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Should we Build a Wall? Great Walls through History

MilkmanDan jokingly says...

I am attempting to play Devil's Advocate and argue that while none of those walls really did much to serve their design goal of keeping "others" out, they may have been "successful" in other ways. This is what I came up with:

Hadrian's Wall: Served as the inspiration for The Wall in A Song of Fire and Ice / Game of Thrones. GoT is awesome, so ... totally worth it.

The Great Wall of China: Did essentially nothing to keep out Mongols, and up to a million or so people died making it, but hey -- today it is one of the biggest draws for tourism into China. China made $618 billion in tourism in 2015 alone, so surely it has already covered the adjusted-for-inflation cost to build it of $380 billion!

The Atlantic Wall: Sure, the Allies broke through it in Normandy in one day. But it forced them to plan how and where to attack it for months, and did result in ~10,000 Allied deaths compared to ~6,000 Germans.

However, that is tiny compared to the really bloody battles of WW2 like Stalingrad (~1.5 million dead), basically the result of Russia using their people as an expendable "meat wall" against the far better-equipped Germans.

...Hmmm -- maybe instead of a literal wall, we should follow a similar approach and just throw lots of expendable bodies at our border with Mexico. I suggest starting with 435 utterly worthless people (US Congressmen) and 55,600 functionally worthless people (TSA employees). Everybody wins!

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