. If anything, it should be even more violent. Lethal injections are disgusting; the state dresses its murders up in the visage of medicine. They make a murder seem clean and clinical.

I think we should do the exact opposite. Make it as brutal as possible. You want the government to kill someone? Fine. We’ll make it a gorefest.

Here’s how we should do executions. First, it’s not carried out by state employees. It’s carried out by the victim’s closest relatives. As for method of execution? They’re going to do it with their bare hands. The condemned is strapped to a chair and injected with a cocktail of powerful pain killers. The victim’s family members are let in. They then have to beat the condemned to death with their bear hands, all while he is screaming and begging for his life. THAT is how executions should be performed. Quit trying to disguise state murder. You want the government to murder someone? Quit the pretense and make it honest. Maybe fewer people would support the death penalty if it consisted of brutally beating people to death instead of a faux-medical treatment.

They have deathright citizenship. You automatically become a citizen if you die in their territory.

That is technically true, while missing a key fact. Birthright citizenship is the norm for countries in the Western Hemisphere. The vast majority of countries in the Americas have birthright citizenship. The USA is not some rare outlier here.

Everything bagel liberalism.

Liberals love to blame racism and misogyny for their own failings.

People vote for Republicans because if you think Democrats are never going to do anything to help you, you might as well vote for the party that will lower your taxes. There’s real problems with that logic, but it is true that Dems put serving corporations ahead of serving the people.

And that’s the problem with liberals. The bar is so low it’s in Hell.

No. It shouldn’t.

Is that not enough? You prefer Trump to not-Trump?

People are tired of this shit. Democrats have been running on this for 20 years at this point. We’re at the point where people would rather see Trump dismantle the entire federal government than vote for one more Democrat promising, that this time, they actually will make meaningful change.

People are just done with this. Democrats have repeatedly failed to make government work for people. If government won’t work for people, why would people care if Trump’s going to come in and tear everything down?

The two party system can collapse. It has several times before. What needs to happen is for the Democratic Party to go the way of the Whigs.

This isn’t punishment. It’s murder.