Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
i know that itās about conservative crackheadery re:allegations of election fraud, but itās lowkey unhinged that americans donāt have national ID. i also know that republicans blocked it, because they donāt want problems solved, they want to stay mad about them. in poland for example, itās a requirement to have ID, itās valid for 10 years and itās free of charge. passport costs $10 to get and it takes a month, sometimes less, from filing a form to getting one. thereās also a govt service where you can get some things done remotely, including govt supplied digital signature that you can use to sign files and is legally equivalent to regular signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUAP
Yeah, the controversy over federal ID cards is completely bafflying to me as well, and I imagine like many things in the US itās some sort of libertarian bugbear or something? But considering the President has now mandated that oneās federal identity is fixed at birth by the angels, it turned out to be a blessing.
The reason is that any government mandated ID is clearly the Mark of the Beast and will be used to bring upon a thousand years of darkness.
You think thatās fringe nonsense and youād be right on the nonsense part, but thatās literally what Ronny Reagan said while he was president
god damn
I definitely heard it presented as a libertarian bugbear. The American right tends to treat the federal government like itās Schrodingerās State. When it does something they like itās an inviolable declaration of our values and identity as a nation, the truest guarantor of liberty and blah blah blah. When it does literally anything else itās a sinister plot to hand over even more control over your life to unelected bureaucrats!
Freedom is when nothing works, got it
See also with the Elon stuff the (pretend-) concern over gov agencies knowing your SSN. Like, what?
from what i understand, lack of single national ID gives (part of?) legal justification for this bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging that republicans use for voter suppression. idk details, american would have to weigh in
I mean, a single national ID card would be one way of preventing this so long as there was a trustworthy way of ensuring that it was updated with everybodyās actual address and the like. I donāt know that we would implement it in such a way as to have that, leading ultimately to another target for this kind of activity rather than a shield from it.
Nightmare scenario with the current administration would be such a thing being tied to citizenship somehow. Mail comes back undelivered and suddenly you have to dig out your birth certificate and explain things to some shitheel from ICE?
but there already is some form of address that govt knows, in most of cases, right? when govt needs to deliver something to you, like, say, court order, they need some address
out there it works like this: there is a legal requirement to have registered an address. itās on you, because when itās not done, some important papers might end up somewhere where you have no idea they might be. itās not in ID, and based on this couple of things are determined like voter lists per district or what tax office are you associated with
Wow I canāt believe Iām still learning new ways the United States do voter suppression. Imagine if they put all that creativity in something other than white supremacy!
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National ID wouldnāt change that unless voter local registration and change-of-address updates were all rigidly and securely integrated.
So long as voter registration is a locally-managed list of names and addresses itās possible to go in and arbitrarily declare some of the registrations void.
OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really donāt know what Iām talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. Itās messy and I havenāt learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):
A bunch of uninformed rambling
US states arenāt thought of as countries for good reason, but in the countryās legal framework that kind of how they work ā just with a lot of work to make borders almost a non-issue, shared citizenship, shared economy, etc. This means that historically a lot of stuff that would be associated with a country (ID, driving permit, residency, military) either only happens at the state level; or happens at both the state and the federal level.
In the constitution the federal government is supposed to stick to itās lane as well: any powers which arenāt explicitly given to the federal government are reserved for the states (10th amendment). Though in practice the federal government has a lot of powers.
Thatās the background and helps explain both the lack of a (compulsory) national ID and how there can be state level election shenanigans:
For national ID this was indeed a conservative bugbear. They were essentially worried about the government building a dossier on them or something. I donāt remember the details itās been a long time: Conservatism 15 years ago was an entirely different beast than it is today. Itās kind of hard to even imagine if the conservatives still have the same fears today, if the liberals donāt, or how it would actually play out. Congress being deadlocked for so long means itās hard to get a vibe on how things would shake out if they started actually passing lots of laws again.
Oh yeah did I mention congress is deadlocked? This both means that the US is essentially operating on decades outdated laws, and that the legislatureās infighting has lead to a power vacuum that the executive and judicial branch have slurped up (which helps explain the current Elon Musk mess)
Anyway election shenanigans: States were historically supposed to be, well, states as in closely aligned countries and this was all set up in the days before fast and easy long distance travel and communication (did I mention America is really big?). This means that each state runs itās own election (which it can do in any legal way it pleases). The outcome of the election is one or more electors, and those electors are who actually send in their choice for president. There have been cases of āfaithless electorsā who vote for someone besides the party they represent. Oddly this hasnāt really been seen as a big deal (since the parties choose the electors they tend to be pretty loyal).
The point of the previous paragraph is this is a mess. Like a real mess. Itās law that made some sense 200 years ago (and maybe not even, they were kinda #yolo-ing the constitution at the time) but is really dated. This means thereās lots of room for shenanigans. Can a state legally disqualify voters? Maybe? Sometimes? Kinda? Theyāre not supposed to be like racist or anything, but determining that depends on a lot of details and shifting supreme court rulings.
okay so in absence of federal ID how do you authenticate anything when dealing with govt things? just by SSN? we have something similar, but years of security malpractice by people who were not trained to do this made these numbers public to probable attackers, so authentication with just that is not considered secure for a couple of years by now. instead, with anything important (like taking a loan, opening bank account, buying a car or real estate etc), you have to also provide your ID number which doesnāt have this problem
but wait there's more
on top of that, for a year of so, govt implemented a switch in that service from upthread, you can also access it offline. this switch allows you to deactivate your SSN-like number so that anything authenticated with that when itās off is considered legally void, and probably wonāt work in the first place because itās supposed to be checked in national db. when you have to authenticate something legitimately, you can switch it on for a day, then switch it off again. this was in response to incidents of identity theft
for some things, but not all things, you can also use digital signature
Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require āreal IDsā / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldnāt be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driverās license says āFederal Limits Applyā.
For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.