Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the the-cows-come-home dept
This week, we've got a double-winner on the insightful side with Thad taking both the top spots. In first place, it's a simple, often-useful reply to (in this instance) Amazon's ability to take away movies people have "bought":
Pirates, as always, are unaffected.
In second place, it's a longer debunking of another comment making some silly assertions about COVID-19:
Well, okay. First of all, it's pretty clear you haven't actually read any of those links you just provided.
Some of your sources are pretty questionable: your first link is a video of something called "The Fat Emperor Podcast". You're fucking joking, right?
And some of your sources are reliable but don't actually say anything about COVID-19. That Mayo Clinic link has nothing to do with vitamin D's effect on respiratory illness; it's about bone disease.
Now, a handful of your links do appear to be legit, and several of them do seem to make a reasonable case that there's a correlation between vitamin D deficiency, likelihood of getting COVID-19 and other similar respiratory diseases, and having worse cases of them when infected.
As such, you may well be right that people should be taking vitamin D to reduce the risk of COVID-19 and other types of illness.
However, you are speaking about it as if it were some kind of miracle drug. It isn't. It may well be more effective than remdesivir (which may not be effective at all), but it's not a vaccine. It may reduce your likelihood of getting COVID-19, and it may reduce the severity of the disease if you do get it. Those are certainly good things, and vitamin D has other health benefits besides.
But I think you're greatly overstating your case when you say "vit D, vit C, zinc combo is already, well proven, in countless places around the world, to be effective against not only CV19, but regular flu."
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about how not every business closure can be blamed on the coronavirus, but a lot will be:
SARS-CoV-2 will be the scapegoat for unrelated failures for years to come. If there was a stock ticker I could invest in for "things SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with but was blamed for anyway" this would be the time to go long.
Next, it's Tim R responding to the neverending attacks on Google News:
Even if Google News were monetized, he makes it sound like Google is in competition with newspapers, trying to wipe them out. It's a news aggregator. It aggregates news. Without the newspapers and other online media, Google News doesn't exist. It's in their best interest for online properties to be successful. And there's no better way to do that than sending them traffic. You know, that very metric that any other advertising web site on the planet treats like gold.
Over on the funny side, we've got a one-two punch regarding the possible legal fees and sanctions looming over Devin Nunes and his lawyer, with the first quip coming from an anonymous commenter:
Oh boy!
Nunes is going to have a cow.
Not to be out done, another anonymous commenter won second place with a reply:
Maybe he'll finally put these cases out to pasture.
And for completion's sake, the first editor's choice on the funny side goes to Samuel Abram for continuing the riff:
Good point. After all, he's milked those cases for all they're worth…
And last but not least, pivoting to the subject of a Texas appeals court brushing off Section 230, we've got That Anonymous Coward with a pretty scathing jab:
If Facebook had shown up with a badge would the Judges have understood immunity then?
That's all for this week, folks!
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YES!!!
I finally won a funny/insightful comment of the week! Thank you everybody, I'm quitting my support of TechDirt, for I have completed all I needed to complete here. Good night, everybody!
*jumps into ocean*
In all seriousness, I will continue to support TechDirt, and I'm just happy I have reached that brass ring!
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Re: YES!!!
it is rather gratifying when people for your comment(s)
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Re: YES!!!
You've never had one before? This is somewhat surprising, but then there are so many quality comments here, and I suppose some randomness as to when people read or vote in a thread.
The whole community is insightful and funny. You are very definitely part of that.
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Thank you! I greatly appreciate that!
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Vitamin D
If Vitamin D was quite so successful in dealing with Coivd-19 then a certain President would be spruiking the benefits of standing around outside with your mouth open facing towards the Sun so that you also get UV inside the body. Maybe someone can design a light-pipe so that you can get sunlight directly into your lungs as well.
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Shalom Samuel.
That's אחד for you! :)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: YES!!!
I thought Shalom was שלום. What you wrote, אחד, is pronounced "echad" and means "one".
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Never mind, I misunderstood your post. I apologize.
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All good.
Enjoy your win :)
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Re: Vitamin D
Hey, I have an idea. Take a 3 foot section of a high voltage UV light and shove it up your LEFTIE ASS! I'll FLICK THE SWITCH and watch you glow like a firefly as I clean the leftie virus from your system.
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You know, for years I have been wondering who was behind the lefty Chinese propaganda that spews forth from sites like this. Finally, and without any doubt, I have the answer - Barry. Barry Obama. He was behind the whole thing. Michael Flynn, Mueller, the whole 9 yards. Barry was an ideologue who met with defeat at the ballot box, and he couldn't accept it. Maybe Hillary was fantasizing about his big black cock, but he was the one who really pulled the illegal strings. Not his gorilla in lipstick and high heels wife, not his savaged and brutalized Clinton would be lover, him. And now it's going to catch up with him. For sure, The rule of law. The rule of law about treason and sedition. It has to apply to him just like more "common people". Law. Rule. Reason. Justice. Amen. Just ask Judge Jeanine. She'll 'splain it to you.
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Hey Bob-obvious, what do you think? I have an idea, but I'd your feedback, you being so all know and all seeing of all things obvious. I think it's obvious, but maybe I'm wrong. The idea is how to win the 2020 election. And the solution is simple:
If you vote for me, I will put Barry, and his friends, on trial for sedition and treason and for being rat bastard liars, thieves, and criminals.
This would roughly parallel the last election (2018), where the Democratic plank was vote for me and we'll impeach 45. Same same, right? Reasonable response, right?
What do you think, it's only of those things that is so obvious after you see it that you just have to smile and pat yourself on the back, right? Vote for me, and we'll put all those seditious treasonous lying rat bastards on trial for their life.
Brilliant, right? 2020! Rat Bastards Hang! YAY!
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Cool, we’ll start with Trump and his cronies, who let thousands of people die by refusing to do anything about the coronavirus and will likely help kill thousands more by pressuring states into reopening early for the sake of capitalism. (“Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”)
Last time I checked, the Obama administration had a far better response to both the H1N1 and ebola outbreaks. Only 12,000 Americans died from H1N1 in the space of a year, and only two deaths from ebola occured on American soil — all because the Obama administration let scientists do their shit proper (trusting in outside expertise, imagine that!) and didn’t ignore the fact that those diseases existed until the outbreaks couldn’t be contained by normal measures. In comparison, over 80,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in a span of three months — thanks largely to the Trump administration ignoring the outbreak, shitting all over outside expertise, fucking over states on PPE, and generally acting like it cared more about capitalism than American citizens (especially the ones in places that voted for Clinton).
Did Obama let Republican voters die during the H1N1 and ebola outbreaks out of partisan hatred for “the enemy”? Because I feel like Trump would let Democrat voters die, without showing even a hint of remorse, if he thought doing so would help him stay in office.
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Racism, sexism, xenophobia, partisan pandering…shit, man, you should’ve put in a QAnon reference or some anti-Semitism for a full 4chan /pol/ Bingo. (“Racism” sits in the free space, obviously.)
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You shoot yourself with bleach yet Hamilton?
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Re:
That's a bit unfair.
Trump would also let Republican voters die, without showing even a hint of remorse, if he thought doing so would help him stay in office.
He's an equal opportunity sociopath.
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Fair, but he also knows that he needs those voters to win, so he would definitely let fewer Republican voters die.
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I'm not so sure about that. The last election proved 2 things - there's a core of people that will vote R not matter what, and that a combination of gerrymandering and the electoral college means that numbers are unimportant compared to location. Add to that his recent attacks on the postal service and mail voting, he can potentially disenfranchise enough opposing voters to make up for any loss in the core cult. Certainly, he's indicated that he's willing to sacrifice a bunch of his voters so long as the economy reopens.
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Not so much randomness as an inability to upvote comments without spending money on credits. This is the one area where Techdirt is hypocritical; acting as a gatekeeper on the ability upvote a comment you really like and/or agree with.
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How is that hypocritical of TechDirt? Neither Mike nor any of the Tims have argued against content moderation, and "acting as a gatekeeper on the ability upvote a comment you really like and/or agree with" is part of that.
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No, it's not. Content moderation is making sure the the comments section doesn't become an unholy mess, and preventing all but the chosen few upvoting is no part of that. Besides, Techdirt leaves comment moderation to commenters by allowing us to flag problem comments until they are hidden, but how many of us are receiving the money Techdirt charges for the ability to upvote.
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You are confusing the first and last comment with the ability to vote a comment as insightful or funny. The first and last comment is just an individual giving extra prominence to a comment, and paying for the privilege.
Funny and insightful are what turn on the indicators for a given comment, along with them being hidden for being trollish, and any visitor to the site can add their votes towards those outcome.
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Obfuscated with code, maybe? The only things I can see that are human-readable are 'FW' and 'LW', and I get demands for purchaseable credits if I click on those.
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Choosing who gets to comment, or whose comments make it through a given “gate”, or who gets to upvote comments — all of these amount to content moderation. That you don’t like the methods, or the results thereof, doesn’t make those methods any less valid.
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That's... not quite how that works.
The Insightful/funny/flag system is completely separate from the first/last word system. First/Last word credits aren't 'earned', they're something anyone who supports the site in a more direct fashion(read: money) gets to 'spend' as desired, with the amount of first/last word 'credits' you have to spend per month depending on which tier of support you choose.
TD allows anyone who visits to support comments they find funny and/or insightful via simply voting as such, allowing many comments in a given thread to be highlighted as striking a cord with the community rather than just one, first/last word is simply a way for those that support the site financially to give a particular comment a little extra prominence by putting it front and center as a reward for that extra bit of support.
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No, it's not. Content moderation is making sure the the comments section doesn't become an unholy mess, and preventing all but the chosen few upvoting is no part of that. Besides, Techdirt leaves comment moderation to commenters by allowing us to flag problem comments until they are hidden, but how many of us are receiving the money Techdirt charges for the ability to upvote.
Others have already explained this to you, but just to be clear: we do not charge anyone to "upvote" comments. Voting for funny or insightful is not based on paying or not paying. Any user can vote the funny or insightful buttons and paying us doesn't change that one bit.
Supporters (depending on level of support) can get other features, including first word/last word credits, but those have nothing to do with the funny or insightful votes. And there is no traditional "upvote" for anyone.
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That's first word and last word. Has nothing to do with the first two buttons for up-voting comments. You need to try harder with those hilarious claims.
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" how many of us are receiving the money Techdirt charges for the ability to upvote.
Nobody, since they don't charge for that?
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"...so he would definitely let fewer Republican voters die."
Well, no. Given how few people he really needs to win with US voter apathy and electoral dilution being what it is, he'll be safe letting the pandemic off its leash almost completely.
Most of his truly die-hard voters either live in trailer parks or rural communities where it's easy to hold a cross-burning without needing a city fire license.
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