Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the word-on-the-street dept

This week, That One Guy dominated the leaderboards with three out of four spots — the top two comments for insightful, and the first place winner for funny. In both places on the insightful side, it's his comments on our post about GoDaddy banning the Texas abortion snitch site, starting with this response to the perennial observation that advocates of the "unborn" don't seem to care much about the born:

A quote I ran across in a youtube comment section of all places sums it up nicely I'd say.

“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; chy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn…

You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dr. Dave Barnhart, Christian Minister

In second place, it's a comment about the fact that Epik also banned the site:

Bloody hell, you know you've really gone above and beyond in being horrible when the hosting service of Gab and Parler says they want nothing to do with you.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Stephen T. Stone responding to someone who painted an bizarre caricature of people who rightly oppose the Texas law:

"you're okay with demonizing any attempt to present alternatives to abortion?"

Anti-choice/pro–forced birthing lawmakers (who are largely conservative) seem content with demonetizing or banning comprehensive sex education and affordable birth control/contraception, both of which are proven to reduce abortion rates. What other alternatives do you believe will reduce abortion rates without legally forcing women to give up their bodily autonomy?

"any information about it that isn't flattering to the practice?"

How about we talk about information that isn’t flattering to the anti-choice crowd⁠—like the fact that the so-called fetal heartbeat on which laws/bills like the Texas bullshit isn’t actually a heartbeat at all? How about you address the fact that, at the six-week cutoff period outlined in the Texas law, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant? Perhaps we can discuss Republican lawmakers have done everything possible to destroy the social safety net and depress wages such that a woman who isn’t wealthy could have serious problems making ends meet and thus raising a healthy child that she may not have wanted in the first place but was legally forced to carry to term. Maybe you’d like to explore the fact that the Texas law makes no exceptions for rape/incest, which literally means a rapist in Texas has a viable reproduction strategy for as long as he isn’t caught.

Let’s have those discussions first. Then we can get to any questions you might have.

Next, it's a comment from anonymous on our post about the trial of Backpage's founders:

A lot of information that has come out since the push for SESTA/FOSTA has made it clear that they were using "sex trafficking" interchangeably for "prostitution."

Also, it was clearly a vehicle for many politician's careers, particularly Kamala Harris in 2016 and the democrats in 2018 who were courting progressives at the time. Although, the democrats still havent figured out that the progessives fully support legalized sex work. Just one more example of how the democratic party is actually far right of center.

Who can forget Kamala Harris's speech as Attorney General of California laying out all of the charges against Backpage? Pretty much everything she said in that speech, save for the list of charges, turned out to be nothing but a pack of lies.

Sorry to mention the politics of all of this but I feel it is an important part of how all of this played out.

Over on the funny side, That One Guy's first place win is for a response to a certain commenter complaining about efforts to fight disinformation:

What a surprise, someone who constantly makes claims and then runs away when asked to support them isn't a fan of a system where that sort of behavior is penalized.

In second place, it's an anonymous comment on our post about Australia's intermediary liability rules, and specifically our description of how "the country down under has always taken an upside down view":

You had to do this.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from That Anonymous Coward about GoDaddy's Texas takedown:

Won't anyone think of about those poor people who wrote bots to pretend they were in texas & submit hundreds of bogus leads to the website?

Finally, it's Flakbait with a response to the news that the FTC is looking into broken McDonalds ice cream machines:

About time!

I am just so glad, so relieved to see the Feds moving on to an important topic and away from the trivial distraction of topics like the price of insulin and EpiPens. It makes me much less frustrated by the amount I pay in taxes.

That's all for this week, folks!

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team