Blackcap Blog

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.

Published at 16:47 on 28 November 2018

Yet more evidence has surfaced of this weasel’s pro-Trump proclivities. Something tells me this won’t be the last damning revelation, either.

Published at 10:09 on 27 November 2018

I’m basing this claim on the known behavior of the agency. Basically, it’s known to be functioning as Trump’s Gestapo:

• It’s long had a tradition, under many presidents, of operating outside constitutional norms. It routinely violates the Fourth Amendment.
• Unlike most labor unions, the union representing ICE agents is a right-wing organization that endorsed Trump in the 2016 election.
• ICE agents have deliberately ignored court orders when the courts rule against Trump regime policies.
• People get tortured to death in ICE detention.

It’s entirely in character for such an agency to provoke a confrontation for political purposes. In fact, the thesis that they did is the simplest and most consistent one going. Per Occam’s razor, it is the one we should assume is true, until and unless facts contradicting it come to light.

Published at 15:11 on 25 November 2018

I don’t think I’ve ever related it here on the Web, and I’m a little short of current events to comment on at the moment, so I think I’ll relate how I began deprogramming myself from the pro-Establishment propaganda that I, like all individuals growing up in our society, was subjected to as a child.

It happened in my early- to mid-teens. This was well before the Internet had made it possible for anyone to easily seek out alternatives to the pro-Establishment mainstream media. Radio had always fascinated me, and as luck would have it that had led to an interest in shortwave radio.

At the time, shortwave was the only practical means of affordably distributing audio programming worldwide, so there was no shortage of foreign broadcasters beaming their angle on world events, in English, to the USA. All one needed was a shortwave receiver and some knowledge how to use it (it was not as simple as tuning in domestic broadcast stations, though it was not particularly difficult, either).

Many of the broadcasters transmitted what was basically state propaganda. It was quite obvious: the governments in those countries were always uncontroversial, always doing only good things, and always with widespread popular support. According to their own state media, of course.

That got me thinking as to how, if I had been unfortunate enough to be born into one of those unfree societies, I might manage to detect and compensate for my indoctrination, assuming I was equipped with a shortwave receiver.

The answer I came up with was based on my observations of individuals around me: they were not all equally honest and moral. Some would tend to tell the truth even if it put them at a disadvantage. Those same individuals also tended to treat others with the most respect. Others tended to lie more often, and the liars typically treated others poorly. It seemed reasonable to presume that these same overall traits could color entire societies and their governments as well.

Therefore, it would be possible to identify the more credible sources of information on shortwave: they would be the ones that admitted self-criticism onto their airwaves. They would be the stations that sometimes admitted painful truths that were inconvenient to their own nations’ governments.

So after a period of introductory listening, one would be able to compile a mental list of information sources, ranked by their evident credibility. Further accuracy could then be achieved by listening to news from as many sources as possible, and comparing the reports for consistency, taking into consideration each source’s estimated reliability and the fact that there’s always a disinclination to report things embarrassing to one’s own side.

I then filed that away as an interesting thought experiment and didn’t think much more about it for several months, until I noticed a first sign that indoctrination and suppression of inconvenient facts was present in my own society.

Maybe it was Radio Australia occasionally mentioning genocide in East Timor being committed by Indonesia, a US (and Australian) ally. That claim later got corroborated by a BBC report. Both sources had been judged credible per the above criteria; plus, the stories aired by Radio Australia were directly inconvenient to their own government. Evidently the line I had been fed about how human rights was the prime motive behind US foreign policy was incorrect. If so, something else must be the prime motive.

Maybe it was the program on Austrian history on Radio Austria International (another source judged reliable) which mentioned how the USSR had occupied Austria and turned it into one of their satellite states for a few years. Then Stalin had been talked out of it and agreed to let Austria basically go its own way, provided that it promised to not take sides in the Cold War. Wait! I had always been told that communism was permanent, and that no country that had “gone communist” had ever gone back. That was how the more extreme Cold War measures were typically sold, and here was evidence that the selling point was itself a lie.

Or perhaps it was one of many news reports from a Western European source which indicated that the nations of Western Europe had significantly more generous welfare states than the USA did. Evidently the line that the USA was almost maxed out on how much social spending a society could sustain without collapsing was incorrect as well. And then there was the little matter that the nationalized broadcasters in Australia, the UK, and many other countries actually seemed to be doing a better job at reporting the news than the capitalist ones at home in the USA. Weren’t nationalized enterprises inevitably supposed to be less efficient than private ones? Yet another lie that I had been told had just been detected.

Whichever was the first sign, others quickly came. The die was now firmly cast: I knew that propaganda was very much a part of my own society and that it had to be watched out for and compensated for.