Thinking Out Loud From Thailand: Another 30-Day X Block, Spanking Kids, and Why X Should Become a Real Media Company

Good morning from Thailand.

This is a thinking-out-loud post. Use your own judgment. Push back if you wish.

I’m on day four of a 30-day block from X. Second one this year. The first, back in April, was over the word “eradicate,” used ambiguously. That was the entire extent of it.

This time it was for saying we should bring back parental physical correction of young children. What used to be called spankings.

Anyone my age—and even my gal, twenty years younger—grew up with it because it was normal. It was how you disciplined a small child before they could talk and reason. A little pain. A little scare. Civilization worked that way for centuries, if not millennia. There’s a logic to it.

The way my mother put it: you cannot reason with a two-year-old. You let them out of the car and they dart. They are not looking for traffic. When you yell “Stop!” they need to stop in their tracks. That only happens if the word has already been made impactful.

People who call that bullshit are just fucking stupid. Children that small do not have the capacity for reason yet. You still have to protect them. Spanking is one decent way to do it and then guide them along.

Far and I were talking about it this morning. She said her mom did it sometimes, her dad almost never—but everyone was more afraid of Dad. Same as America. The old line: “Wait till your father gets home.” I suspect that’s worldwide. That’s all I’m going to say on that.

The other thing I’m sensing harder than ever: the whole social-media scroll. Phones, computers, all the time.

I’m a veteran of the bans, especially Facebook. When you can’t interact—read-only, look at the feed, no likes, no comments, no forwards—it makes you less interested in looking at all. If I do look, I catch myself: why am I looking at this shit? To react to something?

Interesting thing to stop and notice.

I’m a high producer. I use social media to drive the blog. This video will go on YouTube for the same reason. The blog has been going 23 years.

I’ll put it out now and come back to it: X should morph into a media platform, not just a social media platform. Keep the social layer if they want, the way old media outlets used to have comments under stories. Most of them dropped comments because the comments became a sewer. I don’t blame them. I get it.

Example. X once promoted a post of mine about getting knocked out in Phuket, sitting on a motorcycle at 60, by two Australian Muay Thai fighters. Well over 300,000 views. The rash of vile comments was head-shaking.

A few days ago I did the most innocent video you could do: Far working, spreading chicken droppings to fertilize plants, building a frog pond. Last I checked, something like 65,000 views. What could be bad about that? Scroll the comments and a certain percentage—always the low-follower accounts, zero, one, two, three, five, ten followers—are just vile. I call them five-follower people. Nobody in the world gives a fuck what they think. They are nobodies to the entire world.

It’s like a father recording his kids playing in the park and someone in the comments asks when he last molested them. Literally that energy.

One thing X could do instead of policing people like me: let the algorithm or the AI read the post, look at the comments, and delete the vile ones. Not the political-idea posts. Those need more leeway. A person telling a nice story about their life that touches no political issue whatsoever? Vile comments get deleted. Don’t ban the brain. Delete the comment. Send a message: we judged your comment vile and it is summarily deleted. No appeal. Let them waste their time. Employed correctly, AI can catch nearly 100 percent with very few false positives.

That’s the small idea.

The big one: should X move from social media toward an actual 24/7 media company? A desk. A home base. Live. Real people. Round the clock.

There are already hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of solid citizen journalists on the platform. Some research. Some now go out, interview, record. Legacy media almost never does that anymore. They sit and pontificate. They don’t have the budgets. Elon can swing this.

Yesterday there was a very clever, astute Japanese account, @japan_nobunaga. Lives some of the time in the U.S., some in Japan. Half his output explains what Japan is actually like, the mentality. I lived there five years and still learn from him. The other half contrasts Japanese and American ways of doing perfectly innocent things that just land differently.

Elon replied to one of his posts. Nobunaga wrote back, thanked him for the fire, and begged him—politely, cleanly—to buy a Japanese news outlet because they are bombarded with woke nonsense. Elon didn’t say yes. He put it on the table: would the Japanese government allow it?

If I can be so bold: Elon, just start a 24/7 traditional news operation. Source the citizen journalists already on X, all over the world. Bring them in for interviews. Hire people to go out and do actual objective reporting in the old sense.

I think that’s one reason people are glued to social media, and it isn’t great for them. It isn’t great for me. Curated news still has value if it’s done correctly, objectively, with a spirit of truth-seeking and knowledge-building.

That’s enough for me. Have a good day.