Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a reply to someone pushing back on calling the Trump administration fascist:

No, it isn't. Regardless of how you feel about Democrat-led government administrations, Joe Biden didn't...

• give a speech to the Navy in which he heavily implied that the United States Armed Forces would soon have to take care of" (i.e., commit potentially lethal violence against) Republicans
• say that the US Armed Forces should use American cities he deems dangerous" as training grounds, which further implies that American citizens in those cities should be seen as the enemy" and treated like enemy combatants"
• send the National Guard into Republican-led cities and states to fight crime", go after non-existent riots, and/or help ICE carry out mass deportations of people whose only crime was being in the country illegally (as opposed to such people who are reasonably suspected of committing felony-level criminal acts)
• demand that critics of his administration and his allies be silenced for their criticism
• put giant banners on government buildings featuring his face
• jump on a chance to use right-wing violence as an excuse to crack down on civil rights and paint right-wingers as inherently violent and in need of being put down"
• mourn the loss of a public political figure by turning their memorial service into a political rally and giving a political speech

...so when a Democrat president acts anywhere near as shitty as Donald Trump has in the ten years since he's been an actual politician, I'll call them a fascist, too. But I'm going to call Trump and his henchmen fascists" because that's what they are. That goes double for Stephen Miller. All your bothsidesism is a weak-ass attempt to equivocate Democrats being centrist needledicks with the current GOP being a fascist death cult and say well, maybe both sides are to blame for Donald Trump saying he wants to kill Democrats and leftists". Nobody here with any sense is going to buy into that look what you made them do" bullshit, so go sell it at CPAC.

In second place, it's That Anonymous Coward with a comment on Tim Cushing's post about incorrect assumptions in his earlier post on the Iowa school superintendent arrested by ICE:

Sorry about the crow, but I salute you owning the error.

Given that this administration lies regularly, its very hard to accept things they claim are true.

His autism tattoo PROVED his membership in TdA!!!

Statements and written releases often are not worth the paper they are written on. (just ask some judges)

I still have faith in you, mainly because you don't mumble you might have misreported something, you admit fault, accept fault, explain how the fault came to be, & promise to try harder.

As a small consolation at least your not the background check service they were using. Does anyone think that at the same time they filed the lawsuit they considered the very serious problems if they replied on the same service to review others who now have access to children?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from n00bdragon about Trump's immigration theater and its broken priorities:

Chasing sex predators and drug dealers is hard, because there aren't many of them and they hide. Chasing day laborers around Home Depot parking lots is easy because there are so many of them and makes for great TV (for a certain sort of sicko).

Next, it's MrWilson with a comment about Apple's reason for removing the DeICER app:

By this logic, my eyes allow me to see cops and know their location and therefore they're able to be harmed. So if cops aren't just invisible, then they're in terrible danger. Of course if you think this is just silly, the administration is all too happy to allow plainclothes officers"/secret police to abduct people off the streets.

But Apples' logic is bullshit. Do they scan email sent on their servers that mention ICE officer locations? Do they blank the ICE facilities on Apple Maps (intentionally, I don't mean by accident because Apple Maps just sucks in general...).

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is tanj with a comment about Ted Cruz's confusion regarding who was president from 2018 to 2020:

Yet again TD refuses to admit Biden had access to Obama's time machine.

In second place, it's hooboy with another comment about Apple's removal of DeICER:

many uses

"because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group."

OR, it can be used to aid flash mob gatherings of inflatable characters.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from MrWilson, this time about how Trump is making the scam call problem worse:

The scam call was coming from inside the (White) House!

Finally, it's an anonymous commenter with another response to Ted Cruz's timeline confusion:

I was kind of with him when he opposed Kimmel's suspension, but now I wonder if he thought Biden did it.

That's all for this week, folks!