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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really don’t know what I’m talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. It’s messy and I haven’t learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):
A bunch of uninformed rambling
US states aren’t thought of as countries for good reason, but in the country’s legal framework that kind of how they work – 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 it’s lane as well: any powers which aren’t explicitly given to the federal government are reserved for the states (10th amendment). Though in practice the federal government has a lot of powers.
That’s 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 don’t remember the details it’s been a long time: Conservatism 15 years ago was an entirely different beast than it is today. It’s kind of hard to even imagine if the conservatives still have the same fears today, if the liberals don’t, or how it would actually play out. Congress being deadlocked for so long means it’s 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 legislature’s 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 it’s 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 “faithless electors” who vote for someone besides the party they represent. Oddly this hasn’t 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. It’s 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 there’s lots of room for shenanigans. Can a state legally disqualify voters? Maybe? Sometimes? Kinda? They’re 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 doesn’t 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 it’s off is considered legally void, and probably won’t work in the first place because it’s 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
Your SSN is often used as a federal registration number even though the card has “do not use for identification” on it in great big letters. Most functions just trust state ID for authentication purposes and use SSN as a label. An identifier in the database sense rather than the authentication sense. At least in theory.
See also how so many of the laws governing this are frankly archaic at this stage, with congress to busy fighting over whether the government should exist or not to actually govern anything effectively. (Note: government inefficiency has never been treated as a reason to govern better, only to govern less and assign more functions to for-profit private entities.
Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require “real IDs” / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn’t be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver’s license says “Federal Limits Apply”.
For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.