I had a thought: in previous decades it was advantageous for the US to invite academics from China because we could impress them with our highly developed standards of living. We could work them over with intelligence and maybe even turn them as US assets and informants. As life in China gets better and life in the US gets worse, though, this has become a hindrance as those same academics now see the squalor of US cities and decline of US prestige. Now we need to keep them out or the whole charade of US supremacy will collapse. Now they can only be allowed to view the US from movies and television.
I think a lot of "religious" people living under capitalist modernity are in denial. Even when they want to believe, they can't. It's the curse of bourgeois revolution - all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, etc etc.
Yeah I guess people can be culturally Catholic without actually believing in any of the stuff the church says. It's just a place to meet up with the community once every Sunday + holidays. That's probably most denominations of Christians tbh
I don't see it. He has primacy, he's the vicar of Christ, he can't be illegitimate by definition. There can't be an incorrect Pope.
Eastern Orthodox can square this circle because they respect papal primacy without papal supremacy, so the Pope is first among equals and the bishop in Rome rather than the Supreme Pontiff of all bishops and churches. Rome can have an incorrect Pope and that doesn't effect their faith or churches, because they have their autonomy.
Roman Catholics are Roman Catholic because they acknowledge papal supremacy. If they reject it, they reject the Church.
Do they have investments and own property? Then they're bourgeoisified, they materially benefit when the stock market rises and property values go up. In this way their class position is muddled and they benefit from capitalism even as they are exploited by it.
I'm not going to touch your belief that the attacks on US collaborators are unprovoked. That doesn't matter. What matters is that Iran has the ability to make demands because the GCC can't do shit about it. Iran has a position of strength over the GCC too.
"Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users" is a simple answer.
"Governments want a way to easily prosecute users" is also a simple answer.
I don't see why it can't be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn't bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn't very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they're tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they'll eagerly comply.
And when they crash the economy they'll make more money on the way down.