Stephen T. Stone 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Trump Admits: “We Took The Freedom Of Speech Away”

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2025 @ 12:19pm

  I’m fairly sure there are maga boot-lickers, if not Trump himself, trying to say the phrase was taken out of context

  And they rarely, if ever, offer a more logical context for such comments than the context provided by his own words.

• On the post: Trump Admits: “We Took The Freedom Of Speech Away”

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2025 @ 10:50am

  Give a censor one victory and he’ll think he has a mandate.

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2025 @ 10:03am

  The fact that you’re desperate to call Republicans “liberal” when most Republicans would probably pop you in the mouth for doing that tells me all I need to know about how much of a bullshitter you are.

• On the post: It Definitely Looks Like I Was Wrong About The Iowa School Superintendent Arrested By ICE

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2025 @ 10:00am

  Hi there, Stephen Miller. Did you get a boner only by thinking about ICE killing brown people, or did you need Viagra to help?

• On the post: Paramount Formally Hires Bari Weiss To Turn What’s Left Of CBS News Into A Soggy Right Wing Propaganda And Troll Farm

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 10:45pm

  I never agreed to be the victim of right wing terrorists in exchange for other people’s lofty ideals.

  I never did, either. But if you give me a choice between “dying for your civil rights at the hands of right-wingers” and “giving up your civil rights so the government has the power to determine what speech is ‘acceptable’ ”, I’d rather be a martyr than a coward. My stance on this notion of a law against “harmful lies” doesn’t rely on which party is in charge of the government. I care about not giving the government⁠—even one with which I ostensibly agree⁠—any power to say “hey, you said a nasty thing we don’t like, we’re gonna call that a harmful lie and spend months to years trying to put you in jail for it” and fuck up someone’s life forever. No goverment should have the power to declare “[X] is the truth” and hurt those who contradict that stance. Vengeance is never satisfied by an equivalent exchange of pain. This idea is a desire for vengeance disguised (poorly) as justice. For all the good this idea might do, it would cause much more harm in the long run. And I’d be saying this if Kamala Harris were in the Oval Office right now. If you want to give away your liberty for the sake of revenge, that’s your decision. But I don’t remember telling anyone that you had the right to give away mine.

• On the post: Another Trump Official Carelessly Talks War Plans While Hanging Around With Civilians

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 08:11pm

  News outlets like the New York Times have no excuses for not putting the most important information first. Techdirt is an opinion blog, not a news outlet.

• On the post: Paramount Formally Hires Bari Weiss To Turn What’s Left Of CBS News Into A Soggy Right Wing Propaganda And Troll Farm

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 06:51pm

  Yeah, so, how would those counters look any different than what the right is doing at the moment? And how much of the right to free speech will you place on the altar of hurting your enemies? Remember that you’re not spilling only your blood for the sacrifice⁠—you’ve got 300 million more thumbs to prick as well, one of which is mine, and you’re not getting that cut without a motherfucking fight.

• On the post: Google’s Requirement For All Android Developers To Register And Be Verified Threatens To Close Down Open Source App Store F-Droid

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 11:03am

  Google back then: “Don’t be evil.” Google now: “Don’t be stupid by being good.”

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 10:19am

  A thoroughly nasty individual who seems to be taking advantage of a deteriorating Trump to further his own agenda.

  You could apply that description to the GOP in general and end up with an accuracy rate greater than at least 75%.

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 10:08am

  Either he is successful in doing evil right now, or he fails badly right now but has set the table for a more capable Republican tyrant to achieve evil successfully.

  That’s pretty much the entire reason for Project 2025: The people behind it know Trump has basically tripped over his own dick into every bit of success he’s ever had (I still believe he never expected or wanted to win the 2016 election!), but he’s a useful enough idiot that they can achieve their goals through him and leave whatever they don’t get done for a much smarter Republican.

• On the post: OK GOP State Senator, Essentially: Ryan Walters’ Mandates Were Performative Bullshit

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 10:04am

  see also: the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal advocacy group that only defends the rights of conservative Christians against any action the ADF considers “discriminatory”⁠—even (and especially) if the action adheres to the principles of the separation of church and state

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 05:25am

  There are a lot of activist judges just straight up breaking the law.

  A court ruling not going the way you wanted is not “activism”⁠—especially when the ruling actually follows both the law and existing court precedent to arrive at its conclusion.

• On the post: Senator Cruz Figure Out Who Was President From 2018 To 2020 Challenge; Impossible

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 09:00pm

  I hear it’s also one of Mike Masnick’s favorite devices, given how many people complain about articles they wouldn’t be forced to read but for Mike going all Dr. Forrester and making with the brain-zap.

• On the post: The People Applying For ICE Jobs Are Exactly Who You Think They Are

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 08:32pm

  Why single out immigration laws?

  Two men are standing on a street corner, one white and one Latino. One of the men is in the country illegally, and ICE comes to pick up that man while he’s standing on that street corner. The Latino man is ziptied, black-bagged, and taken into a nearby van to be processed for deportation. The white guy was a Danish immigrant who had overstayed his student visa. The Latino guy was born in the States to American citizens. The problem isn’t with immigration laws per se, but with their racist-ass enforcement by people who believe “the Great Replacement” and Trump’s orders have given them free reign to arrest anyone with a skin color darker than alabaster. I’m in favor of reforming immigration and enforcing current immigration laws. I’m not in favor of enforcing the law using the methods ICE has been using since Trump gave them carte blanche to go apeshit on brown people. Also: For someone who offhandedly admits Republicans are horrible people, you sure do a lot of “look what you made us do” shittalking towards Democrats while refusing to shittalk Republicans beyond “they’re reacting to Democrat failures and therefore have no agency of their own, but yeah, they maybe kinda suck, I guess”.

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 05:47pm

  It’s conspicuous how, when a Republican gets into power, often with control of the legislature, a whole lot of anti-public shit follows, and then when a Democrat gets into power, only some of it is rolled back. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  There’s a name for that process: The Ratchet Effect.

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 03:22pm

  The one whining about the normal application of law is Stephen Miller, to the point where he outright said that a judge applying the law as it is (as opposed to what Miller and his boss want it to be) amounts to an insurrection against the federal government. Can you show me a single Democrat who has ever said a court ruling not going the way they wanted is the exact same thing as an attempt to take out of office a sitting Democrat POTUS?

• On the post: The Tyrant In The White House

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 03:19pm

  I think it is a mistake to call all of this fascism

  No, it isn’t. Regardless of how you feel about Democrat-led government administrations, Joe Biden didn’t…

  • give a speech to the Navy in which he heavily implied that the United States Armed Forces would soon have to “take care of” (i.e., commit potentially lethal violence against) Republicans
  • say that the US Armed Forces should use American cities he deems “dangerous” as training grounds, which further implies that American citizens in those cities should be seen as “the enemy” and treated like “enemy combatants”
  • send the National Guard into Republican-led cities and states to “fight crime”, go after non-existent riots, and/or help ICE carry out mass deportations of people whose only crime was being in the country illegally (as opposed to such people who are reasonably suspected of committing felony-level criminal acts)
  • demand that critics of his administration and his allies be silenced for their criticism
  • put giant banners on government buildings featuring his face
  • jump on a chance to use right-wing violence as an excuse to crack down on civil rights and paint right-wingers as inherently violent and in need of being “put down”
  • mourn the loss of a public political figure by turning their memorial service into a political rally and giving a political speech

  …so when a Democrat president acts anywhere near as shitty as Donald Trump has in the ten years since he’s been an actual politician, I’ll call them a fascist, too. But I’m going to call Trump and his henchmen “fascists” because that’s what they are. That goes double for Stephen Miller. All your bothsidesism is a weak-ass attempt to equivocate Democrats being centrist needledicks with the current GOP being a fascist death cult and say “well, maybe both sides are to blame for Donald Trump saying he wants to kill Democrats and leftists”. Nobody here with any sense is going to buy into that “look what you made them do” bullshit, so go sell it at CPAC.

• On the post: Senator Cruz Figure Out Who Was President From 2018 To 2020 Challenge; Impossible

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 11:28am

  You can also add “craven coward” to the list, given how he kissed Trump’s ass after Trump insulted Cruz’s wife multiple times.

• On the post: DOJ Demands Removal Of ICEBlock App; Why Are The ‘Free Speech Warriors’ Suddenly So Quiet?

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 02:28am

  it’s almost like you guys set the precedent that ISPs deplatforming internet services is totally chill if they make you mad

  Actually, we didn’t. This site has discussed the issue of ISP deplatforming in the past, and each time, it’s raised a critical question with no easy answer: At what point in the hierarchy of Internet services⁠—including Internet access providers, domain registrars, and server hosting companies⁠—does a refusal to do business with a site like KiwiFarms become a legitimate act of censorship? Even if we celebrate the idea of a shitpit like KF going offline (albeit temporarily), we still haven’t come up with a solid answer to that question because the answer has to contend with the idea of forced association (i.e., whether a given Internet service provider should be forced by law to do business with KF). The easiest “we can agree to this” answer anyone has come up with so far is that Internet access providers probably shouldn’t have the right to unilaterally decide whether you can access a given site because the IAP doesn’t like it. But beyond that, I’ve never seen a consensus form on this issue, even on this site.

• On the post: Chicago And The End Of American Liberty.

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Oct, 2025 @ 04:02pm

  Incidentally, I happened to see this video today: https://bsky.app/profile/cristianfarias.com/post/3m2hmiitdc22m So let me use this moment to say that yes, I am 100% on board with all of that. Neither of the (cowardly) ICE agents were attacked, the man who was in the process of being kidnapped physically resisted without committing assault, and the onlookers did their best to help the guy⁠—from holding his hand to trying to kick away the twist-ties to filming the incident en masse so it couldn’t be handwaved away⁠—so he wouldn’t be kidnapped. That’s the kind of physical resistance that I’m on board with right now. We don’t need to assault ICE agents when they can be convinced to think “fuck it, let’s go” and leave so they don’t embarass their flunked-out-of-police-academy asses any further. Primo shit there.

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