"Stay home Patrick of Tennessee. We don’t need maga anti-vaxers spreading pestilence across our country. As a matter of fact, don’t even leave your trailer park."

"Board the doors shut and stay inside with your AR-15. I think all of these anti-vaxers should be required to have ‘do not resuscitate’ tattooed on their foreheads." 

Says the top-rated commenter on a Washington Post article, "‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy/White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives." 

The commenter is responding to this: 

There is evidence vaccine passports could motivate skeptical Americans to get shots. Several vaccine-hesitant participants at a recent focus group of Trump voters led by pollster Frank Luntz suggested their desire to see family, go on vacation and resume other aspects of daily life outpaced fear of the shots, particularly if travel companies and others moved to require proof of vaccination....

Some attendees dissented and warned that requiring a credential would backfire. “I would change my travel plans,” said a man identified as Patrick of Tennessee.

Is the developing opinion that only troglodytes resist vaccine passports? Because I just noticed this:

This is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior. https://t.co/PtxbtqVfw1

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) March 28, 2021

Don't conflate resistance to vaccine passports with resistance to getting vaccinated. That's what I think the WaPo commenter did. Patrick of Tennessee objected to "requiring a credential," not to getting vaccinated.

ADDED: I think Wolf may be an anti-vaxxer, so her warning isn't scary.

SO: Let's look at the Guardian article she links to, "Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport/The prime minister’s ‘papers for pints’ scheme is nothing less than a national ID card by stealth." 

Obviously, that's the UK, and in the U.S., the "passports" would probably be handled at the state level, like our other IDs. I can imagine the question of vaccine passports in the U.S. getting swirled up into the voter ID drama. Is getting an ID oppressive or something everyone should gladly, willingly do? 

From The Guardian: 

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”...

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections....

Aha! It is already mixed up in the voter ID matter in the UK. 

[T]here would be no need to make photo ID mandatory at elections if people could simply use their “vaccine passport” – because, once we’ve built a system that links our identity to our health data and made this a condition of re-entering pubs, cinemas or concerts, or even our workplace, we could link it to other data too, public or private. This could be used by more than just pub landlords or election officials. The data on our vaccine passports could be used by the police, just as Singapore’s authorities admitted in January to using contact-tracing data.

All this – effectively, as I say, a stealth national ID card without the necessary debate – when we don’t even know if vaccine passports would help to solve our biggest problem: stopping the spread of the virus....

In January, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “We are not a papers-carrying country.” Yet, here we are, with the government reviewing plans to become just that. Only last month, the vaccine minister, Nadhim Zahawi, ruled out vaccine passports, arguing that they could be “discriminatory” since it is not compulsory for people to get the vaccine.

But some Americans (like the commenter at WaPo quoted above) are enthusiastic about discriminating against anti-vaxxers.

Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark are all countries that have introduced, or plan to introduce, vaccine passports for domestic use. There is a key difference: all of them already have a national ID card system. If we are to follow their example, we would first need an evidence-based explanation as to how vaccine passports will help to stop the spread of the virus.... 

The pandemic has made armchair public health experts of us all, but we need to hear from the real ones to know which trade-offs are necessary, and which are not, as we move into whatever phase is coming next....

I don't think that public health experts can be the last word on "trade-offs," and I don't even know if they can be considered experts on vaccine passports. The issue is whether, given the level of immunity we've already built up, we should limit certain facilities to people who've had the vaccine and, if so, whether we need  them to prove their status with an official government document? 

And what are the collateral effects of this document? Are we concerned about government surveillance and losing our privacy? Are we collaterally enthused because the document could become the voter ID?

"On the day the Capitol was stormed by pro-Trump rioters in January... his phone began to buzz with text messages and phone calls from friends and colleagues, predicting that Clearview AI would be critical..."

"... for identifying participants...  One of Ton-That’s salespeople called because a police officer wanted free access. 'I said we could because it was an emergency situation,' [said the chief executive of Clearview, Ton-That]. And in fact, the next day, the company saw a surge in searches from law enforcement. The F.B.I. wouldn’t discuss whether Clearview AI was being used for its investigation of the riot.... There had been a time when public opinion seemed set firmly against facial recognition. But suddenly — with people showing their faces while rampaging through the Capitol — Clearview and similar products seemed quite appealing. Ton-That and I talked on the phone just a couple of days after the riot.... While he was clearly taken aback by the events unfolding in his adopted country, he also seemed keenly aware it could demonstrate the utility of his company’s product, and perhaps sway those on the fence if it played a role in finding and punishing the people involved. 'You see a lot of detractors change their mind for a somewhat different use case,' he said. 'We’re slowly winning people over.'"

From a long NYT article, "Your Face Is Not Your Own/When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open."

"Some days it’s a journey through hell in my home too. I have things I do to pass the time. Some days I’ll be down and..."

"... moan to myself, Oh, I can’t go on tour. That’s a real positive thing to do, clearly. So I decided that I wasn’t going to do that anymore and get up and do stuff. I decided I wanted to make an EP. Not an album, just an EP with a few songs. I have a huge EP collection of my own. I love it because you can really get into a small amount of tracks, and that’s what the kids love now. They love EPs! And not only that, they love cassettes."

Said Ringo Starr, interviewed at Vulture.

I've thrown out everything cassette-related. Cassettes are back?! I'm getting my information from an 80-year-old man who hasn't left the house more than 8 times in the past year. 

But now I see they've just issued a new cassette version of Nirvana's "Bleach." And last July, NME investigated: "Who the hell is buying cassettes in 2020?/NME investigates/It seems UK music lovers are currently revelling in rectangular nostalgia — there's already been a 103% increase in cassette sales in 2020." 

Last week, NPR reported "Lou Ottens, Inventor Of The Cassette Tape, Has Died": 

Born in 1926, Ottens went from building a radio for his family during World War II — it reportedly had a directional antenna so it could focus on radio signals despite Nazi jamming attempts — to developing technology that would democratize music....

True to their do-it-yourself roots, cassette mixtapes have long been a favorite of punk and rock fans. But their legacy also looms large in hip-hop, where aspiring rappers and producers have used the approach to showcase their ability to chop up other music and create something new. The mixtape ethos has survived — and even thrived — despite the move from magnetic tapes to CDs and digital formats....

[I]nterest in the format has surged in recent years... driven by a mix of nostalgia and an appreciation for tapes' unique status as a tangible but flexible format....

Mixtapes! Do you have any good mixtape stories?