Blackcap Blog

Published at 01:22 on 7 September 2025

1. There is no better Republican Party.
2. There is no better Democratic Party.
3. There is no better electorate.

To be considered rational and reality-based, any theory or proposal must at minimum satisfy all of the above the above three rules.

I am not saying that any of these things is impossible to change, only that spontaneous change is extremely unlikely. Consider them laws of political inertia: things will not change their current trajectories unless work is done on them.

For example, Chuck Schumer’s strategy of waiting for the Republicans to come ’round violates Rule No. 1, and that he persists in the Democratic Party leadership proves Rule No. 2.

Published at 09:56 on 5 September 2025

This just leaked out today.

And yes, I think an armed incursion into another nation, in which some of its civilians are shot and killed, definitely qualifies as an “attack.” If a North Korean commando team did likewise to the USA, you had damn well better believe the a-word would be getting a lot of use in the Western media.

Published at 13:26 on 2 September 2025

What will J.D. (Vance) do?

I think that is the main question to now ask about the U.S.A. There is a lot of speculation out there about how much time The Donald has left on this Earth, and Trump is not exactly young, so this is a reasonable question to ask.

There are, I think, two almost certainly true general principles that should guide this analysis:

1. J.D. Vance will be a more competent macroeconomic administrator than Trump.
2. J.D. Vance is unlikely to inspire the sort of cult following Trump has.

Let’s discuss these in order.

The Economy

Trump’s understanding of economic principles, particularly foreign trade, is just bizarre.

He apparently thinks any trade deficit anywhere implies that someone is getting the better of the U.S.A., and must be stopped. Well, what about essential natural resources that the U.S.A. has an insufficient amount of within its own border to satisfy the demands of its own economy? What if such a resource dominates the economy of a nation or two? Then of course the U.S.A. will run a deficit with those nations. It just has to be that way, that nation has a lot of what the U.S.A. wants, and the U.S.A. does not have so much of what that nation wants. How could it? That other nation is probably one heck of a lot smaller than the U.S.A. Just not enough consumers to buy very much.

The thing is, the U.S.A. still gets whatever resource it is in amounts greater than it otherwise would have, absent foreign trade. This allows the U.S. economy to grow more than it otherwise would have. The U.S.A. ends up better off, even with a trade deficit with Country X.

One of the key insights of economic theory is that transactions can be positive-sum; both parties can emerge better off post-transaction. Transactions don’t have to come with winners and losers. This insight is utterly absent from Trump’s beliefs about international trade.

I don’t grow my own food. Living in a big, expensive city, I can’t. Don’t have the required land. Not particularly interested in being a subsistence farmer, anyhow. So I buy food from my neighbourhood grocery store. I give them money, they give me food. They never give me money for anything. If me and the grocery store were countries, I would be running a trade deficit with them. Does this mean I’m worse off than if I had no access to food?

Trump has even gone so far as to claim “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Literally no economist, whatever their political biases, believes such a thing. They, almost down to a last one, believe precisely the opposite.

Even the economists that believe in managed trade draw a distinction between an orderly and cautious set of tariffs to drive industrial policy versus the chaotic retaliation and counterretaliation that entails a trade war. Trade wars are bad things that often prompt avoidable economic downturns.

Trump’s trade beliefs are just so out-there bizarre that I think it highly unlikely that J.D. Vance is that out there and bizarre. No, Vance has not criticized Trump’s trade policies, but this is most likely because Vance is just keeping his yap shut until he inherits the throne. A Vance administration will have a more sane and rational trade policy.

As such, a Vance administration is likely to exhibit improved economic performance over the alternate timeline of continued Trump trade policies.

The Cult

Trump is unique. There is hardly anyone else so well-suited to appeal to the moral shortcomings that have been indoctrinated in the American people in order to instill pro-capitalist sentiment into them.

The authority of the capitalist boss is similar to the authority of the dictator within a fascist state. In fact, the authority of the fascist dictator was deliberately modelled on the authority of the capitalist boss; Mussolini called his model for Italy the “corporate state” for this reason.

And it just so turns out that the amount of propaganda needed to instill in a people a consensus in favour of submission to the capitalist boss, something the U.S.A. has excelled at (the U.S.A., alone amongst industrial nations, has never had so much as a politically viable social democratic party), is only very slightly less than the amount needed to instill in them an appreciation for the merits of fascism. This is the root of the problem that has now manifested with Trump, and I started blogging about it over twenty years ago, well before Trump became a major political player.

It’s not just me nor is it a particularly recent insight. Approximately 100 years ago to this very day, Norman Thomas wrote: “… political democracy itself will remain in a perilous state while industrial autocracy continues. It is the old story: a house divided against itself cannot stand. A man not good enough to have anything to say about the conduct of the industry in which he makes his living is not good enough to be a voter in a self-governing republic.”

If I were to engineer the perfect leader to transition the U.S.A. to fascism, I would create someone almost exactly like Donald J. Trump. He would have to be a businessman, yes, but he would have to be a famous businessman, one in the public eye as a result of having been a TV or movie star. His acting role would be one that exemplifies and idealizes the authoritarian power of the capitalist over the worker. He should have a catchphrase such as “You’re fired” which embodies this power. He should have a record of demonstrated success as a self-made businessman. (That final item is something Trump, who inherited his fortune, does not have. But three out four ain’t bad.)

There really isn’t anyone else with these attributes ready to step into Trump’s shoes. At any rate, the one per the Constitution who will step into those shoes is J.D. Vance, who has precisely none of these qualities. He’s not even a businessman! He’s a career government employee who has not worked a single day in the private sector. [Update: I have been informed that this is incorrect and he did work as a venture capitalist.]

The closest businessman to Trump is Elon Musk. But he’s not even a natural-born citizen, and thus is not eligible. Plus, although Musk has a measure of star power, he’s not a TV or movie star. He’s just a capitalist with a knack for grabbing the headlines.

What does this mean? Unpopularity. Trump, with all his star power, is still polling underwater. Vance can, after a possible honeymoon period, be expected to poll more underwater.

The Transformation

The thing is, unpopularity won’t matter so much anymore. Per the previous article, the U.S.A. will no longer be what the U.S.A. once was, Trump having transformed it into a right-wing authoritarian system.

There will probably be some unrest, but it will be dealt with harshly. And the bleak news is that harsh measures typically work in authoritarian societies with naturally submissive populaces. And the latter is what we will have; the U.S. populace having already amply demonstrated its naturally submissive proclivities.

Add to those proclivities an economy that, at least initially, stabilizes itself, and any Vance regime will in large be accepted by a populace who doesn’t value freedom very much but mostly just wants personal safety and material comfort.

And with that, we can trace out the likely arc of the coming Vance Administration:

1. A more stable economic policy.
2. Despite the above, initial economic problems.
3. Growing unpopularity.
4. Repression.
5. Economic growth (thanks to No. 1 above eventually bearing fruit).
6. Regime stabilization.

Any hope for greater political freedom in the U.S.A. will have to wait.

The Slow-Acting Ticking Time Bomb

There will, however, be a slow-acting ticking time bomb, and that time bomb is called corruption. Authoritarian societies are inevitably more corrupt than open ones.

Economically, corruption eventually produces collapse. Crony capitalism is unstable, and crony capitalism in the new U.S.A. will be particularly unstable, existing as it does in a political culture that has proven itself repeatedly incapable of adequately regulating its financial sector.

The only question is how long it will take. It took about thirty years in Indonesia under the Suharto dictatorship, which is squarely within the 20–50 years that fascist political orders typically last. The U.S.A. doing a poor job at financial regulation may push things towards the low end of that range.

Even a political culture with generally low morals can be compelled to reform itself morally and resist once it learns a lengthy and painful lesson in the School of Hard Knocks that wages of low moral standards tend to be most unpleasant in the long run.

Published at 10:06 on 1 September 2025

Some U.S. presidents are what can be called transformational presidents. Lincoln (abolition), FDR (welfare state), LBJ (civil rights), etc.

All evidence points to Trump being in the same category, at least as transformative as LBJ and possibly as transformative as Lincoln. My reasoning is as follows:

1. What Trump did in his first term (significant expansion of presidential powers, coup attempt).
2. The comparatively very limited response to it, which cemented the legitimacy of what Trump did to expand presidential power, and set the precedent that coup attempts are now a mostly legitimate political tactic to be used as needed, at least by the Right.
3. What Trump is doing in his second term.
4. How muted the current response is in relation to what Trump is currently doing.

My initial wording was about the responses of the Democratic Party and the politicians who belong to it. Wording it as such is factually correct, but also factually incomplete, because it is not just the Democratic Party.

We could have the same old weak-willed Democratic Party we do in this timeline, but if we had a public that valued a free and open society more, there would have been massive public outrage at what Trump and the political parties (the Republicans, by enabling him, and the Democrats, by failing to vigorously oppose him) were doing. This would have prompted some combination of the Republican Party abandoning their president (like what happened to Nixon), and/or the Democratic Party pandering to the outrage and no longer being afraid to arrest, prosecute, and jail Trump and his top cronies.

Instead, we saw none of the above. Trump engaged in significant transition towards the principles of right-wing authoritarianism, and it was largely accepted by the vast preponderance of Americans. Oh, sure, there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end, the outcome was acceptance. Acceptance with grumbling is still acceptance. Acceptance with denial grounded in the mythology of American exceptionalism is still acceptance.

Sure, some inconsequential nobodies were prosecuted with much fanfare. So what. The ringleaders got off scot-free. That was the main lesson of the whole escapade.

And now we have his second term, in which Trump has ramped up his transformational initiatives, and the response has been amazingly acquiescent. A few protests here and there, more grumbling, but so far still business as usual. Trump is proposing dictatorship and Americans are generally accepting of the proposal.

Yes, yes, I know: opinion polls show Trump is underwater. Big deal. That is merely a form of grumbling. What matters is action, or lack thereof, and so far it has been primarily the latter.

If you want to see what a lack of acceptance looks like, look what happened in Greece when the Greeks decided not to accept the current state of their nation’s rail transport safety. Look what has happened in France when the French decided that reducing retirement benefits was unacceptable. Look at what South Korea and Brazil are doing in response to excesses by their chief executives.

Yes, yes: I know. There have been protests. A day of protest is planned for today. Some noises are being made about soft secession if Trump does stuff like deploying troops to Chicago. Vote blue no matter who and maybe Lucy won’t pull the football away this time. Colour me skeptical.

And yes, some are vigorously opposing it. The key word here is some. There is nowhere near the degree of opposition happening needed to stop the transformation. Focusing on the exceptions to a general trend is not the correct way to assess a situation.

This gets to why I reworded my list to remove explicit references to the Democratic Party. It’s not just the Democratic Party. Sure, it’s possible to blame a failure to lead on the Democrats. But it’s also the case that the Democrats have genuine reasons to believe that Americans by and large don’t want to be led to defend freedom. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: the Democrats don’t lead because there’s not much sentiment from below for them to pander to, and there’s not much sentiment from below because the Democrats aren’t leading.

Ultimately, the Democrats’ institutional spinelessness wouldn’t matter if more was happening in the grassroots. Being filled with spineless panderers, the Democratic Party could in that case pander… to the resistance movement. It would be spineless pandering, but it wouldn’t matter: the necessary things would be getting done, and that, more than the mechanics of why they are being done, is what would really matter.

Advocates of revolution would point to the success of the popular mobilization. Advocates of electoral reformism would point to the big blue wave and how the Democrats delivered. The endless reform-versus-revolution arguments would continue without resolution, both camps having some facts with which to argue.

But that, sadly, is all hypothetical. The vast preponderance of currently-available evidence points to Trump being a transformational president.

Published at 09:46 on 31 August 2025

Tom Nichols, normally a cautious voice about such speculations, thinks it may not be long.

But really, we don’t know. This is the least transparent presidency in history. We know that Trump is old (the oldest man to ever take the presidential oath of office). We know that he’s not as healthy as he once was.

But he has access to the best health care money and power can buy. The absolute best. Even those with lesser access can linger in an old and frail state for surprisingly long. So there is really no way to tell.

The one thing I can say is that I doubt he will live to serve out the full four years of his term. Beyond that, I cannot say much. The obituary may come this afternoon, or it may not come for several more years.

Published at 19:49 on 26 August 2025

I believe I read this long ago, before I purchased a Dragonfly. Then I forgot about it.

Anyhow, one of the annoyances with the Dragonfly is, no matter how much you let it burn down, it always seems to dribble a little fuel when you take it apart.

Then I realized that in the instructions for their similarly-designed liquid fuel stoves, Optimus tells you that when shutting the stove down, the first thing you should do is flip the bottle over. Then you wait for the flame to die (which takes about a minute but which happens real suddenly when it does). Then wait for the hissing to cease. Then, and only then, turn off the valves and disassemble. (Optimus even labels the fuel connectors for their bottles with “on” and “off” to indicate which orientation does what.)

What flipping the bottle over does is cause the dip tube that is normally on the bottom edge of the fuel bottle to be on its top edge instead. Instead of admitting fuel, it now admits pressurized air. This air then purges the fuel line.

And, despite the MSR instructions being silent about this trick, it works. Of course it does. MSR’s stoves have the same basic design.

No more dribbles!

Published at 09:00 on 21 August 2025

I have had one since 2021 so I guess an experience-based update is past due.

Executive summary: High-end stove with high-end performance at a high-end price.

I have yet to take it bikepacking or backpacking (although I expect that to change fairly soon), but I have used it a lot during strict fire bans, thanks to its CSA certification. Otherwise, I typically continue using my vintage Coleman 425E two-burner “suitcase” stove, simply because having a second burner can be a real plus at times.

That Coleman stove works well in the cold and well in the wind, but the Dragonfly still has it beat on both aspects.

The Coleman can be a bit fiddly to light when the temperature is below about 5˚C. (And yes, I sometimes camp in such chilly weather.) The Dragonfly is just rock-solid. It doesn’t matter how cold it is, it primes as easily as it does on a summer afternoon.

Likewise, although I have always been impressed by how well the Coleman stove works on windy days, the Dragonfly just does better yet.

None of this should be a surprise. The MSR stoves, particularly their liquid fuel ones, were designed for mountaineering use in extreme conditions.

Quality often comes with a price, and that is no exception here. I think I paid close to CAD $200 for mine in 2021, and a quick check shows the current price to be in the CAD $250–350 range (yes, it varies that much, which shows how much it pays to comparison shop). Even at the lower end of that range, I would not blame people for thinking twice.

I would, however, caution against saving money buy buying a Chinese white gas stove (there are a number of such models for sale online), unless I could be certain it has a valid safety certification from the UL or CSA. There is simply too much unsafe crap from China being sold online.

Instead, try to find a used, late-model MSR or other name brand stove (Optimus is another well-established brand). A quick check on eBay shows it should be possible to get one for about half the price of a new stove. Or, if you don’t live someplace with strict burn bans like I do, a used older stove in good condition.

And yes, it can simmer (something many white gas stoves, which often are designed for boiling water and not much else, have difficulty with).

Bottom line is that the Dragonfly does live up to its reputation for quality, performance, and flame control.

Published at 07:55 on 19 August 2025

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s autobiographical account of his 1952 journey through South America is something I have been wanting to read since seeing the movie based on it about two decades ago. (Talk about procrastination.)

I had been hoping to, in part, gain some insight into Che’s eventual support for authoritarian leftism.

On that latter term, some leftists disagree with it, saying leftism is intrinsically anti-elite and therefore “leftist” regimes like the one in Cuba (which do have a ruling elite) are in fact anti-leftist. I find such arguments unconvincing, because the motives of the authoritarianism in such regimes are different from the motives of it in right-wing authoritarian regimes. One strives to use force to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system (and tends to not much concerned with preservation of traditional values), the other strives to use force to maintain traditional hierarchies and values.

Trying to overthrow traditional hierarchies on the grounds that they are unjust is classic leftism, therefore I feel the “authoritarian leftism” label is both fair and descriptive. Moreover, it jibes well with conventional terminologies, and I see value in not adopting a rhetoric so divorced from conventional usage as to impede comprehension. It is the mission of the political left to engage with society and to change it, not to retreat into inward-looking subcultures that are mostly irrelevant to the masses.

But I digress. Back to insights into how Guevara became the political force he eventually became. In this respect, I was not disappointed.

The appendix of the book I have contains the translated text a retrospective speech given by Guevara in 1960, in which he claimed “When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.”

I disagree with that assessment, or at least I find it highly misleading. The young Guevara does express core sentiments that stayed with him throughout his life, so far as I can see, and while these core sentiments might be outnumbered by his later insights, they stayed with him and profoundly guided him to become what he became.

Namely, it is clear that Guevara did not in any way reject authoritarianism. This became obvious when reading his near-admiration for Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia and his “indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority” (“Abaca Chile,” “The End of Chile”).

Authoritarianism has been, sadly, part of the scene in Latin America, where nations have, despite the aspirations of many for something better, tended until quite recently to be led by a succession of one strongman after another. Guevara came of age in Argentina under Perón, and writes in his diaries of how, as Argentines, he and Alberto Granado (his travelling companion), were often admired as being from the nation where Perón had won some gains for the working class and the poor.

Many decades ago I read an essay on Guevara that claimed he was, in a sense, a Peronist. At the time, I thought the charge preposterous. Now, I think it has a lot of truth in it. He wasn’t strictly a Peronist (Juan Perón was not a revolutionary and in fact was quite the traditionalist in some aspects), but Guevara did, like Perón, see politics as an exercise in using strongman power to improve the lot of the less fortunate.

To this we can add how Guevara’s personal experiences with liberal democracy as practiced by the USA ranged from somewhat to profoundly unpleasant. First, there was his unplanned stint in Miami at the end of his 1952 journey, in which he got to experience the injustice and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow-era South first-hand.

Even more tragically there was Guatemala, where by a minor miracle (it is always a miracle when left values triumph in a bourgeois society), a leftist, Jacobo Árbenz, won a presidential election and set about reforming Guatemalan society. Árbenz was not a strongman, and did respect civil liberties. The changes happening in Guatemala inspired Guevara, who travelled there to assist the Árbenz government.

But the liberal, democratic values of the Guatemalan revolution didn’t matter. The response of the USA to the democratic, peaceful social revolution Árbenz was trying to create was to sponsor a coup d’etat and overthrow him. Forty long years of bloody repression and civil war followed.

In a world where resistance does not have to be small-l libertarian, in a political culture where pro-liberty values were the exception more than the norm, where a nonviolent revolution that tried to espouse these values till the end had seen them exploited as weaknesses by the forces of superpower imperialism, and where there was a competing superpower holding the promise of leftist revolution with competing values, it is pretty obvious where on the political spectrum Ernesto “Che” Guevara would probably end up.

Which, basically, is where he did end up.

Published at 10:45 on 18 August 2025

It was clear back in 2020 that the historic mission of MAS was now to find a way beyond the cult of personality that had grown up around three-term ex-president Evo Morales, and to transition from the party of Evo into a party of ideas.

Well, they didn’t. Part of MAS wanted to move on, part clung stubbornly to the cult of personality, and the party basically disintegrated as a result of compromise not being possible between two such factions. And yesterday, the inevitable happened.

It didn’t help that MAS also failed to find a way forward after its initial (and initially very successful) plan of using nationalized natural gas revenues to drive spending on economic and social development started faltering as a result of declining revenue. A logical next step would have been to turn to Bolivia’s lithium reserves and use those similarly, but that was never done.

Except it wasn’t inevitable. It could have also ended in left authoritarianism, as one MAS faction used force to impose its will on the other (and on Bolivians in general). Well, it could have, but it didn’t, because of the decentralized nature of the Bolivian social revolution, which has always been big part of my admiration for it, made such a thing highly unlikely.

The most likely end result is now a bourgeois democracy led by the Christian Democrats. Freedoms to organize for something better will in all likelihood remain, and when the new government sells Bolivia short to foreign capital, as it inevitably will, there be an opening for new social movements to arise. Hopefully they will learn from the failures of the past.

Despite Bolivia’s growing debts and inflation, the end result of the social revolution that began with the popular uprisings of the early 2000’s has been net positive. There has been significant economic growth, infrastructure development, and improvement in public health in the past 20 years.

No, it didn’t usher in a new era of socialist utopia in which Bolivia rocketed to first-world levels of development and became a worker’s paradise. No serious observer expected this: this is the real world we are talking about, where miracles and utopias do not exist. But it also, contrary to the consensus of Establishment naysayers, did not end in tyranny and economic ruin.

Popular revolution can work, if decentralism is embraced and authoritarianism is resisted.

Published at 14:08 on 15 August 2025

Some policy proposals have only lengthy, complex arguments in their favour. This one ie easy.

What Israel has done to Gaza is worse than what Russia has done to Ukraine. If you can’t acknowledge this than it is time to acknowledge that your internal biases might be getting in the way of your ability to perceive obvious facts.

Russia has had the hell sanctioned out of it for what it is doing to Ukraine. And rightly so.

Yes, the two situations are not precisely the same. News flash: no two conflicts ever are. The salient point here is the amount of civilian suffering being imposed, and how the Gazans are indisputably suffering far more than the Ukrainians are.

The conclusion seems inescapable to me. Fairness and proportionality say that it is time to sanction the hell out of Israel.