Thread by @PnictogenHorses

let's try again. I wanted to write more *specifically* about Mr. @elonmusk—speculating about why he's the catastrophic person he is, based on what's popularly known about him. everything I'm going to mention is something reported in the popular press (not by @mtaibbi.)

(1/x)

https://twitter.com/PnictogenHorses/status/1619558112171810819

we know that Mr. Musk had an abusive father, whom @elonmusk has had little good to say about. the man was typical colonialist trash—a South African grifter and speculator who *got lucky*, making a lot of money quickly with a partial share in an apartheid-era emerald mine.

(2/x)

Mr. Musk (and certainly his #ElonMusk fan club) has tried as hard as possible to suppress any chatter about the emerald mine; Mr. @elonmusk himself, a prolific and habitual liar, has even tried to pretend that the press made it up. but it's too broadly reported to deny.

(3/x)

Musk and the #ElonMusk fandom has also tried the typical trick of saying that merely because @elonmusk's father hadn't had a stake in the emerald mine for very long, that meant he couldn't have gotten rich from it—but *gem strikes* make a lot of money very fast indeed.

(4/x)

Musk may *hate* his father but he has not genuinely repudiated him—that would have meant giving up all that money, and @elonmusk (we can be fairly sure of this anyway because it's endemic to #capitalism) was prepared to grab any #money at all, any dirty way it came to him.

(5/x)

"I can do some good with this #money," was doubtless what @elonmusk told himself at some point—I'm sure he's still telling himself.

this is the _ignis fatuus_ of avarice—avarice is *sin* (but grifting #Christians of the @dalepartridge / @pastorlocke type think it's fine.)

(6/x)

if you don't like the idea of calling avarice a _sin_, then call it a fatal fixation or an endpoint of thought, a "cognitive trap". avarice is dangerous because it eats up one's entire life. every single *other* desire becomes a mere pretext for trying to grab #money.

(7/x)

always the desire for #money comes *first*, and all other desires become conditional upon the search for money: it really is an _addiction_, #psychology would say (consider: @jordanbpeterson likely tells lots of money-poisoned men that there's nothing wrong with avarice.)

(8/x)

"let me do this *deal* first and then I'll do your thing" really is equivalent to "let me have a drink first then I'll tackle this problem": it's a hallmark of addiction, putting the desired thing *first*, before all other desires. the #money grab comes _first_, always.

(9/x)

plainly I'm only *speculating* that Mr. @elonmusk suffers from this "cognitive trap", this fatal lure of avarice.

it seems likely—not the least because he's always *borrowing more*. the avaricious wish not to risk the pile of loot they've already gotten, hence the loans.

(10/x)

going into #debt just makes it worse. @elonmusk may say, "I'm gonna save the world, just you wait!" but now not only does he have to grab more #money first, but he ALSO has to pay off all the debts that he's incurred from previous rounds of "wanting to save the world".

(11/x)

the "saving the world" task drops further and further down the list of priorities; maybe it's something shoved into the hands of some tax shelter / "foundation", the way that @BillGates has used the @gatesfoundation as a tax shelter and vector for his noxious ambitions.

(12/x)

nothing @elonmusk's been doing all this time seems likely to save the world; for one thing, he seems to think that a "population crisis" is a problem needing immediate solving, even though the human population *must* drop sometime, according to basic population dynamics.

(13/x)

the real story with the "population crisis" nonsense (in which nonsense @mtaibbi and @lhfang and @ShellenbergerMD, and all the other pets in @elonmusk's current menagerie, undoubtedly believe) is that #capitalism needs the warm bodies. they need a captive work force.

(14/x)

#capitalism chews its workers up rapidly indeed, and always needs more and more—just as @elonmusk and @pmarca and all the other avaricious corporate aristocrats always need more and more #money. that's why there's a "population crisis": it's a crisis only for capitalists.

(15/x)

there's also a lot of horrifying racist and eugenics crap of the @charlesmurray / @SwipeWright / @EPoe187 "race science" sort, crap that @elonmusk believes for self-flattering reasons—but that's only _ex post facto_ justification for #capitalism's raw need for fresh food.

(16/x)

remember that one of the chief preoccupations of the NSDAP "race scientists" was determining which "races" are better at forced labor—the Nazıs initiated the Holocaust on the pretext that Jews in labor camps were the "worst workers". that's *very* @elonmusk / @EPoe187.

(17/x)

it's impossible to separate "race science" and the pseudointellectual hogwash that backs up "whıte supremacy" from the needs of #capitalism: bıgotry amounts to reducing human beings to mere _categories_ and that's something #business and #marketing loves doing as well.

(18/x)

#capitalism helped created Nazısm; the tools of capitalist mass-production and mass-marketing—permitting the rapid manufacture of cheap propaganda in vast quantities, and massive #advertising—were the tools that enabled the NSDAP and other #fascist parties to take power.

(19/x)

the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @GOP gang are trying to weaponize @Twitter in like fashion: the clear hope is to *suppress all bad reporting about the Republican Party* and saturate the easily befuddled #media (even @MotherJones) with low-quality stories about @TheDemocrats.

(20/x)

this is *saturating bombing*, in propaganda terms: @mtaibbi (who undoubtedly isn't doing most of the actual work) is trying to keep up a steady barrage of #TwitterFiles, always more and more—trying to give the *illusion* that it's all political dynamite, when it's not.

(21/x)

but I'm digressing from the central topic, which is @elonmusk himself. we know a little bit about his background—not too much, because #ElonMusk has had *decades* of feeding public-relations lies about himself to the press, and having his fanclub erase bad news about him.

(22/x)

the @BillyM2k / @Timcast / @catturd2 crowd are front-line defence against the spread of *bad word*: the idea is that if anyone on @Twitter squeaks some bad news about @elonmusk (like, a @Tesla crash) there's always a posse of angry chuds ready to stamp out the spark.

(23/x)

but there's other methods that @elonmusk and his gang have used to suppress bad news about themselves—like all the @Twitter manipulation that @mtaibbi and @bariweiss and @lhfang and all the rest of his pet journalists have been so very careful never to acknowledge.

(24/x)

all of these people have a lot of practice in locking up parts of themselves behind a tight wall of public silence—@mtaibbi (like the rest of them) has his bigotry to hide, his drug use, his sexual indiscretions, no doubt *other* things. he's lived hard, partied hard.

(25/x)

so what's one *more* secret, like (say) the full list of @elonmusk's team of kept press flacks? or whether they've been meeting with @GOP political figures or "political committees" with locked-in #conservative funding and Republican ties? @mtaibbi's "Deep State", indeed.

(26/x)

so, why does @elonmusk want to do all this? sure, "money and power" are always answers—it's frankly *comical* to me that anyone in Western #journalism would take #ElonMusk at his word when he says he's only doing it out of selfless love for humanity.

(27/x)

and there's a very simple reason for that: @elonmusk (and @mtaibbi and other bigots) doesn't regard most of humanity as human. they're *perishable goods* to him, a burnable resource—ballast that needs to be jettisoned to propel him to #Mars. it's a miserable sort of life.

(28/x)

"I want to save humanity" means naught from a bigot like @elonmusk; his very *concept* of "humanity" is broken into tiny pieces. the same goes for @mtaibbi, @mtracey, @EPoe187, @jonkay and @SwipeWright and the whole @Quillette crowd, maybe even Mr. @ID_AA_Carmack (sorry!)

(29/x)

these people *can't* wish humanity well; they don't even know what "humanity" is.

how'd @elonmusk get that way? again, the answer is too simple: it was beaten into him. bigotry is propagated through child abuse—children need to be *taught* to divide humanity into pieces.

(30/x)

(so...just think of what sort of parenting @MattWalshBlog's children get. or just look at how @joshduggar of the Duggars turned out. brr.)

*child abuse* is also central to the "Gender Critical" crowd. @bindelj and @Docstockk and @jk_rowling appeal to abusive parents.

(31/x)

(arguably @jk_rowling achieved something remarkable in its absurdity, with #HarryPotter: she wrote a ponderous heptalogy of #childrensbooks despite clearly *loathing children*. she loves nothing more than writing bullying descriptions of "ugly" children. she's a bigot.)

(32/x)

undoubtedly @elonmusk was abused. we know what that's like, in the Pnictogen Wing; many abused children have found some sort of shelter here. Frisk and Chara and Kris know, all too well, what that's like from harsh personal experience.

it's tough even to *remember*.

(33/x)

when trauma is hidden, sealed up in the depths of one's mind behind multiple layers of denial and rationalization, you practically forget it's there. the human mind routes around the memory, avoiding anything that might be *too reminiscent* of a moment of searing pain.

(34/x)

let's say for example that your mother gave you a beating as a child, just as a certain song was playing; you might remember *the song* only as something painful now—a song to be avoided. further exposures to the song simply *cause pain*.

the song is now a "trigger".

(35/x)

and if by some horrible mischance you were subjected to an environment where THAT SONG kept coming up again and again—perhaps it turned out to be a massive hit on the radio—then the traumatic aversion would be triggered *again and again*, causing more and more pain.

(36/x)

this is *retraumatization*. I am explaining as fully as I can in lay terms—I am not a psychologist (but then neither is @jordanbpeterson, and there's *reasons* he wants everyone to think that PTSD is a joke unless it's in a cop or a soldier or someone else who "matters").

(37/x)

undoing the damage done by PTSD is very difficult work, especially if the traumatic memories are very *old* and buried by decades of subsequent habituation to having a piece of one's own mind sealed away. human beings are inclined to forget the reasons they *hate* things.

(38/x)

for that's one of the things that happens to traumatic triggers—stimuli that are painful reminders of old forgotten wounds—is that you learn to *hate* the things that trigger you, and you don't even really know why. you develop persistent aversions that make no sense.

(39/x)

hence it's likely that @elonmusk is not consciously aware about his own traumatic patterns of behavior—even though he's a child-abuse victim, even though he's not fond of the man who probably did the most damage. he's got a whole #ElonMusk fanclub telling him he's fine.

(40/x)

*and* he's got a whole club of tame "journalists" like @mtaibbi and @lhfang round him now—people who see their press-agent work for @elonmusk as a *meal ticket*. they're not going to _want_ him to address his own problems; that would interrupt his #business career.

(41/x)

but then that's *the secret* to "hustle culture", the relentless avaricious drive for #money and #success through #sales and #marketing and #investment and #realestate speculation and #cryptocurrency gambling and all the rest of it. that culture *requires traumatization*.

(42/x)

in order to #succeed, on terms that #capitalism offers, you have to be *in pain*, all the time—because pain makes people move. it makes them impatient, shouty, fighty—it makes a person #competitive.

yes. @elonmusk is always in pain. (Chara and I haven't helped.)

~Mona Drafter

@UnrollThread