The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
There are a lot of rationalists in this community. Pointing out that the entire thing is a cult attracts downvotes from people who wish to, for instance, avoid being identified with the offshoots.
Perhaps I will get downvoted to death again for saying so, but the obvious answer is because the name "rationalist" is structurally indistinguishable from the name "scientology" or "the illuminati". You attract people who are desperate for an authority to appeal to, but for whatever reason are no longer affiliated with the church of their youth. Even a rationalist movement which held nothing as dogma would attract people seeking dogma, and dogma would form.
The article begins by saying the rationalist community was "drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences". Obviously the article intends to make the case that this is a cult, but it's already done with the argument at this point.
>The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?
Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.
Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.
You say only saving grace like its some sort of loophole. Most of the people who support banning tiktok have always maintained that the legal justification for banning it rests on the fact that it is controlled by a foreign adversary.
That's not a "saving grace", that's the content of the legislation.