5 Brief Serious Thoughts From A Satirist
Sometimes The Halfway Café is serious for a morning.
1. Remember when Elon Musk claimed D.O.G.E. would give out a dividend to citizens, and said it could be as high as $5,000?
You don’t hear much about that anymore, do you?
It’s no surprise that Musk would have D.O.G.E. follow his regular business schtick of promising wildly unrealistic things to get attention, and then quietly giving up and hoping no one remembers.
Meanwhile, the scoreboard shows that the Trump Administration is actually costing the government more money than a similar period last year under Biden, and D.O.G.E. is cutting and firing so recklessly that the government is wasting money and supplies, sabotaging healthy profit streams (such as the tens of billions of dollars that come from the National Parks), and approaching nowhere near his absurd goal of $1 trillion in savings.
Also, isn’t the whole point of D.O.G.E. to help cut the budget deficit? Why would Trump and Musk give out all the recouped money instead of paying off some of the debt? Elon has revealed himself to be a moron’s caricature of a genius, whose financial success has come more from egotistical self-promotion rather than real business acumen.
Elon Musk is a con man who has been promising for years we’d have a national fleet of self-driving robo-taxi Teslas by now, and a settlement on Mars, and Neuralink networks, and revolutionary hyperloops. He’s the boy-who-cried-eureka, and it has caught up to him with Tesla’s stock prices plummeting alongside his governmental credibility and popularity.
2. What is the point of having “fuck you money” if you never say “fuck you,” even to the fascists?
I’m fed up with all the billionaires, giant corporations, and media companies who are sucking up to Donald Trump with donations to his inauguration (and their attendance), settlements of his frivolous lawsuits, and their conspicuous silence as Trump bumbling his way to fucking the economy, adding to inflation, dismantling the government, wrecking the American hegemony, and administrating arrests and deportations of legal residents.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, etc. are already billionaires leading the biggest global companies in human history, and they’re not willing to risk a couple bad fiscal quarters to resist a blatantly corrupt and immoral president trashing the Constitution to extort everyone he can?
When fascism comes around you really learn who the goddamn pussies and greedy sociopaths of society are.
Props, though, to Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic for not obeying in advance with the Signalgate scandal! If you unsubscribed from The Washington Post over Bezos’s groveling, consider subscribing to The Atlantic!
3. Can Europe rise to meet the moment in Ukraine?
It’s apparent the European Union is operating at an Articles of Confederation level, and could use a more federalized system capable of cohesive, centralized action on foreign policy decided by majorities rather than the current unanimity that is increasingly blocked by Hungary, Slovakia, and other flirtatiously pro-Russian or authoritarian nations in the EU.
But will Germany, France, the UK, Poland, et al. put their money, militaries, nuclear defense capabilities, and domestic politics where their mouths are regarding stalwart commitments to Ukrainian defense? Would such a political effort be possible in this era of surging right wing nationalist movements across the continent?
It seems apparent to me that letting Ukraine collapse and be swallowed by an expansionist Russian neo-czar will result in unquestionably tougher political and security quagmires in the Baltics and then Poland further down the road, and Europe has the chance now to nip Russian aggression in the bud for relatively cheap. It also has the opportunity to keep putting political reform off, and suffer through a much more costly struggle later after Russians have co-opted the Ukrainian military into new meat wave assaults deeper into Europe.
Are Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Andrzej Duda, and the rest of Europe’s fans of democracy capable of building a capable European federalism like the US did after agreeing the Articles of Confederation were not working?
History will be watching. Let me know what you think in the comments!
4. Imagine being Macron, Starmer, or Canada’s Mark Carney, and what it must be like to talk to Donald Trump in person or on the phone.
What an experience that must be… talking to a fucking idiot who is so militantly ignorant, petty, and psychologically incapable of caring about anything except what’s good for him personally. And, on top of it all, he’s a pathological liar who hates leaving paper trails and honors no former agreements, commitments, or deal — even the ones he himself brokered.
I used to wonder what it was like for presidents with robust foreign policies throughout history to have to talk to uneducated war lords in the Middle East, or self-interested prime ministers of Soviet republics, or any number of psycho dictators who have pulled off nationalist coups, but now I wonder a lot about how surreal an experience it must be for European leaders trying to explain to Donny Dumbfuck that NATO is the most beneficial and hegemonic alliance in literally all of human history, and it makes no rational sense to start a trade war with Canada, and all of his talking points are coincidentally the same talking points used by state media propagandists in Russia.
5. The perfect response for when Republicans share election maps full of red to pretend population density isn’t relevant:
If you could somehow measure and map out cultural clout, the orange spots would be like 98% versus the blue’s 2%.
Here’s another good electoral map that proves conservatives are a little lacking in critical thinking when they mistake all of America’s wilderness and rural land populated more by livestock than people for some kind of “gotcha” against Democrats, who have won many more popular votes in my lifetime than Republicans:
I love a good map! 🥃
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Remember that WWII started in September 1939 and USA did not join until December 1941. Western Europe fended for itself until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
Never mind MAGA. They're a grotesque movement based on ignorance and hatred. But what about the educated Republicans? Are they still drinking the Kool-Aid or do they wake up engulfed in dread, thinking, "Oh fuck, what have we done!"