SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
2011 ban on interstate, foreign sports betting extended to online lotteries, poker, casinos
Last November, US Justice Department officials, having reviewed the nation's laws, quietly concluded that, oops, interstate and international internet gambling is actually illegal. For some reason, that view was only made public on Monday. And for now, this hot take is not being enforced across the country.
Published here [PDF], the opinion was written by the DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel, and is effectively a screeching U-turn on seven years of policy. In 2011, the office concluded that 18 US Code § 1084(a), which makes it illegal to use phones and telecommunications to gamble across state lines and the border, only applied to sports betting.
Well, the office was asked to think that over again, and it's come to another conclusion: online poker and similar internet gambling dens are also verboten, not just sports betting. That means e-casinos and online poker rooms with interstate and foreign players are operating illegally, according to the office's legal eagles.
[...] Gambling industry analyst Chris Grove told Reuters while the change won't affect big betting operations located offshore, online state lotteries and e-casinos in the country, whose annual revenues combined are just under US$500m, would be hit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @06:22PM
Correct. My point is that "they need" and "they should" are good ideals to have, but not ones that can be relied upon without the numbers to back it up. History shows that when a group is sufficiently large they will bind all individuals to their moral codes. Personally, I believe this is to try and ensure survival of the group. And I'm not convinced it is not wrong (that groups should likewise have a desire to survive), even though we find many times the moral code enforced is repulsive to the minority and there are groups that I would prefer not survive. But the fact is that it happens.
One cannot expect that one individual's liberty will be sufficient to overturn either mob rule or democratic rule (if there is a difference....) if it is in disagreement with having individual liberty. But a majority or supermajority group of people who believe in liberty, or who make liberty a shared moral norm: that's got power.
It is better, irony notable, to form a group who believes in individual liberty and freedom in sufficient numbers to become the majority who can make that freedom and group's non-judgmentality (*itself* a morality if that wasn't clear earlier) the code which binds all. To tell other subgroups that they may enforce their other morality only on the subgroup unless what they do impinges on another. That majority group, then, does still need individuals willing to defend those ideals, which clashes somewhat - it absolutely requires individuals who are willing to fight and die, together, to promote the cause of individual liberty. We're probably closer to being able to achieve that ideal in the United States than at any other time in its history. And the risks have likewise never been higher. And it will probably never be perfect.
All I'm trying to note is that the vision that fyngyrz promotes (which is very well thought out on the individual level) has to become that group morality of the majority in order to succeed. Or
Source [monticello.org]. But it takes a majority willing to be the fertilizer or the mob wins.