S Peter Davis
·
Twitter is perhaps best known as that social network where random nobodies tell famous people to eat various body parts, but that's not the only thing that happens in it. Sometimes it's the opposite: beloved luminaries taking time out of their busy lives to hurl abuse at fartknucle69 for no good reason. And just like with non-famous jerks, these celebrities are often hilariously oblivious of the fact that they're the ones looking like complete dolts.
WARNING: Do not read if you'd like to retain some respect for ...
William Shatner had every opportunity to propel himself to A-list stardom after his role as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek. So why has he been reduced to jokey cameo bits in Sandra Bullock comedies while, say, Patrick Stewart enjoys ongoing celebrity? Maybe it's because everyone who has ever worked with Shatner thinks he's an asshole.
Recently, Shatner has become acquainted with the popular online insult "SJW" (social justice warrior), an ill-defined term which generally refers to someone who is in favor of feminism, minority rights, or gay rights, but, like, somehow too much in favor of them. Shatner (or whichever shitty nephew runs his Twitter account) has taken to accusing people of being SJWs, snowflakes, misandrists, and whatever other buzzwords he can resurrect from the 4chan boneyard of Trump trolls and men's rights activists:
WilliamShatner/Twitter
WilliamShatner/Twitter
Supposedly, this all has something to do with Shatner deciding that fans of the Starz sci-fi series Outlander should stop calling for two of the actors to hook up, and it got dumber from there. A bunch of authors who had written Star Wars books happened to be among the many Twitter users dismayed that Captain Kirk was being a turd. Shatner saw this as proof that he was the victim of a harassment conspiracy by the Disney Corporation, complete with all the MS Paint arrows and red lines you'd expect from an Alex Jones fan:
WilliamShatner/Twitter
WilliamShatner/Twitter
We're still hoping that this all ends with the punchline to Shatner's famous SNL sketch in which he admits he was pretending to be "the evil Captain Kirk from episode 37, 'The Enemy Within.'"
Markus Persson, who goes by the pseudonym Notch, is one of the greatest success stories in video game history. He emerged from total obscurity to make a little game called Minecraft, which he later sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. So what's the creator of your nephew's favorite game up to these days? Mostly sitting alone in his Kardashian palace, calling strangers "cunts" on Twitter.
It didn't bode well when Persson hitched his wagon to Gamergate, the online "movement" against feminism's imaginary war on video games. In May 2016, after going on a tirade against a tweeter who used the word "mansplaining," he decided to coin his own term:
Notch/Twitter
#cuntfusing immediately became a trending hashtag on Twitter thanks to Notch's several million followers, but it wasn't an off-the-cuff work of genius punnery. The word "cunt" is pretty much the only insult he knows, and boy does he make the most of it. In June 2017, Notch responded to a tweet by indie game developer Zoe Quinn, the original target of Gamergate. As you would expect from the creator of one of the most groundbreaking contemporary games, his response was creative and original:
Notch/Twitter
Soon, Notch clarified that he didn't know that it was Quinn he was responding to. He thought he was insulting some random woman, you see, so it's OK. Of course, he cleared this issue up like a perfect gentleman:
Notch/Twitter
Feminists aren't the only demographic that Persson has a beef with. Toward the end of June, a bunch of people pushed back against gay pride events by promoting the hashtag #HeterosexualPrideDay, because straight people are tragically underrepresented in Western politics. Notch weighed in with his typical, almost Shakespearean eloquence:
Notch/Twitter
Drake Bell formed one half of the popular Nickelodeon kids' sitcom Drake & Josh. Since the show ended in 2007, Bell has needed something else to fill up his days, so he picked up a hobby: being a dick to people more famous than him.
It started in 2012, when Bell struck out at Katy Perry for participating in a biographical movie when she'd only been famous for a few years by that point. When Perry replied, sounding a little hurt, Bell backtracked like crazy, probably mystified that a much bigger celebrity actually noticed his diss. He dubiously announced that his tweets against Perry must have been due to someone "hacking" his account:
DrakeBell/Twitter
And then he tried to further repair the damage to his relationship with real celebrities by tweeting:
DrakeBell/Twitter
Now, Justin Bieber is kind of a jackass, but Bell seems to have a laser-focus on Biebs that nobody can explain. For instance, after Bieber was implicated in a house-egging incident (again: kind of a jackass), Bell fully launched into another tirade:
DrakeBell/Twitter
DrakeBell/Twitter
And ... well, this kind of goes on and on:
DrakeBell/Twitter
DrakeBell/Twitter
There's no evidence that Bieber and Bell have ever met, which makes this whole "feud" all the more bizarre. In fact, as far as we can tell, Bieber has only ever weighed in on this entire thing once, and given that there's a first time for everything, we have to admit that he is the much bigger man here:
JustinBieber/Twitter
Remember Val Kilmer? Like many bygone celebrities, he's still prolific on Twitter, where his tweets into the void occasionally take a turn for the strange. Take March of 2017, for example, when out of the blue he started tweeting about his undying love for Cate Blanchett, complete with a way-too-close selfie:
ValKilmer/Twitter
ValKilmer/Twitter
Now, it's likely that Kilmer and Blanchett are good friends and this is all a lot of good fun. But Kilmer's 220,000 or so followers started to feel a little uncomfortable after he continued to wax lyrical about Blanchett over the course of several days, interspersed with selfies of himself visiting New York landmarks.
ValKilmer/Twitter
Eventually his fans began pointing out that this was getting a little tragic and creepy. Rather than going ahead and admitting it was all a bit of fun, Kilmer dug in his heels and went on the defensive:
ValKilmer/Twitter
In a series of follow-up rants, Kilmer said, "She's a friend of mine and I've met her husband thru the years and we've all gotten along just fine." He added that "She will Back up every word I say n love that I say I love her. I would love an actor I didn't even enjoy if he flew the world to talk about a role." These tweets were later deleted, presumably as one of the conditions of the inevitable restraining order.
It's not breaking news that Jaden Smith, the spawn of superstar Will Smith, is a little strange on Twitter.
OfficalJaden/Twitter
But Smith came off as a little more of a jerk than usual in May 2017, when he took to Twitter, and, in his Usual Style Of Capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word That He Types, he blasted the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. Their sin? Giving him a really shitty room service meal that made him Want To Throw Up On HimSelf.
OfficalJaden/Twitter
OfficalJaden/Twitter
So he hated his hotel experience -- at least he only shat on them on Twitter and didn't throw the TV out the window, like many Hollywood stars would decide to do. A minute later, Smith revealed the horrid crime that the Four Seasons had committed against him: They tried to kill him by putting cheese in his pancakes.
OfficalJaden/Twitter
For background, Jaden Smith is a vegan. But being vegan isn't like being allergic to peanuts. If a piece of cheese flies into your mouth, you don't go into anaphylactic shock and die; you just get a bit grossed out. Honestly, considering it's Jaden Smith we're talking about, nobody is sure whether his allegations of a pancake assassination attempt are merely melodramatic or if this is what he truly believes.
Maybe the best part is that it later came out that the meal Jaden had ordered was the Four Seasons' famous lemon ricotta pancakes. This only raises more questions. Does Jaden Smith realize "ricotta" is a not-uncommon type of cheese? Did it not occur to him to ask? More to the point, does it escape him that one of the primary ingredients of pancakes is eggs, which are also out of bounds for vegans? This truly is the riddle for the ages.
Cracked has previously reported on a weird episode in recent history in which John Popper, the lead singer of '90s band Blues Traveler, got into a heated Twitter feud with a bot called "AssBott," which was programmed to organize random words into nonsense sentences. That was over a year ago, and since then, the feud hasn't cooled down. Popper, apparently furious that he'd lost an argument against the English language itself, launched a war against the guy who made the bot, Kentucky native Forrest Rutherford.
To be fair to Popper, who will almost certainly find this article by Googling his own name, Rutherford did possibly go a little too far after the initial AssBottGate by programming his bot to reply to all of Popper's tweets with jokes at the former star's expense:
AssBott/Twitter
Popper opted to escalate the situation and investigate Rutherford's personal details, including his home address, and post them on Twitter, prefaced by a subtle movie-related pun:
Blues_Traveler/Twitter
Blues_Traveler/Twitter
Popper claimed he would delete the information if Rutherford agreed to never publically mention Popper, Blues Traveler, or anything else related to any of them until the end of time. Rutherford evidently agreed, and Popper deleted the personal information ... until Rutherford retweeted a Blue Traveler tweet, leading to Popper posting Rutherford's street address again, as well as a Google Earth image of his house.
Blues_Traveler/Twitter
Blues_Traveler/Twitter
Popper's repeated forays into publicizing his nemesis' information have led to death threats leveled at Rutherford by Blues Traveler fans (which it turns out do still exist), including one who threatened to send Mexican gangsters to his house to sort him out. Rutherford wasn't too shaken up by the threat, since he somewhat doubts the Mexican Mafia is invested enough in Blues Traveler to follow through.
We're living in an amazing time in history, when we're able to connect directly with our favorite celebrities from the comfort of our own homes, as long as you know their Twitter handle. You can be sure that 99 times out of 100, you'll be completely ignored, but occasionally they'll throw you, like, a retweet, or maybe even a response. What you'll probably never get is a direct private message (DM), because the rich and famous never care that much about the opinions of the little folk. But that's exactly what happened to a Houston Astros fan named Allen H. after he posted a rather tame tweet about Astros pitcher Alex Bregman's disappointing season performance.
AllenH83/Twitter
When he woke up the next morning, Allen found a DM in his inbox from Bregman himself, who took time out of his day to respond personally and privately to some random guy to let him know he doesn't know shit about baseball.
Allen H.
Allen H.
Note that Allen H. didn't even reference Bregman's Twitter handle in his original tweet, which means that Bregman found it by searching his own name. (Hi, Alex!) Second, we're not sure which misspelled creature he was alluding to Allen being "on the nutsack of society," but we're reasonably sure it's either a flea, a fly, or a bunch of geese.
Anyone who travels even semi-frequently knows that air travel is fraught with minor inconveniences. Your plane might be delayed, you might be beaten up and dragged out because your flight was overbooked, and so on. In July, increasingly irrelevant political commentator Ann Coulter discovered this the hard way when her seat was double-booked and she was asked to move to a different seat in the same row -- a slight which Coulter figured was almost as bad as the Holocaust.
AnnCoulter/Twitter
AnnCoulter/Twitter
It seems Coulter had spent $30 extra to purchase a seat with extra leg room, but was horrified to find her place taken up by another woman whose leg length she deemed inferior:
AnnCoulter/Twitter
Coulter even went ahead and took photographs of the comparatively stump-legged woman so that her followers could shame her accordingly, as though that lady was even remotely at fault. And Coulter's tweet rampage continued well into the morning, during which she managed to compare her nightmare experience to being an asylum inmate in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, being a victim of Stanley Milgram's prison torture experiment, and being oppressed by the Stasi of East Germany.
AnnCoulter/Twitter
AnnCoulter/Twitter
AnnCoulter/Twitter
After her rant was over, Delta refunded Coulter the godforsaken 30 bucks, while also releasing a statement about how they found her tweets to be slanderous, derogatory, and insulting. But that only riled Coulter up even more. She got back on Twitter to rant about how her experience was worse than when United Airlines security beat the shit out of a guy, and compared Delta staff to literal fascists and (even worse) SJWs.
AnnCoulter/Twitter
AnnCoulter/Twitter
S. Peter Davis is the creator of the Three Minute Philosophy YouTube series, and is the author of the book Occam's Nightmare.
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