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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter responding to the assertion that there’s no financial incentive to share coronavirus vaccine research:

The ting with the pandemic is that is doing a lot of damage to economies, and the sooner a vaccine is created, the sooner economies can get on track, along with fewer deaths and people disabled out of the work force. It actually makes economic sense to share the information, just to minimize the costs caused by the pandemic, which are greater than any profit to be made from a vaccine.

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone responding to the claim that “left wingers” are hypocritical for wanting to “outlaw firearms” while also commenting on the silence of big Second Amendment advocates when it comes to unidentified secret police invading American cities:

“left wingers want to outlaw firearms”

Flag on the play — bullshit conclusion, 15 yard penalty, turnover on downs.

You may have some “left-wingers” who want to “outlaw firearms”. But you’ll probably find far more who are okay with the idea of Americans having access to guns in a controlled way. Limits on the number of guns someone can own, limits on the kinds of guns someone can buy, requirements for licenses to legally carry a gun, restrictions on who can legally own a gun (e.g., “no domestic abusers”) — all reasonable avenues for gun control that can be debated without going into “tHeY wAnT tO tAkE mUh GuNs!” territory.

That you assume calls for gun control equal “take all the guns!” is either a genuine fault in your thinking or a disingenuous load of bullshit designed to troll people. Which one is it for you, Mr. “I refuse to say whether the law should force Twitter to host Klan propaganda”?

“complain when the right wing 2nd amendment crowd doesn’t stick up for them”

Yeah, and there’s a reason for that: Said 2A crowd loves to talk a big game about standing up to tyranny and preventing dictators from rising to power and whatnot. But what happens when “their side” imposes the tyranny, when “their guy” becomes the dictator? They cheer it on.

How many “MUH GUN RIGHTS, MUH SECOND AMENDMENT” people do you think are marching with people protesting police violence? Because I would bet that the number is low, if not altogether zero. They don’t care if the cops start beating up on “the enemy”. They don’t care about fascism, about tyranny and dictators, until they feel that they’re the targets.

2A militias who don’t want to be called on their hypocrisy might want to consider not being hypocrites. Standing by and watching literal Gestapo tactics being used against their fellow citizens makes them hypocrites. Protesting facemask mandates by storming state capitols with their guns out instead of marching on the front lines of protests against state-sanctioned police violence makes them hypocrites. If they don’t want their cowardice called out, I can think of a simple solution to help them avoid being called cowards.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Another Kevin adding an important caveat to our statement that the DHS agents arresting protesters “look for all the world like a branch of the military”:

Nope. They don’t look at all like any branch of the military. I’m not being pedantic. This is an important point.

If they serving with a branch of the military, their battle dress uniforms would have displayed prominently their names, their services, the insignia of their units, and their insignia of rank, as can be seen at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Dress_Uniform#/media/File:Defense.gov_News_Photo_970806-N-4790M -012.jpg

If this were a war between nations, these individuals would not be soldiers subject to the Third Geneva Convention, but rather unlawful combatants. They are entitled to no protection accorded by wearing a uniform, since they wear merely a camouflage suit that is not recognizable as a uniform.

“Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.”
(Ex parte Quirin 317 U.S. 1 (1942); STONE, CJ delivered the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, with MURPHY, J recusing.)

Next, it’s PaulT responding to the claim that the free market will prevent excessive medical prices by driving over-chargers out of business:

The free market does not and can not work with medicine, where people need the product to live, will pay anything to do that, and may not have the ability to shop around before they need to pay.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Yakko Warner offering some support to Richard Liebowitz in his claim that there’s a public interest in the continuation of his law practice:

I, as a member of the public, am strongly interested in the continuation of his law practice. Reading up on his antics provides much-needed amusement and levity in these days.

In second place, it’s an anonymous commenter responding to the paranoid notion that the DHS agents have been arresting people who are getting paid to cause violence and unrest:

I don’t think they were rounding up cops.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with BernardoVera offering another response to that suggestion, which was as a “what if”:

What if Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria really does have a basement, and the pizzeria is really a secret pedophile ring operated by agents of the New World Order?

What if the alien Lizard people are actually wearing human-skin suits and masquerading as Democrat politicians — and George Soros is really the Lizard Lords’ front-line commander in the field?

Once you start asking such incredibly insightful and penetrating questions, you could end up uncovering almost anything, no matter how cleverly disguised under the camouflage of mere, mundane reality…

Finally, we’ve got Strawb with a comment about the fact that people are already losing interest in Parler since there’s nobody for them to troll:

It seems it was just a…

Parler trick.

I’ll see myself out.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Author: Leigh Beadon

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