Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the awash-in-comments dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some opening thoughts in the comments about schools ending contracts with police:

A matter of proportional response

You don’t nail together a picture frame with a sledgehammer.

You don’t break out an industrial crane to pick up a soup can that fell off the counter.

And you don’t employ police to keep children in line at a school.

Police should never have been tasked to act as ‘security’ in schools in the first place, and the sooner they’re all gone and teachers and staff take up the slack the better.

In second place, it’s ryuugami responding to Devin Nunes’s lawyer accusing twitter of “censoring”:

…

…

… He actually said that?

…

What the actual fuck.

A word for Biss: isn’t this whole shitshow precisely because Nunes wants Twitter to censor, and they refused, you deceitful disingenuous dumbass?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous commenter making plans for Josh Hawley’s proposed Section 230 reform:

I will be filing against all the right wing and religious right outfits which deleted my comments, since they by far have always moderated with the most heavy hands.

Good luck, Senator Dumbass!

Next, it’s TFG responding to a comment that suggested hypocrisy between people’s attitudes about cigarettes and their opinions about the war on drugs, and expanding on a subsequent comment noting that ending the war doesn’t mean not caring:

Correct. There is no hypocrisy here – the idea is to decriminalize drug use and etc. Proponents of ending the War on Drugs are mostly concerned with shifting how drug use is dealt with. Rather than tossing in people in jail or fining them etc. the focus shifts to helping people overcome the addiction.

Rather than pushing all the coke/meth/heroine etc. stuff into the unregulated underground and depending on police to fight it via attempts at suppression or busting the dealers or etc. etc. etc. (which have been oh so successful) you work on addressing the reasons why people turn to drug use in the first place.

All that money that goes into the DEA could be going into social services, good rehab programs, training programs, etc. to help people get out of the ruts that got them into drug use in the first place. Limited authorized recreational use of certain drugs (such as marijuana) under the exact same justification that leaves alcohol and tobacco available for legal purchase could also help.

The War on Drugs is essentially a means to enrich those who “fight” it at the cost of the victims of drug addiction, while simultaneously oppressing a subset of the population and ensure that what amounts to slave labor remains available via mass incarceration.

Over on the funny side, our winners come as a pair — in fact, the first place winner is a reply to the second place winner, but managed to beat it in the rankings by one single vote. But for the sake of clarity, let’s look at them in reverse order. So in second place it’s Rocky with a response to the DOJ’s paradoxical recommendations for Section 230:

Oh my…

I think the only solution to comply with these proposals is to hire Schr?dinger’s cat to handle the moderation.

And in first place, it’s an anonymous reply to that comment:

I thought you could get away without Schr?dinger’s cat (you know, to avoid making a Rube Goldberg machine out of your moderation) by using a quantum computer.

It didn’t work out. The quantum computer calculated all possible moderation solutions and shut down the comment section. It then calculated all possible legal responses, sued itself and won. It is now vacationing in Tahiti while the appeals wend their way through court.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with another comment from That One Guy, responding to a complaint that Techdirt is covering stuff that isn’t immediately and directly related to tech:

And don’t even get me started on the lack of fruit by Apple…

I feel your pain, I can still remember the first time I found out that Fox News wasn’t an entire channel devoted to vulpine related reporting, despite the fact that it’s right there in the name.

If you can’t see the noteworthiness of the current US president making bogus legal threats because they don’t like factual reporting you might want to get your priorities checked.

And finally, it’s an anonymous commenter who couldn’t resist (understandably in my books) making a particular reference when someone referred to the insane actions of eBay executives as a “cunning plan”:

Pity they weren’t Blackadder fans then ?

‘I?m I jumping the gun, , or are the words ?I have a cunning plan? marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation?’

That’s all for this week, folks!