Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the archive-of-your-own dept
This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to the Second Circuit’s ruling against the Internet Archive. In first place, it’s MrWilson with some thoughts on libraries:
The vast majority of authors face an issue with obscurity in the vast sea of available works that is the book market. Libraries increase the chance for new readers to find you. It’s only a downside if you’re a publisher who wants to maximize every chance of a sale (while not paying the author who did the majority of the work as much as they deserve).
Libraries also mean poorer readers have greater access to education. And younger writers can learn style and gain inspiration from the works of others. Libraries enable new writers who create new works.
In second place, it’s That One Guy with a sarcastic reaction:
Dodged a bullet there, thanks major publishers
It’s good thing libraries are a very recent development and publishers are on the ball in killing them off before they can become too big of a threat to society, I mean can you imagine the utter devastation of creativity and authorship that might have resulted if libraries had been around for say, several thousand years?
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ll start out with one more reply to that post, this time from Shannon Vanshoon with thoughts about thee implications of this and other recent rulings:
… I’m starting to think that we seriously need a thorough political scouring of our entire court-system if we’re ever going to seriously rebuild this country. I mean, how many judges are just completely out of step with… everything?
Next, one more comment from MrWilson, this time on another post in response to a question about liability for retweets:
Some courts have held that 230 protects users who retweet. The distinction seems to be that the retweeter may be liable for defamation if they add to or vouch for the content as if it’s true. So just retweeting is likely fine, but adding commentary like “This claim is true” would probably make you liable because you’re adding your own speech to it.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner takes us back again to the post about the Internet Archive, where That Anonymous Coward embraced the court’s reasoning that libraries disincentivize writers:
Its true!!!
We haven’t had a new book from Christie or Doyle since their works finally fell out of copyright hundreds of years after their deaths.
Copyright, making us all really fscking stupid.
In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about the “nerd harder” attitude of policymakers towards tech:
Why not just pass a law requiring some arbitrary tech company to solve all our problems with magic? Stop the whole “death by a thousand magic cuts” bullshit.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Toom1275 about Twitter’s investors losing faith in Elon Musk:
They should have invested in the tiny violins industry.
Finally, we’ll go back for one more comment about the Internet Archive, once again from That One Guy, in response to the suggestion that SCOTUS justices with book deals would recuse themselves from the case:
This supreme court having enough ethics to recuse themselves… aiming for funniest of the week are we?
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was racist as fuck, so in a way we do have a lot of new works from her: Old works that have been re-edited to remove the overt and open racism.
Re: Agatha Christie
Her works did include a lot of overt and open racism, on the other hand, that was just a fact of life in those days. How do you do justice to a period piece — such as ‘Death on the Nile’ — without showing and/or acknowledging all the rampant injustice that was right before your eyes.
I’m not trying to let her off the hook here, but just whitewashing all the faults of yesteryear isn’t improving things.
Re: Re:
Fortunately, being rational human beings capable of critical thought, we’re able to look at them on a case-by-case basis.
Re: Re: Re:
There are plenty of people who failed or audited the “Critical Thinking” class, and many many more who went for the “credulous thinking and delegation of responsibility” elective instead.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Being a “rational human being” I therefore trust you can also consider historical context? I assume the answer is no because you are a Techdirtist who supports retroactively attempting to change popular culture to conform to The Current Morality but I figured I should ask.
Re: Re: Re:2
lol – wut?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
When you say “racist as fuck,” you really just mean that Agatha Christie was proud of her heritage and didn’t try to deny that she had a White identity.
Re: Re:
“White” is a racial identity created to differentiate “white” people (i.e., Europeans) from “black” people (i.e., Africans) and therefore create a hierarchy in which one group (white people) is inherently and infinitely superior to the other group (black people) only and specifically because of their skin color. Anyone can be proud of their ethnic heritage. But being proud of “whiteness” means being proud of an identity created for the sole purpose of sociopolitical domination based on the amount of melanin in someone’s skin. Tell me when I’m telling lies.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
A classification of a group of people is not inherently made as a means to express superiority. It just means “this classification encompasses this group.”
While modern science discredits the idea of race as rooted in scientific racism, labels such as “white” are still used to refer to people groups informally.
White people aren’t going to say they’re proud of their “European heritage” because not every white person came from Europe, and Europe itself contains countries where whites are not the majority. “White heritage” or “white ancestry” makes more sense.
Also, not every black person is from Africa. Aboriginals and Melanesians are some examples.
Re: Re: Re:2
When and why did “white people” and “black people”, as racial groups, come into existence?
Re: Re: Re:3
You’re the one that so often demands links to sources, so why not link to a source to prove your assertion that racial classifications are racist in origin, hypocrite?
Re: Re: Re:4
If you knew a little bit of world-history you would know that the concept of a “white race” that’s distinct from people who weren’t white coincides with the rise of the slave trade. The original concept was borne out of the British who actively started dehumanizing the Irish in the 17th century.
It’s not our problem that didn’t learn something useful about history in school, smart people educate themselves when they realize the holes they have in their education.
Re: Re: Re:2
You’re ironically whitewashing the history by pretending that racial classifications were just benign efforts to group people. White identity (as opposed to individual ethnic identities) wasn’t a thing until western groups wanted to exploit other groups. They grouped “white” people who weren’t all related and they grouped “black” people who weren’t all related.
You’re also pretending that “white people” needs to be a designation. It isn’t useful or necessary unless you’re interested in preserving racial discrimination and bias. Being proud of heritage related to something beyond your family is pretty silly on its face. “I’m proud that I’m from the same ethnic group as someone who did something great” is kind of grasping for significance. Even family pride is kind of weird. Sure, some of my ancestors did interesting things. Someone of them were also assholes.
The exception is groupings based on discrimination and genocide. Black people in the US are united as an identity because they were persecuted and exploited and raped and murdered systemically. They were stripped of their cultural heritages and languages so they rallied under one identity and fought to reverse the effects of that racism and genocide.
Stephen isn’t lying. You’re post hoc justifying racist classifications based on the result of them. There’s no reason to group people by the unscientific perception of melanin content in their skin. As you say, they don’t all come from the same place. Genetically, they aren’t all related. There’s no scientific basis for
Re: Re:
I plead When you say “not guilty your honor.” You really mean you just hope you can get a plea deal that doesn’t involve you going on the sex offender registry.
Re: Re: Did I fucking stutter?
I mean racist as fuck when I say racist as fuck. And you’re clearly racist as fuck too.
Re: Re:
People who are “proud of their heritage” when they broadly define themselves based on a limited range of pigmentation in their skin are saying, “I’m so pathetic I have to identify with such an arbitrarily large pool of ‘ancestors’ 99% of whom I’m not remotely related to in order to feel good about myself.”
If you do something useful with your life instead of spreading hate, you don’t have to rely on heritage to have something to feel good about.
Re: Re: Re:
Please show me evidence that being proud of one’s identity and acknowledging one’s ethnicity are exactly the same thing. I’ll wait.
Re: Re: Re:2 Nonexistant
Here’s a fun fact: No unified ‘White American’ identity exists. There’s all sorts of different cultures floating around across America, and none of them are a unified ‘white’ culture. The closest thing we have is MAGA republicans, but (for example) even Iowa and Minnesota have dramatically different middle-class cultures, and their poor cultures are even more different from their middle class ones. (And I call the middle class culture ‘middle class culture’ because most middle class folks, regardless of their background, share middle class cultures. It’s only the poor where you start seeing a marked difference between the cultures of various groups… and ‘white’ isn’t one of those groups, because poor German-Americans or Nordic-Americans are VERY different from poor Angelo-Americans. I gave Iowa and Minnesota as very specific examples because Iowa is mostly German americans and Minnesota is mostly nordics. Michigan is mostly Angelo-Americans. New York has it’s own culture, so they’re mostly yanks.)
Also! No unified ‘Black American’ identity exists! Minneapolis African Americans have a very different culture from Chicago African Americans, for example. HOWEVER! Black people are discriminated against for being black, and that’s pretty universal across America, so they get to shout ‘black pride’ to counter it.
(Also, if you want to pretend a unified ‘Asian American’ identity exists, I get to laugh at you, and there’s many tribes of Native American)
Re: Re: Re:3
Just to give an example of how Minnesota ‘white’ culture is different from the rest of the USA, because they’re Nordic women traditionally control the household finances and put their menfolk on an allowance. Men make the money, women decide how much of it the man is allowed to spend after household expenses.
Because of this tradition of women doing the household accounting, you’ll also find that the majority of accountants in Minnesota are women. (Though the majority of the investment brokers are men)
In fact, if you work as an investment broker in Minnesota, you’ll find that, with most families, you need to convince the wife of the family as to how much money to invest, and the man of the family as to which funds to invest it into!
And that’s very different from, say, Michigan where, up until very recently, it was considered rude to present a menu with prices on it to a wife or a woman on a date. And they’re neighbors!
On the flip side, Iowa was one of the first states to legalize gay marriage and is the only sate where you can get gay statutory married (In Iowa statutory marriage occurs if you present yourself on an official document signed by a third party stating that you’re married, unlike say Michigan where statutory marriage happens when a woman and man who are otherwise unwedded live together for a certain number of years. Very few states have statutory marriage anymore.)
And that’s because Iowa’s more German tradition is very heavily in favor of marriage (and the sanctity of hard work)
and that Germanic sanctity of hard work thing is why Iowa has one of the lowest legal working ages in the country as well.
Meanwhile Michigan’s heavy Angelo influence means that city governments are considered extensions of the state government, and can be appointed without vote!
And, once more, these three states that touch each other!
Re: Re: Re:3
Still waiting.
Re: Re: Re:3
So, Agatha Christie being proud of her identity as a woman is exactly the same thing as acknowledging the fact that she was white? Now I’m confused.
Re: Re:
Not racist, just proud .. of what idk.
Re:
So was Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
And instead of whitewashing, we got a TON of academic papers analyzing his racism.
And some funny shit. Some people joked that Lovecraft wrote The Shadow over Innsmouth when he realized he was partly Welsh. (Despite him writing the book about 30 years after the fact and the height of his Welsh hatred was in 1921, coinciding with the Irish War of Independence…)
And Lovecraft was the Time Cube Guy of his friend circle.
Re:
It might work better if the old texts were just not edited, period. If I have something that is centuries old, but the spelling and language has been thoroughly modernized, the old thinking strikes you in the face because you identify with modern protagonists.
It’s one reason I am not a fan of modern Bible translations. While of course it doesn’t help reception if you insist on period Latin or Greek or Aramaic, the Early Modern English of the KJV translation does a good job of contextualizing it as a document of long age.
“Thou shalt not kill” has a different ring to it than “You must not murder anyone”.
If you keep modernizing the form, then at some point the content starts looking out of place.
Re: Re:
If you continue to not modernize the form the content ALSO starts looking out of place.
Re: Re:
Agreed, although the context should be given via endnotes.
Let me see
no you cant, that will be another $15.
Its the Publishers that Looked ahead and found that insted of Audio books being a Rarity, Make them Worth buying? They cost Equal to, or MORE then the Hard bound. Then there is the Ultimate Fake out. After its Typed out one time and in digital format, HOW much is it worth? Gotta get the most out of it. For those prices, you might as well go buy a USED book.
Paying a person a couple $1000 to read the book, so that others can have an Audio book. Is a great idea. But compare it to the publishing cost of the BOOK, which is Much higher to Print 1000 books, then to make another recording, over and over.
An artist did a reading on a book for Charity. The Company TOOK the recording and sold it world wide, full price and made Great profits. None went to the Charity.
Replies Are Hidden
I think I like the way we’re hiding trolling and the responses. But, can we add an indicator of how many replies are hidden? I kind of find it interesting to learn that three-quarters of a comment thread are hidden.
Re:
There is a tendency of lamenting about censorship. If postings that a significant ratio of readers considers objectionable go away silently (and they tend to do it in several stages) that doesn’t additionally feed the self-importance of trolls.
Sure, a mixed blessing.
Re:
There is black background popup to the left of the comments where one is shown which comments they have viewed (blue) and which comments they have not viewed (gold).