Thread by @KrisAtLarge

Rorvik in the famous Tom Baker #DoctorWho storyline, "Warriors' Gate".

Rorvik and @mtaibbi's bestest friend @elonmusk have a lot in common! they both love slavery, they both adore bullying people, and their "management" style is pointing a gun and screaming.

~Chara

Rorvik and his men are utterly dependent for their space travel on an enslaved people who know about time travel; like @elonmusk parasitizing the long-suffering staff of @Tesla and @SpaceX, Rorvik doesn't *know* how time or science works—only how to exploit it for gain.

~Chara

whenever someone like the Doctor or K-9 says some big words that Rorvik / @elonmusk doesn't like the sounds of—well, #ElonMusk may not actually *know* what all the intimidating polysyllabic words really mean, but he does know how to pitch a fit.

businessinsider.com/elon-musk-can-…

~Chara

there's a reason that @elonmusk's chums on @Twitter, all the people that do the most crawling round his ankles—@mtaibbi, @MrAndyNgo, @Timcast, and all that crowd of Internet media grifters and #cryptocurrency junkies and the like—are terminally ignorant about science.

~Chara

@elonmusk is a superficial, greedy, immature, money-poisoned corporate tyrant—the world is stuffed full to bursting with people who are EXACTLY like #ElonMusk, but who didn't benefit from decades of constant publicity and being product-placed into movies and @TheSimpsons.

~Chara

and everyone round @elonmusk, even pseudo-gonzo-reporter @mtaibbi, is basically the same. like attracts like, in this case—#ElonMusk has too fragile an ego to permit anyone round him who's too *different*, too much of a challenge to his puerile daydreams about himself.

~Chara

he's a mediocrity, swarmed by other mediocrities—and the only reason @elonmusk is a cloud on humanity's horizon right now is because he *paid* to put himself there.

and somehow, @mtaibbi pretends that Musk is a *rebel outsider*—but then, that's a paid thing, too.

~Chara

Rorvik's finest moment in #DoctorWho's "Warriors' Gate": he's about to make the decision that completely destroys his ship and crew, and he's *cackling*. "THIS IS THE END FOR ALL YOU YOU! I'M FINALLY GETTING SOMETHING DOOONNE!!"

one can imagine @elonmusk screaming this.

~Chara

bad bosses—beyond doubt @elonmusk is a *bad boss* of truly epic scale, a historical catastrophe in "bad boss" terms—have a lot of things in common. one of the most reliable traits is: they think all problems are solved by shouting orders at them.

businessinsider.com/elon-musk-temp…

~Chara

it's certainly good for public consumption. Western pop culture has been heavily propagandized into accepting authoritarian leadership—leadership by shouting orders at people. the @mtaibbi and @lhfang types of the world wish they could be great generals or Roman emperors.

~Chara

@elonmusk seems to represent a sort of end-stage decay process in the Western popular notion of leadership and how to solve problems. he's not just a *bad boss*, but he's a bad boss who does his bad-boss thing in full view of hundreds of millions of @Twitter readers.

~Chara

thanks to *more* vacuous Western entertainment—especially anodyne "office comedies" like @theofficetv and @MikeJudge's "Office Space"—Western audiences have been conditioned to think of bad bosses as _funny_—and inevitable. this is the nature of satire; it's *resigned*.

~Chara

satire is the fictional form of a society in deep decay. Juvenal and Petronius wrote their satires of corrupt and ridiculous Roman imperial society not because they thought that they could change anything, but because they knew they couldn't. they were *resigned* to it.

~Chara

they'd already seen what happened to writers who were too honest and fearless in what they said to the powerful. Ovid got sent to the edge of Roman dominion, and he died there; Seneca was forced to commit suicide; a host of other writers were simply murdered.

~Chara

(this, by the way, is the civilization that racist mountebanks like @pegobry and @charlesmurray think was the pinnacle of human civilization—a corrupt slavedriving tyranny that murdered or exiled all its best artists. why, it's almost like these people despise artists!)

~Chara

anyway Western entertainment has been trying for *decades* now to be "satirical" about everything, and that was _resignation_. the installation of witless figurehead President @RonaldReagan was like a death blow to hope. a scripted dunce was now in charge of The Bomb.

~Chara

what was left to do but try to make the best of what little was left? @TheSimpsons is pervaded with that spirit of *despair*. the overall lesson of "The Simpsons", drilled into viewers' heads over and over, was that there was no hope in anything. all hopes were flim-flam.

~Chara

again and again the lesson of @TheSimpsons was that only the "nuclear family" mattered. stick by your family; everyone else will let you down. it's an very *conservative* message and it would lead to @SouthPark and worse things. it'd also normalize losers like @elonmusk.

~Chara

the decades of evil bosses—portrayed merely as harmless figures of fun—have done their dirty work; they've created a culture of acceptance for appalling celebrity *children* like @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk. we're supposed to _laugh_ while they screw us over.

~Chara