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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT responding to a comment that offered a partial defense of ICE with a reminder about human rights:

“On the other hand, they are breaking the law and know that”

For a lot of immigrants, this is the better choice. Break the law or face certain death/rape/starvation? You’d be a lawbreaker too.

“They are also not US Citizens with the guaranteed protection of the Constitution”

If you think that you need the protection of the US constitution to get basic human rights, that says more about you than the people in the cells.

In second place, we’ve got That One Guy who pushed back a bit on one of our recent examples of content moderation fails:

Of all the times not to include the ‘If you can’t read/see the tweet it says’ bit…

The ‘offending’ tweet in question:

‘If gay people are a mistake, they’re a mistake I’ve made hundreds of millions of times, which proves I’m incompetent and shouldn’t be relied upon for anything.’

“And it’s not difficult to see how a random content moderation employee would skim a tweet like the one flagged above, not recognize the context, the fact that it’s an attempt at satire, and flag it as a problem.”

No, it really is hard to see how someone could read that and not realize it was satire/humor. The only way it could have been more obvious is if they opened it with ‘THIS IS SATIRE’ in bold.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment that expands on the first place winner above, since that left out other important point:

Even if it were, the Constitution is mostly a series of statements about what the government must, can, and cannot do. Rarely does citizenship enter into it.

The portions of the Bill of Rights that say that the government cannot do what they’re currently doing (the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments, from what I can see) do not qualify their statements: 5 protects a “person,” 6 protects “the accused,” 7 and 8 merely state what the Government is not allowed to do under any circumstances.

Next, we’ve got a comment from Cory Doctorow, who dropped by to underline his call for interoperability in tech:

Not forced interop…adversarial interop

To be clear, I’m not (merely) advocating for forced interop (that is, some kind of API mandate), I’m ALSO advocating for an absolute legal defense for “adversarial interop” that would apply to claims under patent, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, EULA/CFAA violations, etc:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Anonymous Anonymous Coward, who aimed to resolve the question of whether Democrats or Republicans are correct in their hatred of CDA 230:

They’re both wrong

Independents blame CDA 230 for causing Republicans and Democrats.

In second place, we’ve got radix who is understandably less than sanguine about Google’s new Stadia service:

10 Google half-asses a new service
20 Few people use it
30 Google cancels the service that few people were using
40 goto 10

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with Stephen T. Stone‘s simple reaction to Tom Brady’s trademark shenanigans:

Now I see why Donald Trump likes the guy: They’re both morons.

And finally, we’ve head to our post about the court that decided planning to get a warrant was as good as having one. One commenter suggested maybe this “planning to” thing could work as a defense in court too, but this anonymous commenter had a better idea:

Don’t even let the situation get that far.

‘I swear, officer. I was planning on slowing down before I got in range of your radar.’

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Author: Leigh Beadon

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