Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:54 on 4 January 2019

The Shutdown Might Be Lengthy

It may even prove to be record-setting. The reason is that the Democrats have historically been a party that values weakness and concession; they interpret this as an expression of peaceful intent. This is so obvious that even an intellectual light weight like Donald Trump is well aware of it. Given that, the odds favor the Democrats caving. Not by as much as they typically do, mind you, (the wall is extremely unpopular amongst Democrats), but they still favor a Democrat cave. And given that, why wouldn’t Trump want a staring contest?

A Record-Long Shutdown Might Doom Both Parties

That’s simply because it would end up causing real hardship and probably provoking a severe recession, and this would provide an opening for a centrist party or movement to arise that campaigns on a “pox on both your houses” platform. There’s risk to it, though; it could also provide a pretext for the fascists to go full fascist (though I place that as an outside chance, given what an incompetent leader Trump has proven to be).

That implies that the Republican Party will be one of the two doomed parties. Trumpism won’t be doomed into oblivion, but it would likely emerge seriously damaged, at least 50% smaller than it currently is. In turn, this would make Trumpism itself essentially irrelevant as a national political force, at least for several years. This would definitely be a very good thing; it is the reason I am hoping the Democrats stand firm.

Alternately, it might not doom the parties; it might instead profoundly change them, provoking a wholesale sweeping purge of the leadership of both. The overall political effect would probably be the same: the reconstituted parties would move strongly to the center, and a centrist consensus would emerge.

It’s an Open Question If That Would Happen

First, there’s the Democrats’ natural proclivity for weakness. Second, there’s the natural inclination for any organization, including any political party, to be concerned with its future.

It certainly would be better for the country and better for the world as a whole if the above scenario transpired; the death of the Democratic and Republican parties is a very small price to pay for kicking fascism to the curb and hitting a political reset button. But it’s far from certain that the Democratic Party would choose to fall on its sword like this.

Any Centrist Backlash Would Not Last

It would probably last five to ten years, and might (in the most optimistic of scenarios for centrists) last twenty. The reason is the basic dynamics of class society, and how centrists are blind to it.

Those on top always want more. Their hunger is never satiated, and their ideology blinds them to the harm this lust for more does. They will therefore strive for more. Centrists are largely blind to this (and most other) aspects of class society, so they will prove incapable of resisting this impulse. Any new centrist movement will become captured by, and become the tool of, the elite.

This will inevitably create an opening for the left. So if the other parts of the above start happening, it is the responsibility of those of us on the left to organize and create a movement that can capitalize on the opening when the inevitable happens.

Another Reason The Above Might Not Happen

Even if the Democrats stand firm, human society is chaotic and difficult to predict: things may unexpectedly head in other directions. One of the most likely causes of this would be a national security crisis of some sort, which is more likely than ever given the current quality of national leadership (or lack thereof).

Published at 10:52 on 3 January 2019

Despite increasing evidence that North Korea is not actually interested in denuclearizing (as anyone with a brain expected), Trump prefers to remain in denial about it, effectively appeasing North Korea. And that’s arguably a good thing, because it beats the most likely alternative: Trump throwing a temper tantrum and starting a war in retaliation.

Effectively, very little has changed with respect to North Korea. This is because there is simply not much the USA can do about the situation. Not all problems have easy solutions, and North Korea is (for a variety of reasons) one of those problems.

Which, in fact, is why so many past administrations “let” the problem get to where it is today: they couldn’t easily do much about it, either.

Published at 09:05 on 2 January 2019

For decades, Bob Avakian, leader of a small Stalinist splinter party, has been calling the Christian right “Christian fascists.” At least with respect to this particular point, facts are proving Avakian’s label accurate. The blind support for authoritarianism in the service of ethnonationalism that Greg Sargent writes about in his recent Washington Post piece has all the hallmarks of fascism.

Published at 10:37 on 1 January 2019

Megan McArdle wrote an interesting piece for the Washington Post yesterday, one which reminded me of an earlier intellectual exercise of my own which came to basically the same conclusion that she just did. I had intended to post that conclusion here some time (as in months) ago, but other events intervened and eventually I forgot about it.

My exercise was prompted by my desire to refute an article by Andrew Sullivan, which tried to explain the rise of right-wing populism in terms of claims made by Plato in ancient times. (Disclaimer: this article seems unavailable at the moment; I furnish the link here in the hope that the problem with it proves temporary.)

I found Sullivan’s explanation simultaneously tantalizing and disappointing.

Tantalizing, because at first it attempted to explain things better than simply a purely class-based analysis. As much as the latter is the default for a leftist like me, I had been struggling with how it was simply unsatisfying. Yes, inequality is high and rising in the USA, and neither political party has been serious about combating it, and this dovetails with the rise of Trump. But inequality has not been nearly so bad in Europe, yet right-wing populism is growing there, too. Worse for my pet theory, in the case of France, right-wing populism has been a big player for longer than it has in the USA. This is precisely the opposite of what my class-based theory would predict. So clearly that theory has its problems.

But Sullivan’s theory was ultimately disappointing. Why now? It didn’t do a good job of answering that. Open societies have been opening up for decades. Conservatives like Sullivan have been long wringing their hands about how dangerous this is. Yet until recently, such danger didn’t manifest. And why didn’t it manifest itself first in the most progressive societies? You’d expect Scandinavia to have gone neo-fascist a good decade or two ago if Sullivan’s neo-Platonic explanation was the cause.

What else could it be, I thought? What new thing could be finally causing something at least superficially like the long-theorized corrosiveness to finally take hold? The Internet was the best answer that I could think of. But was there a further test, one that could better confirm this theory?

It turns out there is. France has a state-owned telephone company that behaves very much unlike capitalism fans claim all state-owned enterprises must be: it has long been highly innovative. It started developing the world’s first universal computer network, Minitel, in the late 1970s, and fully deployed it by 1982. And 1982 marked the turning point for the National Front, which in the space of a handful of years transitioned from being a tiny splinter party to a major one. The correlation is just about perfect.

Back to McArdle for a moment:

It’s striking that two of the 20th century’s periods of greatest political upheaval followed the arrival of a revolutionary communications technology—the 1930s were preceded by the spread of radio, the 1960s by the arrival of television. Both mediums fundamentally changed people’s relationship with information, and in the process radio and television necessarily altered politics.

Yet more correlations. At this point, I think the thesis is going to be difficult to refute, particularly when you consider how the invention of the printing press helped spark the Protestant Reformation: it greatly lowered the cost of books, leading to more widespread literacy, which led to people reading the Bible themselves and deciding for themselves what lessons to take away from it, instead of relying on a Church hierarchy to do the reading and deciding.

So, once again, a new media genie is out of its bottle and is making our times interesting. That is currently the best explanation I have going.

Published at 10:53 on 28 December 2018

In a recent Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post, Never Trump conservative Max Boot begins with a whopper:

President Trump has launched trade wars and undermined our allies while kowtowing to tyrants. And the Democrats? They don’t have much of a foreign policy, and when the party’s progressives propound one, the results sound like Trumpism of the left.

Perhaps Max Boot thinks progressive policies “sound like Trumpism,” but they sound quite different from Trumpism to my ears.

Many progressive Democrats are skeptical of free trade (and have been for decades; Bill Clinton passed NAFTA with Republican support against the wishes of many in his own party). But I am unaware of any voices on the left arguing that trade wars are a good thing and easy to win. Boot is assuming a false dichotomy: either one must be for the status quo ante Trump, or one must be for an all-out trade war. Clearly, there are other options, such as a negotiated withdrawal from the consensus that free trade is always good, perhaps by revising existing free trade agreements into fair trade ones.

Many of us on the left are skeptical of the American empire. And for good reason: empire (and the unthinking support for it by Establishment voices like Boot) gave us the fiascoes in Iraq and Vietnam, as well as US support for bloodthirsty right-wing dictators like Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese-Seko, and Suharto. Yet it is Trump who is bubbling over with enthusiasm and support for foreign autocrats (while at the same time delegitimizing empire). Again, there is the false dichotomy: either you support the status quo ante Trump, or you support Trump’s foreign policy. (How about supporting neither and not getting overly cozy with autocrats at all?)

That said, there are places where the left’s opinions more closely align with Trump’s. And so what if there are? As the old saying goes, sometimes even a stopped clock is correct. The world is not a cartoonish melodrama where all actors are either always evil and always incorrect, or always virtuous and infallible. It is nothing but a childish tantrum to assume that whatever Trump says or does must be wrong and therefore we must always do otherwise.

It is literally the truth that the economic growth during past forty years or so of free trade and deregulation has not been equitably shared. It is literally the truth that Europe pays less per capita for military expenditures and is thus in some sense freeloading on the USA. Given that US taxpayers pay for the military, it is thus the truth that Empire is costing American taxpayers, who therefore in turn could benefit under a more multipolar world.

It is an opinion, and like all opinions neither true nor false, that therefore the USA should change its trade and defense policies in an attempt to get a better overall deal for everyday Americans. It is, however, a reasonable opinion that is well-supported by facts. Furthermore, to reiterate, there are more options available than just Trumpism or the status quo ante Trump.

Now for a few more facts:

• A growing number of those Americans made personally worse off by the policies of the US empire correctly perceive so.
• Capitalism is the dominant economic ideology of the USA.
• Capitalism advocates individuals competing for personal (and not collective or overall) economic gain.

It is thus empire and capitalism themselves (two ideologies beloved by Boot) which have paved the way for empire (and, increasingly, capitalism) to be delegitimized. That which originally created the old center Boot longs for has now corroded it.

Wish for the tide to not sweep in all you want, Mr. Boot, but it won’t help.

Published at 08:51 on 22 December 2018

Not by much, mind you, but they still favor it. Probably 50 to 60 percent odds of the Democrats caving. Because they’re the Party of Institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome; they want the Republicans to like them. So odds are they will blame themselves and take their captor’s side, as they typically do.

Yes, yes: The wall is monstrously unpopular with Democrats. That’s why the odds of caving are only 50 to 60 percent instead of 90% or more.

Published at 19:37 on 20 December 2018

That is my theory why Trump is pulling out of Syria. Not because of any commitment to non-interventionism. Certainly not because of any humanitarian concern (witness his fawning adoration of the genocidal Saudi regime).

Pretty much everything Trump has done in Syria has been consistent with the thesis that he is a Putin puppet. Yes, even when he bombed that air field. Remember, he told his boss about it first.

The biggest losers in this will be the Kurds, who have conducted an amazing (and amazingly successful) experiment in creating a quasi-anarchist society in northern Syria.

Perhaps this will erode his support in the Senate enough to make impeachment feasible. (There’s no shortage of Establishment national security types aghast about it already.) We can hope. Remember, when a tipping point is reached, change can happen astonishingly fast.

Published at 10:18 on 5 December 2018

The gilets jaunes protests were touched off by Emanuel Marcon’s new carbon tax on fuel. These taxes were structured to fall hardest on the lower and middle classes, and they came in the context of taxes on the wealthiest having been recently cut.

Marcon is not a leftist; he styles himself as a centrist and a self-professed “economic realist,” in the typical centrist’s sense of “reality:” the duty of those on the bottom to realize that they deserve to be on the bottom, and deserve to get the short end of the stick while those on the top of society deserve more privileges (and any questioning of this sort of arrangement constitutes questioning “reality”).

It is worth pointing out that carbon fees and taxes have been enacted in other jurisdictions, where they generally have not proven so controversial. This makes it fairly obvious that the problems in France are happening because of how the French government chose to do things, and not because of anything intrinsic to charging for carbon pollution itself.

Published at 11:40 on 1 December 2018

In honor of World AIDS Day, Time magazine recently ran an article on the subject, from which I quote:

Exactly how it spread continues to be studied. A 2014 study said the strain originated in the 1920s in Kinshasa, in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. The 2011 book The Origin of AIDS by infectious disease doctor Jacques Pepin argued that one might be able to trace the virus’ spread to bush-meat hunters who handled chimpanzee blood, and a surge in prostitution that took place among the disorder of the decolonization of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the ’60s. Many of the bureaucrats sent there to establish order came from Haiti, and one or more of those workers may have brought it back to the island. As for how the virus went from Haiti to the U.S., he theorizes that it may have involved another combination of factors, ranging from an unsanitary handling of samples at a plasma center to Haiti’s reputation at the time as a sex tourism destination.

That sugar-coats some truly ugly culpability. That euphemistically-worded “disorder of the decolonization of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” was in no small part fomented by the the CIA, Belgium, and foreign capitalists, who acted to undermine the rule of the democratically-elected adminsitration of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of that nation (then simply called the Republic of the Congo). And I haven’t yet mentioned the genocidial imperialism there whose death toll is estimated at about ten million. That’s right, ten million.

Haiti, too, is a victim of imperialism. Conditions are so bad there (poverty, environmental degradation) in no small part due to evil done by the imperialist nations of the First World. France refused to acknowledge Haiti’s independence, imposing crippling economic sanctions unless the slaves who rebelled repaid slave-owning French capitalists for the “theft” of the “property” they considered the rebelling slaves to be. The entire rest of the “civilized” First World, including the USA, took France’s side in the matter and refused to trade with Haiti until it capitulated.

That was in 1804, and it was not until one hundred and forty-three years later, in 1947, that the debt was repaid. During that time, Haiti’s progress was horribly stunted by its repaying of those onerous reparations. And it was in the resulting festering cesspool of poverty (the worst in the entire Western Hemisphere) that AIDS was so easily able to spread and grow when it arrived in the 1960s.

Published at 11:20 on 1 December 2018

This is a day that I’m usually pretty quiet about, because it’s a puzzle to me how to respectfully respond to it. You see, I’m a queer guy (not a gay guy) in his mid-fifties. Personally, and for reasons I won’t get to in greater detail here, that difference between queer and gay is a huge part of the reason why I managed to both avoid that HIV bullet myself, and avoid the experience of having most of my close friends die, despite being the “right” age to have experienced both.

Therefore, I can’t really relate any sort of the personal horror stories that most gay men of my age can, nor do I really feel in any way like a survivor (or have any consequent survivor’s guilt). So I’ll just have to say that while I haven’t personally experienced much of the impacts many of my friends my age have, I understand that many of them have, and that it must have been terrible.

I will say that I have had the pleasure of meeting many unassuming people who were fierce warriors during the era when AIDS was a crisis in the First World. That latter part is important; in many parts of the Third World, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is still a huge crisis today. It is due to AIDS that many African nations have a lower life expectancy today than they did 30 years ago.