Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the holiday-conversation dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter summing up the motivation behind FOSTA 2.0:

Looks like the ultimate objective is that nobody can publish without the work first being approved by a licensed editor, oh and to keep the copyright cartel happy, and copyright transferred to the publishing company.

In second place, we’ve got That One Guy responding to Alabama’s move to make assaulting cops a hate crime:

Oh so telling priorities…

Because if there’s one group that needs even more legal protections in america, it’s the police. /s

“Sen. Figures (who does not agree with Ward’s assertion that “everyone agrees”) may have been responsible for the death of Elliott’s previous effort when she added an LGBTQ amendment to his 2018 “blue lives matter” bill. That’s the sort of “tacking on” Ward is hoping to prevent here, in order to give cops more protections while leaving more vulnerable residents less protected.”

It’s telling in all the wrong ways that simply adding an amendment to extend the same protections proposed for police(a job you choose) to LGBTQ people(something you don’t choose) was enough to tank the previous incarnation of this legal atrocity.

‘We must protect the police from those that might want to harm them! … but only so long as those same protections aren’t extended to those LGBTQ scum.’

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with tom responding to the incident in which cops shot a woman multiple times during a raid:

I always find it interesting that Officers expect that someone that is asleep to fully comprehend what is going on and not take defensive actions toward strangers in her house while at the same time claiming that her actions surprised and/or threatened the officers who had hours to plan the action, minutes to approach the house and assess the situation and many seconds as it unfolds to take cover and deescalate to a safe ending.

Seems like there is a lot of faking of training records going on.

Next, it’s Thad responding to the assertion that the New York Times needs to be more “balanced”:

That sounds an awful lot like the “view-from-nowhere” approach that has done significant harm to the mainstream US press.

Sometimes, reporting “balanced opinions” merely muddies an issue and creates a sense of false equivalence. We’ve been dealing with a “both sides” approach to climate science for 30 years at this point; it hasn’t worked out well.

If one person says it’s raining and another one says it’s not, a journalist’s job isn’t to report both sides, it’s to look out the window.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is another one from That One Guy, commenting on our post about the Austrian hotel dropping its lawsuit against a guest who complained about pictures of nazis in the lobby:

Well that was awkward

Claimed grandfather wasn’t a nazi and sued to punish someone who said as such. Target does some research and confirms that said person most certainly was a nazi. How’s that saying go, ‘It is better to be suspected of having a nazi grandfather than to sue and remove all doubt’?

“The owners claimed the person had never been a member of the Nazi party, but rather only a member of the military force controlled by the Nazi government. Checkmate, I guess.”

Assume for a second this statement had turned out to be true, that said person wasn’t actually a nazi… was literally the only picture they had of him the one where he was in a nazi uniform? Because If it was that would certainly be odd, and if it wasn’t their choice of which picture they chose to honor him with is just all sorts of screwed up and basically begging people to respond as the guest did, wondering why exactly they had a picture someone in nazi uniform in a prominent place in the hotel.

In second place, it’s Bobvious cooking up a little ditty about Ring:

Eiffel inn two a bern inn ringo phyre ?
Eye weren’t doun, doun, doun
Anderr Flaims when tyre
Ann deet byrns, burnes, bernes
The ringo phyre ?
The ringo feier?

(I feel there may be a layer to that joke I’m missing, in which case someone please enlighten me.)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with David explaining how the Arkansas food labeling law works:

Well, this is to avoid confusion. You can still call your product a “veggie burger” as long as it contains beef.

And finally, it’s an anonymous commenter replying to the assertion that “security theater works”:

So do Tiger repelling rocks, so long as there are no tigers about.

That’s all for this week, folks!