from the back-and-forth dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad, expanding on the fact that Iowa’s book ban demonstrates hatred of LGBTQ people:

Or women. Denying information on the HPV vaccine is more inline with the notion that women who are sexually active deserve to get STDs.

In second place, it’s Toom1275 responding to the same old stuff about moderation being censorship:

The illiterate “moderation is censorship because it suppresses speech!” lie originates solely from both entitlement and irrationality.

Let’s say a person’s unrestricted ability to speak is defined as a baseline “speech value” of 1.0. By being offered the privilege of borrowing another’s speech platform a speaker can, let’s say, expand their speech value to 5x. Have multiple platforms open? Let’s say your speech value is 25x.
The entitled and irrational believe that any withdrawal of these conditional privileges whatsoever (e.g. A platform saying “You broke our rules so you’re no longer allowed on our private property.”) so as to bring one’s current speech value value under this maximum potential, even say 24x, is “suppression” of speech.
In reality, free speech remains fully intact and unsuppressed until it drops below that baseline value of 1.0 (i.e. the government saying “You are not allowed to say this anywhere.) Matthew, Koby, Benjamin, Hyman, BDAC, etc. lying that moderation is censorship is a malicious, disingenuous twisting of language that misleadingly conflates loss of privileges with loss of a hallucinatory “right to post” the sole intent behind which being to support the loss of the actual Constitutional and free speech rights held by platforms.
It is impossible to truthfully claim to support free speech rights while simultaneously opposing moderation.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from Thad, this time on our post warning against using copyright to fight AI:

Anyone who thinks expanding copyright will help individual creators rather than corporate publishers hasn’t been paying attention the last…every single time we’ve ever tried that.

Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the latest example of how you don’t own the content you buy:

Piracy can’t be stealing if buying doesn’t mean owning.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous reply to someone whining about how much they hate Techdirt:

“I hate this website so much that I return every day and force myself to read articles I don’t like and comment about how much I don’t like them because that is definitely a sign of a healthy individual.”

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment, this time about a particularly clunky line from a bad libel lawsuit:

That sentence, realizing it was stuck in a hopeless and stupid case, suffered a seizure and glossolalia. Have pity upon it. It is now undergoing therapy and we are hopeful that it will resume conveying information in the future.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Ron Currier, riffing on the notion that you can’t be confident you’ll be able to use hardware (like cars) you buy “going forward”:

Sorry, the standard model only goes in reverse. If you also want to go forward, that’ll be $100/month extra.

Finally, it’s blakestacey with a comment about the Hawley/Blumenthal AI bill and its circular definition stating “the term ‘generative artificial intelligence’ means an artificial intelligence system”:

Brexit means Brexit!

That’s all for this week, folks!