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Comment by Izikiel43 | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, because the federal government can't assume that everyone has an ID, since they don't issue a universal ID.

I'm from a 3rd world country and we have a national id, the usa is weird in the strangest things.

It's a deep-seated cultural paranoia that the federal government is out to get us. Initially, the US tried to be a confederation like the EU or Canada, but it turned out that we needed slightly more federal power than that to stay as a unified country. But the tension between "loose coalition of independent states" and "unified government that grants some powers to the states" is a pretty fundamental theme throughout US politics.

It isn't paranoia, it's an actual thing that they have and continue to do. They regularly terrorize the people of the United States. Ask your nearest nonwhite citizen, they will tell you.

> the federal government is out to get us

Stop with the gaslighting. It's not paranoia when it's happening plain as day with an authoritarian regime arresting journalists, pointing guns at civilians, threatening retaliation by placing on lists for 1a-protected activities, and arresting people for not being white without a judicial warrant.

It's out to get you whether you have a credit card sized piece of plastic or not. Dying on that hill just creates so much wasted time and money for everyone.

> deep-seated cultural paranoia that the federal government is out to get us.

And yet when the Federal government deploys paramilitaries to a city to do sweeps of everybody who isn't carrying papers, while also using 2nd-amendment lawful carry as a pretext to murder someone, those same people are very quiet.

I've been noticing the same category of oddity for a while now.

Bill Gates and a poorly thought out brainfart about vaccine microchips becoming a conspiracy, vs. Musk and an explicit plan with a funded company to make brain-computer interfaces to merge humans an AI met with barely a peep.

Government spying on all of us was an awful dystopian nightmare right up until Snowden showed us they already had been.

Conspiracy theorists claiming contrails changing the climate, but the actual climate change from the invisible CO2 etc. of the same planes being dismissed as if it were the conspiracy.

Or the one about 5G sending mind-control signals, ignoring the real mind-control (such as it is) coming from accessing social media on your phone… via 5G.

I was about to wonder what pizzagate would turn out to be, then I remembered the Andrew formerly known as Prince and specifically the attempt at using Pizza Express as an alibi.

At this point, given what we've witnessed from them regarding injecting bleach and so on, I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the Trump administration will turn out to have done the conspiracy-theory version of adrenochrome even though it has been produced by organic synthesis since at least 1952. And if they are, it will be brushed aside.

I call this being "exactly wrong".

I don't know whether it's organically muddled thinking as ideas get repeated and blurred without proper thought or evidence, or whether this in itself is "chaff" to hide things (given the allegations around Epstein and 4chan, maybe there's something to that), or whether it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Assuming illegal immigrants should be deported as they broke the law and the government has been doing since Obama, wouldn’t having a standardized national id like every other country in the world simplify things? People only have their passport as a national id is strange, as that’s for usage in other countries.

Where I’m from you carry it everywhere like a credit card.

And funnily enough, all legal immigrants in the USA have a national standardized id, it’s called the green card, so that makes it extra funny that citizens don’t have one.

In most of the modern world, it's impossible to go through life without a bank account at the minimum (which requires an ID), but not so in the USA, there you can live your whole life, paying with, and accepting cash, storing it in your matress.

Among the man weird corners of US national ID politics, is the set of Americans who think a national ID is an unforgivable invasion of liberty but that an ID should be required to vote.

That sort of makes sense though? It's the minimal level of government involvement required. Presumably you can't carry out a fair election without some form of gatekeeping. Whereas why exactly should ID be required to do mundane daily things including traveling long distances?

That said I'm generally fine with the current voting laws and don't see any need to increase scrutiny. But all states have at least some level of verification to get added to the voter rolls.

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