Comment by abirch
2 days ago
The difficulty for the US is people seem to be against a Federal Government ID. India doesn't seem to have this stigma and hence rural India can solve this problem.
2 days ago
The difficulty for the US is people seem to be against a Federal Government ID. India doesn't seem to have this stigma and hence rural India can solve this problem.
I don't think people are against it, we already have the social security identifiers as a government layer... it's just that no one in the government is willing to do it for free in a way that is accessible to everyone
> I don't think people are against it
Every time national ID gets moderately serious discussion it is revealed very clearly that yes, the people are against it.
RealID—which was simply national standardization of state issued ID (when used for a variety of important purposes) had intense resistance, too—and its the closest policy to national ID that has passed.
Social Security identifiers are not ID for the person, and anyway were adopted nearly a century ago at a moment of higher-than-current trust in the federal government.
It would help if the federal government didn’t show itself to abuse ID databases every time it gets ahold of one.
I don’t see how we could develop a national ID in an environment of such low trust (bidirectionally). You need a government that’s responsive to citizens and obeys constitutional guardrails, and citizens who trust the government to protect their best interests. We haven’t had that since the prior century (and last century the government was still breaking our trust, it just didn’t make the news).
People are against national IDs because of privacy, not racism like a previous comment in this thread suggested
People are against requiring certain types of IDs to vote as racism or other forms of voter suppression because it may cost money to get those IDs or be very very hard to do so, when there are other methods to authenticate a person for voting
Those are two separate issues and complaints.
2 replies →
real id is also a massive pain in the ass, which is probably the bigger issue
give people a moderate benefit to do it, like a tax credit, and I think you'll find the majority of people hold their beliefs not so rigidly
I think this is the horse shoe theory where the far left and right are against it. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-conservative-and-li...
I know people who don't have a social security number because their parents didn't want them to be tracked by the system.
Do they live in the woods? How do they work and pay taxes?
1 reply →
America has a substantial fundamentalist christian population who was handed a conspiracy theory about ID cards being a sign of the antichrist as depicted in Revelations decades ago and just will maintain that conspiracy theory for eternity.
The minimum size of this population, people who are adamant that the world is 10k years old, that god created everything as it currently is within those past 10k years, and therefore that all of science is a conspiracy in league with satan to deceive you from god, is about 30 million people. That's the percentage of Americans that willingly state such a belief when an alternative survey option is "Earth is old but god is still real and meaningful and doing everything" ie the current Catholic Dogma.
That exact same cohort is the singular reason for the Satanic Panic back in the 80s, for every child that "wasn't allowed" to participate in Halloween, for kids that weren't allowed to read Harry Potter because it "promoted witchcraft". These people insist we are in a constant and active war against actual physical demons that have infiltrated much of society. They believe they are losing this "war". They believe they are following God's orders. They believe anything is permissible in this war
That's not a conspiracy theory. It's a cautionary tale in the same vein as Don't Create the Torment Nexus. Some people proceed to take it overly literally and engage in wild fantasy (ironic considering the typical views of that population on things like D&D).