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This is very much false, and can be easily refuted by reading what the lawmakers were saying as the law was being passed. For example, here's from the DoJ's memorandum, as quoted on the Senate floor by Senator Clark:

> "Finally, it has been asserted that title VII would impose a requirement for 'racial balance.' This is incorrect. There is no provision . . . in title VII .. .that requires or authorizes any Federal agency or Federal court to require preferential treatment for any individual or any group for the purpose of achieving racial balance. . . . No employer is required to maintain any ratio of Negroes to whites .... On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a given balance would almost certainly run afoul of title VII because it would involve a failure or refusal to hire some individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. What title VII seeks to accomplish, what the civil rights bill seeks to accomplish is equal treatment for all."

This explicitly says that you cannot have a racial quota, because it would be against Title VII of the proposed Civil Rights Act, meaning that the lawmakers proposing the bill explicitly said that the Title VII will protect whites (and all other races) as well as blacks.

> Even if 80% of the population was provably dumb, you'll still need a system that takes their voice into account to avoid the country getting overthrown or become a dictatorship.

I really don't see how it follows.

The result is that "voter suppression" is no longer understood to be a bad thing. You lose the ability to drop this phrase and expect people to pick up that the implication is negative. For example, you said above:

> Democracy is not 2 parties doing voter suppression and gerrymandering as a filter to pass the result to an electoral college.

If "voter suppression" as a term now include things that are universally understood as good, like banning toddlers from voting, this sounds incoherent. Democracy very much is about doing voter suppression, and everybody agrees it to be a good thing!

If you don't like how it sounds, you need to stop including good and proper things under the "voter suppression" label. Rayiner tried to help you with that, by distinguishing between mendacious voter suppression, and good and proper setting of voter qualifications, but you rejected that.

You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?

This is very much not the current practice. The DS-160 form asks you a bunch of questions about things that are not illegal in US, but will almost certainly result in denial of the visa. Not only that, it asks about your family members, and your answers can and will cause visa denial, even if your family members are not applying for a visa with you. This is good and proper: foreigners have no right to enter our country, and just because something is legal for US citizens doesn’t meant it’s desirable, or that we need to extend this right to noncitizens.

> I do not think the US should be able to deny visa applications for speech critical of the US government or Israel.

How about for being a fan of Hitler, glorifying Holocaust, and advocating for changes in US constitution to allow wholesale genocide of Jews and Muslims? None of this is illegal. You are saying that we should we not be able to keep this freak out of our country, right?

> Once a person is in the country I would absolutely want for a judicial fact finding exercise to determine whether a person has violated the terms of their admittance.

When you enter US through a port of entry, a random CBP employee is fully empowered to deny you entry if he decides you violate the terms of your visa, or some other entry denial reason applies. Importantly, you have no right to judicial review of this denial. You can make an administrative appeal, but you are not entitled in any way to have a judge hear your complaint. You are saying now that the second you get admitted into the country, the same process that was due to you before the entry is now insufficient to adjudicate your rights. I don’t buy it, and neither does the law.

> Furthermore, it is repugnant to think that visas can be revoked for nothing but constitutionally protected activities, such as writing opinion pieces for a newspaper.

Why? You can very much be denied the visa for constitutionally protected activities. Happens all the time, in fact. It would be ridiculous if we could deny entry people who glorify Holocaust, but couldn’t kick them out if we find out they do so only after we let them in. First amendment doesn’t prevent us from denying entry to foreigners based on their speech. This is settled law. If we can refuse their entry, I don’t see why it should prevent us from removing them too.

Let’s say I do get a tourist visa, get admitted at the border, and the second I cross it, I begin openly violating the terms of the tourist visa. Can the government deport me right there and then, or am I entitled to a full jury trial that decides my deportation?

Finally, let’s say that I violate my tourist visa covertly instead of overtly, so that the government finds out only 3 years later. You seem to be claiming in your comment that at that point, I am certainly entitled to a jury trial. If you answered “no, you’re not entitled to trial” in the previous scenarios, what exactly do you think has changed that makes me entitled to it now?

I don't think it's a meaningful metric, though, because most tertiary degrees are a waste of time, and higher university graduation rate can be worse if that translates to more people getting useless degrees.

This is not to say that I thing that any of this is wrong. I think that if what Google or OpenAI do is illegal, then the law is wrong, not Google or OpenAI.

No, the cost to import is 0%. The 20% VAT you are talking about here applies equally, regardless of whether the car is imported, or (cough) French. Again, VAT is just a kind of sales tax, and you pay sales tax for all goods, imported and domestic.

To import an American car into France the same 20% is paid plus a 10% import fee for a total of 30%.

No. Importing an American car to EU is 10%, regardless of which country you import it to, and then it's 0% to move it between EU countries. As I repeatedly said, you pay 20% VAT on any car, imported or not. Often, you actually pay additional registration taxes on top of that. For example, to import a car to Poland, on top of 10% EU customs duty and 23% Polish VAT, on a car with engine over 2000cc, you'll pay additional 18.6% excise tax upon registration. So, a $25k Chevrolet Malibu imported from US will cost $38k to buy in Poland.

To answer your question about protection using the numbers above, companies outside the eu that want to compete at an equal price with an equivalent German car would need to do so with a product that is at least 10% cheaper.

Yes, EU does apply protectionist tariffs, but my point is that they are not German tariffs, they're EU-wide. Germany might benefit from these more than countries without car industries, but most large EU countries have substantial car industry. For example, Poland exports $40B of vehicles and vehicle parts each year.

Second, how does VAT protect domestic production? VAT applies to both imported and domestically manufactured goods equally. VAT is really ultimately just a sales tax, just collected in a somewhat different way, and you pay the same sales tax regardless of where the good was produced.

I don't think that 120 years later, bringing up that poem is meant to evoke some kind of universal American spirit. This is not what Americans actually believed back then, and it's not what Americans believe today. That poem has been rejected at the ballot box.

so we went to an ophthalmologist's office, to get it looked at

In UK, you can’t just go to ophthalmologist’s office. You’d first need to schedule an appointment with your GP, who then would (or would not) give you a referral to a specialist. You then need to wait for something between 6-12 months (sometimes more, depending on your location) for an ophthalmologist appointment. You wouldn’t need to pay for it out of pocket, but you’d wish you had an option to pay the damn 500 quid so that you can start the treatment sooner.