Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the sayin'-stuff dept

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side came in response to our post about some police realizing that SESTA/FOSTA has made their job harder. The curiously-named any moose cow word won first place with a simple statement:

FOSTA and SESTA, like most "morality" legislation, is much more about sweeping problems under the rug and pretending they don't exist rather than doing anything substantive to address the real underlying issues.

In second place, it's an anonymous response to a strange comment questioning why we worry about one bad law when there are lots of bad laws:

OK: I'll bite.

We get annoyed at just this one today to bring awareness to it, so that it can be changed. Without public awareness and public shaming of public figures, we will not have change.

So why go after one when there are 500,000+ more laws?

Because each journey starts with a single step. Once THIS law is taken care of, there are 499,999+ laws, and we can work on the next item.

Your attitude only results in things getting continually worse. It is the attitude the Russian troll farms use to promote apathy.

Be part of the solution and pick a law you feel is unjust, and see it through to being removed.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got a pair of responses from our two frequent "That" commenters to our post about the congressional push to protect police with hate crime laws — both addressing the common arguments about police having a dangerous job. First up it's That One Guy:

Yeah, no-one's arguing that it's a risk free job, but here's the thing: The ones in it either knew that ahead of time that it carried risk and accepted that anyway, or they were so clueless that that fact flew completely over their head, and they need to quit immediately and let someone with a working brain take their position.

I face heightened risk every time I wake up and get out of bed. I face heightened risk every time I get in a car. Countless things cause 'heightened risk', if they can't deal with a historically safe job because it carries anything higher than no risk then they most certainly have no business in a profession that carries extra risk and is already well protected by the laws.

This is yet another boot-licking, 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal that others' move that will widen the gap between the public and police once more, which, ironically enough, stands to make things even riskier for police.

And next it's That Anonymous Coward:

Pretty sure the number of people ending up dead or beaten after interaction with cops is much higher than the number of dead cops.

They know the job is dangerous...
A woman might knock on your window requiring lethal force.
A car might backfire requiring pursuit & 40+ bullets fired while standing on the hood of the car.
The house of an innocent person the warrant isn't for might get uppity wondering why these jackbooted thugs broke in.
A baby might need to be flash banged for officer safety.
A dog might wag its tail in the vicinity of a cop requiring its execution.
A young officer might freak out & blow someone away in their panic & require being comforted before anyone seeks help for the person who was shot.
A driver might reach for his ID after being instructed to & be shot by a cop for following directions.
A body cam might be turned off or have the audio muted after a citizen is shot by a cop so they can get the story right.
A department might run a fucking black site that the CIA would be proud of torturing citizens until they admit to crimes to make the pain stop.
A department might steal millions in military gear handouts & just hand them out to various citizens around town.

But yes, please codify what a large percentage of the population already know... Cops are a special group who can do no wrong, can not be held responsible for their actions, and can repeatedly lie on the stand... but sure lets give them another law to use against critics or them uppity citizens who know their rights & the law.

Good faith exceptions.
Using stereotypes of demons to justify murder.
Abusing citizens.
Throwing them into paddy wagons & giving them a rough ride to teach them a lesson (or paralyze them for life).

Perhaps a better use of time & resources would have been a hate crime law protecting citizens from cops. I mean, we have the higher body count & we didn't have to pad the numbers by including desk riding doughnut gobbling warriors who had a heart attack.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad making a small correction to Mike's point that a certain rabidly anti-regulation commenter on Techdirt sounds like a high-school student:

That's not fair.

High school students know how to use quotation marks correctly.

In second place, it's Jinxed with another comment about SESTA/FOSTA:

Perhaps Techdirt reach out to one of the authors of the bill?
Here, I'll help:
https://www.mpaa.org/who-we-are/#contact-us

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out on our post about breathalyzers inflating results by as much as 6%, where one commenter suggested this isn't really a problem and McCrea quickly corrected that notion:

And we should prosecute everyone who does 50mph in a 55 zone a speeding ticket be "Oh, he wasn't "SPEEDING" when crashed into you isn't any solace."

Personally, I find you far more than 6% short of being reasonable. Only 6% over the fine line of sanity. Only 6% short of a full deck? Only 6% dimmer than a burnt out bulb?

Geez, first time in two years I've logged into to make a comment. I guess I only respond to 6% of the trolls.

Finally, since it's one more chance to shamelessly plug our Kickstarter campaign for CIA: Collect It All (which ends on Tuesday!), we've got a comment from last weekend's post about the game. In response to an angry commenter who seems to think selling a physical product undermines our opinions on digital economics, That One Guy got sarcastic:

Wait a tic, you mean it's possible to make money off of something despite it being freely available, thanks to someone adding value to the free part(in this case by saving you the trouble of constructing them yourself)?

You are blowing my mind here man, who could have ever thought you could make money off of something that people could get for free? That you can in fact compete with free?

That's all for this week, folks!

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