Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:56 on 14 December 2025

Yes, I know that Trump is not exactly doing too hot in the polls right now. Political strategist Rick Wilson is positively giddy about it.

I have argued recently that a blue wave or two is likely to be significantly less consequential, in the long run, than many people think. Now I wish to argue that the hypothetical blue wave might not happen at all.

The reason is simple: war. Americans are, on the whole, an astonishingly ignorant people when it comes to foreign policy. This ignorance is no accident; Establishment politics has carefully tended and nurtured it for many decades. All the better to help prevent democratic accountability from interfering with military adventurism. It is one of the natural consequences of being a superpower, and a key reason why superpower status is a threat to free society.

Any administration that starts a war historically gets an incredible amount of deferential treatment from the mainstream media, the purported opposition party (both parties are united in their support for empire), and the populace as a whole. Do not think for a minute that this cannot apply to a war against Venezuela.

Maybe it won’t. We’re not that far past getting burned by the consequences of past deferential treatment for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe this one will come too soon on the heels of the earlier ones.

But don’t be too sure about that. It is at least as plausible that Trump will succeed in selling his Venezuela war. The authoritarian regime that runs Venezuela is not precisely the sort of government to inspire sympathy. Advocates of war will be able to paint opponents of war as Maduro allies or sympathizers, a characterization made all the easier by the shameful reality that it is not very hard to find American leftists that are allies or sympathizers of the Maduro regime. The Establishment media, already in many cases cravenly capitulating to Trump, could very easily once more assume its historic role as propagandists for the ruling class’ latest war of choice.

If this happens, Trump could easily prevail in the next few electoral cycles. I am quite sure, in fact, that this is a huge part of why Trump seems eager for a war with Venezuela. I will give the man credit for one thing: he knows advanced state of moral decline of the nation he leads better than virtually anyone else in the halls of power, and he has used this knowledge to become what is already one of the most successful, effective, and consequential presidents in U.S. history.

Yes, successful and effective. He has made more change, more quickly, than any president since FDR and quite possibly any since Lincoln. It is now part of established political precedent that U.S. presidents may incite coups to attempt to stay in power, can lie about just about anything, can make law and policy by fiat with little or no input from Congress, engage in crass nepotism, receive bribes, and cannot and should not be held accountable under the law.

To assume that a war in Venezuela will fail to keep Trump in power is to assume a moral and informed American public that, by and large, simply does not exist. See Rule No. 3.

Published at 08:37 on 12 December 2025

One of the things that has been worrying me most about Canadian politics is the smug sense of complacency. There is just too much belief in the concept that being a separate country will somehow be a free ticket to escape many consequences of the ongoing transition to fascism south of the border.

In particular, I have been worried about the complacency on national defence. On the Left, I saw complacency about the mere need for defence. This is understandable, as military spending has often been sold under the guise of “defence” when in fact actual defence has little or nothing to do with it. On the Right, there is not so much problem with the very concept of defence, but there is a reluctance to see the USA having become the sort of threat it has actually become. This is also understandable, as acknowledging so means acknowledging no small amount of dirty laundry in the Right’s very own hamper.

That is why I find this to be extremely welcome news. Apparently the Canadian military has been quietly doing an honest assessment of the situation, and come to the obvious conclusion: that the cause of peace and freedom for Canada is now best served by pursuing a measure of military deterrence.

Better yet are the voices on the Left, such as Charlie Angus, who have traditionally been quite skeptical of military spending. Not so much any more, perhaps. Let’s hope so.

Armed struggle is indeed a highly unpleasant thing, but ultimately the world is complex and messy place that does not lend itself to any one simplistic rule (such as “war bad”). As John Stuart Mill once observed:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic as that. As the old saying goes, Si vis pacem, para bellum. The best possible use of a fighting force is the use that does not involve any actual fighting; the mere presence of such a force can serve to detract a would-be evildoer and aggressor, by underscoring that the costs of evildoing and aggression are unlikely to be cheap.

And yes, this can work against a significantly more powerful opponent. First, you have the asymmetry of sacrifice: a people are generally willing to sacrifice more to preserve their own freedom than they are to subjugate someone else’s. Then, you have the asymmetry of mission: in order to succeed at conquering a country, the conquerer has to achieve complete control over the conquered. In order to succeed at resisting a conqueror, one needs to do far less; one needs merely to deny the conqueror that control.

Make it clear to Trump that a forcible annexation will be more trouble than it is worth, and Trump will likely forget about the idea (or at least repeatedly postpone it, which accomplishes the same thing). Appealing to a fascist’s sense of justice and humanity is both pointless and foolish, as fascists are lacking in both. Appealing to a fascist’s sense of what is best for his personal power and prestige, however, offers a very real chance of being a successful appeal. And this is not merely theoretical; Finland for many years pursued such policies with respect to the red fascism just to its east, and thereby preserved its independence.

If Canada makes it clear to American fascism that the cause of American fascism is best served by seeking some form of coexistence with a democratic Canada, coexistence it is likely to be, which is far better than being a fascist vassal state.

Published at 10:09 on 2 December 2025

I really don’t think there can honestly be debate on these two options any more, not in the context of U.S. politics.

This is for the simple fact that this particular ship has already sailed. It is abundantly clear that the U.S. is already in the midst of a fascist revolution of sorts. The signs of revolutionary change are all over the place:

• Imposing tariffs by fiat.
• Courts, particularly the Supreme Court in its decision that presidents have basically unlimited authority, endorsing a dictatorial presidency.
• Demolishing the East Wing of the White House with no public approval process and no advance notice, for the purpose of clearing the way for a giant ballroom funded by bribe money.
• DOGE making massive, extra-legal changes to the Federal bureaucracy.
• Denying the clear results of the 2020 election, and pardoning those involved in his coup attempt.
• Politically-motivated pardons of corrupt officials.
• ICE —
• Extrajudicial detentions and deportations.
• Ignoring court orders.
• Masked secret agents.
• Routine brutality.
• Denying Representatives and Senators access and oversight.
• Massive funding for more of the same (and worse) approved.
• Politically-motivated retribution against law firms, universities, and news media who act contrary the regime’s wishes.
• The capitalist class mostly falling in line behind the regime.
• Extrajudicial killings on the high seas.
• Refusing to spend duly-appropriated funds.
• Spending funds without proper appropriation.
• Purging military officials judged likely to be insufficiently subservient to the president and any unlawful orders he might issue.

Even many centre-right sources such are now saying it, or seriously implying it: Joe Walsh, Peter Wehner, and The Bulwark to name just three examples.

Yet, despite this, the fascists have not achieved total power. I recently moved this site out of the U.S.A., yes, but that move was anticipatory. There’s plenty of anti-regime material openly circulating in the U.S.A. This would not be the case in a totalitarian society.

It is also clear that Trump is not very popular. That’s just one poll, of course, but it’s a reliable one that has been conducted for decades, and other polls are saying the same thing. Plus you have the electoral backlash at the start of this month, which indicates that the signs in the polls are not just phantoms (and again, that such a backlash can occur is a sign the regime lacks total control).

Where this all goes is unclear. There have been some signs of an independent resistance, but the overall level of it has been nowhere near enough to force the needed changes.

It really seems that most opposed to Trump are pinning their hopes on a big blue wave in 2026 and again in 2028. Even if one is generous and assumes such waves come, an honest assessment will I believe conclude that it is highly unlikely to accomplish that much. This is, after all, the Democratic Party we are talking about (see Rule No. 2). It didn’t accomplish all that much the last time; the Biden years proved to be just a momentary pause in an overall march to fascism. Why should it prove any different the next time?

Yes, there are younger Democrats like A.O.C. who wish to do more, but the party as a whole is still firmly in the hands of an old guard that has proven itself to be more of a willing co-participant than an oppositional force when it comes to the ongoing transition to fascism. A massive none of the above opposition movement could force the Democrats’ hand in a useful way, but again, such a thing does not currently exist.

Until something changes, then, my general prognosis remains pessimistic.

Published at 07:55 on 22 November 2025

Not sure how much of a surprise it was, though I expected them to be each others’ foils, too.

Perhaps Trump senses picking fights with Mamdani would be a losing game for him.

Perhaps Mamdani’s charisma won out. The guy is a natural-born politician: absolutely great at making people like him. It’s one of the reasons he won.

But, again, I am not sure just how much of a surprise this really is. That is because, despite all the rhetoric about the two being polar opposites, they are less so than many realize. Yes, they are on opposite ends of the left/right political spectrum, but that is only one way of classifying politicians.

They are both outsiders, disliked by their party’s established elites (though this is no longer the case for Trump, given that he now is one of his party’s established elites, it once was the case). They both appeal to some of the same crowds (in the wake of Mamdani’s surprise primary victory, polls indicated no small amount of Trump/Mamdani voters). They both play the populist game. They both are New Yorkers.

Yes, there are important differences despite all that. I am not saying they are two peas in a pod. I am just saying they are not the absolute diametric opposites they are often portrayed to be.

And this is the big problem with the whole “Trump is far right, and his victory shows the Democrats need to move to the right in response to the verdict of the recent election” line. Voters are not pundits, and do not think about politics like pundits do. It’s one of the things Rachael Bitecofer (not leftist by any means) harps on.

And yes, arguably this means that many voters are stunningly ignorant and misinformed. Cry harder. There is the electorate you might wish the USA had, and the one it actually has, and they are two distinct and different things. To paraphrase a famous ex-Secretary of Defense, elections are fought with the electorate we actually have, not the electorate we might wish to have. See also Rule No. 3.

Finally, this is how things stand with Trump and Mamdani right now. Wait a week (or even a day) and they might be quite different. This is Trump we are talking about, and Trump is famously unpredictable. They may well still turn out to be each others’ foils.

Published at 07:00 on 8 November 2025

Have been pretty quiet here recently. That’s because I’m focusing on other stuff, namely, getting this site out of the USA. Currently it is hosted at a server farm in the San Francisco Bay Area, run by a US-based cloud hosting company. Soon it will be hosted at a server farm in Quebec, run by a France-based cloud hosting company.

Also, my domain names are in the process of being cut over from being hosted by a US-based registrar to a Canada-based one.

Given the rapid progress of democratic decline in the USA, and the political nature of much of what I post here, such measures are, I think, only prudent.

Published at 07:45 on 2 November 2025

Time to clarify what I recently published here.

Per my recent definition, newspapers and magazines might appear to be timelines, but they are not. This is because all articles in a publication have a single source: the the individual (or typically) firm producing the publication. Everything goes through the same editorial team before it gets in. The information has been curated by humans.

The exception would be a publication with extremely lax (or no) editorial standards whatsoever, which simply publishes everything (or nearly everything) submitted to it. Those would be timelines.

This also explains why the posts of an individual social media account are not timelines, even though virtually all social media users repost content from others. Those reposts were still done by a human. The information has still been curated.

Published at 07:41 on 31 October 2025

Before continuing, it is necessary to define what I mean by timeline in this article.

timeline, n. An online list of one-to-many communications from mixed sources.

So, Facebook’s infamous algorithmic timeline qualifies as a timeline, but so are its “feeds” of friends and groups. The chronological timelines of Bluesky and Mastodon are also timelines, and therefore also evil. An email account that is on one or more mailing lists is also a timeline, but an email account that is not subscribed to lists is not a timeline. If you log onto Facebook, the list of your friends is not a timeline, because that is a list of Facebook accounts, not communications from those accounts. If you click on a friend and view their posts, that is also not a timeline, because the contents come from a single source, not mixed sources. And so on.

Timelines are evil because of the time burden they impose. This is because of how computer technology makes it so easy to send information, coupled with how timelines often contain many senders of information, inevitably makes for very busy timelines.

Some very timeline-like things existed before the dawn of the Internet. Junk mail and junk phone calls turned physical mailboxes and telephones into such things. This is why so many people rightly found them objectionable.

Algorithmic timelines are more evil than strict chronological ones, because of the opaque nature of the criteria for ordering and selecting timeline contents, but even strict chronological timelines are evil.

The only thing that can make a timeline non-evil is sparse traffic, but due to information being so cheap and easy to send this can never reliably be the case. Evil is the natural state of most timelines, and even normally non-evil timelines will at times assume this state.

Timelines are the chief thing responsible for making people spend so much time online and disconnected from the real world that exists outside of cyberspace. Create a timeline for someone, and the fear of missing out on something important that might be buried in it leads them to spend unhealthy amounts of time online.

As such, timelines are probably responsible (or at least partly responsible) for much of the recent trend of politics and society getting worse, which is driven by organic and real-world interactions being replaced by time spent in cyberspace, based on opaque criteria, all the while being monitored and exploited by capitalists and politicians.

At least this is my current operating theory. I arrived at it as a result of struggling over why I spent so much time in front of computer screens, to the detriment of achieving other goals in my life. As such, I am now in the process of experimentally de-timelining my life.

Published at 11:14 on 29 October 2025

Hamas claims having trouble locating them. Israel claims Hamas is deliberately not releasing the bodies. Who is more believable?

In this particular situation, I think it is Hamas. Not because I like them (I don’t), but simply because the Hamas line jibes better with reality. Even the New York Times, hardly a pro-Hamas publication, states “devastation in the enclave complicates the retrieval of all remains.”

Because of course it would. Years of relentless bombing have pulverized Gaza. There is ample photographic evidence of this. So many bombs have been dropped in some areas that a significant part of the (in)famous network of tunnels Hamas excavated has no doubt collapsed. Those same tunnels were doubtless used by Hamas to hide some of their captives. Those bodies are now many meters underground. Even the captives held in buildings are going to be buried under several meters of rubble, if those buildings were bombed. And all of it happened in a chaotic war situation with hastily-planned last-minute moves, of which accurate records were almost certainly not kept (and even when records were kept, the damage from the attacks has in many cases destroyed them).

To expect prompt delivery of all remains is thus highly unrealistic. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is still to this very day finding and repatriating remains of American servicemen who perished in a war that ended fifty years ago. For decades, there were endless conspiracy theories circulating that Vietnam was deliberately not returning bodies, or even still holding captives as prisoners of war, long after the Paris Peace Accords were signed and the conflict ended. None of these allegations have ever been substantiated.

Every war has its missing. There are missing servicemen from World War I that are still unaccounted for. The sad reality is that a few of these captives in Gaza will probably never have their bodies located and repatriated. (Yes, I know the Hamas captives were generally civilians and not combatants, but the general conditions that make their bodies hard to locate are fundamentally the same.)

Finally, Netanyahu benefits if there is a war going on. He’s not a very popular leader, and he has a lot of scandals to his name. Trump had to twist his arm almost to the point of breaking it in order to compel him to agree to a cease fire. Because of course he did. Netanyahu wants war. War is a distraction from his scandals and unpopularity. Even some normally very staid sources reluctant to criticize Israel have pointed this out. Israeli opposition figures point it out frequently.

So of course Netanyahu is going to demand the unrealistic and the impossible. It gives him a pretext to end the ceasefire and continue holding on to power.

Published at 10:09 on 26 October 2025

He’s the (apparently) left populist candidate running in the Democratic Party primary to become that party’s candidate for U.S. Senate from the state of Maine (to hopefully unseat Susan “Concerned” Collins).

Everything was going relatively well for him until it came out that he has had a Nazi totenkopf tattoo on his chest for approximately the past two decades. Platner responded by claiming he had no idea as to the origin of the symbol and having it covered up soon after the news of it broke.

Many of his erstwhile backers on the activist Left have since expressed skepticism about Platner’s claims and have shifted their support to other candidates. After looking into his background a bit, I share the skepticism. (Moreover, evidence has emerged that he was well aware of its symbolism. But back to my skepticism.)

First, the guy has been at times dabbling in left-wing causes ever since his High School years, when he protested against George W. Bush’s Iraq War, and was voted “most likely to start a revolution” by his peers.

Yet, despite his knowledge of how the ruling class was willing to abuse military power, he chose to enlist in that very same military. He attended college after serving three deployments in Iraq… then rejoined the military, this time as part of the Maryland Army National Guard, and served an additional deployment in Afghanistan. After that stint ended, he topped it all off by serving as a Blackwater mercenary in Afghanistan. Then it was back to private life and dabbling in left-wing causes. Eventually he gets approached by activists who want him to become a Senate candidate.

How likely is it that someone with as much exposure to politics, particularly left-wing politics (of which anti-fascism is part) as Platner has had, would continue to remain ignorant for so long of the totenkopf and its symbolism? Not very likely, in my view.

It is certainly possible that his story of getting it in Croatia by choosing it off the wall of a tattoo parlour is accurate. That country has a disturbing fascist past it has never come to a reckoning with. It is the one-time home of the Ustaše, a fascist regime infamous for its brutality. (The Ustaše concentration camp of Jasenovac was even worse than the Nazi concentration camps.) Franjo Tuđman, president of Croatia from 1990 to 1999, was a Holocaust denier who wrote antisemitic propaganda that tried to blame the crimes of the Ustaše on the Jews.

But I digress. To reiterate, it just beggars the imagination that he was unaware of the symbol’s meaning until only recently, and there is already evidence that he is lying and was well aware of its origin and meaning.

This is not because he’s a committed Nazi, but because he’s not a committed leftist or liberal. He’s an amoral adventurer and maybe by this point a conman, too. He’ll play around with a variety of ideologies and careers without firmly believing in any of them. Wants to have an adventure as an antiwar activist in High School and has it. Wants to have adventures as first a soldier and then a mercenary and has them.

Now, after having the idea floated by him, it is time for an adventure in Senatorial politics. Because of his past adventures in Left causes, running on the left comes natural to him.

That is, until he’s in office, gets a little bored, and it’s time for other adventures. I could easily see him getting frustrated with the Democratic Party (it’s a frustrating organization), resigning from that party and becoming an independent, and drifting firmly into the MAGA orbit. That may seem like a big leap, but is it, really, for someone who went from demonstrating against U.S. imperialism to signing up to fight in the very same imperialist military whose invasion he so recently protested?

The guy could easily become Fetterman 2.0, that is. Or worse. Imagine Fetterman but instead of weak-willed appeasement he enthusiastically starts backing all of Stephen Miller’s worst ideas.

And can we cut the crap about purity tests? Yes, what I am advocating here is in a sense a purity test, in that it sets out some standards and finds Platner wanting in that regard. There’s this thing called balance: it’s wrong to demand perfection of fallible humans, but it is also wrong to say that there ought to be no standards whatsoever.

If the story arc of Platner’s life was from committed young right-winger from a right-wing family, to enthusiastic military volunteer ready to prove his patriotism, to disillusionment at what he saw U.S. imperialism doing, to regret at having what he realized was Nazi symbolism tattooed on his body (followed by having it promptly covered up or removed), to a post-military career as a Left activist, I would be incredibly enthusiastic about his campaign. A lot of what he is saying is absolutely spot-on, and I love that he pulls no punches while saying it. That he made mistakes earlier in his life I would not hold against him, because he learned from those mistakes.

In this case, however, the story arc of his life points to quite a different path, one that raises very real questions about his character.

It’s not as if there is nobody else running in the primary, and the filing deadline has not even passed yet. Choose someone else to run against Collins.

Published at 14:43 on 25 October 2025

This is an important question to ask because it has real bearing for the continued existence of political freedom in the USA. (50501 is the organization behind the two waves of “No Kings” protests in the USA.)

As I have written previously, the answer as to whether or not te USA remains a relatively free country depends largely on whether or not a “none of the above” mass opposition movement, not explicitly linked with either the Democratic Party establishment or the radical Left subculture, emerges. So: does 50501 appear to be such a movement?

The answer: apparently yes. I have not found much at all credibly linking 50501’s top leadership (such as it is, the group seems to be quite informal) to the Democratic Party establishment.

Yes, I am sure one can find examples of Democratic politicians endorsing or appearing at No Kings rallies. So what. That is irrelevant to my claim, which is, to reiterate, about that group’s top leadership, such as it is, who are not Democratic Party bigwigs.

The biggest link seems to be between 50501 and the Bernie Sanders campaigns. Kay Evert from the Atlanta area seems prominent.

Bernie Sanders is not a career Democrat (he is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats), and when he was a member of a political party, it was with first a small socialist party and then another small, generically progressive party, both unique to Vermont.

In fact Democratic Party establishment generally does not like Bernie Sanders very much. It’s why they put their finger on the scale in favour of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a big part of why career Democratic Party candidates united against Sanders in 2020.

Even the right-wing Influence Watch organization, who I am sure would love to deligitamize 50501 as much as they can, just does not have much on establishment Democrat links to 50501 as of this time.

Perhaps a greater worry is how timid the 50501 actions have been, given what is happening. A healthy democracy would have grassroots movements basically shutting down business as usual in response to something like a Trump regime. Business as usual has been shut down in several European democracies in recent years over scandals far less serious. It is not hard, in fact, to find anarchists griping about this very thing.

50501 would counter that anything more aggressive would probably alienate many Americans. And they are probably correct about this. But this ends up damning the American public for its generally low morals and standards, since, to reiterate, a healthy democracy would have a much stronger political immune response happening.

What it all boils down to, I think, is reason for a little — but only a little — optimism. It is a positive sign that a “none of the above” movement might actually be emerging, but we need a lot more than what we have seen so far, and we need it stat.