Seam0nkey

In the US at least I think as a policy matter there is still a commitment to building out of it in the medium to long term.

However it's not politically viable to advocate that as a policy solution without a stopgap policy to make progress in the interim.

In the sense that a former president of the US was just indicted for the first time ever, yes, it's political. By definition, in fact.

However, to engage in a counterfactual: would I expect in the scenario that a different president not eligible for reelection were to generate the same fact pattern as Trump to also be indicted? Or another scenario: a politician who is eligible for reelection to a different lower office?

Yes, in both cases.

In other words, by virtue of Trump's position I think special care and thought was taken to make sure things are on the up and up. I think prosecutors are smart people and generally are aware and thoughtful about the position they are in. I do not think they are pursuing this issue with extra vigor because Trump is Trump.

>he doesn't like laws that go after social media platforms

From a legal perspective you don't gotta be biased to reach the conclusion that there's not much states can do. Section 230 and and the 1st amendment are both crazy strong tools in their pockets.

Most indictments are never sealed (if the accused has been arrested on other charges, for example, there isn't much use in trying to keep it secret from the accused), and the ones that are always become unsealed in order to go to trial. There are a number of reasons to file an indictment under seal - ranging from juvenile records to managing flight risks of the accused.

The one that is probably most pertinent in this case has to do with testimony in front of a grand jury: both encouraging it to occur, and preventing it from being tampered with by the accused.

The second half of paragraph 2 on page 7 of the brief:

>And no foreign state has supported NSO’s claim to immunity; indeed, NSO has not even identified the states for which it claims to have acted as an agent.

I actually think you give the parent argument just a tad too little credit. If crypto was useful as a currency (and, as you point out, if it is comparably as energy efficient as visa), that would be an effective refutation to the energy consumption argument; freeing up human resources to do something else would be a substantial net benefit of the system for society.

However, crypto does not behave to act effectively as a currency; it would be an awful idea to replace the global financial infrastructure with crypto thus the energy costs are here to stay.

>That policy was rectified many years ago.

You're half right - the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the punishment ratio from 100:1 to about 18:1, and later in 2018 Congress made this change retroactive. This certainly improved the issue, but lawmakers continue to discuss whether it should be eliminated entirely.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/19/22336224/equal-act-cocaine-sen...

Platforms have the problem of scale. If I don't like how facebook or twitter are contributing to the information ecosystem I could go hang out on Gab or some other niche platform - but the tradeoff is that the people I want to interact with aren't there. These systems are inertial - while it is a great idea that future platforms should implement design choices that incentivize a well informed public and discourage conspiracy-mongering and misinformation that doesn't fix the issues with the current information ecosystem for years if not decades to come. Even if users were well informed about content moderation policies (they aren't), and users were rational actors (they're not), there are other goods involved that prevent that sort of ordered transition scenario. Frankly large scale platforms need to make significant changes to how they handle their role in information-space.

To clarify the WSJ opinion section wrote articles including the one you linked that treat the allegations credibly. The newsroom wasn't as generous: https://variety.com/2020/politics/news/wall-street-journal-h...

Actually ad-homs rarely show up in competitive debate. Competitive debate has the norms that an unanswered argument is considered to be true, and that the winner of the round is usually decided by a judge trained in argumentation. (most often a former debater or coach themselves)

For competition dirtier tactics including making 'must answer or you lose' style arguments that take longer to answer than they do to make in order to generate a time advantage.

If you scroll down a magistrate ruled a couple weeks ago that the journalist must disclose their source.

Pishevar's conduct doesn't really have anything to do with the story. The issue is about the circumstances under which a journalist can be compelled to reveal their sources, and how that will effect the incentives for other sources on other issues to come forward with (actual) information that the public should know about.