Hi HN -
I made a site that takes a UK postcode, grabs the local MP's information and generates an AI mockup of what their ID might look like. It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force. edit - My open AI credits got hugged to death, please use a known postcode (like one from Kier Starmer's constituency, WC2B6NH) in the meantime. |
These heckin' kids needs more protection. I suggest banning all VPNs too, only this way kids are truly protected like they are in China and Iran.
This way they will know for sure that it was you who upload your id. Then they will need someone else to watch the camera in case it gets tampered with.
Could you give a short TL;DR of how ids are constructed so we can all laugh here in comments?
Most are on Wikipedia, no?
Btw UK surpassed Russia in these kinda arrests
".... similar comparisons, stating that 3,300 people were arrested in the UK while only 400 in Russia, have circulated on social media for years. The original source of this claim is Konstantin Kisin, a Russia-born, half-British comedian, writer, and podcast co-host. His interview, where he makes this comparison [at 26:26], was recorded in 2019, based on data from 2016-2017.
For years, social media users have relied on Kisin’s statements to compare Russia and the UK. Many refer to data from the human rights group Agora, which reported that 411 people faced prosecution in Russia in 2017 for social media activity. In the majority of cases, media users were accused of [....] what authorities consider provocative content. On the other hand, UK comparisons are often based on a 2017 article in The Times, which cited 2016 data showing that over 3,300 people were arrested or questioned under Section 127 of the Communications Act. However, the same article notes that in half of these cases, investigations were dropped before prosecution. Additionally, Section 127 is not limited to social media, and it also applies to emails and other forms of electronic communication. Moreover, the Russian figure represents prosecutions, while the UK figure represents arrests, making the comparison inappropriate for many reasons. For example, the content of the clauses differs: in the UK, they are applied to a broader range of cases, while the data from Russia reflects arrests for the activity on social media. Additionally, the analysis of cases shows the difference between the two countries in the application of the laws. In Russia, many citizens and journalists have been arrested for expressing critical opinions or posting government-opposed views on social media. It is also worth noting that in the UK, cases brought under Section 127 that result in citizens being subjected to community service or fines are often debated."
The article I've cited mainly discusses a comparison by Guri Sultanishvili which is harder to justify, but Konstantin Kisin's comments have been more widely referenced in the public debate.
[1] https://mythdetector.com/en/free-expression-on-the-internet/
Had to make sure to implement this so that I didn't end up generating duplicates.
Let's not forget that Matthew Somerville did (and still does!) most of the actual work tho.
So the Tories, who created this awful bill in the first place, are now voting against it? Clown country.
What's really interesting is those that voted "Aye" who aren't Labour/ex Labour
DUP and Reform. Well the one reform MP that bothered to turn up. How surprising.
Labour voted in conservative policy. Conservatives voted against it. Reform, whilst all over the news for being against it, voted for it.
Just as a slight correction – the only "Reform MP" that voted for it is James McMurdock, but he's no longer a Reform MP and I'm not sure why he is still listed as one here.
I suppose such a tool might not work in a first-past-the-post voting system, but in my case it certainly has certainly helped to see what politicians actually vote like rather than just trusting the promises. If you live in a country with easily accessible digital records of votes/bills/proposals, I imagine you could throw something similar together and help quite a few people.
Neither did a lot of conservatives and labour, interestingly.
Greens and Lib Dems voted no, which raises my opinion of them.
Agreed its a mess.
Crap like Communications Act 2003 and Ofcom has been Labour policy for decades.
That defeats the point of the legislation since it creates a gaping wide backdoor to exploit official people, who are now the most valuable targets because of that exemption.
Never mind the matter of providing a rule for the people and making the people who made the rule immune to it.
The blackmail trade will be incredibly lucrative.
I'm not in the UK, so I don't have any idea about their laws, but I'd be shocked to find this was above board. Your FAQ claims it's a parody site and claims "The ID number isn't valid and you can't use the card for anything real." but you've just confirmed here it can indeed be used for real things (discord, reddit).
Your domain registration is UK-based, so, be careful!
ID verification is enforced on all Chinese websites. People figured out they can just use Xi's ID number.
MPs can be litigious. Especially if this is seen to be enabling things like ID fraud.
Also, there are only 650 constituencies. I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
Create a scandal. Bad PR is the only way out now.
From the FAQ:
> How did you do this?
> This site uses React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. The MP data is fetched from the UK government public API, and the AI-generated images use the latest model from open AI. The images are stored on a Cloudflare R2 bucket. The code is open source, so you can check it out on GitHub. It was done in a hurry.
The git repo linked from that FAQ shows a 404: https://github.com/timje/use-my-mps-id
Name: Mike Wood
Party: Conservative
Constituency: Stafford
Surely the way you build something like this is a postcode -> constituency table (I assume available free), a constituency -> mp table, and mp -> image generation (with caching or generate multiple versions)
Even if the lookup data mis-selected the constituency (I think some postcodes can straddle constituencies), surely the Constituency/Name/Party would be consistent.
I'm guessing you're using chat-gpt for the entire program?
https://members-api.parliament.uk/api/Location/Constituency/...
returns three constituencies, all of which look fine to me, but the "Stafford" one is the middle, and you're using the data from the first returned constituency
It's actually the postcode of a WeWork in Holborn (which happens to be in Starmer's constituency.)
Keir Starmer's postcode is SW1A 2AA.
will do it.
All in all, one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface, but the more you think about it the better it gets.
Seems odd, but probably wouldn't be noticed by an automated validator anyway.
I am not a layer but identity theft is a first thing that comes to mind
If so it’d be kinda crazy to go after you if anyone can just make an image like this in ChatGPT anyway.
It get all sorts of complaints from it and then it eventually says it’ll make one but only someone similar and only similar to a uk licensed and then makes something pretty close to reality - but not as recognisable as yours.
However, I doubt that's a strong legal argument.
To me this seems more similar to a people participating in a masquerade or comedian who dress themselves in the likeness of a politician. They are using the identity of the politician, but not in the way that identity fraud is intended to prevent.
Domain registration is an interesting example. To my knowledge, falsifying domain registration data is not a crime. Domain registrars have regulations to verify the identity of customers, including the recourse to suspend a domain if the data is incorrect. I could see a case if a person impersonate a politician in order to falsely attribute content of a website, under a registered domain name, as belonging/sanctioned by that politician, but that would likely fall under defamation laws. The crime could also be identity fraud, but the intent would be defamation.
As I mentioned in another comment, I've heard no compelling argument that differentiates between this scenario (e.g. kid uses this site to access a nsfw subreddit) and an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
In that scenario, the police don't just pick 1 entity to punish. The kid gets in trouble, the store (most likely) gets in trouble, and (if found) the fake ID supplier gets in trouble.
In the end, I hope that the owner of the website never has to find out exactly where and how the laws shake out, and that "it's a satirical website" is a strong enough defense. But from my armchair, I would suspect that the UK police/legislators would not look favorably on the "it's satire" defense. Especially because of this post which advertises that the fake ID works for some services, and there are under-18s on HN.
>Law often focus on intent.
I would expect that advertising that the IDs work on real services undermines any defense of "my intent was satire".
Many of the age verification services explicitly promise not to retain photos!
It talks explicitly about verifying your identity, not your age, so no loopholes today I'm afraid
Most MPs' home addresses are actually quite easy to find. Mine's was printed below his name on the ballot paper last election – a nice reminder of how we used to have a high-trust society. I doubt this practice will be continued for much longer.
I'm more talking about the developer of the site rather than the users. And the developer could potentially be found out if they posted it on a popular hacking website and used a known alias and registered the domain in the UK.
But, if they're comfortable, all the more power to them. As I said, I do really like the spirit of the site.
I would say not, but then again I'm no lawyer.
There's plausible deniability in that there's a big "this is satire" watermark on top of the licence. The DOB in part 3 is wrong, and the driver number in part 5 is modified to include the 5 letters of the surname, but is otherwise incorrect. The DOB encoded in the licence number doesn't even match the wrong DOB in part 3 either.
If anything accepts this as valid ID, then it just shows how farcical the system is.
Although I suspect such ... "innovations" ... would soon get to the western world including UK.
Is that really true? So search engines? News sites? Pseudo-anonymous discussion forums?
No, you don't need ID verification to use search engine or read news in China.
However, sites that depend on user-generated content (like forums) would ask for at least your phone number.
Source: https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_5129723.htm
> Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, Article 24: When network operators provide users with network access, domain name registration services, fixed-line and mobile phone network access procedures, or provide users with information publishing, instant messaging and other services, they shall require users to provide real identity information when signing an agreement with the user or confirming the provision of services. If the user does not provide real identity information, the network operator shall not provide the relevant services to the user.
The big asterisk: there's no anonymous internet service in China, you have to ID yourself to get access to the internet (article 24), and the service provider are required to keep record of you (IP and everything) (article 21), and they are also required to cooperate with the authority (no surprise here) (article 28). And using VPN or Tor is likely illegal (article 27).
It's obvious that they care (to some extent) that they're getting valid emails, so why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
Civil servants aren't there to say whether a policy is good, sensible, or a vote-winner. The CS policy profeasion is there, in part, to advise on risks. Ministers decide whether to accept those risks.
There were plenty of people (like me) who would have pointed out the various risks and problems. Some of which caused policy to change, and some were accepted.
I don't think I've ever seen in recent years the CS be blamed for something like this.
> I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
It looks like it already works like this? It was slow the first time I searched for my postcode, subsequent times have been very fast.
Do you think porn sites are more interested in a) correctly preventing unauthorized people from accessing their site, or b) selling as many subscriptions as they can while nominally complying with the law?
I’m not from the UK, so I’m not familiar with what their IDs are supposed to look like.
I was suspicious, though—the hands holding the ID cards looked kind of “crispy.” But at the same time, I thought, “woah, where did the website owner even get these photos?” It wasn’t until I read the Hacker News post that I realized they were all AI-generated (and now cached).
And here’s the thing: I’m an engineer at Apple with decades of experience in the tech industry—I’m not exactly new to this stuff. If I got fooled even for a couple of seconds, imagine how easy it would be to trick someone who isn’t technical.
Yes, I know. still much worse
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/28/oklahoma-superintende...
There's also some obvious tells if you know what UK driving licenses look like: the layout is wrong, the background is too plain, and all the anti-forgery features are missing. Real licenses have much more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
I'd say they're obviously AI fakes, just trying a few: B249AL (it made her bald), SA487AB (different shape, hair color and hair), TN248DF (it grew his hair back), HA26ND (bald, again) and NG166QE (I don't even need to explain)...
Wahl-o-Mat is *not* the same, it’s stated politics. One of the criticisms of it is that actual voting might (lol) differ. There was an alternative one, [0] Real-o-Mat that checked actual voting behavior. Though that has its own set of issues.
They have the same number of MPs as the Green party, fewer than the DUP, half the SNP, and about 1/20th of the Lib Dems.
I note 75% of them didn't bother turning up to work, I'm shocked one did.
I work at a domain registrar and I have yet to here anyone talking about criminal punishment for false registration data. I have also never heard about any one being charged for filling in the wrong phone or email address when signing up for a service or membership.
Looking at my local laws here in Sweden, the law text for identity fraud explicitly requires that the use of something else identity must result in some for of direct harm to the person. UK law could be different, but I have yet to hear something to indicate this.
The scenario I was comparing is an underage kid visiting this website, generating an ID, and accessing content that would otherwise be illegal for them to access by using the fake ID. In this scenario, everyone (potentially) would be in trouble, not just the website verifying the ID, just like an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
The reason I mentioned domain registration was not because it is illegal to register a domain or anything of that sort. I mentioned it because it suggests the website owner is based in the UK, which is easy pickings for the UK government to pursue (if they choose to). If the website owner was based in Malaysia, it would be significantly harder for the UK to pursue any legal recourse against them (if they choose to).
I'm having trouble working out what's category 1. Schedule 1 defines exemptions https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/1/part... ; otherwise this refers OFCOM to "critera" which I can't find.
As I understand it, Wikipedia are seeking judicial review of OFCOM's placing them in category 1, which requires the most stringent checks including identity.
I've heard many government workers say that it's funny but they can't watch it, as it's so accurate it's depressing.
Hire an expert they said. From the pool of experts they had heard about through contacts in the civil service. None of whom have any industry or real world experience. At best, someone was on an industry eating and drinking with the right people panel. I was there for 3 months and crawled back to my previous job cap in hand, bruised and educated.
It was long enough ago that I can away with rounding errors of months on my CV thank goodness...
Political satire is kind of dead in an age of unironic stupidity.
It's certainly illegal to make fake IDs, but I don't know if that applies to just generating an image rather than fully forging a physical copy. And anyway these images look nothing like the real IDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
There's no rule that only 1 entity can get in trouble.
If I use a fake ID to by smokes while underage, I will definitely get in trouble for that and the store that sold me the smokes may also get in trouble (depending on how realistic the ID is, etc.). If the provider of my fake ID is found, they also get in trouble.
I haven't yet heard a compelling argument why this website (who, in the analogous scenario above, would be the fake ID provider) would not be subject to the same logic.
I hope that the defense of "this is a satirical website" is strong enough (or preferably, it never even has to be put to the test), however given what I've gathered about the general attitude UK legislators have regarding the internet, I think it is more likely that they would do anything in their power to try and punish someone operating a site like this.
Are sim cards easily swapped?
Very easily. Apple even specifically introduced dual-sim iPhone for China.
> How easily can a burner be used?
You need to bring your ID to a telecom to get a phone number legally. But I don't know if there is a black market for burner sims.
(Last time I've been there was a few years ago so take it with a grain of salt.)
Because they don't support eSIMs there.
Anyone from behind the great wall care to comment? Is HN event reachable from behind the great wall with out Tor?
It wasn't a "time bomb". They introduced this legislation because they wanted it.
Under Boris Johnson?
Well, I suppose we have the benefit of hindsight.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
I can't prove I control an email in order to use your wifi, if I can't use your wifi.
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...
Basically if 0% of americans want a law it has 30% chance of passing, and if 100% of american want a law it has 32% chance of passing. For lobby groups it goes from 0% = 0% to 100% = 65% chance. Much closer to preference based lawmaking.
I can't think of a country that does have people largely in agreement with the governments actions, lately.
Or perhaps, for any given country, one can find a collection of loud voices detailing how 'the people' disagree with what's happening. But whether they meaningfully do is hard to establish.
I imagine a lot of Brits agree with the incoming rules, whether they are effective or not. You find that here in Aus too - a lot of Australians vehemently agree with the protectionist laws, because the intent of them is to protect children. And to many of them it doesn't matter what the real outcome is, because you want to protect children don't you? And this law is to protect children, QED.
I'm not sure you understand what the word "monarchy" means.
Have you ever met or spoken to a Conservative voter in your entire life?
We hold that LLMs are incapable of generating copyrighted images, so it's not just a tool - if it was just a tool then the author would be able to copyright the images. The courts recognise that an LLM is capable of generating things in its own right (which is why they're not copyrightable - copyrights only protect human works).
So it follows that an LLM must be able to create images itself, separate from the human prompter.
Whether that's enough to absolve the human of the crime, though - IANAL, and I suspect it would take the House of Lords to rule on it definitively.
Whether that's actually legal in this case I don't know, but I'm pretty sure courts won't conclude "welp, it was the AI, not the user" in a case like this.
There isn't one.
EDIT: actually, depending on your age and what you watched on TV, maybe you were visiting from Boston?
If the 3 numbers I type match the 3 digits of the owner's postal code, it's probably a reasonable signal that I'm the owner (even without the letters).
https://youtu.be/XanjZw5hPvE?si=Og-5iyLzjxebT6EF
I was inputting for ages.
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/notes/division/3/in...
Here's the Conservative white paper on Online Harms from 2019, during the May government:
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...
Perhaps you can explain why the conservative party keep writing bills that clamp down on freedoms, introducing them, whipping their party to vote for them and signing them into law?
That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
The bigger issue is that the left hasn't really existed in most countries for a long time, like the UK. "new labour" betrayed their heritage and adopted conservative points of view. Leaders who are trying to bring it back like Corbyn are ridiculed and marginalised.
Conservatism is the ideology that some people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while others are bound by the law but not protected by it.
Obviously if you are in the first group that sounds like the best kind of freedom, meanwhile everyone else is unprotected and punished, which makes sense why they would not want that kind of goverment structure.
When the House of Commons and the King disagree the Commons is supreme.
When that was last tested, in 1688, the reigning monarch was removed from power and replaced.
It was enshrined in the Bill of Rights 1689 and has not needed to be tested since.
When they disagree, they get a big dose of massive character assassination (Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbin)
Or just dead (David Kelly).
Discussed in detail during the non public weekly meetings between the PM and head of state.
https://go.photoshelter.com/brands/blog/photographers/blog/t...
I’m not suggesting that everyone most do self-immolation, but if it were me, I would draw the line at being afraid of being “caught” for an obvious prank using no PII. Screw that, come arrest me if things have really gotten that bad.
In fact, the Tories did NOT promise to reduce immigration. They promised 2 things that are guaranteed to increase immigration:
- 50,000 extra nurses (including foreign recruitment)
- A points-based system, you can find articles talking about how this increases immigration
> A points-based system, you can find articles talking about how this increases immigration
Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they? And secondly, how is that guaranteed to increase immigration?
The UK media and some of politicians at the time were all talking about an Australian-style points system. As someone pretty intimately acquainted with the Australian system, people (including ex-PM Teresa May) didn't seem to understand that under the Australian system -
- The government sets a minimum number of points under which you won't even be considered.
- The government set a maximum number of visas they will grant under the scheme each year
- The people with the best points are invited to apply for those visas
So with this setup the 'paper' minimum might be 65 points, but the effective threshhold is often 95 points to actually be invited to apply.
Yet in the UK the picture was painted as if you set a points threshhold and that's it, anyone with more than that gets a visa and you can't possibly control the numbers. It seemed like a total misunderstanding of the scheme.
They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower, or adjusts which skills get more points, according to perceived need for skilled people. Aus has higher migration under their points scheme as a choice. The UK could have chosen to limit skilled visas under a similar program to a much lower level.
As far as I could tell, all of the articles and talking points at the time entirely ignored this.
Boris introduced 2 million (legal) immigrants in the first (unaffected) year we "took back control" of the borders under the new system rolled out in 2020
The UK's new points-based immigration system - https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
The fact they didn't introduce it doesn't change the fact that adding 50,000 nurses required an increase in immigration. I went back and re-read the article, they also promised more childcare places. Guess what? That also requires more immigration.
In fact, I just read the manifesto itself and they also added a "fast-track NHS visa," so we have a clear "let's increase immigration" policy right in your face! Page 22, hilariously right next to where they promise "numbers will come down."
> They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower
You're correct, the government can choose to give out less visas, and they hinted that they would in the manifest (page 22). But if you read the rest of the manifesto, you realise quickly that the two goals can't be achieved at the same time. It's like promising to cure cancer by shooting the patient.
Look, we can argue about this until the cows come home but, if you voted Tory because you thought they would bring immigration numbers down, then you should have read their manifesto. The fact that they were never able to do this was right there!
Going back to "I voted for Brexit," then complaining about Brexit. Well, that's also something that there's no excuse for. In December 2019, the deal that was to be agreed was known. If you didn't like what it said about fishing or whatever, well, tough shit. You agreed to it when you put your tick in the box for Conservative.
---
Manifesto: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5da42e2cae7ebd3f8bde353c/...
In fact they did. They promised to reduce immigration. They did the opposite of what you just said.
Their 2019 manifesto said "There will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down."
Source: PDF linked on https://conservativehome.com/2019/12/06/read-the-conservativ...
this is misreading what I said. what I said is that the left isn't redistributing enough money
My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners. Policies such as government supported housing, daycare, support this.
These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
Imo this is the folly of the left.
relate every part of this sentence to the previous sentence
Oh absolutely. This is the way to make a more fair and balanced society.
If the US doesn't want that, fine but it is of course also the reason for the no-go areas/ghettos, the amount of violent crime etc. Because people who are in the lowest class and have no upward mobility will tend to spiral away in crime, because that does pay.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
I understand its purpose, but it does restrict freedom. Personally I am much more a fan of charity because its voluntary nature preserves freedom, but I accept the duality of freedom is the potential for lousy initial conditions in life.
> We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
I think we should strive to push society to freer markets. Neither leading party seems to have interest, however.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers.
Moreover despite all the constant pearl clutching about "systemic imbalances in resources between whites and People of Color" from the progressive left, you will find that most of these policies actually transfer wealth from the middle and upper-middle class ethnic minority demographics to rich white nepotists in the government.
If progressives were actually serious about correcting racial wealth disparities, we would implement a taxation scheme that taxes whites more heavily, and ethnic minorities less so, based on some metric of the overall injustices visited upon them.
Instead, the instant an ethnic minority gets a leg up on the system all the crabs in the progressive bucket demand that he get pulled back down. The words and slogans about "equity" are just hymnal responses that the white progressive uses to absolve themselves of all responsibility and accountability, since after accepting the Code of Conduct and the DEI statement they've already been "born again" out of the original sins of implicit bias and racism.
And DEI is something that is not about quotas at all. It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind", which is ironically enough what Trump says how he wants things to be (but in reality he is very racist).
Perhaps in all the talk of making the system like the Australian one, they missed the crucial part of it - that you also apply limits to the visas you issue.
In fact it looks like that's exactly what happened, they introduced a Skilled Worker visa with no quota.
I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system that was being talked about, seemingly from all sides.
I didn't vote for them either way :shrug:
> Wtf are you talking about? The Conservatives promised to reduce immigration in 2019.
Taken with that context, it's important to understand the manifesto to realise they didn't really "promise" to reduce immigration.
> I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system
A lot of blame belongs with our media. Frankly, it's piss-poor, barely goes beyond surface level reading of things and attempts to get soundbites out of politicians. I get more out of random YouTubers and podcasters, which has its own problems because how do you know which ones know what they're talking about?
Just to clarify on this point, I didn't mean "you" as in literally "you," I intended this in the informal "you" that's used in British English to indirectly refer to a group of people.
You are under the core progressive delusion that choosing not to identify or label yourself as a thing, means you are in fact not that thing. In truth, the labeling of a thing is completely orthogonal to its ontological status.
Concrete example: most of the left believes in a "gender identity," which is an immaterial, non-objective, unobservable, unscientific, metaphysical phenomenon that is somehow "more you" than the material reality of the physical body. If you strip away the gender theory jargon, you end up with a concept equivalent to "the soul", which is in contemporary discourse usually regarded as a religious, not a scientific, concept.
You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
> It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind"
Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
I stand very firm in my position that everything progressives say is a direct negation of reality.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1181138066/affirmative-action...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-courts-conserv...
It's about feeling. Someone with a different gender feels uncomfortable in their body (and that's putting it mildly). If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
> You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
Of course, religion was invented to help people make sense of the world (and of course as a means of control). Gender identity has always existed. It makes sense that religion invented some terms to explain it away. Because as a means of control and no IVF options etc this was contrary to religions' survival. After all, religion gets passed on through upbringing. If you approach a person as an adult with this kind of stuff most of them will reject it, but as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected. This is why conservative people are so obsessed about birthrates.
> Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
But DEI is not affirmative action. I work in this field myself for a big multinational. We don't do that. There are no quotas. We do measure our effectiveness with it (If you're in a country with 90% latino people and hire 80% caucasians obviously something is wrong) but we don't have hiring quotas. Instead what we do is management/HR training to recognise and avoid bias. And materials to improve understanding of minority needs, like LGBTIQ+ (which is the area I do some work in).
A lot of managers wouldn't even have known what nonbinary is for example, they would just see someone appear for an interview and dismiss them as 'weird'. They also wouldn't understand the specific issues they could encounter in the workplace. This is what we're working against.
Affirmative action is something that companies do that don't actually care about DEI but just want their "numbers" to look good. Quotas is the easiest way to solve "the numbers" but not actually do the hard work of removing bias. Meaning minority people will get hired but for the wrong reasons, and they will still have issues in the workplace resulting from lack of understanding. This is not the way to approach it, only when you're a lazy company.
This is equally unscientific.
> If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
May as well, given the catastrophe that is the replication crisis [2]. Besides, psychology has grown divorced from its roots, which are found in religion as a proto-psychology of mind (which is the modern term for what would have classically been known as "the soul"). You can further investigate the correspondences between religion, mysticism, and psychology in Jung's "Psychology and Alchemy."
> Gender identity has always existed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far there is no evidentiary basis for the "gender identity" in the body; some would even say that there cannot be a biological basis of gender, for this "holds the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender." [0]
Absent any biological or physical evidence I can only surmise that "gender identities" either do not exist, or are metaphysical; and to the scientifically-minded, these two statements are functionally equivalent.
In fact, I could even just as easily say "souls have always existed."
The paper [0] even continues on to state, essentially, that gender is an "intersubjectival" reality, which, ironically, is defined in an Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion:
Rejecting the notion that knowledge is purely
empirical and cumulative, Gergen has argued
that “truth” is always value laden and, therefore
(drawing from critical theory), “reality” is not
immutable, but always is understood via interpre-
tation [3].
> as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected.
Much of the LGBTQ+, almost by definition, cannot reproduce biologically and thus cannot have kids. Would you also claim that LGBTQ+'s survival probability, as a neo-religion complete with rebranded souls, is also affected? How does such an ideology reproduce, if not through indoctrination of children?
> But DEI is not affirmative action
At a layman's first glance this would appear to be the case from the SCOTUS syllabus:
More broadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that
discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as “af-
firmative action” or “equity” programs—are based on the
benighted notion “that it is possible to tell when discrimi-
nation helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities.” Fisher
I, 570 U. S., at 328 (THOMAS, J., concurring). [1]
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
[3] https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/referenceworken...
And LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology. People don't choose who they are attracted to. That's a conservative myth invented to make it seem like people are 'converted' to being gay or trans and that thus this could be prevented or reverted. There is no ideology nor agenda and it just is. We don't convert people. That's again a projection of something that religions do. They have agendas and conversion.
And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says. They are completely irrelevant where I live (and they should be in the US too as they are heavily politicised by the appointment process by the president).
As stated in my previous post these are classically synonyms that refer to the exact same entity. This use of language goes back to at least Descartes (translation by E. Haldane):
to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks,
that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a
reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly
unknown to me [0].
> LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology.
Why not?
> We don't convert people.
No, the LGBTQ+ just bifurcate the world into "allies" and "enemies". They mandate the use of neopronouns and neodemonyms, using letters not even in the alphabets of other languages, and try to correct perceived "gendered language" in languages that have no concept of gender in their grammar to begin with. People who refuse to prostrate themselves before your linguistic imperialism get cancelled and/or fired because they are obviously deplorable bigots.
Just look at how the LGBTQ+ was pushing "Filipinx" on people they have nothing to do with, an entire fucking ocean away, despite Tagalog already being ungendered and not having a letter X in its alphabet. [3]
There were a bunch of whites who came to the Philippines and then installed not one, but two (Spanish, English) languages in the populace, to the point where time is still told in Spanish to this day, and native Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more, resorting now to a hybrid of Tagalog and English. [2]
Call them by any other name but those all look like instances of cultural imperialism and proselytization to me. Will whites ever learn? Or are they so blinded by their self-professed virtue and ~crosses~ pride flags that they think, certainly, that they are in the right, and all the homophobes and transphobes from all those other Conservative countries need to be enlightened to 21st century morals (those godless heathens)?
> And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says.
I'm running past my point of caring too, since all you do is write falsehood without citation.
[0] https://yale.learningu.org/download/041e9642-df02-4eed-a895-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(psychology)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU
[3] https://opinion.inquirer.net/133571/filipino-or-filipinx