Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the word-from-on-high dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment in a conversation about how the First Amendment applies to government sanctions of foreign countries that impact domestic companies:

Given the first amendment(along with the others) is a prohibition on what the government can do with regards to speech, telling a company ‘you are not allowed to let them speak’ seems like the sort of thing that would struggle in court, though that of course would require a judge with a spine to rule on the matter, and those can be a bit difficult to find these days.

In second place, it’s Thad commending our description of the UNC Silent Sam statue as, unambiguously, a racist monument:

I appreciate the bluntness.

None of this “racially charged” or “which some have called racist” or putting racist in quotation marks bullshit that’s so unfortunately common in media coverage of topics like these.

We need to call racism what it is. Thanks for doing so.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more nod to That One Guy, in response to those who describe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a full repeal of FOSTA as support for sex trafficking:

The ‘I know you are but what am I?’ offense I see

The kicker of course is that those supporting the bill and/or opposing an investigation into it are actually holding positions much more sex-trafficking friendly than AOC.

When even the gorram police are saying the bill has made it harder to find sex traffickers and their victims defending the bill is not defending the victims of sex trafficking it’s defending sex traffickers by making it easier for them to avoid being caught and continue victimizing people in the process.

If the politicians slagging AOC for wanting the bill rightly scrapped actually cared about preventing or reducing sex trafficking they’d be right there with her, supporting it’s removal or at the very least an investigation into whether it’s actually done what it’s defending claimed it was for, but as was the case for those that presented the bill and defended it when the bill was being presented odds are good they don’t actually give a damn about sex trafficking, and are only in it for the cheap(in both senses of the word) PR.

Next, it’s James Burkhardt explaining a key issue with one Arizona legislator’s proposal to strip Section 230 immunity from politically biased platforms:

The proposal doesn’t punish moderation (or censorship). It punishes “political motivation”, which as I highlighted above, is nearly impossible to prove. You can prove a bias exists, proving the motivation behind that bias is another thing entirely. An economically motivated bias against Neo-Nazi memes is not a political motivation, for instance.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment responding to the copyright dispute over photos of a banana duct-taped to an art gallery wall:

If the copyright upon this banana taped artwork is not honored, then there will be no incentive to produce additional produce taped artwork.

In second place, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a response to Chooseco’s lawsuit against Netflix over Bandersnatch:

Turn to page 47 if you want to create more bad legal concepts

Turn to page 97 if you want to just get money from the deep pockets

Turn to page 32 if you weren’t sure Chooseco was still in business

Turn to page 75 if you just want dragons and explosions

Close the book if you’re tired of rent seeking assholes ruining building on old things to create new better things

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with Pixelation asking the all-important question about the banana photo dispute:

I wonder…

Who would own the copyright if a monkey took the picture?

And finally, we’ve got justok in response to the lawsuit over civil asset forfeiture being used to steal people’s cars:

I had the perfect comment, but the cops seized it.

That’s all for this week, folks!