Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, Yahoo was facing accusations that it wasn't entirely honest about its ability to recover communications that it claimed were deleted. That Anonymous Coward won first place for insightful by expanding on the problems with the situation:

Parallel construction should never be acceptable. To violate any alleged protections citizens have, and then build a fantasy way to explain how they obtained it to hide the actual source seems to be an affront to Justice.

But then we let court officers lie with no downside, Judges refuse to shame prosecutors who violate the law in order to secure a conviction against someone they knew was innocent, they throw out all the rules to get the bad guy and when caught they dismiss cases rather than admit what they are doing is wrong.

This isn't how the legal system is supposed to work, and its looking like the rot has spread to far for us to save it. No bandaid is going to fix this, we need to cut out the bad parts to save the system.

Meanwhile, after we made the point that the content of the leaked DNC emails is relevant and important regardless of whether or not it was Russians who obtained them, one anonymous commenter won second place for insightful by agreeing wholeheartedly:

I've been yelling this article's point at my computer screen all weekend. If the DNC hadn't done nefarious shit and communicated about it over an insecure medium, there'd be nothing for whoever, Russian-sponsored or otherwise, to hack and release! This is shooting the messenger - the same way Edward Snowden was blamed for endangering Americans when it was the illegal and nefarious actions by the government that he exposed that had done that.

I don't care if the email leaks came from Satan himself. If the content is factual, it's relevant.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start with another aspect of the DNC email hack: the claims by the party that Wikileaks is full of malware. Mcinsand pulled out the political dictionary:

translation

Apparently, 'malware' is a new term for inconvenient truths.

Next, we've got a response to the defamation threats from an anti-vax film distributor trying to squash criticism, which will be the source of both of our top winners on the funny side. But before that, PaulT offered an excellent summary of anti-vax psychology, and why it's not all just about pure stupidity:

There's 2 things at play here. One is ignorance, of course. The other thing is the thing that's harder to deal with, and the thing that these anti-vaxxers are deliberately altering for the worse - perception.

In my parents' era, it was easy to see the benefits of vaccines, and the dangers on not having them. Smallpox was real, measles was killing people and most knew people who had suffered and been disabled by polio (my uncle's right arm was useless from a young age from the disease). Meanwhile autism was a relatively new diagnosis and wasn't properly understood.

Fast forward to today - smallpox is dead, destroyed by vaccination. Nobody really knows anyone who's suffered with diseases like polio, while things like measles have been weakened so that it's often lumped in with less dangerous diseases. Measles is an inconvenience in the minds of parents who haven't been exposed to the scarring, blindness and death a strain can cause. However, they are well aware of autism and most likely know people who have been diagnosed somewhere on the spectrum.

This is why anti-vaxxer propaganda is so dangerous. It preys on the fears of parents who are scared their child might be autistic, but are ignorant of the very real dangers that come with lower levels of vaccination. The biggest problem is that even discredited frauds like Wakefield and outdated talking points like mercury in vaccines can somehow convince some people better than verifiable science.

But enough of the dry analysis - first place for funny goes to Vidiot, who illustrated the backfire that comes with frivolous defamation threats like these:

Like a Warner Bros. cartoon

Lesson number one: When you load up the defamation cannon, you can probably expect that the biggest explosion won't be coming out of the front end.

In second place, we've got Dale Evans, who saw right through our ploy:

PR firm propaganda, paid for by Big Pharma $$$

Nice propaganda effort, this article, web page, and the fake comments included. Shows you what Big Pharma profits $$$$ can purchase in the way of public relations firm services. Pretty convincing. Very God-less and immoral. These PR firms should be shut down and their staff sent to prison!

For editor's choice on the funny side, we head to the news that Russia's state internet censor accidentally blocked its own security certificate authority and took down its own website, where we have two quick-and-dirty jokes in response. First, it's Berenerd wondering what the problem is:

Seems like its working as it should, blocking those bad propaganda sites

And last but not least, it's Lord Lidl of Cheem (lord who of where?) with a slightly tortured but still amusing twist on a classic:

In Soviet Russia, site ban bans ban.

That's all for this week, folks!