Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:24 on 24 August 2023

Of course Putin did it. There is a well-established history of Putin’s adversaries suffering unfortunate “accidents.” The chances of this being a bona-fide accident are somewhere between slim and none.

Putin had to do something like this to regain some strength after showing himself to be the pathetic weakling who ran away and hid when threatened and then thanked his challenger for standing down. That is emphatically not how a strongman deals with his adversaries. Unfortunate “accidents,” by contrast, are a classic.

The trouble is, Putin still turned tail last June, and still then thanked Prigozhin for standing down. He can’t undo those things. He’s regained some strength, but he has a ways to go before he looks once again like the strongman Putin of old.

More challenges to Putin’s authority are still possible. Likely, even.

Published at 22:33 on 23 August 2023

Trump has been warned not to threaten jurists or poison potential jurors.

So of course he will. He has no self-control, and his whole life up to this point has taught him that as a hereditary member of the wealthy class, the laws that apply to the little people do not apply to him.

At that point, again it becomes put up or shut up time for the legal system (just like it did when Trump instigated an insurrection). Norms that are not upheld cease to be norms.

Published at 19:21 on 9 August 2023

This spring, it was coming Real Soon Now.

The anticipated start date came and went, and it was still coming Real Soon Now.

Then it basically dropped off the news radar and we stopped hearing about it. There have been no stories about the sort of big territorial gains one would expect given a successful counteroffensive.

This is, by contrast, exactly what we would expect given a failed counteroffensive. No belligerent will ever admit their grand plans have failed. If the counteroffensive had yielded significant territorial gains, you had darn well better believe it would be all over the media. But a failure will just get swept under the rug and not talked about. As we have seen.

Overall, the conflict has still gone far better for Ukraine than originally anticipated (remember, I was expecting Kiev to fall and the situation to degrade into an prolonged occupation facing guerrilla warfare). It’s just that this particular phase of it has gone significantly worse than anticipated for Ukraine.

This should not be reason for despair. No war goes exactly as planned even for the eventual victor. The Confederates scored important battle victories over the Union. The Axis defeated the Allies in many battles, and even ended up completely occupying some of them.

This was always going to be a long, ugly, bloody slog. Like it or not, if the Russian leadership wants to be in Ukraine, Russian troops will be in Ukraine, and there is really not much Ukraine or the West can do to stop that (at least not overnight).

Russian troops will only cease to be in Ukraine there when the Russian leadership decides to withdraw them. This is a natural consequence of the disparity in military strength between the two nations. The Russian military is not particularly well run, but Russia is so much larger a country that it still is the more militarily powerful of the two.

It is a situation much like Afghanistan (for both the Soviet and US-led invasions). Both the USSR and the USA were (and in the case of the USA are) much more powerful than Afghanistan. So long as the occupier wanted to be there, it was there. It was only when the occupier decided that the costs of the occupation were no longer worth it that the occupier decided to leave. And getting to that latter decision took many years.

Published at 07:12 on 2 August 2023

From the indictment:

The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant [Trump] remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Them or us. They use the power of the State to destroy us (and with it, open society), or we use the power of the State to destroy them (and enable open society to be preserved). It was always thus. As I wrote in the wake of the insurrection:

We must win and the fascists must lose. It is as simple as that. Everything  that follows flows from this simple, elementary fact.

Fascists want a world where fascism is the only principle allowed. All debate, all activity, save for the glorification of the fascist order, will be sedition. Non-fascists span the whole gamut of ideologies outside fascism, and we do not want that. The vast, vast majority of us want a world where openness, debate, and dissent are not only allowed but valued. This latter state of affairs may be termed an open society.

There is simply no compromise possible between the two positions. Either open society prevails, or fascism prevails.

12 January 2021

This is why I was so worried about the lack of a prosecution of those at the top for the events of 6 January, and this is why I am so relieved to see prosecution finally commence.

Published at 23:05 on 1 August 2023

It seems as if American democracy might finally be getting serious about trying to save itself.

The basic nature of the indictment is plain: that Trump incited the insurrection on January 6th.

I am not personally averse to insurrections, if they are against a corrupt Establishment that deserves an insurrection. If Democratic operatives had really tried to steal a legitimate victory from a Republican candidate (or, of course, the converse), then the sort of thing we saw on the 6th would be both:

• Only to be expected, and
• Completely justified.

As such, the false claims on Trump’s part that he was cheated out of his victory had only one logical conclusion: the one we saw play out on the 6th.

Really, nothing could be more clear.

The question now is whether all the dilly-dallying on the way to getting here makes this a case of closing the barn door after all the cows have already escaped. But as the old saying goes, better late than never.

Published at 20:42 on 25 July 2023

First, the assigned reading:

• The FBI and the Justice Department dragged their feet for well over a year when it came to finally repudiating the American version of Führerprinzip.
• The FBI resisted raiding Mar-A-Lago for stolen classified documents.
• All this foot-dragging has significantly increased the risk of another coup attempt in 2024 or early 2025.

The extra content is a little discussion.

First, will this foot dragging result in any action being too little, too late? It might. Had the lawbreaking by the most powerful been treated more seriously sooner, Trump might already be seriously damaged to the point that the GOP would finally throw him under a bus. (His base of cult followers would never do so, but the party leadership might, if they realize that the sooner they do so, the sooner they can move on from a candidate who is doomed to lose. They don’t care about democracy, but they do care about remaining politically viable.)

Second, it really all goes to show what a bunch of pure unadulterated bullshit the “they are picking on Trump” line of the Right continues to be. Trump has gotten nothing but free rides and special treatment from the entire system, basically since the very first day of his life as the heir of a multimillionaire. If Trump wasn’t getting special treatment, he would already be in prison.

Published at 06:56 on 12 July 2023

Too bad. As mentioned earlier, Ukraine does not belong in NATO. Not yet at least. Moreover, the process of getting to where Ukraine’s membership in NATO makes sense is likely to be long and complex enough that any sort of strict timeline is foolish to promise.

Biden was wrong to give Ukraine cluster bombs but he is dead right when it comes to NATO membership for Ukraine.

Ukraine is not getting an express ticket to NATO membership and Zelensky can like it or lump it. (Who else is he going to get to shovel mass quantities of military aid at his country in its time of need? Beggars can’t be choosers.)

Published at 21:05 on 11 July 2023

Now it has come out that Putin has actually met personally with Prigozhin in the wake of the Wagner mutiny. This just screams weakness. A strong authoritarian would have had the leader of a mutiny against him disappeared within a matter of days.

To reiterate: I can’t see Putin lasting much longer than a year.

Published at 19:07 on 6 July 2023

Cluster bombs? NATO membership (not eventually, right away)? It seems like no bad idea is bad enough not to get serious consideration these days.

Cluster bombs first: the problem with cluster bombs is that the bomblets in them don’t all explode. Most of them do, but not all of them. The remaining unexploded ones lie in wait for some unfortunate individual, often a civilian, sometimes a child. Then, tragedy. They are as bad as land mines (which are banned by international treaty for a reason).

Fast-tracked NATO membership: no, no, no.

First and most important, Ukraine is actively fighting Russia. Membership while that state of affairs exists violates the unwritten rule that two superpowers don’t directly fight each other. (The NATO treaty requires an attack against one nation to be interpreted as an attack against all. This means that the next bullet fired by a Russian soldier brings the USA into a direct war against Russia.) The argument being proffered for this is that since there hasn’t been a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, what the hey, it’s worth a roll of the dice, let’s push our luck and go for broke. This is so reckless that it frankly boggles the imagination.

Second, Ukraine is not a functioning, first-world democracy. Yes, Ukraine is definitely better at the whole democracy and civil rights thing than Russia has been in recent decades, no disagreement there. But it’s still best understood as a democratizing country, not a democratized one. Ukraine still has huge problems with corruption. There are right now headaches at times caused by the likes of Turkey, Poland, and Hungary voting contrary to Western norms. Why compound them by giving another less-than-fully-compatible nation an express ticket to full membership?

Look, I get it. Putin is a piece of fascist, imperialist shit who started this war. Nothing wrong with helping Ukraine defend itself against Putin’s aggression. But please, be prudent about it. The above two ideas are disasters.

Published at 18:07 on 26 June 2023

Putin made an unscheduled speech today in which yet again he thanked Wagner for standing down and not going into Moscow. Total weak guy stuff (a strong leader would have promised punishment and retribution).

That one year time frame I gave a few posts ago was my upper bound for how much longer Putin can last in office. His actual remaining time in office might be quite a bit less.

Remember, revolutions in Russia seldom happen in one fell swoop. In 1917, the February Revolution preceded the October Revolution. The attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was followed some months later by the breakup of the USSR, and that was followed in 1993 by Yeltsin’s coup against parliament. The Wagner mutiny is probably just the beginning.