FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...

Your first argument was that "...paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly."; i.e., you justified it on the fact that they were paid professionals; the type of work doesn't matter and no judgement should be done.

Now, you admit that there is indeed a moral/amoral issue in making advertisements, but argue that in this case the FTX players must have been good liars and the actors must have been fooled.

Considering the actors to have reasonably vetted the thing as worthwhile & ethical, but having been fooled, is indeed a much better grounds to give someone a pass.

Especially so for the celebs who also invested their own money and have now lost it.

Of course the assassin example is extreme, I said so, and selected it because extremes can make the point more obvious. That makes it no less valid. I'm not questioning people's morals — I making obvious the foundational element that something being a "professional job" does not remove the actions from the sphere of moral judgement.

Certainly the celebs who invested along with promoting the thing were also fooled. That does not mean that they were absolved of moral judgement because it was a professional job, but that they can indeed be judged and given a pass because they were also fooled. Sure, the end result of both is that they pass, but the reasoning matters.

Your second argument is a good one in probably most cases; the first was not.

They're often good material. But they are way way way fringe. 60 Minutes especially is probably only still around because it would be a public embarrassment to kill it.

I mean, the heavy metal sonic aesthetic is not well suited for Mariachi music. The fact that Metalachi exists and has a following doesn't disprove the hypothesis.

A growing force in political fund-raising, he has a super PAC that recently gave more than $10 million to a Democratic congressional candidate who supports some of his philanthropic priorities.

In public, Mr. Bankman-Fried can sometimes seem uncomfortable, tapping his foot or twirling a fidget spinner. But the awkwardness is part of a calculated self-presentation. Over countless tweets, interviews and TV appearances, he’s positioned himself as a mad-scientist-cum-diplomat — a straight-talking brainiac willing to embrace regulation of his nascent industry and criticize its worst excesses.

Now Mr. Bankman-Fried is trying to leverage his fame to set policy in Washington, at a moment when the risks of crypto trading are growing increasingly stark; he makes regular trips to the Capitol from his base in the Bahamas, meeting with regulators and testifying in Congress. If he’s successful, he could become one of the most influential figures in the new era of technological experimentation that supporters call web3, writing the rule book for a slew of risky investment products that are increasingly reshaping the internet, finance and even the arts.

But his detractors say his advocacy is driven by self-interest. His political contributions have prompted complaints that he’s distorting the competitive landscape to advance his own agenda. And the charm offensive in Washington has alarmed consumer advocates who argue that FTX is exacerbating the volatility in crypto markets and putting investors at risk.

FTX serves as a portal to the crypto world. With the click of a button, a curious investor can turn dollars into Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Ether. It’s as simple as buying paper towels from Target — except that the value of a digital asset can be wiped away overnight amid the types of market gyrations that have sent cryptocurrency prices crashing over the past month. In the United States, crypto exchanges occupy a regulatory gray area: It remains unsettled whether the tokens are securities, commodities or something else entirely. Mr. Bankman-Fried has been pitching a regulatory structure with expanded authority for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is smaller and less aggressive than the Securities and Exchange Commission and has traditionally been more sympathetic to the crypto industry.

FTX is headquartered in the Bahamas partly because 80 percent of its $1.1 billion in global revenue stems from a trading instrument that remains illegal in the United States. On the FTX platform, investors can borrow money to make enormous bets on the future prices of cryptocurrencies, leading to potentially astronomical gains — or catastrophic losses.

So not only is the article extremely up-front about the fact that SBF donated to the Democratic primaries (and as far as I can tell, none at all to the general election), it's far from "glowing" (it's a banal, if colorful, profile) and, contrary to the parent commenter's claims, nowhere does it claim that he is a "do-gooder", rather using the phrase in the context of how EA advocates think of themselves.

The sheer irony of people railing against misinformation in media while willfully misinforming people on social media.