This incident between James Woods and Elon Musk happened several days ago, but this is my first time seeing commentary about it. Basically, James Woods is a vocally conservative actor who, despite nabbing plenty of big roles in the past, doesn't get much work these days thanks to his worldview. This hasn't stopped him from being something of a rightie firebrand on Twitter. He recently made some cynical remarks about how Twitter (now "X") will be removing its "block" feature (i.e., block someone's account so you no longer see that person's tweets/Xeets/posts), making conservatives like Woods vulnerable to attacks from all angles, and an irritated Musk responded to Woods directly, telling Woods to just delete his account. This was obviously meant as a "put your money where your mouth is" dare, and I haven't followed the story closely enough to know what happened in the aftermath.
Ah. So the aftermath seems to be that Woods is still on X, but Elon Musk has, ironically, blocked him, using the very same blocking feature that he's planning to take away. So I guess James Woods won't be blocked for long. Why does Musk think blocking—for the regular proles—makes no sense? Because trolls have a right to verbally harass people all day long, and we're just supposed to take that? Seems like a strange stance to me. Not very customer-friendly. As an option, blocking represents a choice, and choice is the signal characteristic of freedom. Remove blocking, reduce freedom. Double plus ungood.
I don't embed too many Josiah Rises videos because Josiah strikes me as a little too keyed up and way too—for lack of a better word—flail-y. Several rightie commentators have this same mannerism, seeming almost spastic in front of their microphones as they get their rant on. Josiah also isn't nearly as articulate as he thinks he is; to me, he's definitely a lower-tier rightie commentator.
And for what it's worth, assuming the Musk-versus-Zuckerberg MMA fight does happen, I think Musk is going to get his clock cleaned. Musk supposedly practices several martial arts, but Zuckerberg is apparently a dedicated Brazilian-jiujitsu practitioner. He's got youth and a measure of brawn on his side. Musk, meanwhile, doesn't have the bearing I'd associate with a practicing martial artist. He comes off as kind of soft and doughy, but who knows? He might surprise us all by stepping into the octagon with a Mike Tyson physique.
1 comment:
I'm unclear on Musk's motivations here, but I read something that speculated it had to do with advertising revenue in some way. I've never been a Twitter (or X) user, but I block people on Facebook with some regularity (that's how I deal with the beggars these days).
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