Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  On the 10th of the month, the US Supreme Court heard arguments on "whether the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" violates the First Amendment.  One week later, the Supreme Court issued per curiam opinion with no dissents upholding the law. Sotomayor and Gorsuch each filed a concurrence.  By way of reminder: this case arose because President Trump, in his first administration, sought to make it impossible for TikTok to continue in the US. He purported to ban it by executive order. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/ But a district court judge struck down the ban on the ground that there would have to be a statutory mandate.   Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a statutory mandate, and that is the law that (oddly, with Trump's blessing) the PRC backed management of TikTok was seeking to have declared unconstitutional on first amendment ground...

I admit to having very mixed feelings about the whole TikTok issue. Let's review.  The US House of Representatives has passed, in what is nowadays an impressively bipartisan vote, (and with 352 yeas) a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a US ban.  A study last year out of Rutgers University indicated a "strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government." Perhaps more worrying, the broad use of TikTok is a means by which interests in China may build up a database on Americans and America, and whoever at ByteDance can get that information would be susceptible to demands from his/her government to pass it along.    What information exactly (aside from dance trends) would China get in this way that it could turn to nefarious purposes? It could help identify targets for recruitment for espionage, or data could be crossed-chec...