Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the not-so-funny dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about ICE arresting Brad Lander:
Republicans keep saying no one is above the law, but they keep referring only to other people and not themselves. They don’t need warrants. They don’t need to provide due process. They get to assault whomever they like. They don’t even have to identify themselves.
In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with another thought on the arrest and the idea that Lander was pulling a “stunt”:
If more Democrats pulled “stunts” like this one, maybe they wouldn’t be seen as a bunch of nutless, gutless, “we must appease the GOP at all costs” cowards—even (and especially) by the people who ostensibly make up the Democrat voting base.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with BernardoVerda and a comment about RFK Jr. predictably spreading even more disinformation:
This is why experts stopped having “debates” with RFK Jr.
RFK Jr repeatedly lies and misinforms:
- He consistently cites bad data and bad studies, and while misrepresenting good data and good studies.
- He gets corrected with detailed explanations on why the data is bad, and/or how it doesn’t mean what he claims it means.
- At the next opportunity, he repeats the very same misinformation as before, that he wasn’t able support the last time he argued against informed expert opinion, as if the previous “debate” never happened.
It’s RFK Jr’s basic modus operandi .
Next, it’s one more comment from MrWilson, this time about ICE complaining about assault on officers:
Assault to these Meal Team Six cosplayers means they brutalized a bunch of human beings and that some victims pushed back, didn’t collapse immediately, or some even did, but they want to claim something happened to make themselves out to be the victims.
They’re pretending that they are the only ones who can be subject to unjust violence. They’re also admitting, despite their toxically masculine culture, that they’re a bunch of wimps.
Over on the funny side… well, this is something I’ve never quite seen before. Perhaps due to the incredibly dire state of the world right now, we had virtually no funny votes on comments this week. No comment got more than a handful of votes, with only 7 barely scraping past the threshold to receive a badge — and several of those are not “real” funny comments but just dumb comments that people seem to have idly clicked funny on for the sake of mockery. So, for once, we’re just going to forego the full Funny side of this post, and I’ll highlight one comment from Thad that performed better on the insightful side but might as well go here, in response to Trump and ICE waffling on the mass arrests of employed migrants:
The racists who want cheap labor and the racists who want a white ethnostate are fighting again.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
To be fair, it seems like there’s less and less to be laughing at, except as a gallows humor coping mechanism.
Re:
Yeah, and the jokes are falling flat on the wrong sort of people too. You want to hope that humor could pierce the psychological bubble that some people are in but it just reinforces it. It really is a cult.
The question is what you do with a cult when it’s this size and this powerful. I don’t think anything like this in human history has a precedent.
Re: Re:
You let it eat itself from the inside out while saving anyone the cult could harm in the process—including people who want out of the cult. I can’t imagine that any kind of social deprogramming would work on people so far gone into the GOP death cult that they both voted for Donald Trump for his “no more wars” promise and cheered on his bombing of Iran.
The people running the U.S. these days are losing power. They know their platform, their policies, and their ideology are more unpopular than ever with a broader populace. It’s why they stacked the Supreme Court with Trump appointees when they had the chance: What better way to keep their influence alive—especially after they’re dead or out of office—than by making sure the next 20 years or so of SCOTUS decisions favor an authoritarian ideology and give greater deference to privileged white people?
Re: Re: Re:
The SCOTUS thing is just the most improbable twist of fate. Trump didn’t do anything to get so many SCOTUS appointments. He would have gotten Brown’s seat too if he had been more careful about how he did it. It’s just one more thing in the inexplicable string of random events and tosses of the die that have somehow, against every odd, always turned up Trump. Forget the moldering real estate business, Trump should have been a professional lottery player (he’d have made more money too). His ability to escape all consequences and have absolutely every question turn up in his favor will never make sense to me. I’d believe he was a wizard except their main stat is INT.
Re: Re: Re:2
How? Are you suggesting he should have killed Breyer?
Re: Re: Re:2 SCOTUS lifetime appointments...
The more vicious part of me wants to see the lifetime appointments of US Supreme Court judges become a liability, but at this point they’ve made plenty of rulings, each of which have resulted in a preventable body count.
Re: Re: Re:2
Trump didn’t do anything, but Mitch McConnell spent a couple decades undermining Senate processes in order to do exactly that.
Acting like Trump is an isolated incident, rather than the current figurehead of a long-running political apparatus, is wrong. Each of those events you deem “random” were people making explicit, intentional choices to do those things. Not a single one was inexplicable.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s a veritable demographic inevitability!
I guess we need some parody articles from the writers here. Onion style! I’m not sure who your target should be but… Okay, we all know who they should be about!
Political comment.
Dont believe what you read, Except the Bible..
Bible,
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. You must love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt,”
There are many others sating the same thing. But Wish the Politician to READ THE BIBLE.
Re: 'You first.'
I would love it if any time a christian nationalist tried that crap the other person simple responded by pointing out that they don’t know or follow the book they’re pushing, so why should anyone else feel obligated to do so?
Re: Kindness to the stranger is OT
The essential crime of Sodom and Gomorrah was failure to uplift the stranger, the widow, the impoverished, while hoarding excess.
Re: Re:
No, it’s not. It’s about rainbow people and DEI and woke. We need to vaccinate against the woke mind virus!
Incidents of kidnapping
Yes thats one of many Needed.
6v1 and you got hurt?
Read comment about WHy they Started in BLUE states. Cause they Might have gotten SHOT, by now, in the red states.
Re: Blue state witchcraft
I’ve heard that there have been incidents of heavy glitter-bombing of ICE agents in the field, glitter is notorious for being difficult to clean off.
It makes the ICE agents identifiable when they’re out of uniform.
When I was in San Francisco, and was expected to be armed, I got an anti-riot pepper spray gun (less the enormous canister), and the spray was laced with dayglo red dye developed to be difficult to wash off (so that persons involved in an incident could be identified).
It wouldn’t be that difficult to customize paint projectiles with something more like India ink than the easy-wash extreme-sports paints.
Re: Re:
Methylene blue, gentian violet.
Since no one listends to the poor..
According to the Fed.
“In the US, the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for 2025 is $15,650 for a single person and $32,150 for a family of four in the 48 contiguous states,”
This is strange, as in 1993, even a single person could make UNDER 29,000 and still be BELOW the poverty level. So this must be Another thing NOT Adjusted over th last 30 years.
So what is our Goiv. For, if they cant keep up with things, Including computers at IRS, Pentagon, VA. Computers ranging from the 2-3 of the oldest Mainframes for 1969, to the VA, with Windows 95 Which isnt a bad thing, but they keep over paying for SOFTWARE.
Re:
Hey man, don’t knock those COBOL mainframes. They’re still around because they work. They don’t break, they don’t make mistakes, they don’t have downtime, they’re virtually bug free, and they are really really really fast.
Re: Re:
“Computers don’t make errors; people do.”
Re: Re: Re:
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
Re: Re: Re:2
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Re: Re: Re:3
Funny, you credited the movie D.A.R.Y.L. for your first quotation, yet seem to have forgotten the source of the second, which was War Games, by the by.
Re: Re: Re:4
I didn’t forget the source. I didn’t cite it because it was less obscure than D.A.R.Y.L. was culturally, by the by.
Re: Re: Re:5
Depends on when you were born, which you seem to have forgotten, by the by.
Re: Re: Re:6
No, it doesn’t depend on when you were born, by the by. D.A.R.Y.L. has not been referenced in the last 40 years as much as War Games has been culturally. D.A.R.Y.L. was a sleeper. It got less than $8 million at the box office in the US and Canada, whereas War Games made $79 million. A widely viewed Marvel movie referenced War Games. What popular franchise media has made an overt D.A.R.Y.L. reference in the last 20 years?
You seem to have forgotten that telling people stuff that isn’t true doesn’t make it true just because you put “by the by” and the end of your sentence, by the by.
Re: Re: Re:7
Every accusation a confession.
Re: Re: Re:8
Yes, I confess that by the by doesn’t make things true. Trying to use phrases you don’t understand isn’t clever.
Re: Re: Re:9
I second AC’s assertion.
Re: Re: Re:10
You’re doing that thing again where you show up in a dead thread agreeing with an AC you’re pretending isn’t also you to build some unconvincing sense of consensus while trolling over the most petty nonsense. If you have a grudge, spill it, and then get some therapy.
Re: Re: Re:11
Actually, I’m the AC you seem to be accusing and David is not me nor ever has been, so is that some kind of confession to sockpuppeting on your part? As for the “dead thread” allegation, if you believe the thread to be dead when David replied, you’re more guilty of that offense by replying later than they did.
Re: Re: Re:12
Actually, I’m the AC who posted that and I’m also David. It’s really weird that you’re impersonating me.
Re: Re: Re:12
No, I’m Spartacus!
Re: Re: Re:12
Why are you lying? I’m the AC who made the comment!
Re: Re: Re:12
Actually, I’m the AC.
Re: Re: And
Slow as Snot in winter, NO RAM, Very little storage even if they Still make those Metallic 12″ 720k Disks. And tjhe Pentagon doesnt Know how to get the Data Off to transfer it anyway.
Sny time there was a Chance to Update the Whole thing, Even CHEAPLY, it was stomped on.
Re: Re: Re:
This is an inaccurate conception of the machines as they exist today. Here’s some of IBM’s latest sales pitch.
The software running on them is much the same as it was 30-40 years ago (though like all systems it continues to evolve and be added to), but the machines themselves have advanced quite a bit. They’re not a whole lot different from the distributed servers that you’ll see in Amazon and Cisco server farms (at least insofar as it’s a computer in a box and you’ll fill rooms with them to meet your computing needs).
The box itself is language agnostic though. You can run COBOL, JAVA, whatever on these things. It’s just that the old financial transaction systems are all written in COBOL and they do a fantastic job at it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with COBOL as a language, it’s very very good at record processing and the production of forms, and the way it handles data storage is very efficient.
Don’t knock it till you’ve seen it action.
Re: Re: Re:2 COBOL works fine
Mr. Musk just likes to break things for sake of breaking things, sans ideas on making it better.
Also if he can exploit the process for more swimming lucre.