Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the what's-the-word dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Clarence Thomas using an originalism argument against the actual malice standard:

I once again note that if Clarence Thomas truly believed in constitutional originalism⁠—i.e., the notion that the ghosts of the Founding Fathers and the original form of the Constitution are all that should have permanent say over the laws of the United States⁠—he would be a slave instead of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment on our post about anti-porn crusader Ricky Schroder:

Reading through it, this filing hardly limits itself to concerns about porn, it effectively argues that aside from “political speech”, state and local governments should be allowed to censor any content as they wish as nearly nothing has what we think of as first amendment protections and that legislating morality is an acceptable government goal so such censorship would be a compelling government interest. Such arguments if ever taken up by the legal system could potentially expand drastically into mainstream content produced over the past century. It effectively argues that it would be acceptable to have Chinese style censorship outside of a small “political” exemption.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the many reasons people copy and pirate:

Have you ever heard of Spore? The game to end up as the years most pirated item, above porn, due to how idiotic EA had been with it’s restrictions.

They tried to restrict the physical disk to a limited number of installs. So everyone who bought it legally was pirating it so they could actually reinstall it.

I once pirated a game I own so I could play it on the go without an internet connection.

People famously pirate Nintendo music because Nintendo REFUSES to sell it.

Alot of stuff is pirated because of convenience, or lack of legal methods.

An example of this is Anime and Manga. Sooooo many people around the world were waiting for services like Crunchyroll because the only way to get the content in a language besides Japanese was pirated content translated by fans.

Next, it’s Comboman with a comment about Elon Musk’s harebrained plan to charge $1/year to tweet:

eMail Stamps?

Reminds me of one of the “brilliant” ideas back in the day for stopping spam. Charge a minimal fee ($0.01 to $0.05) to send an email (they were never clear on who would charge this or how) and then spam would somehow disappear. They seemed to ignore the fact that snail mail also has spam (i.e. junk mail) despite charging a much higher fee.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous rejoinder to a winner from last week’s comment post, and the part of the comment that referred to Musk being head of a $44-billion tech company:

An 8 billion dollar tech company, surely?

In second place, it’s Thad with another comment about constitutional originalism:

Very rarely do I have anything positive to say about Alito, but that time in Brown v EMA oral arguments when he said “What Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?” was a solid burn.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of comments about our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon (which you should play, if you haven’t yet!) Naturally, a lot of people’s thoughts went to the same place, such as brandx who had a fun (but alas incorrect) theory about the genesis of the game:

I’m pretty sure a certain billionaire (at least for now) finally realized he’s in way over his head and reached out to you to give him a hand to figure this shit out – in a way that doesn’t expose him as needing anyone’s help.

…or an anonymous commenter, who was worried about where playing might take them:

I figured it’d start of sort of like moderator mayhem, but then half my team would be laid off, followed by funding cuts for the rest of my team, followed by me being hauled before congress to explain while I’m also the only surviving employee able to make actionable changes (which I can’t make because I’m tied up with Congress)….

That’s all for this week, folks!