from the say-it-loud dept

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.’s resignation coming entirely from Democrats:

And that’s why trying to distill partisan politics down to just “team blue” vs. “team red” is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death issues break down on pretty clear partisan lines, and it’s entirely clear which party is right and which one is wrong.

Christ knows the Democrats aren’t perfect. But of the two major parties they’re the one that’s not a eugenicist death cult.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment on our post about monitor makers hitting owners with annoying ads, and our characterization of how it happened:

No, that’s not how computers work. Microsoft Windows identifies the connected monitor, and then, on its own authority, checks whether the manufacturer has “recommended” any software to go with it; if so, Windows installs that without telling the user. The monitor isn’t installing anything.

Of course, we should also be criticizing monitor manufacturers for taking advantage of this misfeature. But the root problem is with Microsoft. More than 2 decades after the Sony rootkit, they haven’t learned their lesson (or maybe they have: people will put up with this shit, and the blame will mostly be misdirected).

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from. MrWilson. First, it’s one about giving Elon Musk credit when his products work:

Nope. Not at all. Screw that noise.

Teslas might function as a car some of the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to give Musk any credit whatsoever.

Starlink is a money pit from whence nothing can be recovered. Even the most corrupt broadband fiber deployment can be dug up or reused. Comcast could, in a just judicial system, be broken up as an illegal monopoly and their infrastructure that we paid for could be reused by other service providers.

And not every dollar was going to go to big monopolistic companies, whereas any money going to Starlink funds literal authoritarian, anti-democratic election interference.

Next, it’s one on our post about the “Darnella Test” for social media regulation:

Unfortunately, “kids won’t be able to post videos that make authorities look bad and fuel significant protests” is an appealing argument to the authoritarians who are already in favor of curbing social media access for kids which those authoritarians can’t directly control.

Over on the funny side, things are extremely quiet this week, so we’re going to truncate it and just feature the only comment that received enough votes to earn a funny badge. It’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a comment calling Mitch McConnell a vegetable:

How dare you insult vegetables like that. Unlike Mitch McConnell’s political career, vegetables are actually good for the average person.

That’s all for this week, folks!