April Fool’s Day

For those of you who did not pick up on it already, yesterday’s post on Section 230 reforms was an April Fool’s Day prank – concocted by Eric Turkewitz. Read his deconstruction of it here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2012 at 8:45 am and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to April Fool’s Day

  1. Charles Platt says:
    April 2, 2012 at 10:33 am

    To me, a good April Fool joke is a story which you can half-believe, and then quickly realize is way beyond the bounds of plausibility, because it contains an ingredient of absurdity. This is what makes it funny. A classic example was the BBC documentary in the early 1960s which featured the annual spaghetti harvest in Italy, where peasants were shown diligently plucking strands of spaghetti from bushes where it had grown.

    I don’t feel that the Lieberman “joke” conforms with this honorable tradition, because the element of absurdity is missing. The man’s history of advocacy for fear-driven legislation that violates constitutional liberties is so long and horrible, I would not be at all surprised if he proposed legislation described in the “joke.” The author of the “joke” suggests we are ready to prejudge the man; I would say we have learned through bitter experience that he has often gone farther than one would have believed possible.

    Here is an analogy. Would an April Fool story circulated in, say, 1937 about Hitler invading Poland have been funny? Briefly, perhaps.

  2. fresh job says:
    April 6, 2012 at 10:50 am

    fresh job…

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