Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the information-comment-provider dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with the only sane response to seeing a jokey cartoon about police brutality in an official police use-of-force training presentation:

'What do you mean 'beating people' isn't funny? Since when?'

When your training material includes jokes about beating suspects you've given up any pretense of not being filled with and run by thugs, and the idea that it's just a 'bad apple' or two goes right out the window.

In second place, we've got an anonymous open message to the Senate in response to the latest all-out attack on encryption:

Dear Senate

You first. Break encryption on every method of communication that is used for official and unofficial use for the House and Senate. After a year of being able to review all of the important things that they are doing and verifying that it works without a problem, then consider rolling it out to the rest of us.

We have a thing called the constitution and it is there to keep this kind of law from being passed. You would have to amend that for any of these arguments to be at all valid.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with another anonymous comment about all the fresh attacks on Section 230, which I hope is overly pessimistic, but the sentiment is understandable:

It's only been three days and we have not one, not two, not three, but FIVE different bills targeting 230 all aiming to change it in ways that not only wouldn't do what they say, but just about enable the very things they claim to be against.

sigh 230 had a good run. It's just another reason why we can't have anything nice when we have people who either don't understand or are paid not to understand what they're legislating.

Next, it's another comment from That One Guy making an important point about Parler and other "free speech" social media platforms:

Just a reminder...

When someone claims that they want to force platforms to block only 'illegal' content it's important to remember that racism, sexism, all other forms of bigotry, advocating that some categories of people are inherently 'lesser', voicing support for nazi ideals and/or that the wrong side won the War to Preserve Slavery(otherwise known as the Civil war) are all legal speech and thus would be out of bounds for removal if moderation was only allowed to block/remove illegal content.

That is the kind of speech that those pushing 'neutrality' bills like this one are not just trying to protect but foist onto the public, whether people want it or not.

Over on the funny side, we've got a rare situation where both our winners are making exactly the same joke. On our big post designed as a destination for people who are getting Section 230 all wrong there were, of course, plenty of people getting it wrong in the comments — the perfect setup for some recursive humor. In first place, an anonymous commenter responded to someone who pushed back, insisting it is possible to "lose" Section 230 protections:

As it happens, I just came across a useful article to refer you to:

Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act

And in second place, we've got Toom1275 offering up a similar link to someone who decided to focus on the "good faith" concept — but since that comment is just the URL of the post and nothing else, there's no real need to quote it here, so... on to the editor's choice for funny!

First, we've got Stephen T. Stone responding to our post about Parler and, specifically, a brief conditional statement about whether Parler ever gets big enough to matter:

Narrator: It won’t.

And finally, we've got Thad projecting past the Section 230 ruling in Devin Nunes' cow lawsuit:

Next up, the judge unfairly rules that you can't sue someone who didn't break any laws.

That's all for this week, folks!

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