Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:57 on 9 April 2025

It is amusing to see all the Trumpsplainers trying to hypothesize why Trump is doing what he is doing, when simply observing all the easily-observable facts and applying Occam’s Razor yields a far simpler and far more logically consistent explanation.

Trump has no hidden master plan with respect to trade policy. He’s not a man of great intellect. He’s the sort of intellectually and morally compromised individual that only a bourgeois society, in thrall to capitalism and possessed of a need to rationalize the power that capitalists have, could elevate to a position of great power.

Trump is exactly who he appears to be: a child of privilege, born into great wealth, whose entire life has taught him — correctly — that in a bourgeois society there is no true rule of law, that the wealthy and powerful are not bound by the laws that bind lesser people.

Trump’s inherited class privilege got him out of having to serve against his will in Vietnam. It got him a degree from an Ivy League school. It got him a huge head start in business. Once in business, he used that class privilege to repeatedly shaft his suppliers, and to repeatedly evade any serious consequences for doing so.

It is Trump’s power as capitalist, the authoritarian leader of the capitalist firm with near absolute power to fire employees at will, that got him his most famous byline during his career as an actor playing a capitalist on television.

His entire life has taught him that he can do whatever he wants, follow his whims wherever they lead him, and not only evade personal consequences, but exist in a society where huge numbers nevertheless still continue to admire him and celebrate his power.

Another characteristic of Trump is his inflated ego. This is amply-demonstrated by his numerous statements boasting of his own imagined great skills. He always thinks he is the smartest guy in the room.

Although himself a capitalist, he doesn’t always personally adhere to capitalist orthodoxy, which is pretty much squarely behind free trade. He probably would, if he were better at reasoning things out and following logical implications. But he’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier of society. (He just thinks he is.)

For whatever reason, he has long been a big fan of tariffs. That many very smart, very bourgeois, very pro-capitalist economists think otherwise is irrelevant. That even most apolitical economists think otherwise is irrelevant. That even many left-leaning economists think otherwise is irrelevant. The consensus of social scientists, like the consensus of any sort of scientists, is irrelevant. He’s sure he’s the smartest guy in the room, after all.

Trump is so much a fan of tariffs that he once called himself a “tariff man.” He once went so far as to quip that trade wars are good and easy to win.

By virtue of assuming power in a sick republic that has amassed ever-growing power into its presidency and which has never held a president accountable to the law, Trump now has the power to create tariffs. So tariffs there are.

Last time, Trump was never fully prepared to rule. He actually was surprised he won in 2016. He never seriously planned to win, so he had no ideas (before winning) of who to assemble into an administration.

So when he won, he was forced to wing it. A lot of the folks he assembled weren’t the greatest, but a few key ones were actually competent. And even the mediocre ones could usually recognize a truly moonbat when they saw one. So his worst ideas tended to get stalled, slow-walked, and watered down.

Not in 2024. He knew he could win because he had won once before. He had plenty of helpers and followers who knew he could win and who came up with plans for what to do if he won. He assembled a team of unquestioningly loyal sycophants. There is no pushback from within this time.

So tariffs there are, and tariffs there will continue to be until Trump himself decides to change course. And Trump is now more insulated from reality than ever, so tariffs there might continue to be for some time, despite how much harm they are causing.

There is no 3D quantum chess strategy. There is just a narcissistic fascist with great power acting on his personal whim. Nothing more, nothing less.

As to what happens next, I am sure top capitalists are trying to twist Trump’s arm and get him to reconsider his policies. Who knows, they might even be successful. Trump could declare victory, citing a willingness on the part of trading partners to negotiate, and turn off the tariffs.

Then again, he could persevere; he is more insulated from reality than he ever was. This trade war could be to Trump as the Ukraine war is to Putin. Note that Putin is still in power despite how much worse than planned his Ukraine war has gone. But also note that Putin had consolidated power a lot more before he embarked on his Ukraine misadventure.

If he perseveres, expect the fascist playbook to be followed: his regime will blame the resulting economic problems on immigrants, transpeople, and others it has chosen as its scapegoats. And, the USA being the morally compromised society it is, the scapegoating may well prove to be successful.

If you’re looking for predictions, “Trump will continue to do whatever his whim dictates” is not a very good predictive theory. I suspect this is why so many pundits are avoiding this most obvious of theories.

But it doesn’t matter. The world does not organize itself around making life easy for pundits. There is no secret strategy.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Looks like the capitalists persuaded him to put most of it on hold… for now (or until his whim takes him in another direction).

Published at 16:35 on 3 April 2025

That is my summary of where career conservative J.V. Last is right now. Late last month he wrote an essay which included the following:

The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.

Granted, he still has faith in the Democratic Party that I don’t have, but he’s not really that far from what I have already concluded here earlier. It took about four years for the corpse to start stinking badly enough for even some conservatives to now realize it, but here we are.

Inconvenient facts are curious things. They don’t become any less inconvenient when you ignore them. Quite the contrary, in fact.

And make no mistake: I am glad to see individuals like Last finally start coming on board. It’s what growing a movement looks like.

Published at 09:15 on 31 March 2025

Executive Summary

Export your video from the Photos app in original, unmodified format. Then, in the Finder (yes, the Finder), right-click on the video file you exported and choose Services → Encode Selected Video Files, and choose your encoding (1080p in my case). The result will be an HD video that can be shared on YouTube and which will not be all desaturated and overexposed.

The Details

The first time I tried importing a video shot on my iPhone into DaVinci Resolve it happened: the video was all washed-out and overexposed. It brought back bad memories of uploading still photos to the Web and viewing them on my Mac in the late aughts, as the overall effect was quite similar.

Then, the fault was Apple software botching colour management. Specifically, Safari was assuming that any image file without colour management data embedded in it should be displayed using the native Apple colour space. The latter has a wider gamut than the de-facto standard sRGB colour space, and using it to view unconverted sRGB data causes photos that look overexposed and desaturated, i.e. “washed out.” The same web page would have photos that would look just fine on Linux and Windows systems.

Mac fanboys at this stage would get all pompous about how “Apple does colour management right” when in fact Apple was getting it massively wrong. Yes, Apple did use a colour space that provided a wider gamut than Windows or Linux. Yes, Apple system tools and libraries had support for reading colour space data before Linux and Windows did, but their handling of data with no colour space information was flawed; what should have been interpreted as sRGB was instead being interpreted as being in the native system colour space.

So it was Apple’s fault. The workaround was to always embed colour space data in every image saved for Web use, and to always save that data in sRGB form. Windows and Linux would ignore the colour space information but the image data would be sRGB so it would display correctly there. Apple software would see the sRGB colour space metadata and do the necessary conversion before passing it on for display.

Eventually, Apple fixed their broken colour management, but old habits die hard and I still save still images in the above way for Web use.

I don’t know exactly who is at fault here, but:

• The iPhone camera application is being weird. The Rec.709 gamma and colour space are the industry defaults for 1080p (i.e. “HD”) video (in fact, they were developed for use in HD video), yet if you tell your iPhone to shoot video in “HD” mode, it uses the Rec.2020 colour space with the Rec.2100 HLG gamma. You get an oddball video file instead of a standard HD one.
• The Photos app on both the iPhone and the desktop Macs will display the resulting video just fine, as will QuickTime Player and iMovie.
• When you import the video into DaVinci Resolve, the result looks all washed-out.
• When you export the video from the Photos app and tell it to use 1080p format, it does convert the colour space, but it does a poor job of it. The result looks somewhat washed-out and it has weird colour shifts.
• When you add a colour space transform to DaVinci Resolve’s colour processing, it also does a poor job of conversion.

So at this stage my money is on it mostly being DaVinci Resolve’s fault. It seems to be ignoring colour space information and assuming everything is Rec.709. It also seems deficient in reasonable defaults for colour space conversion (if the Finder can do it and get acceptable results without a lot of tedious tweaking by hand, DaVinci Resolve should offer a way to do this as well).

But Apple doesn’t completely escape blame here. If video colour space conversion is so tricky to get right (and I think this is part of the problem), then why use the troublesome Rec.2020 colour space when the user is telling the Camera app to shoot HD videos?

Apple fanboys should at this stage have a nice hot steaming cup of STFU. Yes, I know that Rec.2020 is “better” in the sense that it has a wider gamut and finer resolution than the industry standard, and thus preserves the ability to do more recovery of correct information in postprocessing. But the user has told the Camera app to shoot an HD video. That is critical. When the rest of the world talks about an “HD” video, they are talking about a video in the Rec.709 colour space, not some oddball Franken-video with the HD resolution but a non-HD colour space that will massively fail when shown on most video players on most platforms. Preserve the ability to shoot and save with greater colour resolution, yes, but don’t call it “HD” video if it’s not recording standard HD video.

There is, thankfully, a way to do a colour space conversion that produces acceptable results. It is hidden in, of all places, the Finder. See the executive summary above.

This, too, is Apple’s fault. The conversion should not be hidden in the Finder. It should not be in the Finder at all. It should be an option in the Photos app. (Well, it is, but that option doesn’t do a good job. Apple needs to fix the colour space conversion in Photos and clean up the Finder to not have the feature creep it does.)

To reiterate, it all brings back bad memories of what life was like fifteen or so years ago with still images. Implementing colour management in ways that could be theoretically superior to industry standards, but botching the implementation and making life needlessly difficult for your users, just seems to be in Apple’s genes. And mostly ignoring the desirability of embedding colour space info in media files seems to be in everyone else’s genes.

Published at 08:01 on 8 March 2025

Or, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” versus “peace, order, and good government.”

At least, that’s the dichotomy as it is commonly presented on both sides of the border. Or, should I say, it is so far as Americans are even aware of the second quoted phrase above, and most are not. It is a dichotomy that I disagree with. While it is possible to pick and choose examples that fall into that narrative, one does not have to try very hard to find counterexamples to it.

Zoning and Land Use Planning

I live in a neighbourhood of the sort that simply does not exist in most US West Coast cities. The sole exception is San Francisco, which is old enough to predate most planning and zoning laws. My neighbourhood does not predate such laws, yet it has a form more typical of neighbourhoods that predate such laws in the USA.

First, the lot sizes are a lot smaller. In the USA, supposed land of individual freedom and property rights, there was a government agency (the FHA) handing down dictates from above regarding, amongst other things, minimum lot size. Properties in nonconforming neighbourhoods would be not be eligible for government-underwritten mortgages, so not surprisingly, municipalities and developers caved to the demands. In Canada, supposed land of submission to good government, the Federal government was largely silent. The market dictated lot sizes, and since there was a market for 3500 square foot lots, such lots were platted and sold.

Second, a lot of the people who first settled here were immigrants from southern Europe. They were not wealthy. They could only just barely afford homes, and many of them couldn’t afford homes on their own; they could only afford them if they split their housing cost with some tenants. So they did just that. Now, this was against the law, these areas being at the time zoned for single family use. But then a curious thing happened: the City of Vancouver blanched at enforcing the law. These were people’s homes after all. These were individuals with property rights choosing to do what they wanted with their property. Is this the sort people we are, to come down with the mailed fist of authority onto individuals pursuing their own dreams with their own homes in their own way? So East Vancouver ended up becoming neighbourhood after neighbourhood of mainly duplexes. Eventually the city acknowledged reality and legalized such uses.

Americans have tried to do this, too. Sometimes it flies, but usually it doesn’t end so well. Neighbours notice other neighbours have too many cars parked in front, or have too many people entering and exiting, some routinely using the exterior entrance to the basement. A zoning violation gets reported. And the city usually comes down hard on such things. We have neighbourhood standards to enforce after all. Conform to the norm or suffer the consequences.

Policing

Independent police oversight, in which a third party investigates accusations of unlawful behaviour by law enforcement officers, is the norm in Canada and many other First World democracies. It is the exception to the norm in the USA, where police departments are generally trusted to police themselves. How this can be squared with Canadians having faith in government and Americans questioning authority is simply beyond me.

Incarceration

No nation locks up as many people as does the USA, either per capita or in absolute numbers. Not even China. Not even Russia. Not even Cuba. My guess is that North Korea should probably be number one on that list, but accurate data is sort of hard to come by when it comes to the Hermit Kingdom. Still, if your standards for a core human rights measure are “well, at least we’re better than North Korea,” let me suggest that your standards define the bottom of the barrel. Again, how this can be squared with Canadians being the ones more accepting of authority and submission to it is simply beyond me.

Prohibition

This one’s a little murkier. Both the USA and Canada went on an ill-fated experiment to micromanage which substances adults may or may not imbibe, and it went poorly in both countries. The difference is that when it started going poorly in Canada, it got repealed. Because of course it did: it was just like the illegal duplexes of which I wrote earlier. Do we really want to be in the business of policing what private citizens want to drink in their own homes? Is that the sort of society we are?

The USA doubled down. Respect authority! Obey! Time for a new, powerful, Federal police agency! Only after the doubling-down failed, and a Great Depression made people realize that a legal, profitable, alcoholic beverages industry might prove to be something of an economic shot in the arm, did the failed experiment finally end. In the meantime, Americans acquired a taste for Canadian whisky which led to one of Canada’s more profitable export industries.

On cannabis, some US states such as Colorado and Washington beat Canada to the game at legalization. Sort of. It’s still illegal on the Federal level, so what we have is a legal gray area where cannabis is illegal under Federal law but legal under State law, so the state and local cops won’t enforce what is a Federal matter. Plus it’s an all-cash business; banks are Federally regulated and don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Canada took its time (and many Canadians were embarrassed that it took so long), but cannabis is now completely legal here. Pot shops take credit and debit cards, because of course they do, that makes life easier for your customers and the banks have no qualms about serving just another legal business.

One area that fits the popular narrative is that no province pushed the envelope the way any US state did and tried to legalize cannabis before the Federal government was ready.

Narcotics

Canada trusts me, as a responsible adult, to go to my local pharmacy and purchase narcotics over the counter. No, they are not very strong narcotics. Yes, I do have to go and ask the pharmacist for them. Yes, he does ask to see my ID, and does record my purchase, so if I become addicted, it will be evident to the authorities. But I still can do it. Not in the so-called land of the free.

The Draft

Canada has been very reluctant to conscript people into its military against their will. Doing so during World War I triggered rioting and a political crisis. It was the USA that drafted young men to go fight in Vietnam against their will, and it was to Canada that many of these men fled for sake of their individual liberty. It is hard to think of any greater violation of liberty than to force an individual into servitude, yet the USA did just that.

Slavery

And not just during the Vietnam War. For decades, enslaved Black Americans fled north to freedom via the Underground Railroad. It’s not so well known in the USA, but Canada had slavery at one time, too. It just wasn’t so economically important on this side of the border, and quickly ran into adverse court decisions (there was a famous one in what is now Quebec that proclaimed that while slavery was legal, there was no law against a slave running away from their master). It was the so-called land of the free that for decades made peace with slavery and rationalized it because it was economically profitable.

LGBTQ Rights

Sex between consenting adults became fully legal nationwide in Canada in 1969. It took until 2003 for the USA to get to the same place (via a court decision that could be reversed at any time now). Canada also beat the USA when it came to legalizing same-sex marriage (which again is the law of the land in the USA by virtue of a court decision that could be reversed any time now).

And Finally, the Elephant

You know, the decline in liberty accompanying the transition to fascism that most Americans apparently seem just fine with. And sorry, I don’t know any other honest way to interpret those poll results. If Party A is advocating fascism, and Party B is advocating something squarely within the bounds of small-l, small-d liberal democracy, and the overall public takeaway that Party A is approximately where it ought to be and Party B is too far left, well, it seems obvious to me.

But You’re Cherry-Picking!

Sure, there’s things that fit the narrative (I even pointed one out above). But come on now, the last few months should conclusively prove beyond doubt that something is rotten in the supposed Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Some of us have been sensing the rot for some time.

I suggest it’s merely a commonly-believed narrative, and not any sort of accurate summary of actual political attitudes. The land of “peace, order, and good government” is quite often also the land of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and such it has long been.

Published at 09:27 on 23 February 2025

Let me start by saying I have been nothing but satisfied with Digital Ocean, which I use to host this blog, so far. The issue here is not anything Digital Ocean has done, it is what Digital Ocean is highly likely to do in the future.

Digital Ocean is a capitalist enterprise based in a country undergoing a transition from democracy to fascism. The historical role of the capitalist class is to line up in support behind fascist regimes whenever they arise.

I do not know the politics of Digital Ocean’s top management and board of directors. It does not much matter. Even if both are dominated by political progressives, compliance with the rapidly-emerging fascist regime is highly likely.

In a capitalist corporation, management serves at the pleasure of the board, whose prime mission is to act in the interest of the corporation’s stockholders and their desire to maximize profits. Profits are not maximized by staking out adversarial positions to an authoritarian regime.

The above makes compliance the expected outcome, and the historical record of capitalism under fascism bears this theory out.

Yes, even under the Nazis there were businesses like DEF (Oskar Schindler’s firm) and Ernst Leitz GmbH (the makers of Leica cameras) that tried to do the right thing as much as they could. But even they were heavily constrained, and did a lot of complying (both manufactured materiel for the Wehrmacht). Even if Digital Ocean follows in their footsteps (and odds are against it, good guys like Leitz and Schindler are the exceptions that prove a general rule), they will still have to make a public show of being loyal Trump fascists.

Even in the optimistic case, then, this site is likely to end up as collateral damage should it remain on Digital Ocean.

Hence, it is now time for me to move this site elsewhere, which brings me to the requirements for what “elsewhere” should ideally be.

1. As little US connection as possible. Ideally this would be an organization that is neither owned by US capital, managed or overseen by US citizens, based in the USA, nor physically hosted in the USA.
2. Cloud hosting that lets me run my own installation of WordPress on my own installation of Linux. I am not interested in sharing an OS installation or a WordPress installation with others; past experience has taught me that both are insufficient to my needs.
3. The ability to assign a static IP address to a virtual server.
4. A provider that offers an S3-compatible cloud storage service, since I use such to keep this site backed up.

Any suggestions as to the above would be greatly appreciated!

Published at 11:29 on 6 February 2025

Ironically, this is something which could be created by disbelieving in it.

Assume a widespread disbelief in the relevance of the Democratic Party, accompanied by a widespread rejection of Trump. Then, the most likely result is the pursuit of change outside the auspices of the Democratic Party.

Since the Party is, in fact, incompetent almost to the point of irrelevance, this would make the resistance more effective than one which pursues mainly in-Party strategies.

Now, while the Democrats are incompetent, they are also the lesser half of a two-party duopoly. This is part of the reason for their incompetence, in fact; the duopoly insulates the Democrats from the normal forces of ideological competition.

The same duopoly also makes it extremely difficult for any sort of new movement to gain true, effective party status. (The latter has happened only once in U.S. history, when abolitionists created the Republican Party.) The natural outcome, borne of Democratic Party opportunism and oppositional frustration, is some sort of merger of the new opposition with the old Democratic Party. This could then make the post-merger Democratic Party more relevant.

By contrast, a widespread continuation of belief in the Democrats’ relevance is likely to enable them to coast along in their current ineptitude, protected by the duopoly, as they evolve into an opposition in name only that serves mainly to legitimize a fascist state run by a Republican Party that dominates virtually all aspects of the political process.

Whichever option is chosen will, in other words, be a self-falsifying prophecy.

Published at 09:11 on 29 January 2025

China is probably key to halting this global rise in fascism. When will the world realize it? When will China realize it?

I think, in some sense, China already has realized it, but has chosen to word it all very diplomatically… for now. They don’t want to pick fights needlessly or prematurely.

Yes, China is a nasty dictatorship, with approximately zero interest in directly advancing the cause of freedom. But, per the link in the previous paragraph, it is a dictatorship that values stability and the international system, which is more than one can say for today’s USA. Plus, like every nation, China wants greater power and influence for itself.

The part about valuing stability and an international framework is important. It gives other nations something more than “USA #1, suck it, losers!” does. Sure, China is going to advocate an international framework rigged to China’s advantage. But it’s still a framework. There will still be commitment to it. This is still better for the rest of the world.

As such, good old-fashioned self-interest will motivate most of the rest of the world to prefer the Chinese option. This is precisely the sort of soft power that for decades led nations to opt for a framework dominated by the USA, despite that framework being rigged to the USA’s advantage.

In short: China understands soft power. The USA no longer does. This can be expected to work in China’s favour over the long run.

The old American empire is not coming back, either. U.S. allies could wave off Trump I as a one-off anomaly; Trump himself didn’t have any idea how powerful the presidency was, or have a very good idea of what to do with that power. Trump II knows both, and so far as U.S. allies go, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Plus, so far as the rest of the world goes, it always makes sense to not put all of one’s eggs in a single basket. In a world with two roughly comparable major powers (which is what it will soon be), national freedom of action is often best maximized by playing one power off another.

Europe is slowly getting over its post-World War II aversion to power, but too slowly to become the major power it might be any time soon. Plus, Europe has its own fascism problem.

So, for the medium term, China versus the USA it is. And China probably has the upper hand.

Published at 15:36 on 19 January 2025

Notice that it’s an old-fashioned corded one. “I wish mice didn’t have cords” is a thought that has passed through my mind exactly never. Bluetooth mice struck me as a stupid idea a dozen years ago, and they strike me as a stupid idea today.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they still made old-fashioned corded mice, given how long Bluetooth ones have been around. I guess it goes to show that I am not the only corded mouse diehard out there. Maybe I should have purchased a second one just in case the market decides to make wireless mice mandatory before this one dies, but I have enough of an issue with accumulating clutter as it is.

As for keyboards and mice, so for phone headsets, but double or treble.

Again, use Bluetooth and they become battery-dependant. They lose a convenient leash that keeps both earbuds paired with each other, and which makes the whole headset significantly larger and easier to find. I just know I’d be losing headsets, running into dead batteries, and ending up with singleton earbuds if I was stupid enough to buy into the Bluetooth hype.

Furthermore, a huge part of my reason for preferring to use a headset on the phone is to get the phone’s antenna away from my skull. No, there is no definite evidence that low-power microwaves are harmful to the brain, but given that it is so easy to drastically reduce my exposure (thank you, inverse square law), why shouldn’t I?

A long time ago, I worked in the nuclear industry, and they have a policy called ALARA which means as low as reasonably achievable. A canonical example, on posters throughout my workplace, showed a worker tasked with moving a low-level radioactive item from one place to another. A cart was available, and using it meant one could put the item on the far end of the cart and wheel it to its destination, instead of carrying it against one’s body. Moral of the story: use the cart. Always do everything you can to minimize your exposure.

Well, Bluetooth uses radio waves to do its thing, which makes Bluetooth headsets a whole lot less useful for reducing RF exposure, since each earbud has a tiny radio transmitter in it.

And then we have bluetooth pairing, needed to prevent unauthorized devices from connecting to one’s computer. Sometimes this ends up being a tremendous pain. For example, I have never had much luck pairing a smart phone with my desktop computer. I tried it, I thought it would be nifty to download images without using a USB cable. Spent most of an hour getting it to work, it worked for a while, then it stopped working. Blew another hour trying to get things working again, then gave up and used a USB cable (which, of course, worked perfectly). Ever since it’s been USB cable all the way.

Aside for some niche cases (such as keyboards for tablets, which have limited battery power and one or no USB ports), Bluetooth just doesn’t make sense, and comes across as the answer to the question: “How do we take perfectly fine wired connections and make them dramatically worse?”

Published at 15:52 on 8 January 2025

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that Canada is going to face a reckoning in the next few months, and that most Canadians really have no idea of what is likely coming. It might completely reshape the political landscape before the coming Federal election can be held, it is that much of a reckoning.

The thorough rottenness of the American system is about to be laid bare, and it will become evident that Canadians as well as Americans have largely been living in ignorance of the full magnitude of this rottenness. This will send a real jolt through the Canadian political system.

If Canadians are willing to demonstrate to Trump that, as Jagmeet Singh recently said “If you want to pick a fight with us, it’s going to hurt you as well,” it is likely that Trump’s bluff will have been called. Trump is a classic bully, and bullies engage in bullying not because they are brave, but because they think they can get away with it.

Whatever the cost of standing up to the bullying, it will in the long run (and probably even in the medium run) end up being far cheaper than choosing to not stand up to the bully. It is not resistance but acquiescence that has the highest price attached to it.

Published at 10:12 on 14 December 2024

The Republic of Korea, more commonly known as South Korea, just demonstrated itself to have a much healthier political culture than the so-called leader of the free world. It’s not even remotely a close call.

President Yoon Suk Yeol, frustrated at a National Assembly that refused to do his bidding, declared martial law, accusing his opponents of being “communists” (a frequent screed launched by conservatives at their opponents, whether or not actual communism is at play).

It hasn’t gone so well for Yoon or his government since then. The National Assembly promptly reconvened (challenging soldiers who were attempting to block the entrance to its Proceeding Hall), and unanimously voted to revoke the declaration. Yes, a unanimous vote, including Assembly members who belonged to the same party as the president. None of this falling in line behind Yoon like the US Republicans fall in line behind Trump.

It’s not been a picture perfect response. The logical next step is to impeach the fascist who just tried to destroy democracy. On that, there was foot-dragging, due to opposition from parliamentarians in the president’s own party. But recently, enough of them were persuaded to cross the aisle to get the necessary supermajority for impeachment.

Advocates of martial law within Yoon’s administration are also being dealt with. And by “being dealt with,” I mean being treated like the accused criminals they are: arrested, detained, and charged with crimes in preparation for their trials. Not so much of the endless hand-wringing about whether or not the powerful should be held to account that plagues US political culture. The Republic of Korea is still apparently a nation of laws, not men.

I must point out here that there is no Get Out of Criticism Free card for the USA by virtue of its political polarization. South Korea is also a highly polarized society. Its president and legislature were deadlocked for months; this deadlock was in fact the motive for martial law attempt. Yet, in spite of the polarization, enough Koreans from across that polarized political spectrum have been able to unite in defence of the basic premises of an open and free society.

By contrast, the big news out of the USA is that Biden decided to pardon his own son and that Trump is highly likely to get virtually every last massively unqualified fascist toady he wants on his Cabinet.

That former point handily vindicates my earlier decision to be personally done with the Democratic Party. It is an institution that has proven itself time and again be not an opponent of democratic decline, but instead a willing co-participant in it. Any hope for the USA depends on the emergence of the sort of “none of the above” grassroots movement of which I have written earlier.

So please, spare me any garbage about American exceptionalism. The only things exceptional about today’s America are its low morals and advanced state of political decline.