Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the chitchat dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Darkness Of Course with a response to the everpresent complaints from one... prolific commenter about supposedly being censored:
You are spamming the site with repeated falsehoods, and lies. Additionally you are insulting TechDirt and everyone in it, quite often because you do not understand the very basics of how networks, the internet, the web, web sites, and web site commenting works.
You generate spam. Many respond via the "spam flag" on the insightful/funny/copy functions/flag <- Spam filter flag.
You are a spammer. And a liar. And a nutjob. See, simple to explain, difficult for an idiot to understand.
My 1st Amend rights align with Mike's. We don't want to be associated with you: Read the 1st, Dummy. The 1st Amendment that is. If you need help, see your doctor.
In second place, it's Thad with some thoughts about the political situation in Arizona:
Under the leadership of Kelli Ward, the AZGOP has taken a hard turn toward the fringe. They've alienated voters and donors; the current leadership is somehow too far-right for the party of Evan Mecham, Fife Symington, and Joe Arpaio.
And they see which way things are going. Democrats have held a majority of Arizona's seats in the US House for years, and now both our US Senate seats have gone to Democrats. Statewide offices are increasingly going to Democrats as well (though governor has been a tough nut to crack), and while Republicans still hold both chambers in the state legislature, they've gone from supermajorities to a majority of just 2 seats in each house.
They're panicking.
And much like the GOP at the national level, they really only have two choices if they want to keep winning elections: either they can stop being racist conspiracy whackjobs and start appealing to more mainstream voters, or they can engage in mass-scale voter disenfranchisement efforts and make sure only racist conspiracy whackjobs get to vote.
They've made their choice.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from Thad, this time on our post about FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's op-ed in Newsweek calling for big tech to subsidize big telecom:
Reminder: Newsweek is a fringe right-wing conspiracy magazine, using a once-respectable name to deceive people into thinking it's a respectable publication.
Next, it's another response to that same post, this time from MathFox who flipped the suggestion on its head:
I think that "big telecom" should pay "big tech" because "big tech" generates the content that drives bandwidth usage, enabling the ISP to sell high-bandwidth connections to their customers... (and collect fees for exceeding the bandwidth cap...)
If there was no YouTube, Steam, etc. everyone could still get by with a dial-in modem.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter with another response to complaints of censorship in our comments section:
IKR? I never see your inane comments like this one i can't see either.
In second place, it's Thad yet again, with a link regarding Florida's unconstitutional social media moderation law:
Evergreen: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the notion that people can be convicted of crimes based on DNA analysis software that they can't examine:
I have a secret magic box into which I can place my hand and pull out names on slips of paper that are guaranteed to be the names of pedophiles. The prosecutor of this case is one of those names. No, you can't see the box. If you see it, the box stops working. Also the pedophiles will win. Don't let that happen!
Finally, it's Bloof with a response to the suggestion that Democrats rigged elections in Arizona:
You know the people controlling Maricopa county's elections were republicans, right? So in your mind, democrats pretended to be lifelong republicans, got elected as republicans and spent years doing thankless jobs so they could unseat a republican by making voters in a democratic area vote for a democrat... Talk about cunning!
That's all for this week, folks!
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So?
I live in a part of the world that didn't have flat local phone rates. I wouldn't want to swap my phone bills from that time with my current ones.
And these days I have VDSL with 50Mb/10Mb that actually consistently puts those data rates through (admittedly after I scrapped the !@#$ DSL modem of the provider and got my own one). Flat rate, and this is one of the cheaper ones. It's not the lowest one since at one time 2 analog connections required ISDN, and ISDN was not an option for the cheapest setup.
Not everyone lives in the U.S. The phone bill actually matches the advertised price (and the service quality had been upgraded a few times without raising the price or resetting contractual cancellation deadlines) and I have a number of different providers to choose from.
This started with a federally owned monopoly analog line network like in the U.S., but over here bribing politicians is illegal and actually frowned upon, so privatisation, with all its rough vertices and edges, worked out a bit differently.
So big tech here did not wash more money into the providers' pockets than what ended up there in analog line times. However, they do get the copper to do a lot more work than it once did (and even in the early age of digitisation, they could just wire up the oodles of line pairs in any old manner and the circuits figured out what to do with them afterwards). And now that they are laying fiber all over the country, the kind of work they need to do per bandwidth per meter has become quite lower again.
So essentially, technical progress makes things cheaper. Nobody gets philosophic about hard disks being 1000 times lighter and with 1000000 more capacity than in times of yore while being actually cheaper. And nobody says "where would digital storage makers be without digital cameras?".
I actually think that network speeds have caused "big tech" more than the other way round, but everyone is entitled to his own interpretation.
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Re: So?
I am from a country where the former public owned telecom company was forced to sub-lease its lines to the competition at a fair price. We do have competition, so better quality for a lower price (compared to the US.) Thanks to customer protection laws the actual price is the same as the advertised price.
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I never realized that is specifically what happened to Newsweek, insightful indeed. I thought they had just gone to great lengths to provide the opportunity for all sorts of reprehensible dishonest people to write opinion pieces in a misguided attempt at impartiality. WaPo and NYT stray into that territory from time to time, but Newsweek took it to an extreme level that at times made its opinion section appear to be a far right blog. I stopped clicking on their garbage a while back.
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Re:
Publication outlets in particular seem to get laid to rest in Stephen King's "Pet Sematary" a lot.
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Re:
Yes, the linked article, and articles linked in that article, were pretty interesting to read.
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How did this bad dudes comment do?
Hey Leigh…
On the interest of full transparency, how did this comment of mine rank when it came to funny comments? It's one comment of which I'm really proud!
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Re: How did this bad dudes comment do?
It was in the top 10
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Re: Re: How did this bad dudes comment do?
Yay! My Memorial Day weekend is happy just knowing that! Thank you so much and you have an excellent day!
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Re: Re: Re: How did this bad dudes comment do?
Yeah no that was pretty funny.
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The sociopathic wannabe internet bullies love to think using words like "nutjob" or being verbally aggressive (only behind a keyboard, with Masnick quoting it) proves nothing more than my comments struck a nerve.\
Particuarly telling is the speaker's presentation of opinion as if it were fact.
People were censored for saying COVID came from a lab.
Masnick's words, and the words he endorses by giving them further recognition, are going to haunt him at the worst possible time.
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I have One Simple Challenge for you.
Name one American citizen who was directly and explicitly censored by anyone from any level of the United States government — i.e., fined, imprisoned, or otherwise prevented from speaking their mind by a local/state/federal government agent or agency in direct violation of the First Amendment — for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab”. Please note that a social interaction network banning someone from the service for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab” is not censorship because, as Judge Brett Kavanaugh pointed out, “A private entity … who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor”.
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Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
Under Knight v. Trump, anyone CENSORED by Twitter lost their first-Amendment right to participate in a discussion of official policy.
To put the goalpost back to its original location, the primary point was that having arbiters of what is "true" invites inevitable abuse.
It's quite possible a court may rule in the future that a social network that hosts government channels can't universally ban someone from those channels, so yes when Twitter terminates someone's account, they are a state actor, if they are censoring discussions on pages of elected officials.
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Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
And did you think that Trump would be your champion of who decides what is true or otherwise? How did that turn out? But because he speaks out once against Section 230, suddenly he's your Chosen One. How'd that turn out again?
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Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
So you admit that you both have nothing, and lack understanding of Knight v. Trump (or the subjects at hand, for that matter.)
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Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
I'm always impressed. The amount of time, effort and energy you pour into misrepresenting facts, yet making the lies so obvious that nobody with an ounce of sense would ever fall for them, is truly a sight to behold. Not the best use of one's time, but I do like the way you announce that you don't understand the basics of the facts before spinning them.
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Re: Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
Nothing compared to the time and energy people on here ADDRESS posts as if they are checking boxes on corporate talking points.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
Is that why your expose hasn't happened after three years of threats and hype?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
"...as if they are checking boxes on corporate talking points."
Unfortunately for the alt-right people referencing factual reality tend to all present more or less identical comments. Because "alternative facts" don't exist. There's just one reality - the one we live in.
And that means whenever some moron who thinks the world inside their heads or the one posited in some murky white supremacy echo chamber is an alternative position to take, the response tends to be a bullet list of where that assertion is wrong.
Incidentally, yes, smarter corporations tend to use these same facts in their talking points whenever they think factual reality will back what they have to say. Truth is truth, no matter who speaks it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
"Nothing compared to the time and energy people on here ADDRESS posts"
It doesn't matter how obvious misinformation is, sadly. As we have seen many times, people vote and act on some of the most hilariously bad lies if they fit their preconceived desires to be true. If people put in time and energy to lie, then other may feel the need to put in time and energy to ensure that the lie doesn't influence any readers.
"checking boxes on corporate talking points"
I hope I'm reading this incorrectly, but - are you seriously trying to say that addressing factual reality is a corporate conspiracy now?
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Re: Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
This kind of logic is good enough to lead an attack on the halls of Congress and get away with it. You just need to keep repeating it. And it might even lead to "reelection" or provide smoke screen for a military coup that Michael Flynn is now calling for in QAnon circles. A majority of Republicans believes that last election's actual winner is Donald Trump, and a sizable portion of them state in polls that they may have to revert to force (whatever that means: lynching, insurrection, coup) to preserve the "American way of life".
Not the Constitution, mind you. And the way to get to this state is to poison the information channels with the tripe you are seeing here. It will reach the susceptible targets.
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No, they didn’t — they lost the privilege of taking part in such discussions on Twitter. Nobody has a right to use Twitter. And Knight v. Trump dealt with the idea of a constituent being blocked by a politician on social media and thus being unable to “participate in a discussion of official policy”. The actions of Twitter itself never entered into the picture because the blocks were decisions made by a user — i.e., Trump.
Having no arbiters at all invites bullshit to flow freely — which is why right-wing media has no real “sieves” to filter out facts from bullshit. For all their biases and whatnot, “centrist” and left-wing media does tend to filter the bullshit. If that approach doesn’t comfort your ignorance, that’s a “you” problem.
It’s also possible that Republicans will control enough state legislatures and Congressional seats to amend the Constitution so that such a ruling wouldn’t fly in the face of at least a few decades of First Amendment jurisprudence.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. But I won’t stop you if you want to.
No politician — be they a candidate for any given office, a mayor, a state senator, a Congressperson, or the actual goddamned President of the United States — is entitled to use of private property they don’t own as a personal soapbox. No person has that “right”.
Twitter isn’t a state actor; it didn’t become one because it banned Donald Trump. To believe otherwise is to believe the United States federal government can compel Twitter to carry its speech in any and all contexts and situations. No court in this country (except maybe in Texas) would ever rule on such a situation in a way that will give you or anyone else the right to free reach (i.e., an audience).
Now go back to Parler.
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Re: Re: I have One Simple Challenge for you.
It’s like you have a fetish for pubically humiliating yourself here.
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Re:
[Projects facts not in evidence]
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Re:
Hey Jon boi. What rock did you crawl out from this time?
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Re: Re:
Thats no rock.
Thats a coprolite.
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Re: Re: Re:
That's no coprolite.
That's his love-child.
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And when the moderate wing of the Dems split, how will the new two parties attack each other?
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Re:
I'll tell you what they won't do: throw a big tantrum and attempt to overthrow the government like your buddies did on Jan 6th.
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The great thing about fact checking is that so many people can learn to do it. It's a very simple kind of library research, the sort of thing that they teach in high school. You learn to find the primary source (which might be a real researcher or an internet blowhard-nutjob, or a real scientist way out of his field, or an eyewitness) and correlate their speech with what else you have been able to confirm.
Don't like Twitter's pro fact checkers? Set up your own site. It takes more time than finding the new website for whatever intemperate bigot last got kicked off for saying things that have nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism and everything to do with egoism.... but at the end of the day it is MUCH more satisfying.
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Re:
Well, so many people can learn to do electric wiring but that doesn't mean that it isn't in need of regulation.
Because do it wrong, and people may be shocked, shocked I tell you.
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Re: Re:
False equivalence.
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Re:
The problem is, real fact checkers will always return the same results. It doesn't matter who does the research on the 2020 election, for example, an honest fact check will always return the facts that there is no evidence of widespread fraud, the election has been certified as fair by multiple bodies both inside and outside of the US, and there's no reason to believe the claims of fraud.
That's not what these people want. They want the fact checking to be removed, so that their constant claims of fraud will be believed by people likely to vote for the losers next time around, and it's easier to pretend the election was stolen than it is to deal with the issues that led to them to lose.
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