rule of law

The point is that if you over-prioritize loyalty, other essential goods get de-prioritized. And those other goods are far more important to sound public decision-making.
 

There is only one sword for one ruler to make one law for the whole kingdom. Why is this? For most of recorded history, this was just presumed to be the right way. Do you ever stop and ask why? There is nothing about social organization that requires this to be true. Instead of handing out swords, the lady of the lake should have become a merchant and sold stuff that people clearly needed more than a ruler, such as groceries, medicine, or cash advances.

Imagine a libertarian fantasy world, where proponents of freedom decide the proper size and scope of government. Well, that fantasy world exists, sort of. It’s called Liberland.
 

The President of the European Commission said in 2010: “The oath of independence and respect for the EU Treaties is more than a symbolic act”. As it turned out, it was not even a symbolic act.

Joe McNamee, EDRi: Commissioners’ oath – a broken promise on fundamental rights »

Ecuador has written to the Swedish government complaining of a “serious lack of progress” in the investigation involving a rape allegation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Get arrested in Durham, England, and artificial intelligence could help decide whether you’re held in custody or sent home—but it’s not yet clear if the algorithm is more accurate than police officers when it comes to assessing whether someone is likely to reoffend.

The EU is in the process of updating the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD).
As one could expect, this opens the floodgates when it comes to regulating and censoring content such as video (and even animated GIF:s) on a number of platforms. This includes otherwise legal content.
Today the EU E-Commerce Directive gives service providers and platforms some reasonable protection. EDRi explains…

In a speech Thursday at a Washington DC think tank, CIA Director Michael Pompeo called the whistleblower site WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and said news organizations that reveal the government’s crimes are “enemies” of the United States. (…)
Referring to WikiLeaks’ founder, Pompeo declared that “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms.” (…)

Reuters: Hacker documents show NSA tools for breaching global money transfer system »

Here, the potential to become an accidental criminal is rather high since residents aren’t even allowed to see copies of the legal code without first applying for a license and paying a hefty fine to the state.