Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the words-were-exchanged dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the USPS seizing “defund the police” facemasks:

Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier.

In second place, it’s a comment from Naughty Autie (that also won second place for Funny), responding to another commenter’s thoughts on Truth Social banning people over January 6 comments:

Wow, you’ve sure changed your tune! Before (just yesterday), you were absolutely convinced that it was only ‘woke idealogue’ social media websites like Twitter that engaged in viewpoint-based ‘censorship’. Now you know what moderation based purely on viewpoint actually looks like, and we, the sensible folk on Techdirt, are all laughing at your dismayed reaction.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with a comment from That One Guy about the Copyright Small Claims Court:

‘Copyright extortion for cheap? Where do we sign up?!’

I expect it will be used and the overwhelming number of people/companies using it will be exactly the sort that shows up so often in TD articles about weaponizing the legal system for fun and profits.

Next, it’s a comment from Upstream about the disconnect between what people care about, and what cops enforce:

Mutual Exclusivity

Many years ago, when the state college I attended was first required to make an annual report of campus police activity (the campus police were technically state police, the same as the Highway Patrol, the state Bureau of Investigation, etc), the categories of crimes reported and crimes for which arrests were made were mutually exclusive. That is, for all of the categories that crimes were reported (i.e. rape, assault, robbery, theft, etc) no arrests were made, and for all of the categories for crimes where arrests were made (i.e. drug crimes, DUI, vandalism, etc), no crimes were reported.

This mutual exclusivity of crimes reported versus arrests made continued for at least the next two years.

As I have said before, if it is not fun or profitable, cops don’t want to be involved. And if it might be dangerous, cops really don’t want to be involved.

Over on the funny side, Naughty Autie took both of the top spots. We already saw the second place comment above (where it also won second place for Insightful), but in first place it’s a comment about blaming video games for mass shootings:

They’ve got a point.

To this day I still play Fable II and Fable III on the Xbox 360, and it’s caused me to regularly run up to random people, do a gymnastic flip and land on my knees on their shoulders, and then grip their heads between my thighs before fatally breaking their necks with a sharp twist of my hips. The only reason I haven’t yet been caught is that I’m very, very good at hiding the bodies. 😏

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Eric about wireless prices creeping upwards following mergers:

The price of the grill cheese sandwich has not gone up, just the price of the milk for the cheese has increased, thus causing cheese prices to go up, and in turn you will now see an additional line item “cheese recovery cost fee” representing these additional costs. But the cost for the grill cheese is still the same, just your final bill will be higher.

Finally, it’s one more comment from That One Guy, this time in response to the rather inherently flawed assertion that “to claim that Twitter or Facebook has any true competitors is obnoxiously stupid”:

Did… you know what, I’ll give you a few minutes to see it.

That’s all for this week, folks!


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Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”

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18 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

To claim that Twitter or Facebook has any true competitors is obnoxiously stupid. They provide access to communicate to the public. Our very right to freedom of speech.

I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. If you’re trying to reach the millions of people like me who don’t, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be included in the necessary means by which you could communicate with me. And one of the reasons a lot of people don’t use Twitter or Facebook is that there often isn’t any real communication happening. It’s so much noise that any useful signal is lost.

Naughty Autie says:

Re:

I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. If you’re trying to reach the millions of people like me who don’t, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be included in the necessary means by which you could communicate with me.

Same here. If I want two-way communication, there’s phone, text, or email. If I want to communicate online, it’s obvious where I go for that. 🙂

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

ThorsProvoni (profile) says:

"Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier"

It’s entertaining that the USPS is not a statutorily defined federal telecommunications common carrier.

The USPS is a common law-defined state message common carrier just like Twitter and other racist discriminatory social medium platforms.

Racist participants in TechDirt seem unable to keep their racist pro-discrimination nonsense straight.

The Plaintiffs did not bother with a complaint about denial of common carriage because there was no denial of common carriage.

Because a racist, who supports the right of a social medium platform to discriminate against a US citizen, did not bother to read the complaint, he does not realize that the complaint contains no charge that is related to common carriage.

It is worth mentioning that no private message carrier has ever argued that the carriage of a postcard, which openly contains the speech of a customer, infringes the First Amendment rights of the private message carrier.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Rocky says:

Re: Re: Re:

As I’ve said before, you are a kook, and AFAIK, kook isn’t a race or religion.

But do go on screaming “racist” when people tells you to shut up because of your odious nature, it’ll only further prove to anyone that what you have to say is totally irrelevant.

Rocky says:

Re:

It’s entertaining that the USPS is not a statutorily defined federal telecommunications common carrier.

No, but it is a common carrier per the definition.

The USPS is a common law-defined state message common carrier just like Twitter and other racist discriminatory social medium platforms.

It’s entertaining that Twitter et al are not a statutorily defined federal telecommunications common carrier, it’s also entertaining that they don’t fit the definition of common carrier.

Racist participants in TechDirt seem unable to keep their racist pro-discrimination nonsense straight.

If calling out bullshit, conflations and straight up stupidity is racist, then the definition of what racism is has become so diluted that it doesn’t mean anything useful anymore.

The Plaintiffs did not bother with a complaint about denial of common carriage because there was no denial of common carriage.

It’s interesting that you are voicing an argument that undermines your idea that social media are common carriers, because USPS is per definition a common carrier while social media aren’t.

It is worth mentioning that no private message carrier has ever argued that the carriage of a postcard, which openly contains the speech of a customer, infringes the First Amendment rights of the private message carrier.

Because mentioning is stupid. A mail carrier doesn’t show postcards (or letter for that matter) to the public, they just deliver them to their intended recipients so there is nothing to argue about. And the thing is, a postcard or a letter must still conform to certain rules for a mail carrier to accept them – and that is analogous to a form of moderation.

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