Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Another week, another fantastic batch of comments. The winner voted "most insightful" (by a wide margin) was the comment from Chris Rhodes in response to Philly police harassing a guy legally carrying a gun, and then having him charged with "disorderly conduct." Rhodes responds to the claim that the guy "set up" the police by carrying a gun and recording the conversation:

I also like the claims by police that he "set them up."

Yep, he knew that the police would be completely ignorant of the law and purposefully set himself up to almost get shot by Officer Jackass with a chip on his shoulder. Clearly

Coming in second (again by a wide margin over number three) was a comment from Marcus Carab in response to the claims by police (in a different article than the one Chris responded to above) that the public shouldn't be able to record them, because it would create "chilling effects" on the police. Carab points out what this really means:

This seems like a confession that the standards for becoming a police officer are too low. "We simply can't guarantee that all of our officers have enough training and self-control to confidently do their job when there is any level of scrutiny."

For editor's choice, the first one is from an Anonymous Coward, who was part of the same discussion that Marcus' comment came from, concerning recording police. One commenter had argued that it was unfair to police to record them because it might be edited to show the police in "the worst-possible light." In response, the commenter here pointed out how that makes no sense:

So then it's unfair to put a criminal in jail for robbing a bank because you are putting him in jail for his actions committed during his worst possible light. The footage of him robbing the bank is selective in nature, you are selecting the moments of his life that portray the bank robber in the worst possible light. You are not considering the other aspects of the bank robbers life.

They say people are judged by the worst thing they've done (ie: an otherwise nice person murders someone and gets put to jail for life). So why should cops be any different? If anything, those who are responsible for upholding the law should be held to a higher moral and legal standard than the rest of us (at least while on duty). The real question here is not, "why is the footage editing out all the good things that the officer does" it's, "why is the officer doing bad things in the first place".

As far as being taken out of context, I don't buy the argument that the public is too incompetent to understand the different contextual possibilities that a camera could be drawing its information from and therefore no footage should ever be permitted at all. Under that pretext, we can argue that all cameras that record the public should be abolished because there is no way of knowing whether or not they are simply taking footage out of context. Why does the "if you're not doing anything wrong then you wouldn't mind them watching you" only apply to citizens and not police?

and why should we simply assume that the police are less likely to edit footage than a regular citizen, just because the police say so? Citizens are guilty until proven innocent while police are innocent until proven guilty, but we must deny citizens the means to prove those police guilty (but police get access to the means to prove citizens guilty)?

Finally, on the insightful side, of the ledger, we have this wonderful comment from jjmsan concerning the post about Jonathan Coulton. In discussing successful business models, we're often told that the success stories we show are really "exceptions" rather than any sort of accurate rule to build on. But this comment pointed out that that argument can be flipped around:

I have to point out that under the labels the bands that made it were also an exception. Otherwise everyone who started a band would have had their music published.

Jumping over to the funny side.... The winner this week topped all previous vote getters, including last week's winner, which had been the highest previous vote-getter. Honestly, this comment got so many votes that I'll be surprised if any comment tops this one for a while. It's from an Anonymous Coward on that story about the Philly cops mentioned above, but this commenter decided to wax lyrical on the topic, and channel his inner Will Smith:

In West Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground is where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all shootin' some B-Ball outside of school
When a couple of cops, who were up to no good, started makin trouble in my neighboorhood
I recorded one little fight and the cops got scared, had the D.A. trump up some charges that weren't really fair

Coming in second was Gracey's comment on the idea of giving young people's votes more weight, which she feared might lead to bad outcomes:

Great...so conceivably we could end up with Lady Gaga as President?

Super. Just shoot me now

Anyone know where her birth certificate is?

As for editors choice, we've got one from Pickle Monger, who responded to Senator Chuck Schumer grandstanding yet again, with an old joke:

There's an old joke:
A robber stops a man and says:
- Give me your money!
- How dare you?! I'm a United States Senator!
- In that case, give me my money!

And... finally, we've got Johnjac responding to attempts by the recording industry up in Canada to tax SD cards because a few people might use them to store music. John's solution is that we should just start being a bit more direct:

Let's cut to the chase, and tax ears. 100% of pirated music is listened via ears.

Human ears, are the obvious place to start, but lets not forget the the horses who have been caught listening to pirate music. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090327/1113014276.shtml

And, there you go. Let's see what you've got in store for this coming week...

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