Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the word-from-the-wise dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is drkkgt with a comment about the Texas school district that banned every book that had been flagged for review:
Personally, I think these libraries should then be required to post a prominently displayed list of the books that were removed, author, ISBN, Publisher, Publishing Date, the reason they were removed, and the name of the person/group that requested it.
In second place, it’s jimb with a comment about Devin Nunes claiming the right to an unimpaired reputation:
Reputations are earned, not entitlements…
Devin Nunes is “entitled” to exactly the reputation he has earned, every bit of it, by his actions and his life history. As is any of us, including Devin’s cow. Mr. Nunes has, by his actions and his associations, earned -every bit- of the online ridicule and derision that tag and follow him… and each lawsuit and in-court tantrum earns him a bit more of his reputation. That he doesn’t seem to understand this earns him yet a bit more. Keep going, Devin, and let us watch you earn a reputation as a slow learner, too.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from That One Guy about the Secret Service wiping the Jan. 6 insurrection texts:
‘Oh no, all that incriminating evidence is gone, how terrible…’
I believe they lost that data to to an ‘honest mistake’ just as much as I believe that police body-cams ‘coincidentally’ seem to malfunction just when things start to happen that they might not want recorded.
Yeah every last person involved needs to be fired and barred from ever having a government job again at a minimum and then brought up on obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence charges.
Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a response to the argument from Eve 6 singer Max Collins that owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance:
I can bring up a perfect example of what they’re talking about: World Wrestling Entertainment.
WWE’s home video output used to involve DVDs and Blu-rays of documentary features and classic content collections…up until the WWE Network came along. Soon after the Network launched, WWE slowly cut back on its physical media releases. It has stopped releasing Blu-rays altogether and now only releases a handful of DVDs (mostly for pay-per-vi…sorry, premium live events) per year. Even after the transition from the standalone Network service to Peacock (in the U.S.), WWE remains a company with a vast library of content that can only be seen through a subscription streaming service.
Between that example and Disney refusing to release its Disney+ originals on physical media, the direction is clear: Megacorps don’t want you owning anything because they want you to pay rent on accessing any part of culture—for the rest of your life.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is melonlord highlighting a particularly amusing excerpt from the court ruling throwing out the Stop WOKE Act:
From page 30:
“If that were true, the Due Process Clause would tolerate laws containing the most incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness word salads so long as they used actual words. See generally James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939).”
This judge lol
In second place, it’s radix with a response to those who would claim the attack on Salman Rushdie was somehow caused by social media:
After being published in 1989, Rushdie, his publisher, and sellers of the book got death threats, bounties, and even assassination attempts pretty much constantly for 15 years before “social media” was even a term.
Clearly this is Twitter’s fault.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with That One Guy and a response to radix’s comment:
Don’t you see that just proves how bad social media is, it was able to cause all that even before it existed.
Social media is so toxic and dangerous that time itself was warped to allow it to influence people before any of the relevant companies and platforms existed, and if that’s not proof of how terrible social media is I don’t know what is.
Finally, we’ve got a quip from Toom1275 about Devin Nunes’s ongoing hole-digging:
Nunes could have stayed silent and been thought of as a fool. Instead he sued a cow for defamation, and remooved all doubt.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
Nunes?
“Nunes could have stayed silent and been thought of as a fool. Instead he sued a cow for defamation, and remooved all doubt.”
I really Doubt that is the only cause.
Re:
Well, yes, he’d removed all doubt at least as soon as he made his infamous bullshit-shoveling “Memo” if not long before, but that fact doesn’t make the joke work.
Banned books
If I were still teaching high school English, I would give every student, in every class, a list of books that they are not to, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, read.
I suspect that the demand for the books would increase.
"owning media"
I have another example.
The Oxford English Dictionary was available in printed form or on a CD. Now the last print version is the 1989 edition and the last CD version is the 2009 edition.
Oxford University Press has announced that those are the last editions to be made available on physical media, either print or digital. All future editions are available only by online subscription. ($100 per year).
“It’s only a dictionary, who gives a rat?” Yes, but the Oxford Dictionary is recognized as the authorative historical dictionary and it’s not easily replaced by anything else for legal or historical research.
Re:
Well that’s one way to make yourself obsolete.
‘Lets see, do I want to pay $100 a year for something I’ll never actually own, or do I just want to hit up wikipedia for the same information and only have to deal with the occasional request to donate some money to support them…?’
Re: Re:
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, the OED is a dictionary, so they give very different info to each other. If you want the kind of info the OED used to provide for a (somewhat) reasonable price, look no further than its competitor.
Re: Re: Re:
The Wiktionary is part of the Wikisphere also.
Re: Re: Re: Wikitionary
Or the Wikitionary.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page
Re: Re: Re:2
Either or. They both cost the same amount to access.
Re: Re: Re:3
Wikipedia costs twice as much due to the pictures.
Re: Re: Re:4
Nope, Wikipedia costs the same as Wiktionary and the Cambridge dictionary to those of us using broadband. I’m sorry you’re still stuck on dial-up, but that’s the fault of your country’s laws and a (seemingly) powerless FCC.
Re: Re: Re:5
So you could say the Wikitionary costs ten times as much to access.
Re: Re: Re:6
I wouldn’t know. It costs the same to me: zero extra dollars beyond the price of the Internet bill.
Re: Re: Re:5
There’s also The American Heritage Dictionary, now dictionary.com. That’s also free (with ads).