from the up-for-discussion dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump’s freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders:
What everyone appears to overlook
Trump’s tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are illegal.
Otherwise why would he bother?
In second place, it’s Thad with a comment about Trump’s DOJ ordering the Texas GOP to take a blatantly illegal path to attempt gerrymandering:
Even if SCOTUS doesn’t reverse it they’ve still got time to pass another one that could survive a court challenge before the next election, but it’s going to be really funny if Texas’s gerrymander never goes into effect and California’s retaliatory gerrymander does. Wile E Coyote-ass motherfuckers.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from That One Guy about Trump’s absurd comparison of Antifa to organized gangs and terrorist groups:
‘Make protesting your regime illegal with this one simple trick!’
It makes perfect sense really, you just need to think like a member of a brutal dictatorship.
Step 1: Frame anyone that protests against you as part of Antifa since clearly no-one else would ever do that.
Step 2: Declare that Antifa is a terrorist organization right up there with actual violent criminal organizations.
Step 3: Congrats, anyone that protests against you can now be accused of and legally treated as violent terrorists, and if you’re already laying the groundwork of (accused) criminals not only having no rights but being able to be executed on the spot without the hassle of a trial then all the better!
Next, it’s Stephen T. Stone replying to the argument that algorithmic sorting of content makes a platform liable for that content:
Okay, but why, though?
Ordering posts from people whom you follow in a reverse chronological order, where their most recent posts sit at the top of your feed, is itself a programmatic decision even if it’s the default setting. The same goes for positioning/ordering reposts from people whom you follow, even if the option to see those reposts is turned on by default. That you don’t see those decisions as decisions doesn’t change the reality that they are, in fact, decisions made by the service as to how they’ll decide to show you content. Adding an extra algorithm is just an extra decision; it shouldn’t make a service more liable for user-generated content any more than it would be without that extra decision.
I understand the impulse to want to punish Elon Musk for what he’s done to Twitter. A shitload of other people probably feel the same way. But in trying to take down the tree that is Twitter’s promotion (accidental or otherwise) of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent content with a flamethrower, you’d also risk burning down the all the other trees in the forest—and by that, I mean you’d risk destroying a large swath of the Internet just so you can stick it to Elon. Is that a risk you want to take?
Over on the funny side, we head back to our post about Trump calling for Democrats’ heads over their message to the military, where Thad responded to the idea that this was seditous behavior:
You can tell it’s not really sedition because Trump didn’t pardon them.
In second place, it’s David with a response to something we said about criticism getting under the thin skin of authoritarians:
The term you are looking for is “exoskeleton”.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, once again we’re a little light on funny comments this week, so we’ll keep it to just one 
— it’s Michael Barclay with a comment about a world in which bad court rulings on AI are accidentally making everything illegal:
Teacher: OK, everyone, hand in your book reports
Clever Student: The Copyright Clause ate my homework
That’s all for this week, folks!
