Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the conversationalism dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a response to Georgia’s attempts to punish Delta for the CEO’s statement about voting laws:

Never thought I’d be bothered by government transparency

And yet here I am: bothered by just how transparent the Republicans in influential positions are about what they are doing.

They consider themselves royalty, dealing out reward and punishment according to their whim instead of following the letter of the law. Seeing an actual royal, namely Prince Harry of England now working for an SF-based company focused about mental health is sort of a weird contrast in the category of self-entitlement.

In second place, it’s Bloof responding to a commenter who spouted a bunch of nonsense about Parler and the info it turned over to the FBI:

Parler was never a place where americans can speak their mind, it was a Mercer funded radicalisation petrie dish and data farm.

It became useless for that, and ‘gelded’ as the attempted insurrection and the resulting removal from app stores destroyed it’s ability to reach beyond the people who feel they’re not quite racist enough for GAB.

They forced their way into a place offlimits to the public, destroyed property, recording themselves doing so, and they beat a policeman to death.

They recorded themselves comitting crimes, they admitted it across all social media, posed for photos and videos with metadata. There is no question what they did was illegal, the only question is how harsh the punishment will be, probably not as harsh as they deserve because they’re middle class and white.

If it’s unconstitutional to gather evidence of crimes, the american justice system is in even more in need of root and branch reform than I thought.

Americans do not have the right to commit crimes without punishment, no matter how white and conservative they are.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a simple anonymous comment on one of our Content Moderation Case Studies about automated takedowns:

Any entity sending automated notices should be considered untrustworthy by default.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment on our post about Nike suing MSCHF, in response to the assertion that the existence of some brand confusion is the same as “likelihood of confusion”:

You give me a product made by any company in the world, and I’ll find you a person who honestly believes that product was made by Amazon.

There are always multiple people. Always.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Michael with a response to the Qanon rallying cry:

That slogan

“Where we go one, we go all”

Is that not the very definition of “sheep”?

In second place, it’s an anonymous commenter with a suggestion for Parler’s communications team next time their users are angry about info being handed to the FBI:

What Parler should have said:

Parler was founded in response to the cancel culture which unfairly attempts to silence conservative speech. Our growth shows that there is a large community of conservatives who do not wish to be silenced.

Parler provides this community with an even larger audience when we forward its speech to third parties. This is in line with our mission to ensure that our users will continue to speak freely and to be heard.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we remain on the Parler post, in which we had requested to know the German word for a group of people like Parler’s users, and Jeroen Hellingman had the answer:

That German word is “Idiot”: perfectly understood by speakers of English as well, but if you want something with a more alien sound “Dummkopf” is also appropriate.

Finally, it’s Baron von Robber on our post about the hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s new website relying on Section 230, responding to a commenter who insisted it’s fine because “Trump follows existing law — the FULL text of the law” (whatever that means):

You should be in contact with Trump’s lawyers. They need your advice when NY and Georgia indict him.

That’s all for this week, folks!


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Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”

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5 Comments
David says:

This and that...

That German word is "Idiot": perfectly understood by speakers of English as well, but if you want something with a more alien sound "Dummkopf" is also appropriate.

The funny thing is that the Greek origin for "idiot" basically means "as a private facility, not in an official capacity". Like "dilettant", once dedicating people who indulged in an art out of private interest rather than in the course of employment, the term has soured over the millennia.

Somehow hobbyists get a bad rap.

In other news, I was certainly surprised to see me in the "insightful" top place: I was basically freely associating. When I actively try to end up in the "insightful" category, I am usually marked "funny", and when I am angling for "funny", I tend to end up marked as a troll with responses to me marked as "insightful".

There is always a surprise for me in stock, but then that is what people are for.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: This and that...

Well yes, it is a reflection of self. More or less unique to oneself. The idiot is the one who stands out for being unique in a certain way. One can use "unique" in a pejorative sense in a similar fashion. Not sure why "medical science" of a certain time and place decided this was a good moniker for a condition other than they don’t know what is actually wrong, but really want to label a thing. (Which also weirdly makes it less idios, by definition.) See for comparison: idiopathy.

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