Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:06 on 5 July 2025

Quite a bit has happened this week, which I have yet to comment on.

Carney Cravenly Caves

Oh, sure, there’s technically a chance it was, as Carney’s apologists say, all pre-planned. But let’s get real here. Occam’s Razor says it is far more likely to be just what it appears to be, which is just what I said it was in the title for this section.

What’s particularly worrying is not the specific policy caved on, but the general policy area of the cave; namely, regulating social media. There has long been something toxic to a free and open society about social media. The Trump era, with the US capitalist class lining up in support behind fascism, as the capitalist class inevitably does, makes the problem all the more acute. What once was a bug is now most definitely a feature. You can take it to the bank that the social media giants are doing their level best to make their algorithms as fascism-friendly as possible.

As such, it is incumbent on the remaining free societies of the world to regulate the hell out of these social media giants. (There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, which I will get into sometime.)

Now Carney has just had Canada concede to its hostile neighbour that yes, it is only reasonable for Canada to accommodate that neighbour’s wishes when it comes to social media. This is precisely the wrong sort of precedent to be setting.

It is the year 1950 in an alternate history timeline. The USSR is trying to gain control over domestic US media via dummy holding companies. Would the United States have just sat there while the USSR gained control of CBS and NBC? Yet this is basically the analogue of what Carney has now set precedent that Canada do. Social media are that influential in public opinion.

The Enabling Act

It’s a crude analogue, because decades-long precedents and trends, plus recent friendly Supreme Court rulings, have accomplished a lot of it, but if anything is the American analogue to the Enabling Act, it is how the big ugly bill has allocated an obscene and shocking amount of money to the ICE gestapo (long one of the most powerful and least accountable law enforcement agencies). The first concentration camp, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, has already opened, and Trump fascists are gleefully celebrating America’s new Dachau with commemorative merchandise.

You can take it to the bank that those camps will not only be used for oppressing immigrants.

Lots of people smell the corpse now.

Left Rhetorical Incompetence

If the political Left had any rhetorical competence, the alliterations “big bad bill” and “alligator Auschwitz” would now be entering common use. It’s seemingly a little thing, but it’s not really a little thing: good labelling and sloganeering matter a lot in politics.

Zohran Mamdani Is in Personal Peril

Odds are that within two years, he will either be dead, disappeared, incarcerated, under house arrest, or in exile. Because of course he will be. Authoritarian states do not stand idly by and let true opposition arise.

Since (overall, individual exceptions do not disprove the general rule) the Democratic Party has been a co-participant in, not an opponent of the USA’s transition to fascism, it may well be allowed to continue existing. Authoritarian regimes often allow sham opposition parties, and the Democratic Party has long been effectively functioning as such voluntarily, anyhow. A transition to a more formal arrangement would thus represent a relatively minor change.

The real question is whether, and how much, the paradox of repression manifests when the inevitable happens to Mamdani.

Published at 09:53 on 3 July 2025

I have been toying with the idea of purchasing a Kobo ebook reader for some time now. But I keep coming ’round to it being a questionable value proposition.

This is mainly due to capitalist avarice, not the base technology itself (which, while not perfect, is actually pretty good by now).

Available ebook titles (at least those in open, non-proprietary formats) seem quite limited in comparison to traditional paper book ones, so for books I would have to purchase, an ebook would not be an option in many cases. To this can be added how ebooks do not tend to sell at much of a discount off traditional paper books, which makes it even harder to recoup my investment in a reader. Note that I have a limited time window to do that (probably in the 5–10 year range, while paper books last indefinitely) due to the rapid pace of technological obsolescence in the computer and electronic fields.

That paltry discount starts looking like a non-discount once one I realize how much fewer use rights I would have with ebooks. Given all that sleazy capitalist garbage, I would expect an ebook title to be sold for half or less of what a traditional paper book is. This is seldom the case.

In particular, that discount often vanishes entirely or becomes negative once the option of used paper books enters the picture. You can’t buy a used ebook, for the same reason you can’t sell one: ebooks don’t come with that right of ownership. On the subject of selling books, for paper books I no longer need, I can recoup yet more of my acquisition cost by selling them.

Given all the above, I doubt very much that ebooks in general offer any price advantage over paper books.

Kindle ebooks offer a far greater title selection than do open formats, but I don’t trust Amazon. No, scratch that. I do trust Amazon. I trust them to act in ways which are advantageous to their own bottom line and disadvantageous to mine. I am quite certain that Kindle (and the proprietary ebooks sold for the same) are not exactly what they seem. Maybe Kindle spies on the reader. Maybe its OS is programmed for obsolescence in a few years, so Amazon can force the user to replace a device which otherwise still works perfectly. Maybe its ebooks have particularly awful end user licensing agreements. Maybe more than one of the above. Maybe something else.

I don’t know for sure what it is, but I do know that it almost certainly is something. It’s Amazon. There has got to be a catch or three.

Unless some of the above changes, or I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don’t seem to make much sense to me.

Published at 08:51 on 27 June 2025

Today’s ruling should come as no surprise, as it is completely consistent with an earlier ruling by the same Supreme Court.

The problem is, as I wrote earlier, that there are six fascists on the Supreme Court. Fascists don’t care about judicial independence. In fact, they oppose it,as it gets in the way of the will of the leader they follow.

Starting to really look like the courts won’t save you, Nice Liberals.

Published at 18:06 on 26 June 2025

Because, really, it is not my point to make. It’s a decision for New Yorkers to make, of which I am not one.

But, at over eight million people, it is the largest city in the USA, and as such has more peoople living in it than live in most US states. That alone gives it a prominence that ensures what happens in NYC often doesn’t stay there. Then you have how it is a world-class artistic and cultural centre. Yet more prominence. If Mamdani wins in November, he will likely become one of Trump’s foils, and thus affect US politics as a whole. And what affects US politics affects world politics.

When New Yorkers say their city is the capital of the world, it is, in other words, no idle boast.

Andrew Cuomo has been so humiliated by his primary loss that most pundits are predicting he will entirely drop out of the race, and not even attempt to run as an independent in November. Not so for scandal-plagued incumbent Eric Adams, who has already loudly announced his candidacy.

Here’s another point, though: If Adams continues to hog the limelight, and the centrists line up behind him, he probably loses. Mamdani has already dispatched one corrupt centrist career politician and can probably dispatch another.

If the centrists line up behind someone like Jim Walden, however, they have a good shot at things. Not a sure one (there are no sure shots in politics), but a good one. Walden looks like an outsider who is free from the taint of scandal. It’s that, and not the democratic socialism, that was Mandani’s real secret sauce in the primary. Sure, Mamdani’s base loves that he’s a socialist, but that base alone is not enough to see him through to victory.

It’s not yet clear who the centrists will line up behind.

Right now, there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some of the centrist crowd about the primary outcome. Something tells me that they wouldn’t be whining so hard if Cuomo had won, despite Cuomo being the very epitome of a corrupt, out of touch, elitist, career Democrat. You know, the sort of epitome that tilted enough swing voters to Trump the last cycle.

If that crowd really cared about electability, they would care about their own team’s electability issues at least somewhat. But they don’t. So yeah, they just might well fall in line behind Adams.

Or, in other words, the establishment just might just continue unwittingly helping Zohran Mamdani all the way to Gracie Mansion. Which would be fine by me.

Published at 10:48 on 25 June 2025

Well, not a complete surprise, because polling did show him surging in support, but a surprise nonetheless (the preponderance of polls still showed him missing the mark).

Paradoxically, I think, it shows basically what the support for Trump shows: that a significant number of Americans realize the political Establishment has not served them well and are upset at that Establishment.

Mamdani and Trump are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, so many political pundits cannot see this. But pundits are weirdos: they care a lot about politics. Most Americans do not care a lot about politics. Most Americans are stunningly politically ignorant, to the point that they are not even able to name their two Senators and one Representative in Congress.

Most Americans don’t think Trump is a fascist because most Americans have no idea what fascism actually is. To them, he’s just an outsider promising to shake things up. They can be convinced, with the right propaganda, to give his extremism a whirl (again, they realize the Establishment that Trump has disdain for has not served them well), or they can be convinced, again with the right propaganda, that he’s just too far outside the norm to be safe.

And, it turns out, many those same unsophisticates can be persuaded to vote for a candidate significantly to the left of that Establishment as well.

That latter point bears elaborating on. There are at this very moment democratic socialists opining that this election shows Americans (or at least New Yorkers) are coming ’round to their ideology. No they are not. They are merely dissatisfied with the political Establishment and what it has brought them, and are willing to entertain giving those from outside that Establishment a whirl.

Most Americans still have a generally negative connotation of what “socialism” means. Mamdani would have probably done better had he avoided that label. By which I mean he could have had exactly the same planks in his platform, just used slightly different branding, and done better as a result.

Donald Trump does not call himself a “red-white-and-blue American fascist,” a “21st century fascist,” or anything of the such. He could, and it would be an exercise in honest labelling, but he doesn’t. Yet one more example of why Trump is actually more politically savvy than most of the Left. (Of course he is. Just look at his winning record at the ballot box.)

Of course, this cuts both ways. The Establishment Democrats would have probably done better (and likely won) if they had put forth better standard-bearers than a disgraced mayor and a disgraced former governor. So what we have here is basically a situation in which one side’s incompetence cancelled out the other side’s.

But I am digressing here. The same Democratic Party Establishment that backed Cuomo in a desperate and ultimately failed effort to keep Mamdani from winning the primary is the same Establishment that is now only one for three in keeping the most extreme and unqualified candidate to ever seek that office out of the White House. (And when they did gain power, they refused to use it to crush fascism.) These are not people of either great political wisdom or great political morals, and we all need to spend a lot less time paying serious attention to what they have to say.

If Mamdani wins in November and accomplishes that alone, his victory will have meant something.

If, furthermore, his administration is a success and gets more Americans to seriously entertain more left-wing policies, it would be great. But even the former lesser case would prove politically beneficial.

Published at 07:15 on 22 June 2025

Now we get to see how many Trumpers rescind their support for Trump as a result, and how many will convince themselves that Big Brother just increased the chocolate rations.

We also get to see how Iran retaliates. If Iran does not retaliate, it will show how weak and ineffectual the regime is, which will hasten its demise. Those who run that regime know this.

Iran gets to choose the time, place, and means of retaliation, and they will choose it with an eye to maximizing the surprise factor and the effectiveness of the mission.

Welcome to war.

Published at 08:49 on 20 June 2025

Short Answer

Who knows? It will depend largely on his whim at the moment, and that is famously unpredictable.

Longer Answer

It is not the definitive “yes” answer that Rick Wilson seems to think it is.

Why? Because Trumpers are not what he thinks they are. Many Republicans warmed to Trump’s willingness to burn it all down in part because they felt betrayed by their own elite, who led the USA into a number of futile “forever wars” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Wilson is of course one of that old elite, he hates Trump, and this reality is therefore most unpleasant to him.

So he constructs an alternate reality in which much of the Right just became inexplicably depraved for no good reasons at all. And, conveniently enough, there are plenty of examples of depraved beliefs to back this whole “depraved” narrative up.

I sometimes interact with Trumpers online, and one common narrative they volunteer as to why they are what they are does fall back on these forever wars. It’s why they can so easily wave off all the concerns of the Never Trump crowd (largely dominated by those same neoconservatives who led the USA into those wars).

And keep in mind: this is what has been volunteered to me, repeatedly, for years now. It’s not some new stuff that some echo chamber media voices thought up on the spot just to help them argue “no, we don’t want to get more involved in the Israel/Iran war, trust me.” It really seems to be a genuine motive.

As such, I rate it as highly likely that if Trump does get the USA heavily involved, it will hurt him.

Sure, a lot of his base are fascist follower types who will pivot on a dime and not only argue but actually believe that Big Brother just increased the chocolate rations. A lot. But not all. Some won’t.

And Trump didn’t win by much, so he can’t afford to lose much support. He’s already underwater on most issues in the polls.

Getting the USA directly involved is highly likely to hurt Trump. And Trump might realize that, which reduces the odds that he will. It is revealing that his current line is that he will decide in “two weeks.” That seems to be his stock phrase for kicking the can down the road and often doing nothing at all.

Trump’s only loyalty is to himself. He has no loyalty to anything or anyone else, including Israel and/or Netanyahu.

Anyone giving almost-certain answers on this one is missing some important points.

Published at 22:15 on 17 June 2025

To avoid being simply negative and cutting others’ efforts down, I will contrast the shambolic time and date situation in Java with the superior one in Python.

The latter has two time and date packages. This is largely as a result of history. One, time, came early on, and basically is a way to call the Posix time and date functions from Python. The other, datetime, came later, and is geared to more advanced use cases.

I almost always just use time, because as I said earlier, by far the most common uses for a time datatype are to create an instance of one and to print it. For that, the traditional time library is more than sufficient.

But even datetime is so much better designed than its Java counterpart. Instead of nine absolute time types, there are three (a calendar date, a time of day, and a date with a time). Instead of two relative types, there is just one (which, really, is all one needs). Instead of an elaborate set of classes devoted to formatting and outputting a time, there is just a strftime method for each time object (and all the strftime‘s use exactly the same format-specifying mini-language, which is mostly compatible with the one used in the Posix/C world. The cognitive load of understanding it all is so much more reasonable.

As for the legacy class, its base time type is a Python floating point number. This is a value type, and as such avoids all the headaches associated with a mutable reference type. Its alternate time type is a Python tuple. Since tuples are immutable in Python, this also neatly avoids mutability headaches. And since standard, pre-existing data types are used, there is once more less cognitive load imposed on the programmer.

Since there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the older time class, it is considered just fine to use it in new programs. Because of course it is: it is the simpler of the two, and simplicity has long been a core value in the Python world.

It’s one of the reasons I can be so harsh on Java. They knew better, or rather should have known better. Python predates Java, and Python did not come up with this simplicity-as-a-virtue business. UNIX embodied it over two decades before Python popped onto the scene. By the time the 1990’s rolled around, UNIX had a longstanding reputation for being an exceptionally productive programming environment.

The principles were known. The Java world chose to ignore them, and has suffered as a result ever since.

Published at 14:27 on 15 June 2025

This site has been stable since I implemented a stopgap measure to prevent abusive crawling from taking it down.

Alas, the abusive crawling persists. It is happening in spite of robots.txt directing robots to avoid the troublesome URL. The robots in question also, contrary to best practice, contain no user agent information identifying themselves. Pure sleaze. I suspect one or more AI firms to be behind it, trolling the Internet for code to train their models on.

So a longer-term fix has now been implemented. The offending URL now always returns and HTTP 403 (Forbidden) response, about which RFC 2616 says “The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.”

The returned response contains instructions for how to edit the URL in the browser URL window so as to reach the desired service, so humans once more have access to it. Effectively, this functions as a form of CAPTCHA.

It’s done via a CGI script. It doesn’t have to be, but it was easy that way. Rename the old script to the name that now accesses the service, and install the new one as a drop-in replacement for the old one at the original address. Plus, it keeps the URL similar so it’s relatively easy for humans to edit into the form needed to access the service.

The “script” is actually a compiled C program and not a script, because it has to be. Anything more resource-intensive might cause the abusive crawlers to take my site down.

Anyhow, problem (hopefully) solved.

Published at 09:17 on 14 June 2025

There has been a lot of hand-wringing recently from many on the anti-Trump side of how the recent protests against ICE are doomed to be a disaster because they are not perfectly adhering to the ideals set forth by those wringing their hands.

Look, this is a stupid basis on how to judge things. No set of protests of any size and consequence is ever going to strictly adhere to any one individual’s pet set of standards for political protest. It’s just not going to happen.

This sort of unrealistically high standard is almost uniquely applied at home and nowhere else. Look at any other authoritarian country where open opposition emerges, and you will find incidents of, at the least, property destruction and retaliation in kind against police violence. Of course, the narrative is never about the property destruction or retaliation then. In fact, that stuff usually gets papered over in the mass media. But it’s fairly easy to find the images of burning vehicles and protesters throwing rocks at police if you look for them.

Almost never is there the “oh, dear, the protester’s tactics are going to alienate people from their cause” take for such protests abroad. Rather, the sign that protests are emerging at all is seen as a positive sign that the regime’s spell over its populace is breaking.

And yes, at this point, the USA is best understood as some form of a soft authoritarian regime. It’s really the only honest way to characterize a society where masked secret police go around disappearing people, with (up until the last week or so) very little resistance from the populace.

No, that doesn’t mean that optics are unimportant, or that there are not big issues on the American Left. I have written before on how much the American Left is an inward-looking subculture and of the necessity of any protest movement to break out of that subculture.

But that latter point cuts both ways. There is also a need for any protest movement to break out of the control of the Democratic Party and its allies. That crowd is so stunningly incompetent at the whole politics game that any leadership role on their part probably dooms opposition to ineffectiveness. What we don’t want is protests that can be turned on and off at the whims of the Democratic Party. We need the heat to stay turned up on Washington even after Trump is, one way or another, removed from office. The Democrats did very little to fight fascism under Biden and there is exactly zero reason to assume they will, absent a lot of pressure from below, do much about it again if they ever manage to regain power.

And this leads me to the really worrying thing about the planned No Kings protests. From what I have been able to determine, it’s all being run by a centralized leadership that is, in fact, closely linked to the Democratic Party.

We still have yet to see any sort of broad none-of-the-above movement emerge. This limits my optimism, although it is also true that in this sort of situation, any protests almost always beat no protests. So I am more optimistic than I was a month ago, but it will take significant changes in the nature of the opposition to Trump to raise that optimism to a truly significant level.