This week, our winning comment on the insightful side comes in response to the president’s recent threats against NBC, with Geno0wl racking up the votes to take first place:
Could you even imagine
Trump’s base brush this off as a flippant remark(like they do for everything he does from his bull pulpit).
But flip back a year and imagine the shit-fit the right would be throwing right now if Obama said this exact same thing about Fox News. It would be insanity. Hell imagine if Obama said literally half the things Trump says now. They would be foaming at the mouth.
In second place, we’ve got a comment from Baron von Robber in a thread on that same post, but it’s a versatile one that works in many contexts:
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” – Hitchens’s razor
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, in which crade brings some perspective to the problems that do exist with the news media:
Yes, there is something wrong, but there are also ways to correct it without government interfering. News organizations rely on their reputations. Simply outing them (you know, actually pointing out specific things that are fiction or lies, and proving so) would easily destroy their reputation for people who are seeking truth in news.
People who are seeking echo chambers or who are willfully ignorant are another story, but that’s their right as free people correct?
The answer has to be in teaching the population critical thinking and why the objective truth is valuable, the consequence of echo chamber isolation / willful ignorance.
It’s worse if there is deliberate systematic targeted misinformation.. (Like to manipulate the U.S. population to do whatever Russia wants for example)
Next, we have an excellent comment from aerinai that came in response to Twitter’s blocking woes, but which taps into a larger and very important idea that we’ve discussed before — that the root of many of these problems is the ascendance of platforms over protocols:
Unfortunately, platforms are the sexy, new thing that everyone loves. Close down the hatches and let a single company create a ‘platform’.
Email doesn’t have this problem because it is a Protocol. Twitter has the problem because it is a platform. BitTorrent doesn’t censor applications, because it is a protocol. The Apple App Store has a problem because it is a platform.
So the more we feed into Platform culture, the more you will see people putting arbitrary control over how people use it. Not necessarily good or bad; it is their right as the platform curator, but we just need to understand curators will censor at their whims because reasons.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes from Toom1275 in response to another commenter pointing out that, while it’s great the Internet Archives found a way to liberate some works via a never-before-used piece of copyright law, it’s just further evidence of how wholly broken the system is:
“You’re giving him CPR for a bullet wound to the head?!”
In second place, we’ve got a response to a particular commenter, which I won’t bother explaining because you’ll know what it’s about — and if you don’t, it’s really not worth learning:
“I tried to post the same comment 9 times and I’m so confused why my comments won’t pass the filter!”
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of comments from regular fixture Roger Strong, starting with one more response to Trump’s NBC comments:
This is so insane and stupid it’s as if the US Patent and Trademark Office were put in charge of the executive branch.
And next, a wonderful summing-up of the latest attempt by science publishers to stop researchers from sharing their work:
“Dinosaurs Against Unauthorized Comets”
That’s all for this week, folks!
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Author: Leigh Beadon