Most Insightful, Funniest Comments Of The Week On Techdirt

Techdirt

from the and-the-winner-is... dept

Well, this week, I thought we were going to have another single comment dominate both categories, but it was not to be. Dark Helmet took the top spot (by a wide margin) on the “insightful” side of things with the following comment concerning the legality of domain seizures by Homeland Security. It also came in second in the “funniest” category, being narrowly beaten out by another comment, which we’ll discuss below. Generally speaking, the comments that win funniest or most insightful are not deep down in a thread, but this week’s was an exception. The post, if you don’t recall, laid out the legal arguments for why the seizures were against the law, and some of the usual critics in the audience started mocking it… without providing any actual rebuttals, and Dark Helmet apparently got fed up with the lack of substance:

I’d have thought this would be right up your alley, AJ. Karl bothered to give a long thoughtful explanation of his view and backed it up with references to boot. Something you USED to do.

Your response was to claim that one case controlled w/o bothering to cite why for all us non-DeVry law students and then dismiss the entire post as muddied and confused jumbled logic. To boot, you missed Karl’s point about the method by which speech must be handled when POTENTIAL 1st Amendment defenses can be raised.

I can’t read what you’ve been writing lately. I try….I really do. And I can read. And I see that you have written something. Yet usually about halfway through your first sentence, my eyeballs declare war on me for forcing them into this and try to stab me in the brain.

Do you have any idea how much this hurts? To have your own eyeballs try to stab you in the brain. I tried to reason with them. “C’mon eyeballs,” I usually say. “You’re my second favorite pair of balls on my body. I don’t mean you no harm, I just want to read this guy’s comment”.

But do they listen? No. They just keep trying to stab my brain with oddly formed silia.

So, sorry, I tried….

The comment that came in second on the most insightful ratings was also about the domain seizures, and represented a plea to the world not to judge us by the ridiculous actions of our government. It was written by an aptly-named user, CommonSense.

The U.S. Government is quickly showing that it will do whatever it wants…

Some of the U.S. citizens are equally scared, and equally despise our own government for it…

To the World: Please don’t confuse U.S. Government Policy with the wishes of the U.S. People.

I also did want to highlight another comment, which only came in fifth, but which I thought did a really nice job debunking some claims of critics who argued that the UK was right to prioritize the recording industry’s old business model over internet access for more people. This was a personal favorite of mine, even if it didn’t get enough votes to crack the top two or three — so consider this one the “editor’s choice” award. I won’t post the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:

The purpose of IP shouldn’t be to ensure jobs, that’s the purpose of things like communism. The free market is perfectly capable of creating content without IP. If content can be created without IP (which it can) then the purpose of having jobs to begin with (to create goods and services) has been served. If it puts some content creators out of business then that will drive them towards more relevant jobs, jobs that are marginally (though not necessarily absolutely) more important than the job of creating content. It’s not the governments job to direct what the free market needs. For example, there is only so much food that can be produced in a market at any given time and that amount of food is influenced by the amount of labor that goes into creating food. If the government directs more people to produce content through various free market distortions that means less people will work to produce food (since people only have so much time in a day to do work and there are fewer people producing food) and less food will be produced. The free market is best at determining the marginal value of everything and how much of each thing should be produced, not the government.

Moving on to “funniest.” Coming in first, and just edging out Dark Helmet’s comment above was Lobo Santo’s retort to one of our commenters who seems to go to great lengths to mock any and everything posted on the site:

I’ve been analyzing your posts, and I’m fairly certain I could replace you with a fairly small shell script.

Second place was Dark Helmet’s comment. Now, I should note that the humor in both of these comments seems to be directed at mocking/taking down some of the regular critics in the comments. I understand why this is being done, but I’m a little disappointed in it. I’d rather the comments be more focused on providing arguments focused on the ideas being discussed, rather than the people discussing them. So, a small plea from over here: let’s try to keep things focused on ideas, rather than people.

In third place, we had JohnJac, who made a bunch of folks laugh with his prediction on what may happen to the kid who got burned on his face by super hot nachos at Disney:

5 years from now on school picture day, little Timmy will go into a panic attack with the photographer says “Say Cheese”

For the editor’s choice, I’m actually going to pick three, but the first one I’m not going to post the content, because it was on the story about plagiarism and whether or not it was appropriate to cite sources, and an anonymous coward posted his or her “thoughts” on the matter by simply plagiarizing my entire post. And, two more for the road, both by Dark Helmet. First is his note concerning the issues with autocorrect making people type funny errors via their mobile device:

Oh, please. There’s nothing wrong with autocorrect. If you’re low on blood sugar, just spend the sixty-five sense for a cock….

Sent from my iPad

And, finally, his response to the fact that he won the “editor’s choice” last week with his brilliant DMCA notice in poetic form. He responded again, with another poetic legal threat:

If I may say in this short preamble,
That here is another fine example,
Of yet another author’s words being stolen,
And his rights left for others to trample,

You must have missed the point of my last epic poem joint,
Because you used it without my permission,
I did not grant or annoint, use of words that I’d coined,
For your own amused transmission,

So consider this another cereal request,
To take down this poem at my behest,
And watch as my chest will swell,
As I sue Techdirt straight to Hell,

You know where to find me, you socialist thief,
And don’t you dare think about brushing this off, chief,
I’d continue writing but I have to poop,
Love: Dark Helmet’s Legal Notice Writing Group.

Let’s see if we can convince him to write more…