Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the "the-discourse" dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone doing the one of the only things you can still do when the feds continue to fail in their quest to find the dreaded antifa — be sarcastic about it:

Wow, it?s almost as if antifascism is an ideology instead of an organized hierarchial group and the biggest domestic terrorism threat in the United States comes from right-wing groups such as anti-government militias~. Imagine that~.

In second place, we’ve got a double winner from Thad that also took second place over on the funny side. It’s a response to the usually-reliable claim that Republicans aren’t stupid, but rather know their claims are bullshit:

Are you sure? Because I find it very easy to believe that Donald Trump Jr. really is just that stupid.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous response to the insistence that Google is a monopoly:

But a monopoly in what? In mobile phone stuff, maybe?can one realistically use non-Apple mobile phones without a Google account? They have about 80% of the market last I checked, and I’ve heard that some apps won’t work without the proprietary Google services available. But saying their search engine is anticompetitive is perplexing.

The first Google result for “search engine” is “17 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead of Google”; then a couple of German results for some reason, then Startpage and a Wikipedia page. Google have paid Apple and others for promotion, but it’s super easy to switch to a bunch of others. I can’t think of many things with less lock-in than search engines. (I switched from Altavista to Google after using it once, then to DuckDuckGo when Google started banning anonymous access. Didn’t take a minute to update the bookmark.) Barr using this as an example of anticompetitive behavior can be seen as a shibboleth of a low-quality lawsuit and/or Barr’s unfamiliarity with the market.

Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a simple question about the claim that social media networks are desperate to silence conservatives:

Then why doesn?t Twitter get rid of those conservatives? Twitter has that right. The conservatives can go to Parler and build their little shitpile there; they have no legal right to force Twitter into hosting speech.

(Answer: Twitter, like Facebook, is bending over backwards to be nice to conservatives so the service doesn?t appear ?biased?. An account that reposts Trump?s tweets verbatim would get [and has been] suspended/banned for saying the same exact thing as Trump. How is that not ?special treatment? for conservatives?)

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is David with a response to Stephen’s first-place insightful comment above:

Man, you sound like a brain-washed radical leftist (checks notes) DHS homeland threat assessment.

We’ve already had the second-place double winner, so we’ll move straight on to the editor’s choice with Zonker responding to the DOJ’s argument that the generic use of “Google” as a word is evidence of a monopoly:

I keep getting Comcasted every time I call customer support about my cable service.

I’m also sick and tired of being Verizoned every time I hit the limit on my unlimited phone plan.

Finally, it’s Rocky with a simple question for someone spreading some supposedly-censored news:

Wow! How did you even hear about that if it was censored?

That’s all for this week, folks!