Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the takesgiving dept

This week, That One Guy took both top spots on the insightful side, winning first place with a response to Sherwin-Williams very stupidly firing the employee who made paint mixing cool on TikTok:

‘… Wait, where did that sales spike go?’

‘This man is making videos of our products and driving a ton of positive attention to them, what should we do?’

‘Fire him, how dare he think of stealing our product for his personal gain!’

‘He’s not only paying for all of what he’s using he’s donating it to charity afterwards, providing double the PR gain for us.’

‘Did you just suggest that I was wrong about something?

‘Nope, I’ll get right on firing him for his impertinence.’

In second place, it’s his response to the court denying immunity to cops who beat and tased an unresisting man to death:

The rule stands: ‘Only call the cops if you want someone dead’

That this even needed to be said shows how utterly corrupt and horrifying the US legal system is. There is video evidence of half a dozen thugs with badges either beating, tasing and ultimately murdering someone suffering a psychotic break or sitting back and watching while that went on and it had to be explicitly ruled that no, that does not fall under acceptable police behavior which means that yes, they can be tried and potentially face consequences for their actions.

Good on the judge for not falling for the legal abomination that is qualified immunity, but the fact that a case this damning even needed a circuit judge to rule on it shows just how utterly vile the law has become and how insanely privileged and protected police are from even the chance of consequences for their actions. With a corpse to point to, testimony of the store owner and video evidence of what took place this should have been the shortest murder trial in history, rather than something that higher courts needed to weigh in on and that still needs to go to court.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two more comments from that first post, including a followup from That One Guy. But first, commenter jonr arrived with an important update:

Yay for Florida Paints

And there’s an update: In a video just posted to his account, Anthony says he has now been hired by the company Florida Paints and will be moving to Florida to help make their paint cool. So there’s at least one paint company that gets it.

…Which prompted this rejoinder from our dominant insightful winner of the week:

‘First our sales tank, now theirs is spiking, what’s going on?’

Oh that is just too good, not only did Sherwin-Williams fire someone who was providing great PR for their brand but they ended up driving him directly into a competitor’s arms in the process, leaving nothing but bad PR for them as the new employer gets all of the good.

Whatever exec made the decision to fire him really needs to be shown the door post-haste, as while it may be too late to recover from this fumble with ‘leadership’ like that they’re going to ‘lead’ the company straight into bankruptcy.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Beefcake with another comment on that same post, summing up the situation thusly:

Summary

Paint saint complaint restraint attaint.

Update: Aquaint

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about Parler that may have been intended as a joke but was more likely just so-stupid-you-have-to-laugh — garnering it plenty of reports and a whole lot of funny votes:

Parler is a free speech capitalist platform providing a good safe space using moderation, based off the FCC and the SCOTUS
Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are Marxist platforms, providing bad safe space using communist censorship.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of other comments on that post. First up, it’s a observer with a direct response to that winning comment, pointing out one of the most obvious ways that it’s very dumb:

Yes, the multi-billion dollar private corporations are /checks notes/ Marxists. Do you even look up the words you use before typing them?

Next, it’s TheResidentSkeptic with a response to one particular piece of phrasing in our post, in which we suggested Parler is learning the same lessons that Twitter has learned:

Wanna Bet?

“… Parler is learning …”

Methinks you give them too much credit…

That’s all for this week, folks!