But they love him in the mirror universe.

'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." '

And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.

Ah yes, that too.

Meanwhile his old friend from PayPal seems to have a thing for the villains from The Lord of the Rings universe.

I wonder if he ever read the 5th book, Mostly Harmless. In that book there's an aside which describes how the people of the planet Golgafrincham tricked all the useless members of their society (management consultants, etc) into thinking the planet was doomed and getting on a ship to escape the planet which they programmed to fly to another salary system and crash into one of the planets there. That part of the book always stuck with me, and more and more I wish there was a way we could do the same to Musk and his billionaire cronies.

Of course I don't think Musk has actually read any of the HHGTTG novels, especially not the 5th one so maybe there's still a chance?

$10 says he loves the wiki brief of the mos def version.

Or he claimed to be hugely into trek and hhgttg to fit in when in uni and now can't untangle himself from the lie without an ego blow

I think he likes it because he identifies with the tech corpos and wants to bring that piece of it, complete with shit broken AI to life

I think this is indeed it, unfortunately.

To such sociopaths incapable of empathetic thought, Star Trek is awesome because future and technology and winning battles. So if you’re a tech bro and you’re winning (money) and pushing technology forward regardless of the costs, and everybody knows who you are because of it, well then you must be an awesome human that’s winning at life! Because obviously good life = victorious life.

Remember how conservatives think that Rage Against The Machine is on their side. There's no delusion too great after that.

It's not about values, it's about image and symbolism. And the fact that a white dude got to go all over the universe telling aliens they're wrong and they need to accept the American... uhhm Federation way!

Imagine he's developing the Neurolink because he thought it was good.

...I'm sorry?

That is not TOS. That is a person like Elon's idea of TOS. I grew up on TOS before any other Star Trek existed. It helped shape my values- made me cherish ideas like inclusion and diversity and equality. It also helped teach me to talk things out rather than just come in guns blazing.

Yes, there was a cowboy element to TOS considering Gene sold it to executives as "Wagon Train to the stars," but it doesn't have the typical morality of a Western. At all.

In fact, if you want to talk specifically about indigenous Americans, the episode The Paradise Syndrome had a far more positive view of them than pretty much anything else on TV at the time.

TOS had the same basic values, even if they weren't quite as refined.

The show from the 60s with a black female bridge officer who was part of television's first interracial kiss? The one with the utopian society where race and religion were unimportant, people worked as they were able to benefit society without capital, and episodes centered on things like the silliness of prejudice and hoarding wealth?

The one where the greatest villain was a 20th century human who had tried to establish a stratified society based on genetic superiority?

That show?

I mean the Bell Riots happen in 2024 in the Prime Timeline. The 21st century sucks in Star Trek. Eugenics wars, Sanctuary Districts, WWIII, fascist dictatorships using soldiers addicted to drugs...

It's only after a nuclear holocaust that humanity is reborn into their "hopeful era". I mean hell, they literally had to retcon the timeline because the 90s weren't actually as awful as the show claimed and they had to move the Eugenics Wars. The 21st century is dark in the Prime Timeline, and it's fully believable that it was just as bad as our real 21st century or worse.

So no, as easy as it is to cave to doomerism, I think the message of Star Trek is that this too shall pass. Stuff sucks, no doubt, the world is in a dark place right now, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way.

I like to rewatch DS9: "Past Tense" sometimes because it really hits home how bad things are, but also gives hope for how maybe there's a future in which we look back and wonder how things got this bad.

[Section 31 has entered chat]

he COMES from the Mrirror Universe.

Sure, but he’s made of “hard light”, if you get my drift 😏

What are you trying to say? That a hologram is not a person but a mere tool?

Delusional temporarily embarrassed millionaires and billionaires.

Don't mind their working class appearances at the moment, they'll get a lucky break and be set back to their high status.

Well, okay but selling a single family home these days goes for over a million commonly in the cities, even if it’s your only family home and for example you are moving into smaller home or selling for money for health care or to move into retirement home etc

A home you could have bought between 30-50 k 30 or 40 years ago could easily be worth over 1 million now

A million a year barely lifts you beyond the middle class these days. You would still need a mortgage ( at least for a couple of years ) where I live.

I think maybe $10 million would be better. But I prefer a progressive system over a cap. Earning more money should always make you more money. People respond to incentives. We just need to increase the tax rate as high as 90% by the time you are making $10 million or more.

If a few billionaires had $100 million, it would not wreck society.

I mean, I like to shit on Billionaires as much as anyone, but they don't really own a Billion dollars like sitting around in their bank accounts. They own it in assets like stocks of companies, real estate, etc. The money they spend are usually loans against these assets which they then pay back by selling some because their values usually increases more than the interest rates.

So I don't understand how you are envisioning this asset cap and going to social services. Imagine you have stock In a company that's growing more than a million dollars. Would they be forced to sell the stock to 'social services'? Who controls these assets then? Or are they forced to sell them? Then the assets just get passed around.

I don't think a solution is that simple. Maybe it would be better if we regulate the companies more. But for that we need to agree on rules on an international level because otherwise, as it is now already happening, they just switch their HQ to less regulated countries. The EU approaches this with regulations you need to follow if you want to operate in the EU at all. Which makes the corps found subcorps to operate in EU. They evade all regulations as long as we can't agree on an international standard.

Long story short. It's not the billionaires money that's the problem, it's the power they hold in their assets in multinational corporations that enables them to operate above any laws of one nation.

What?! Awesome!

And since I had to double check if I remembered right, the film is Total Recall

Edit: Looking closer, I can see the family resemblance between JohnnyCab and EMH.

The puppet's face is also based on Picardo's

I always liked him as The Cowboy (see movie Inner Space), don't knock just come! I didn't watch Voyager when it was new and took awhile to make that connection when I did. He's an extremely different character than the EMH for sure.

Don’t forget the mint frosting!

Everything makes sense when you realize our Elon Musk is a Terran.

And now Ricky Martin is in my head.

Yeah but everyone else found it normal. Weren't there even schools named after him? Maybe I'm misremembering.

And yeah if did happen before he went full mask-off. But there was still accusations of weird behaviour towards women, still overworking employees, still massive union-busting efforts, etc.

People were cringing about it even when it came out. Elon may not have gone full mask off yet, but he was headed there.

Why is Barty Crouch Jr. side-eyeing Lewis Zimmerman?

Thankfully, we are wanting to create Starfleet not the whole Star trek timeline.

I'm not sure building flamethrowers is necessarily a positive personality trade. They don't exactly have a great history.

Was that from futurama?

You call the a pressed ham?!?!

This is a thing in psychology. Overcoming challenges is what forces us to grow, so when you break that "game" by having so much money that you never have to be challenged again, it makes sense that you would stop developing.

You see the same sort of thing with alcohol/drug addiction - when a person finds a chemical "easy-button" for dopamine, they tend to mentally get stuck around the age that they started using.

He's the biggest own goal in history. Because everything he says is so massively ridiculous.

If he just shut the hell up he'd have quite a nice life, he's got more money than he'll ever know what to do with (and that's saying something considering he wants to colonize another planet), he owns some big exciting companies who have a real possibility of generating truly eye-watering amounts of money, and up until he opened his mouth he was fairly popular across all social groups.

All he needs to do is just keep his mouth closed.

Thanks! I was under the impression that The Doctor is not with us anymore, but I'm glad I was wrong.

Ok, of the humans, 75% are white.

And I don't know which show you watched, but most of Starfleet were humans