Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the who-said-that? dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof (who also took first place on the funny side), responding to the notion that all government services should be voluntarily chosen and paid for:

It's been tried, Colorado springs experimented with being a voluntary libertarian paradise, but soon found out it cost them far more than it saved. They turned off all the streetlights for example, and found people were happy to pay $300 to turn on the streetlights in their own neighborhood but not $200 to turn all the streetlights on in all neighbourhoods, and while it saved them $1.25 million in electricity, it cost them $5 million due to copper theft. No electricity made it easy and safe to loot, oh and no police and fire services as they were slashed too.

People would gut the things the US needs to run because they're incredibly shortsighted, rather than the big wastes of money like defense because fear motivates better than helping the less fortunate.

In second place on the insightful side, we've got Stephen T. Stone on our post about the unfolding whistleblower situation in the Trump administration, responding to the silly question of "why should I care?":

The President of the United States is accused, apparently credibly, of doing something worth reporting through official whistleblower channels. That someone would feel the need to do so should make you care about what the president did to warrant that report. Whether it is “nothing” shouldn’t matter until after the substance of the complaint is revealed.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with That One Guy correcting the notion that there's no reason to oppose collecting data on FOSTA's impact:

Oh I can think of a few... In addition to the reason in the article of politicians not wanting to appear 'pro-sex work' by foolish voters, there's also the very real possibility that such a study would make official that FOSTA not only didn't help sex workers it actually made things worse for them, which would be rather 'awkward' to those that were so gung-ho about how great the bill was and how they were helping so much by passing it, and raise the question of 'If it's been so damaging then why keep it around rather than repealing it?'

Given the study has high odds of exposing some rather nasty truths I expect that the bill to create and fund it will face some stiff opposition, or if it does squeak through the resulting study to be quickly buried and forgotten because after all 'there are much more important things to worry about, and politicians only have so much time to do their jobs.'

Next, we've got an anonymous response to another sad and strained attempt to equate people who support laws against Nazi imagery with Nazis themselves:

One of them committed genocide. The other commented in a way you found unfavourable, about an existing law.

Over on the funny side, it's Bloof again in first place, this time sarcastically responding to a strange question about what the ACLU will do with the legal fees it was awarded in a lawsuit:

They're going to tip bags of cash onto an altar to baphomet and make love atop it... Pay their legal fees, what else would they use money awarded to pay their legal fees for?

In second place, it's an anonymous response to the hotel owner who filed a libel lawsuit because someone described a lobby photo of Nazi party members in Nazi uniforms as... a photo of Nazis:

Man, they'll call anyone Nazis these days.

Don't they know the term can only be used to refer to Hitler himself, and maybe a few of his best-known lieutenants?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we'll start out with this comment from nasch about the fact that the city that lost the ACLU lawsuit over displaying the Ten Commandments at city hall could have opted to just allow a huge variety of religious monuments:

The really difficult one is the Invisible Pink Unicorn statue.

And finally, we've got an anonymous commenter finally bringing some clarity to Josh Hawley's rant about parents controlling their children's online activities:

You forgot the glossary!

Parent: A government official
Child/Kid: everyone else

That's all for this week, folks!

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