Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the the-hum-of-conversation dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a response to Josh Hawley’s politically-motivated call to break up companies:

‘Only companies I agree with deserve rights!’

I am shocked that insurrectionist Hawley is an enemy of the first amendment as well, why it’s getting to the point that I’m starting to suspect that he thinks the law’s entire purpose is to serve him rather than the public in general, much like his Dear Leader did and does.

Much like the MLB stunt even those that are in favor of ‘reigning in’ companies like Google and Facebook should be seriously angry at this stunt, because by saying the silent part out loud(‘I’m going after them because I don’t like how they’re using their actual rights!’) he just made it much harder to take any real action against those companies as you can be damn sure that they will be raising the question of motives and unconstitutional retribution against any attempt to go after them after this.

The funny thing about that quote of his is if you take out the bullhorns(because they’re certainly not dogwhistles) and swap out ‘Big Tech’ for ‘telecom’ then he might actually have had a point, as they are coddled by politicians and do use their power to squash competitors to keep their position, but funnily enough the politicians screaming about how much power the likes of Facebook and Google have tend to utter nary a peep when it comes to Comcast and AT&T.

In second place, it’s Nathan F with a response to Derek Chauvin’s conviction:

This incident is why cops try so very hard to keep the public from filming incidents, why riot police go after journalists, and don’t turn their body cameras on. They don’t want to be held accountable for their actions.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from PaulT responding to a defense of the Chicago cop who killed 13-year-old Adam Toldeo:

“When the police talk about “split second decisions” sometimes they’re right”

The problem isn’t the “split second decision” as such, it’s the regularity in which the inability to de-escalate situations makes them necessary. Also, the fact that cops in the US are trained to bark conflicting orders so that no matter what action the target makes they can be deemed as disobeying orders and can thus be executed.

Bear in mind also that there was someone else who had to make a split second decision – the kid who was murdered. One party was a supposedly highly trained peace keeping force, the other was a scared 13 year old. Yet, it seems the latter was the one who reacted in the correct way, but died for it.

“Did the kid have the gun or was it planted later behind the fence as justification? Not obvious from the video.”

I’ve seen footage that shows that the kid did indeed have a gun previously. But, that’s not the point. He was ordered to drop his weapon and raise his arms, then he was shot anyway after he did exactly what was asked of him.

Next, it’s another comment from That One Guy , this time about Apple’s claims that the word “buy” isn’t confusing to customers who are only getting a license:

‘People would never think that words mean what they mean.’

If you buy a physical CD then you can give it to someone else, you can sell it, and the store most certainly is not allowed to come to your house after the fact and take it back, so if a company wants to use the ‘Buy’ label then they should be forced to treat the transaction as a purchase, and conversely if they want to treat it as a license then they should be required to use that label.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment responding to ongoing nonsense complaints about our spam filter:

“I keep spamming comments and getting blocked for spam, it’s a conspiracy!”

In second place, it’s a comment from Flakbait on our post about Morrissey complaining about The Simpsons, in response to another commenter who simply asked “Who?”:

No, Daltry and Townsend aren’t the ones with the issue.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad deploying (possibly for the second time?) a joke about the European Commission’s promises about upload filters and free speech:

I did the “I want everything in one bag but I don’t want the bag to be heavy” reference last time, right?

And finally, we’ve got a simple little joke from Pixelation to somebody (helpfully!) catching a typo in one of our posts:

That’s very pedanti of you.

That’s all for this week, folks!