Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the truer-words dept
This week, we’ve got a double winner on the insightful side with Stephen T. Stone taking both top spots. In first place, it’s a comment about how, whatever you might think about old Twitter, its moderation practices were sure better than they are now:
Maybe I didn’t hear about it, but I don’t recall any stories about Jack Dorsey unbanning someone who knowingly and provably posted CSAM on Twitter.
In second place, it’s a comment about the push to outlaw porn:
Whenever freedom is eroded, porn will always go first, since few people will publicly defend it. Someone may cheer if it gets banned, but eventually, something they value will become the thing nobody is willing to publicly defend. Republicans already know this—and weaponize it to a frightening degree. Same-sex kissing in movies? “That’s porn.” A book about a girl with two mommies? “Yep, porn.” Age-appropriate sex education? “Oh that is hella porn.” They know how well the phrase “protecting kids” serves these efforts. But this isn’t about “protecting” kids, so much as it’s about controlling them—much like how this fight against porn isn’t about the porn, so much as it’s about opening a door to censoring content that conservatives don’t like.
And since I know some dipshit troll will try to twist what I’m saying here: I don’t support children being exposed to porn, I don’t support porn being in public libraries, and I support age-appropriate sex education because it’s proven to help prevent the sexual assault of children.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the RIAA joining the effort to kill the Internet Archive. First, it’s That One Guy on what the fight tells us:
If culture is to survive it will be in spite of copyright, not because of it
78rpm records were some of the earliest musical recordings, and were produced from 1898 through the 1950s when they were replaced by 33 1/3rpm and 45rpm vinyl records.
Lawsuits like this are one of the reasons I have absolutely zero sympathy when that lots whines about those dastardly pirates destroying creativity itself. When they’re throwing fits over the idea of music half a century to a over a century old being able to be listened to without money changing hands it just serves as further evidence of how utterly absurd copyright law currently is.
Next, it’s Crafy Coyote with a reply to that comment:
Just watched the MTV documentary about the start of hiphop
“Mixtape”. Hiphop survived because of people who stood up to copyright, not because of copyright. If undercover cops had attended Kool Herc’s legendary apartment party in 1973 where the genre was invented, everyone involved would be arrested for copyright infringement and hiphop would never exist. Instead, the rappers, many of which were career criminals dodged law enforcement attempts to enforce copyright by hopping state and national borders, so hiphop spread all over the world.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is BeatrixWillius with a comment about Linda Yaccarino’s ramblings about ExTwitter:
The woman can play bs bingo with herself. Impressed!
In second place, it’s Anon E Mouse with a comment about Canada complaining about its own dumb law preventing news about wildfires from spreading on Facebook:
Ignoring the real issue
Obviously, Meta started the wildfires. They needed a hot topic Canadians would want to follow in the news to highlight the link tax issue, and since nothing newsworthy actually happens in Canada they started the fires to get that one big example story.
do we still use /s for sarcasm or is there a better symbol now
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a half-hearted anonymous defense of Linda Yaccarino:
C’mon Mike, no need to be so hard on Yaccarino. With what Musk has given her to work with, “empty platitude, meaningless business jargon, nonsense speech” is about all she can put out unless she wants to undercut him, and we know her tenure will be measured in nanoseconds if she does that…
Finally, it’s another anonymous comment, this time about RIAA lawyer Matt Oppenheim:
I am become death, destroyer of culture.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
Protect the Children
Is funny,
as every time they do it makes things worse.
Its like the OLD religion suggesting Women should be married YOUNG. But recent history Wants you to wait until you are 16-18 or OLDER.
Ignorance does not make things happen the way you WANT them.
Re:
The same people who squawk about “saving the children” always seem to be the ones who believe in “underage women”. Methinks they protest too much about the behaviors of fictional others while steadfastly ignoring their own.
The thing to remember about these cries to “protect the children” is, they aren’t talking about protecting the living, breathing human beings we call children. Rather, it’s about preserving the social role of “child”, forever unchanging. That “protecting the children” from a proper and scientific approach to sex ed will make those children more vulnerable to rape and the predation of pedophiles doesn’t matter to them, so long as the survivors are children in the “right way”.
The Right tends to view the world in terms and hierarchies, believing that it is natural and good to have a few of the “best” mega-successful figures at the top of the social hierarchical pyramid and lots of “worse” people at the bottom of this hierarchy. The belief is that you gravitate to the “right” place where you “fit” and are “supposed to be”. It is viewed as deeply wrong, and many on the right think it is utterly impossible, to change the pyramid, let alone to create a flat and non-hierarchical structure. To that end, they interpret any attempt to disrupt the way things “should be” under their perception of the world as it “ought to be” is either foolish madness, or an attempt to trick people into putting you in “the wrong place”.
It’s also worth noting that this conceptual social pyramid is regularly viewed only in part – only including themselves and those below them. To give power to those who “should” be under their complete control, like giving children the ability to inform authorities about physical abuse and see actual consequences, is viewed as similar to damaging or stealing one’s property – and particularly in the case of children, who are literally treated as property even in elements of the law. Thus, anything that disrupts their total and despotic control over their own children is perceived as no different from claiming your car or your toothbrush.
This combines to help explain why they are willing to harm children in the name of “defending the children” – who cares if some children get hurt, after all, so long as the system keeps them firmly under your thumb?
Re: 'Any day now that'll be me...'
The Right tends to view the world in terms and hierarchies, believing that it is natural and good to have a few of the “best” mega-successful figures at the top of the social hierarchical pyramid and lots of “worse” people at the bottom of this hierarchy. The belief is that you gravitate to the “right” place where you “fit” and are “supposed to be”. It is viewed as deeply wrong, and many on the right think it is utterly impossible, to change the pyramid, let alone to create a flat and non-hierarchical structure.
While this may be part of it I suspect that part of it can be summed up in a line I heard, ‘A nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires’, where you’ll have people in dire financial situations defending the rich and cheering them on less because they believe that the rich ‘deserve’ it but because those doing the defending see themselves in that position any day now and want to ensure that when it’s them there they’ll have to worry about consequences as little as those currently there do.
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Re: Re:
Letting the right have offspring is precisely why we’re in the mess we’re in today. The root cause of it all is letting straight white men getting away with everything. No more. We have to put a stop to this or sexual expression as nature intended will be destroyed forever.
Re: Re: Re:
Herman we know it’s you.
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Re: Re: Re:2
If you would like to know for sure, you should encourage the site owner not to send my signed-in posts to moderation.
Re: Re: Re:3
Hun we knows it’s you. You’re the only one so far back in the closet your zip code is in Narnia.
Re: Re: Re:3 '... No, no all the other users are wrong.'
‘Curse those personal consequences for my actions!’
Re: Re: Re:3
Thanks for admitting you’re using more than one hallucination to harass Techdirt.
Re: Re: Re:4
Double worn lanai futon on you?
Re: Re: Re:3
Everyone is gay, you fucking waste of space.
You just haven’t been taken out of the closet yet.
You will be dragged out, kicking and screaming, if we have to.
You can’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
I’m glad you chose this gem for funniest of the week, Mr. Beadon, because its comedic timing was critically perfect.
Awoke Me In The Morning
So those on the so-called right don’t want to become woke. Therefore they want to stay sleep. Doesn’t that make them all zombies? And if nobody is woke, who’s drinking all that coffee? Lefty liberals are stealing our coffee!
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Notice that this NY Times story about Gender Queer shows illustrations from the book, but not the sexually charged ones to which people have objected, even though the story mentions the fact that people have complained that the book is pornographic. I can think of two reasons – either the images violate the standards of what the NY Times allows itself to publish, or the NY Times is afraid that people seeing those images will agree that they are not appropriate for school libraries.
Re:
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve read Gender Queer, and while there is indeed spicy stuff in the book, there was also spicy stuff in Catcher in the Rye and 1984, and the purpose of the Gender Queer book was not to titillate (unlike actual pornography), so while I understand why it’s the most banned book in the US, I still feel not even Gender Queer should be banned as even non-binary Trans Kids need someone from a previous generation to look up to.
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Re: Re:
Two things –
If even a liberal outlet like the NYT won’t print the images people have been complaining about, it’s a bad look for people who say that the book should be available to children in school libraries.
I would not ban any books from libraries, school or otherwise. But since Gender Queer paints a false and harmful picture of human sexual identity, libraries should balance it with other books that tell the truth, that people can only ever be the sex of their bodies and that there is no such thing as being non-binary or gender-queer.
Re: Re: Re:
” that people can only ever be the sex of their bodies”
If only those bodies were as simple as you want them to be. A primer for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
How do I differ – let me count the ways.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Saw the movie. If you were to suggest that only intersex people may apply gender-weird terms to themselves, woke gender activists would screech in fury.
Re: Re: Re:
The LGBT community exists, so describing people from that community, even in fiction, is not creating a false picture of human sexuality. Indeed you insistence that only CIS gender is the true state of humans is the false picture.
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Re: Re: Re:2
LGB people have a preference for the sex of their sexual and romantic partners. T people have a delusion that they can be a sex different from their bodies. There is no such thing as gender identity. There is no such thing as non-binary. There is extent of conformance to gender stereotypes, which, in a free society, people may adopt as they like.
Re: Re: Re:
…if you believe in an absolute one-or-the-other binary of human sexual biology and gender identity around which you’re basing your entire perception of human existence, to the point of lashing out with violent anger at anyone who challenges that binary in even the smallest of ways.
Re: Re: Re:2
Indeed.
Re: Re: Re:3
What makes your beliefs superior to their beliefs, and why does that entitle you to carry out an aggressive campaign against them? Unless you can offer significant credentials in a relevant field, you opinion is just an uniformed opinion.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Because my beliefs are true and their beliefs are false. Gender ideology is so obviously garbage that it takes no credentials at all to see that. It’s the people with credentials that have let themselves be seduced by lies.
Fortunately, every time a man claiming to be a woman steals a medal from a real woman in a women’s sporting event, it drives another nail into the public’s acceptance of woke ideology.
Re: Re: Re:5
I am whatever the fuck gender I say I am and makes me feel the best.
You will not stop me. You will not stop US.
Your time is over and you will be transcended, discarded as obsolete.
Actually, the quote properly goes:
I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.
As entered into the Ancient Scrolls of Sinanju by Chiun.
(Obligatory copyright notice: © 1972 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy)
Re:
Not if the context is the Oppenheimer reference (itself taken from the Bhagavad Gita)
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If schools will not teach students about being queer, it is up to us to effect that paradigm shift. Girls need to be equipped with the knowledge that they can kiss more than filthy, nasty cis straight boys.