Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Last week, when we launched our Techdirt Survival Fund, we received a lot of support and encouragement - but of course we also recognize that there are plenty of good reasons some readers might not want or be able to donate. So it was largely unnecessary for one commenter to come by and explain that we "aren't important enough", but at least it yielded a response from Vaultnode that won most insightful comment of the week:

Aren't you an egotistical one? Mike has had lawmakers and Congressional staffers on his podcasts saying that TechDirt's writings was substantively responsible for changing some legislation on tech issues.

That's pretty damn important in my eyes.

Moving on... In second place on the insightful side we head to our post about Trump's ongoing Chicago crime proclamations, where one commenter busted out the "Chiraq" label, only for Roger Strong to counter with some blunt fact-checking:

ABC7 I-Team Investigation: Despite 'Chiraq' label, data show Chicago not even close to Iraq

In that same nine year period when 4,265 citizens were killed in Chicago, there were almost 30 times as many citizens killed in Iraq. Last year, there were 459 murders in Chicago. In Iraq, there were more than 17,000. Last weekend in Chicago, there were seven murders. In Iraq, there were 103. And Iraq's murders have been doubling year to year, unlike Chicago's murder rate that has been cut in half since 1991.

Speaking of Roger Strong and fact checking, for editor's choice on the insightful side he gets one more nod for his characterization of the Trump administration's media strategy:

It's like a distributed denial-of-service attack on fact checkers.

Next, we've got an excellent anonymous response to the frankly idiotic refrain of "Techdirt loves regulation and hates capitalism":

It is important to not conflate "Capitalism" with the corrupt, globalist-rigged, anti-competitive, anti-free-market, labor-crushing, democracy-hating, politically-coopted, crony manipulations of whatever in the hell name you'd come up with to describe what the US/Western markets have metastasize into. Where big money is in play, Capitalism does not typically exist (only mega corporations doing whatever they consider necessary to ensure the continued existence of their established interests).

There are few better examples of what Capitalism is NOT, than the US broadband industry. It's an industry that better serves as a cautionary tale as to what devastation befalls a country that allows industry to "self-regulate" too much and then fails to enforces meaningful consequences to those organizations whose belligerent pursuit of profit delivers ever increasing degrees of harm to the public good.

"Government Regulation" per se, should never be the crux of the discussion. The meaningful discussion concerns itself with 'good/effective-in-promoting-healthy-markets' versus 'bad/effective-in-promoting-rigged-markets' regulation.

Our contemporary problem with "regulation" in the US/Western markets is that big business and their wealthy benefactors have corrupted/gamed the regulatory process and the end result is that a boat load of very bad (i.e., nonsensical - unless it happened to be your lobbyist who wrote it up and bribed the politicians to pass it) regulation exists.

Over on the funny side, for first place we head to our post about how the Trump administration is going to handle leaks, in which we dedicated the first portion to once again harshly criticizing Obama's handling of the same. Thad sarcastically underlined that fact for some of our detractors:

But what I want to know is why Techdirt never talks about all the secrecy in the Obama Administration.

Next, we head to our latest post about the Oracle/Google debacle, where we accidentally failed to close a parenthesis in the post to the understandable ire of one punctuation-sensitive commenter. But an anonymous commenter won second place for funny by making up an excuse for us:

TechDirt cannot use closed parentheses because "matching parentheses" notation appears in the Java API, which has been copyrighted by Oracle.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a response from Gwiz to one of the perennial "what does this have to do with tech" comments we receive:

I really wish people would quit asking this, like it's some sort of "gotcha" moment. Techdirt writes about a lot of things, most of them related to tech, but not always. If it's a problem for you, find something else to read.

Seriously, do you people post comments at PopeHat.com and ask them what their articles have to do with the Catholic leader's headgear too?

Finally, because it is also one of my own pet peeves and conversational red flags, we've got one more nod to Thad for a response to someone who used a particular term in his comment:

Sheeple?
Clearly you are a serious person with serious ideas.

That's all for this week, folks!