Check the wikipedia article, pretty neutral and factual reporting on the history. TLDR he revealed the US committing war crimes, they went after him with everything they had including planning an assassination attempt (which they never went through with). They tried to apply US law internationally to somebody who wasn’t a US citizen and wasn’t in the US. The UN said his detainment was illegal and torture. He’s been on the run, in some embassy, or jail for over 10 years for activity other news organizations regularly and legally engage in (leaking classified documents). Various US military, intelligence, etc agency heads have testified to congress that they couldn’t find a single death related to the documents he leaked, he didn’t put anybody at risk, in fact, Wikileaks sent every leak to the US govt before leaking it asking them for notes on what to redact. The US refused to participate in that process.

He also revealed the DNC was trying to bury Bernie, which the DNC didn’t even deny, they had to let a bunch of their top people go and do a bunch of primary reforms as a result. That’s when liberals started hating Wikileaks, because the DNC emails helped get Trump elected. They say the “timing” of right before the election makes his leak partisan. But wouldn’t you want that information before you vote? It is the job of wikileaks, or any journalist, to maximize the impact of information they are revealing on corruption. It’s not Julian’s fault the DNC was corrupt AF, all they had to do to avoid that was… not be corrupt.

There were also some sex assault allegations against him, which I tend to believe have some veracity to them however the accusers explicitly did not want him charged, it was a ploy to get him to Sweden where he would be extradited to the US. He was never even charged, only “wanted to questioning” but somehow got an interpol notice for it. His lawyers offered over a dozen times for him to be interviewed but Sweden insisted on an “in-person” interview for some reason. Curious.

Oh, and he helped save Snowden’s life by getting him a flight out of China.

If anybody wants an excellent overview of why the US thinks this is needed (and how other countries are doing their nuclear re-armament efforts), I highly suggest this video from perun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBZceqiKHrI

I’m not a bot, I just see things differently than you. I think Bitcoin and blockchain generally will lead us to a more efficient, more peaceful world where people have more financial and political autonomy. I think things will look different (in a better way) when our underlying currency supply is not inflationary. Most economists disagree.

after all the existences Bitcoin and it’s offspawns must have ruined, them not having provided any tangible benefits to humanity in the process, how can one still argue it could ever do anything good as a replacement for money.

When people talk about negative associated with crypto, as I’m sure you know, 99% of the time they are talking about stuff that is not Bitcoin. Most of the scams in the crypto space fall apart with the slightest scrutiny. Many of the most notable scams have little to do with crypto at all. FTX was a classic ponzi scheme, most of which have been done with fiat currency, yet we do not blame the US dollar for Bernie Madoff’s existence. Exchange collapses are bad, I agree, which is why I always advise people to not store significant funds on exchanges. Those exchanges need to be better regulated/have better oversight and transparency. Any time you have a third party store funds for you, whether they are a bank or exchange, there is a risk they will rug you. There are also risks associated with self-custody. That is for each person to weigh and decide. The US and Europe have had fairly stable banking systems the past 100 years or so, which is a historical anomaly, but most countries are not so fortunate, and it’s not like the EU and US banking system have not had their own collapses, rugs, and other issues. I would go so far to say that fiat currency is also a scam, just one we have come to accept as legitimate. It is designed to lose value over time, it fails the basic function a currency is supposed to provide, which is as a store of value when you sell your labor or goods so that you can then use that value to purchase something equally valuable from somebody else. That functionality doesn’t happen if your currency lost value due to supply inflation. We have the state control currency because they were the most stable institution ever created by humanity, so they were our best option. Satoshi changed all that.

As far as utility? I think the market cap speaks for itself, so does investment by major investment firms and banks. I can send money to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone for less than a penny in fees. The transaction settles instantly. It doesn’t matter whether or not they have access to a stable banking system or if my bank/country has an agreement with their bank/country to enable the efficient transfer of funds. I can do it from my couch instead of M-F 9-5 and I don’t even have to wait in line at a bank branch. That’s powerful utility right there. I sent Bitcoin to Ukraine’s government when the war started so they could buy weapons and whatever else they needed. That would have been a slow, expensive nightmare to do with bank wires. My bank likely wouldn’t have even let me send money to a country at war since the receiving bank couldn’t guarantee liquidity in exchange. DAOs are powerful ways to change the way we organize society. I help run a non-profit bounty program for open-source projects, people donate to it with crypto, which is much easier to do on an international scale when we don’t need to involve the conventional, slow, convoluted international banking system. We can use those crypto donations to fund open source tools for scientific research. There are many points of utility.

Small countries are now experimenting with Bitcoin because it gives them a way to have a reasonably stable currency without becoming subservient to the US. Before Bitcoin, their options were to manage their own currency which they lack the stability to do or become subject to the whims of a foreign government. Likewise, in some parts of the world, women cannot legally have a bank account. But they can have a phone and run Bitcoin on it. Granted, that would be illegal for them too, but it is at least possible whereas there is no bank that would agree to open an account for them. That’s a different kind of utility than the kind I get out of it, but a relevant form. Bitcoin can be a powerful tool against tyrants and dictatorships, a way to “opt out” of the monetary system that keeps them in power.

I find Bitcoin useful, you may not, that is your choice. I have used it in everyday transactions, I have bought and sold goods and services with it. Since I have started making an effort to prioritize using it, I have been surprised how many places will accept it for payment. Much of crypto is hot garbage or outright scams, even if the technology itself has great potential. Crypto exchanges and stablecoins are not to be trusted. That said, Bitcoin has kept its fiscal promises to me and all of its users for 15 years. There’s no reason to expect that to change in the next 15, as long as computers still run the protocol, it will execute itself faithfully. The protocol works, you can use it to send coins from point A to point B. Whether or not you or society or whoever find that useful is not up to me.

Bitcoin solves this. The 1 BTC you have today will always be 1 BTC which will always be the same portion of supply. How much that BTC buys you will change over time, but the portion of supply will always remain the same. And if the last 15 years are any indication, it will generally buy you more over time. Meanwhile, your fiat currency increases supply by 2-3% per year in “good” years.

BTC has kept to its fiscal promise or a fixed supply and reliable transactions for 15 years. Bitcoin has a market cap of 850 billion dollars, which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Bigger than Sweden or Israel. It is decentralized and not run by any country but by a protocol enforced by tens of thousands of computers all over the globe. With Lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for under a penny in fees. You can do that with a smartphone and halfway reliable internet access. It works in warzones, it works in international waters (with satellite internet), it works everywhere. It doesn’t care what your credit score is or whether or not your authoritarian government likes Bitcoin or not. No middlemen, no bank holidays, and it does this for < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and “stranded supply”.

Good. I don’t use TikTok and never will, but the government shouldn’t be able to tell you what kind of speech you listen to, what speech you make, or what platforms you use to communicate it. This is some 1984 shit. Looking forward to Trump banning every app except Truth social because we opened the door to this nonsense and all the other apps are spreading “anti-christian hate speech” or “anti-american-first propaganda”. Fuck the CCP. But also fuck the government trying to restrict speech.

“Press” has always been a business. This isn’t the dunk you think it is. They have always dealt with and interviewed sanctioned individuals. Some even interview prisoners! Imagine, interviewing not just somebody accused of breaking the law, but somebody convicted of it, like Mandela! What should we do with those journalists? According to some people on this thread:

Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.

You’re right. And it’s both. But social media has greatly accelerated our ability to exploit/be vulnerable to that quirk of the human brain. Specifically, the promotion of content based on interaction alone is the problem. It’s a policy choice by social media companies that has disastrous consequences for humanity.

Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?

Consumer choice and divestment. Brands are pulling out of Twitter, we need more of that from Meta and for them and/or consumers to recognize the dangers of using that platform. Consciousness-raising etc. People are recognizing the dangers of social media and centralization of the public square (though they may not use those terms), these platforms are hemorrhaging users, things are moving in the right direction. Musk and Spez are the best promoters of the fediverse we could ask for. And we need platforms like Fedi to mature and capture that audience. I think there’s a balancing act here to make sure we have safe online spaces for people to participate in (that are federated) while allowing the expression of a diversity of viewpoints so we don’t continue down the rabbit hole of polarization. One of the big problems with online public squares is the inability to tell intentions of commenters ie is that person genuinely “just asking questions” or is this a troll attempt? Reputation systems may help with this.

State regulation of this area is really tricky, all the proposals I’ve seen so far are pretty ripe for abuse by the government and I don’t want to give them that kind of power. They also make it harder for smaller sites and federations to exist since regulatory burdens limit who can run social media sites to only companies with money to pay lawyers.

Was the US dropping a nuke on Hiroshima a war crime? Or Firebombing entire cities? Unfortunately, “war crimes”, while they have a clear international definition, tend to only apply to whoever loses wars. That’s why the US passed a law requiring military intervention if the ICC tried to arrest an American general.

Here’s Robert McNamara, US Defense Secretary during the Vietnam war, answering that question: “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He… and I’d say I… were behaving as war criminals”

Should we ban his books? Sanction people for interviewing him? If we did, we wouldn’t have had that gem of a quote. That entire documentary, mostly composed of interviews of McNamara, is a powerful testament to the dangers of war for humanity. We don’t want a situation where journalists are scared to interview people because of what the government might do to them in response.

This instance of an unstable person consuming content online and then and going to hurt people in real life is scary, but I’d propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces. And that maybe it’s not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things, even if that speech in part motivated them.

What you’re describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech and free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on. There is a major push in society for everybody to splinter off into spaces where everybody agrees with them and, idk, that’s exactly what happens to people when they go down the quanon/OAN/etc rabbit hole. We have lost to many “third spaces” in public where we might have these kinds of discussions and everybody keeps getting more polarized.

The problem with hate speech the last 10 years has much more to do with the “I get in 1 word, they get in 100” problem than anything else. When you get into where people get their news, social media is a big part of that puzzle and Facebook et al has been able to put their thumb on the scale in a major way to spread hateful divisive content. Nazis has access to the internet in the 90s and 2000s, but they were in their own little bubbles and couldn’t do a whole lot. It’s social media that gave them a real platform by incentivizing their content and choosing, algorithmically, to promote posts which got “engagement”. Likes are engagement, angry reacts are engagement, comments are engagement. Reddit had a decent system with incentivizing upvotes, but incentivizing all engagement? You get civil wars. Not only did this incentivization mechanism make divisive content more likely to show up in people’s feeds, but it created a financial incentive for those posters to make divisive content and it made Facebook’s bottom line predicated on divisive content.

People are scared of the spread of hate speech and the right in the right wing it’s causing and they are ready to throw “free speech” as a concept out because they are so afraid of it. We don’t need to do that. What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive. If we do that, online hate speech will retreat back into it’s little bubble and it will be a thing 1% of people hear and get influenced by, not 30%. Luckily, I think this is already happening. Fedi is a good move in this direction.

To my knowledge he’s not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where’s the censorship?

The title of the article: Tucker Carlson Could Face Sanctions Over Putin Interview. They’re not talking about Facebook refusing to host the video. They’re talking about the EU government doing something about the fact that he interviewed Putin.

The right-wing is able to complain about the “mainstream media” and “fake news” precisely because there’s a grain of truth there. The news has gotten more corporate, less trustworthy, more biased, and less reliable over the past 50 years. People don’t trust the news, rightly so. Fox News is part of that, they are the most egregious offender in many ways, but they are not the root of the issue.

And trying to sanction Tucker? Using the government? Boy does it play into that narrative well. Tucker is praying that he gets sanctioned because that would totally validate the “I’m being censored as a conservative” victim persecution fetish that maga has

Where, exactly, should the line be draw then between “reporting” and “being a mouthpiece”. Because if you can’t codify a set of very clear standards that can exist in law, the government will use every last bit of ambiguity to repress dissent, especially when the government is not being headed by somebody on your “side”. In the US, there are some very clear, very specific carve-outs for the 1st amendment.

George Bush is considered by many to be a war criminal, he invaded two countries with no legal pretext. Should his writings or paintings be banned speech? Should the government be able to censor him? How about Pinochet? or Stalin? How can we learn about history if we cannot see and understand why one side acted the way they did? What their motivations were? We don’t censor those things, and we shouldn’t. The USSR however did widely censor the writings of western authors, using much the same arguments you make here.

The easier solution is to not grant the government that kind of censorship power, acknowledge that words are just words and we being free people can discern fact from fiction and come to our own conclusions, and push for platforms to not give airtime to hacks like Tucker. If you do not believe people can hear two arguments and discern which is better, you may as well give up on democracy entirely. The whole concept of democracy is premised on believing that people can do that. If they can’t, we may as well hand over all our liberties to the nearest wannabe dictator and be done with the inefficiencies of voting.

Agreed, but going around interviewing politicians and posting that online is clearly a journalistic activity. Should Barbara Walters have been thrown in jail or sanctioned for interviewing Castro? A marketplace of ideas in a free society requires the ability to hear the arguments of all sides so we can form rebuttals to them and arrive at some kind of consensus, as a society, about what our values are and how our institutions ought to reflect those values. We don’t have to give a platform to those ideas, we can be wise about how and where those ideas are discussed and shared, but we don’t hand over the power to make those decisions to the government because in the past governments have been pretty terrible custodians of that power.

And a free, unrestrained press is our first line of defense against governments trending towards tyranny and authoritarianism. Governments trying to repress speech is the “canary in the coalmine” that they are getting more authoritarian and corrupt. If we don’t draw a line in the sand there, the next few steps they take will be even harder to fight back against as we will have lost our ability as a society to be aware of and share information about it. Look at Putin, look at Trump, look at Hitler, look at Orban. The first thing they do when they get elected is de-legitimize the press and try to restrict their ability to publish.

Whether he’s a journalist or not, he’s a US citizen, he has a right to free speech guaranteed under the constitution and the UN declaration of human rights. The EU has a similar document.

It’s wild to me how many allegedly left-leaning or “liberal” people who say they believe in open societies, free expression, etc will gladly throw all that out the window if it means they get to punish somebody they disagree with. This trend has really picked up the last 10 years or so. Fuck tucker carlson but he has a right to speak freely and it’s terrifying that the government can sanction a journalist, even a shitty one, for the crime of interviewing somebody.

Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let’s not emulate him. I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.

Societies which stifle dissent, especially using the power of the state, grow weaker because they aren’t able to effectively adapt to change. Remember it is not too long ago that advocating for gay marriage would have been seen as morally deviant and repugnant. But strong speech protections allow us as a society to have that discussion and come to the correct conclusion which is that it’s fine to be gay, that love is love, and that gay people deserve equal protection under the law.

BRICS nations like China are desperately trying to move off the dollar, which is a major tool of US control. The problem is, nobody trust the Yuan, the Ruble, or any of their other fiat currencies. They can’t trust each other, so the US remains the global currency hegemon. But that is a privileged position it basically only got because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. The US’s position in this area will continue to erode.

There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D

What will replace it? My bet is on Bitcoin. A few smaller nations (Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador) have embraced it as a way to reduce the control the US has over their economies. The blowback from the world bank, IMF etc has been very telling. They do not like the idea of a country that doesn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of debt, restructuring, and subservience to the dollar. Throughout history, countries have had to choose between minting their own currency which many lack the political stability to do, or using the currency of another country as the expense of their own sovereignty. But now there is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a politically neutral currency that cannot be controlled by any nation state or even group of nation-states. It is immune to corruption and human error. It just works well to send money from A to B and nobody can cheat it. It’s market cap is 850 billion dollars, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On par with Switzerland. Higher than sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than vietnam.

Bitcoin’s fiscal policy is clear and predictable. 21 million coins will be minted. No more, no less. And if you have a private key, you can spend your coins. Nobody else can spend them. It has kept that promise for 15 years. 365 days a year. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day. Without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or a single hack. And there’s no reason to think it can’t keep that promise another 15. The incentives and security mechanisms built into Bitcoin the past 15 are the same it will have the next 15.

Anybody can use Bitcoin with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. With Bitcoin lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for pennies in fees. No credit check required, no middlemen, no nonsense. It doesn’t matter if your country doesn’t have stable banking infrastructure or a government constantly devaluing your currency. And it does all of this with less than 1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables, since miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity which tends to be made from renewables at off-peak hours.