This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy summing up the awfulness of the government’s approach to Backpage:
Key word there: ‘Was’
“In effect, everything the company did to enhance protection and legality was twisted into evidence of criminality and moral failure. And, for years, folks have promoted these topsy-turvy explanations.”
Bend over backwards and go out of their way to help catch and stop sex traffickers? Thrown to the wolves, prevented from being able to present the evidence of that effort in court because it undermines the prosecutors(seriously, could the judges and prosecutors be any more blatantly corrupt, given they are ordering the destruction of exculpatory evidence?)…
Between FOSTA tying knowing something’s going on with liability for it, and Backpage having their own actions used against them good luck getting any site to so much as talk with investigators, and as for sites proactively calling them up to report something a moderator or owner of a site would have to be insane to even try, so that’s off the table.
Yet more evidence it would seem that for all the claims about how evil Backpage was and how necessary FOSTA was to ‘protect the victims of sex trafficking’, it was if anything helping no-one but those engaged in sex trafficking, helping them keep their actions hidden and away from the eyes of those that would stop them.
In second place, we’ve got a comment from bhull242 responding to our post about Bret Stephens’ hypocritical response to a mild joke on Twitter. Of course as many of you probably know, said response has gotten even more insane since then, and we’ve got a post on Stephens’ latest column coming this week, but in the mean time:
The most surprising thing about this…
…isn’t that he took offense, or that he is a free-speech hypocrite, or that this backfired horribly, or that he doubled down, or that he decided to shut down his Twitter account.
It’s the fact that, of all the tweets to be offended over, this was the one he couldn’t take? Seriously? It was a minor insult that few people saw, few people Liked, no one retweeted, and hadn’t been directly sent to him. And it’s not like he was following the guy who posted it. It had to take some effort to find the thing. And why was this so offensive? Knowing Twitter, there had to be better insults than that to get worked up about.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments responding to Josh Hawley’s latest attack on technology, and his claims that there’s no real innovation anymore compared to the feats of the 20th century. First, it’s Michael pushing back on the specific claim that cities haven’t changed in 50 years:
I’m not sure where this guy lives, but I barely recognize the town I grew up in. It’s completely different. Solar panels and energy efficient materials and designs have our cities looking completely different.
How does anyone take this guy seriously?
Next, we’ve got an incisive point from Thad that will serve as a test of just how much this Republican truly cares about cutting-edge science and technology:
Let’s see how long it takes Hawley to vote to cut NASA funding.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes from our post offering some praise to the FCC for making a good (if small) decision to give suicide prevention hotlines a three-digit emergency phone number. But it’s hard to praise the FCC without wanting to take a swipe at them too, and DannyB was quick to oblige:
How about a 3 digit number to contact the FCC ?
I propose the new FCC number be 666.
For second place, we head back to last week’s comments post, where one commenter asked why the order of the Funniest and Most Insightful categories in the post is the oppose of the order in the title, and an anonymous responder had the answer:
To make you shiver with antici…
…pation.
(The real answer is: I dunno, and I was hoping nobody would ask. But if you think about it, the title would be a syntactic disaster if the terms were switched, while the flow of the post seems generally superior with the funny stuff coming second.)
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more response to Josh Hawley, this time from Bloof:
Hawley is right, they should do everything like companies in his state, that hotbed of innovation, Missouri. They could switch to producing soybeans as it’s going great for the state of Missouri under republican policies.
And finally, we’ve got Anonymous Anonymous Coward responding to the company that is suing the Black Hat conference after its pricey sponsorship didn’t prevent its product from being mocked:
Just what did BlackHat sell for $115,000.00?
?What do you mean we can’t buy respect and dignity?
That’s all for this week, folks!
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Author: Leigh Beadon