Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:44 on 7 July 2024

Published at 20:22 on 5 July 2024

The good news is that Biden wasn’t totally out of it like he was at the debate last week. The bad news for Biden is that he needed to really hit it out of the park, and he didn’t. He still came off sounding like an old man.

Some were worried that Stephanopoulos would only ask softball questions. He didn’t. He asked numerous pointed questions and was quite persistent when Biden evaded answering them forthrightly.

Of particular note is that Biden admitted that he has not yet watched his debate performance. It as if deep inside, he knows the uncomfortable truth of how much he has aged, how this affects his fitness for the office, and that he does not want to face it.

It was not a live interview, which limits how convincing it can be. It is difficult to definitively refute accusations that some senior moments ended up on the cutting-room floor, although I suspect they did not, for the simple reason that Stephanopoulos has a stake in this: he is a lifelong Democrat, and has reason to be concerned about Biden’s electability. This is probably why he was also not shy about asking his interviewee pointed questions.

P.S. The more I think about it, the more that Biden has been unwilling to watch his own debate performance is revealing, and not in a good way. It means he has serious mental hangups about assessing his own competence. That is not something we want to see in a president.

Published at 17:48 on 2 July 2024

Have I told you recently just how much I despise the Democratic Party leadership clique? I don’t mean all Democrats (although I am to the left of that party), I mean the leadership clique. The people who decided Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate in 2016. The people who decided to coronate Biden as nominee instead of having a primary competition this cycle. Those people.

They have the unmitigated gall to smugly act as if they are the responsible adults in the room. This, despite blunder after overwhelming blunder.

This brings us to the Vice-President. Unlike the leadership clique, she is one of the party’s liberals, not one of its centrists. Biden, a centrist, nominated her because he had to nominate a liberal as a running mate in order to maximize his ticket’s appeal to the progressive base.

Now that Biden has demonstrated his unfitness for office, Harris is the logical choice for someone to fill his post. Because of course she is. Just read the United States Constitution.

Biden has to plain old resign. If he doesn’t resign, if he stays in office for the remainder of his term while trying to coronate a centrist replacement at a brokered convention, it is going to piss off Blacks and progressives and cost Biden votes. We know dirty pool when we see it.

That puts the leadership clique in a quandary. They don’t like Harris. They really don’t like Harris. She is not one of them, she is a heartbeat away from the presidency, and they can’t stand it. So many of them are saying that Biden can’t resign, because Harris is, in their words, “unelectable.”

Listen, you morons: Biden just blew a presidential debate worse than any candidate has ever blown such a debate in my lifetime. Quite possibly, he blew it worse than any candidate in any presidential debate in all of United States history. This is no exaggeration, it is cold, hard fact.

Yet somehow you think this disaster of a candidate, who has manifestly exhibited his unfitness for the office he occupies and seeks reelection to, is less of a lift to reelect than a Vice-President who is 59 years old, in good mental and physical health, but just happens to be a bit too far left for your personal political tastes?

Suck it up, buttercups. You don’t get to call all the shots all the time. Either a fascist goes to the White House or a liberal does. Your choice.

I don’t normally ascribe to conspiracy theories, but if there was one I would buy in to, it is that the Democratic Party exists primarily as a conspiracy to control, contain, and disempower the Left, and that those who run it know this and are deliberately in the game to do so. I will note that the current line on Kamala Harris fits this narrative like a glove.

Published at 22:56 on 1 July 2024

Six fascists on the Supreme Court.

It’s dead, Jim. The Republic is dead.

Published at 20:37 on 28 June 2024

First, if Biden really was sick, why did we only learn this after the fact, when his team was desperate to make excuses for his poor performance? Why didn’t the White House warn us beforehand, so that expectations could be tempered?

Second, it is conceivable that he might have indeed had a cold (his voice was hoarse, after all), and his team wanted him to persevere because they were afraid of the damage admitting frail health might do.

Third, it doesn’t much matter in the end analysis whether or not Biden had a cold. He works at, and is campaigning for another term of, the hardest job in the world. One of the things that makes it a hard job is its physically demanding nature. You really don’t get much of a chance to rest and recuperate during physical illness. You are generally expected to plow through periods of sickness and keep working a demanding schedule.

Those are the terms of the job, and Biden just showed to all that he is no longer capable of them. And that is the most favourable honest assessment possible of Biden’s performance. If, as is more likely than not, he was not actually fighting a cold, he is even less up to the physical and mental demands of the job.

Published at 08:08 on 28 June 2024

1. Growing power of reactionary populism.
2. Insurrection by right-wing populist movement.
3. Elected government unwilling or unable to punish insurrectionists effectively.
4. Frail octogenarian selected to be president by pro-democracy forces (we are here).
5. Transition to fascist dictatorship.

Published at 22:04 on 27 June 2024

Really, Biden just about ticked all the boxes in the “frail old man who has no business running for the most difficult job in the world” department. Because that is precisely what he came off as.

F*ck you very much, Democratic Party leadership. First Hillary in 2016 and now a Biden second term attempt. You people have a talent for running sure losers. Yet you continue to act as if you are the smartest people around, and talk down condescendingly to anyone who dissents.

It doesn’t bode very well for a last-minute course correction.

Published at 16:47 on 25 June 2024

The same Go program I had to fight with for two days to get to the point where it was still unfinished, but:

• I had satisfied my curiosity that it was, indeed, possible to do the particular thing I was struggling with in Go, and
• It had been painful enough to prove to me that I should not consider Go a language of choice.

… Has now been coded to the same stage of completion in C++. It took half the time, half the effort, and under half the lines of code that it did in Go.

And that is as an absolute novice C++ programmer, writing his second C++ program ever. I had been experimenting with Go for about a year before I recently gave up on it.

It’s not that C++ is good, mind you. It’s a total cruft fest that should have been put out of business by something more modern at least 15 years ago. But it’s still possible to do things in C++ without the language and/or standard library persistently getting in your way like they do in Go.

Go is so bad it is literally worse than C++.

Published at 09:32 on 21 June 2024

I just can’t seem to learn. I so much want there to be a better alternative (i.e. a good, modern programming language that compiles down to machine code) to C/C++ out there. And I just can’t stop thinking that Go might be it. Then I keep running into problems. Go (and its libraries) continually keep making it very difficult to do clever things.

My obstacle this time is how Go parses command-line arguments. Most modern languages do this by building a collection of objects to describe the allowed command-line syntax, making a parse call, and receiving in return a collection of objects describing the options and arguments found.

Go is different, probably because it was written by individuals skeptical of object-oriented programming. Instead, it is all based on passing pointers into an argument-parsing subsystem. When one initiates a parse, the pointed-to variables get set in ways reflecting what the user typed on the command line.

That might work well enough in the simple case, but my case is not so simple. I am trying to write a family of related commands, each with a set of standard arguments, and most with some custom, command-specific arguments as well. Moreover, there is a configuration file, and it is possible to get values from there if they are not specified on the command line with options.

In Java, I have done that by using the Apache Commons CLI library, subclassing the main class that holds the syntax description, and having it auto-populate itself with the standard arguments. Then my subcommands all use that class, and automagically get the standard options they need. No fuss, no muss, no repeated code, and all the options are in a single place.

Then I pull those parsed option values into the class representing a parsed configuration file, so that a command-line option will overwrite the in-memory copy of an in-file option. Presto! All the configurable values I need are now all in one place. And not only that, it was simple and easy to accomplish.

Go’s pointer-based argument parsing makes this basically impossible. Oh, there’s an alternate argument parsing library out there, but it is likewise broken by design, because it is pointer-based as well. Wait! There is a “value interface” that might offer an out? Nope, sorry, no escape: it only seems to support string values (even Boolean flags are unsupported!), and it is incompletely documented.

I keep running into this sort of crap with Go. And only with Go. Other modern languages just don’t seem to have this degree of pervasive brokenness. The Python standard library, for example, parses arguments much in the same way that Apache library does in Java. Even the hoary old cruft-fest of a programming language that is C++ has a popular third-party library that does the right thing.

It’s not just argument parsing. Previously, I struggled with how Go’s character set support can’t signal an explicit error condition when it encounters invalid input. Java, Python, Ruby, C++: all can do this if requested. Not Go, at least not out of the box and not without a lot of extra effort.

It’s bad enough to make me seriously question if there’s any problem space out there for which Go is the most appropriate solution. I know there are large, successful software systems written in Go, but my own personal experiences make me suspect strongly that those projects were much harder to get to their current state of completeness than if they had been written in some other, less limiting, less pervasively crippled by bad design, environment.

Perhaps it’s all just me, and others don’t feel the suck so much. Frankly, I don’t think so. But that’s just one more person. More damning, I think, is the verdict of Go’s original sponsor, Google. If Go really was the way to fill the need for a more modern language that compiles to machine code, then Google would not be sponsoring the Carbon project.

It’s all a shame, because to reiterate I really want there to be a better alternative to C/C++ out there. Alas, Go does not seem to be it.

Published at 13:09 on 20 June 2024

What would give me hope, in the event of a Trump win, that a transition to fascist rule in the USA is unlikely? I think the answer is best found where I recently wrote that who ultimately prevails will mostly be “a question of which side manages to best triumph over its own internal incompetence.” The answer is, in other words, a question of how the opposition to Trump might manage to best triumph over its own internal incompetence, and how many signs of this appear.

I think the most promising such sign would be the appearance on the scene of what I will term, for lack of a better phrase, a “none of the above” opposition that quickly attracts a large degree of popular support. By “none of the above,” I mean that it won’t be associated (at least not explicitly) with either the Democratic Party establishment, or with the radical Left subculture. Many, perhaps most, involved in it won’t even personally identify as either Democrats or leftists, and neither will most of its initial leadership and/or public figures.

The necessary factors for such a movement appearing will exist, namely:

1. Trump’s extremism.
2. The self-evident incompetence of existing oppositional actors.

The first will motivate people to oppose Trump, and the second will make them realize that they can’t rely on existing organizations to do the opposing and must therefore create something new and more effective. The question is whether or not the motives will bear the desired fruit.

This also means that the best contingency plan would be to start laying the groundwork for facilitating the appearance of such a movement now.