Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:43 on 27 September 2018

Public schools in rural, conservative areas are starting to ban yoga. In fact, the entire state of Alabama has, throughout their K-12 public education system.

As the subject of this post indicates, they have a point. A very good point, in fact. Yoga is not merely a physical activity; it is very much part of the Hindu religion. Schools should not be in the business of imposing compulsory religious practices on children. This is as true for religious practices popular in left-wing and countercultural circles as it is for ones popular in conservative, traditionalist ones.

Yoga proponents cite studies that show yoga is beneficial for children. This is largely irrelevant. There are studies that show regular churchgoers live longer. There are studies that show people who pray regularly are healthier than those who don’t. If “it benefits children” is a blanket excuse for crossing the church-state barrier, then congratulations: you’ve just made the case for compulsory Christian prayer in public schools.

There is a way to bring the benefits of yoga’s physical activity to children without violating the separation of church and state: study the yoga poses, use them to design a religion-neutral calisthenics program, and have students do that instead of yoga in gym class.

If a child’s parents feel strongly that traditional spiritual yoga would be beneficial, they are free to enroll their child in the privately-run, privately-funded, after-school yoga program of their choice—much like Christian parents are free to enroll their children in their church’s Sunday School program.

Fair’s fair—no special rights for Christians or New Agers.

Published at 18:02 on 26 September 2018

Because I’ve seen most of Moore’s movies, going back to Roger & Me, I made a point to see Fahrenheit 11/9 while it was still playing in the theatres.

Compared to his other movies, it’s more rambling and unfocused. Although its stated focus is Trump, it spends a significant fraction of its footage exploring the Flint water crisis. That’s not to say I don’t recommend it; its documenting of the various aspects of the Flint water crisis is alone enough reason to see the film. I had no idea the crisis was so bad, or the state government led by Rick Snyder was so complicit in the poisoning of an entire city.

The amount of time the film spends on Flint makes me suspect that Moore had initially been filming footage for a followup to Roger & Me and decided to shift gears after Trump’s unexpected victory. (Although Moore had been one of the few voices warning of such a possibility, it seems clear to me that he was still taken aback when it actually happened.)

One of the film’s weak points is its inconsistent portrayal of Donald Trump. It starts out with what I believe to be an accurate one: as a buffoon who basically stumbled his way into the presidency, aided by a monstrously incompetent opponent. But after the introduction, it tries to paint Trump in a more sinister and calculating light, focusing on the parallels between Trump and the Nazis. While I’ve done that myself (for good reason: there are parallels), it’s important not to lose sight of Trump’s incompetence.

Another inconsistency comes up when it comes to civil rights, a panicked public, and the all-too-often willingness to sacrifice essential liberty in the name of temporary safety. It mentions 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire. But the film also approvingly cites the movement to increase the governments’ power to disarm the public in response to well-publicized tragedies like the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School. The contradiction is particularly jarring right at the end of the film, which is accomplished via a series of vignettes recapitulating the main points the film made. The juxtaposition came off as more than a little ironic to me.

The film vaguely hints at more revolutionary politics a few times, talking about how “the whole damn system” is the problem. I wish it had gone into a bit more detail of that aspect, particularly how capitalist propaganda paves the way for fascist propaganda and sometimes a fascist state. (There’s just not that big a difference between the level of disregard for basic facts that it takes to convince the masses that the class hierarchy of bourgeois “democracy” is in their best interest, and what it takes to convince them that a fascist dictatorship is.)

It is important to realize that despite his left-of-center politics and his filmmaking skills, Michael Moore is still not in any real sense a revolutionary. As such, there are limits to the depth of any analysis and insight he has to offer. It’s questionable whether the capitalist system would allow a film with an eloquent revolutionary voice to be widely distributed. (It is, alas, even more questionable whether the present-day ghetto of inward-looking radical politics could even produce such a film.)

But I digress; so much for film’s weak points. In its favor, the film really does pull few punches when naming the guilty parties. The Democratic Party establishment gets a well-deserved roasting for its abandonment of the working class and its pandering to corporate interests. Hillary Clinton gets portrayed as the out-of-touch Establishment figure with shockingly poor judgment that the actually is. And, to reiterate, the film’s exposé about Flint is worth the price of admission alone.

Published at 09:17 on 23 September 2018

The chattering classes are spending a fair amount of time on the story that Rosenstein might have considered encouraging Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25^th Amendment.

While that does put Rosenstein at risk of dismissal, it is important to note that legally this is nowhere near as bad as stealing papers from Trump’s desk. The 25^th is a constitutionally-endorsed act of insubordination, designed to protect the country against a president incapable of performing his duties. By contrast, there’s nothing in the US Constitution about it being OK for staffers to hide presidential papers they don’t like.

Published at 17:02 on 22 September 2018

As promised in my most recent post, here’s my thoughts on health care. First, any reform should have three main ideals:

1. As much universality as possible. Health care should be a right, not a privilege. An individual’s standing in the class hierarchy should have as little effect as possible (ideally, none) on the quality of the health care s/he receives.
2. As little centralization as possible. A single bureaucracy must not be allowed to run the whole show. Imagine what would happen if a competent fascist (as opposed to an incompetent one like Trump) got control of such a bureaucracy, and used denial of health care as a tool to oppress people.
3. Be achievable soon. It should not require any grand revolutionary transformation of society. As desirable as I personally happen to think that is, I also realize that it will take time. There’s people suffering from lack of access to health care who need it now, not at some vague point in a distant future.

The first two goals conflict somewhat, of course. The simplest way to decouple access from place in the class hierarchy is to have a centralized bureaucracy ensure that all get the same access. And the simplest way to decentralize is to let health care policy be market-driven. Welcome to the real world, where good solutions are never simple or easy.

That said, there are things one can do. Single payer, whatever my misgivings about the centralization it involves, actually is a measure in this direction. It centralizes health insurance, while leaving health care decentralized.

Doctors and clinics in Canada are private businesses, who if they choose can buck the system by giving care (at their own expense) to those whom the government would deny insurance. This is imperfect, of course, but it beats the pants off any system where doctors could simply be summarily dismissed by the centralized government bureaucracy that employs them.

But there’s no reason for insurance to be centralized for there to be universal coverage. It’s a false dichotomy to insist that the only two options for health insurance are capitalist competition or government centralization. Private, nonprofit, noncapitalist organizations already exist. There is no fundamental reason why health insurance could not be provided by multiple private nonprofit organizations.

In fact, this is already partially being done in Switzerland. Health insurance companies there are still for-profit capitalist concerns, but only partially. On the basic, universal insurance that the government subsidizes, they are forbidden from making profits (and required by law to offer such coverage). Universal access has been achieved with one more level of insulation between the State and its awesome power and those who furnish health care.

Critics point to how Switzerland is not as good at controlling costs as most other countries with universal health care. That is in fact the case, but it is also the case that the Swiss system is much better at controlling costs than the one in the USA, and does so while ensuring a basic level of access for all.

Moreover, the Swiss seem to actually get something for all the money they spend. Theirs is a high-quality system as well as a high-cost one; Switzerland ranks near the top of European countries when it comes to life expectancy. Importantly, they are also getting decentralization and the resultant resistance to tyranny. Securing liberty is certainly worth paying for as well.

It’s not a perfect system, of course. It’s greatest failing is that it’s a strongly two-tier system; the universal insurance is fairly basic. But there’s no reason a decentralized system could not be accompanied by a more generous level of universal care.

There is also, to reiterate, no reason for private insurance schemes to be for-profit, capitalist ones. One should take it one step further and require or strongly encourage insurance firms to be non-profit. For bonus points, encourage them to be governed by those whom they cover: have insurance cooperatives.

The State’s role would be largely limited to distributing vouchers for coverage to everyone. Vouchers have something of a bad name in the USA, due to their use by opponents of universal education. The problem here is not the vouchers themselves, but that schools are allowed to charge tuitions above and beyond the voucher amount. Therefore vouchers end up serving merely as discount coupons for the wealthy to purchase privilege for their children. One can eliminate this problem by banning the institutions accepting the vouchers from charging anything extra.

Also, there must be a promotion of civil society. Health care workers must be encouraged to unionize, and health care consumers should be encouraged to form watchdog groups. There need to be multiple, intersecting, non-government organizations in place to promote the interests of all involved, and if needed to resist the efforts of any tyranny from above to undermine the right to universal health care.

None of this will guarantee a positive outcome, of course. No plan will. Even plans modeled on successful programs elsewhere might fail if tried in the USA. Countries are not the same; what works in one place might not work in another, and in the real world success is never guaranteed.

This is a quick and incomplete sketch. I haven’t even begun to address things like the need to keep coverage reasonably well-standardized, and to collect and disseminate impartial statistics on how well various insurers and providers do, so that people can make well-informed decisions, instead of being compelled to swim in a sea of policies with twisty little mazes of fine print, all different.

When it gets to where health care is now, where the USA is paying more and more for it and getting less and less to show for it, it should be possible to replicate pieces of what have been done nearly everyplace else to achieve better outcomes. The “better, cheaper, faster” trichotomy only is valid if one is at an optima point, and evidence strongly indicates that the USA has drifted well away from any of those.

Published at 17:43 on 21 September 2018

This definitely qualifies as both creepy and dystopian.

Note where this is happening and note who is doing it. Namely, it is happening in the USA and not in some big-government European welfare state. And capitalists, not government bureaucrats, are the ones mandating it. None of that should be a surprise except to the Ayn Rand-quoting idiots who seem to think that only government can be a threat to peoples’ liberties.

That’s not to say that it’s of no concern that a more centralized, universal health care system in the USA might be tempted to abuse people’s privacy like this. The privacy-violating demands related in the story are already happening first in the USA, for openers. And a country that sends the like of a Trump to the White House can’t really be said to be the sort of place where widespread concern for civil liberties prevails.

These are powerful arguments for having universal health care be accomplished in way that’s more decentralized and independent from government control than single-payer. It’s not impossible to do; there are, in fact, examples of countries that already do it. I will be posting some more thoughts on how to solve this problem soon.

It’s not just health insurance companies that are doing such things, either. Most of the big Internet companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rely on privacy-compromising data collection as a core part of their business model. And again (and depressingly) the USA is a place where such practices tend to widely-tolerated; what pushback there is seems to be concentrated in Europe.

Every society has its moral failings, and this behooves those of us proposing social change, even sorely needed social change (particularly sorely needed change), to be aware of those failings so that they may be compensated for. Else things may well get more creepy and more dystopian, and paradoxically get that way via the best of intentions.

Published at 09:15 on 20 September 2018

This link basically says it all. Of course it’s all about power. Of course all the stated principles are nothing but fig leaves for arguing in favor of what most benefits one’s side at the moment.

 

Published at 08:23 on 20 September 2018

This makes for a depressing read, and not being a Pagan, I’m not even in the target audience for the publication that ran it.

Religious claims are not scientific claims. As such, it is not possible to prove or disprove them according to any sort of scientifically rigorous standards. Furthermore, the majority of people have some sort of religious or at least spiritual beliefs.

Put those two factors together and you can pretty quickly take away some conclusions:

1. If you’re hostile to any sort of religious belief, congratulations: you’ve automatically written off the majority of potential supporters for your cause.
2. What should matter (really, the only thing that can matter for purposes of logic-based inquiry and debate) is an individual’s position and actions in the realm of real-world, non-spiritual, things that are provable via something approaching scientific inquiry.

If someone supports a freer, more egalitarian world, it should not matter whether they share your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. Such beliefs should be basically irrelevant for purposes of forming broad-based coalitions. (Your beliefs are doubtless very important to you, but that in no way means others must share them.)

Assuming that just because someone is religious therefore they share all the very worst characteristics of any religious person is as bad as assuming that just because someone identifies as a socialist or a communist (or atheist) that s/he wants to do exactly the sort of stuff that Stalin and Pol Pot did.

Published at 08:14 on 19 September 2018

If Ford refuses to appear, Kavanaugh gets approved. Just consider the basic facts in such a scenario:

• It’s about an alleged incident that happened over thirty years ago, when the nominee was in high school.
• There’s only a single allegation.
• The one making the allegation is unwilling to testify under oath about it.

Furthermore, this is today’s GOP we’re talking about. There’s very little that’s too low for them. But revisit the above list: even if that wasn’t the case, we’d still be talking about a single allegation over something that happened decades ago in high school.

Even if Ford appears and puts forth a highly credible testimony, it’s at worst a crap shoot, because the GOP’s standards are so low: it would be entirely in their character to send a rapist to the Supreme Court if said rapist seems likely to legislate from the bench in ways they approve.

Even if Kavanaugh gets approved, this is not necessarily over. Suppose he gets approved. Suppose also that Ford refuses to testify. Note that Kavanaugh has said he will testify about the alleged incident regardless. Now suppose also other allegations, later in life and highly credible, surface. Suppose one of them results in a criminal conviction. Now we have a criminal sitting on the Supreme Court who lied about his past crimes in order to get there. We’re talking about impeachment material here.

Even if no other allegations surface and it becomes increasingly clear that Kavanaugh lied to the Senate under oath to secure his approval, we’re still talking about impeachment material. Perjury is a crime.

Therefore, it may literally be years before this thing fully plays out.

Published at 13:35 on 16 September 2018

Up until the details broke today, some pieces of the puzzle that was the sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh simply didn’t fit.

Namely, why was the story broken only recently, and by Sen. Feinstein of all people? Ms. Feinstein is not an über-liberal partisan; quite the contrary, she numbers amongst the centrists that constitute the right wing of the Democratic Party. She is simply not the sort of person to deliberately sit on a story, then release an incomplete version of it as a calculated liberal political maneuver. The claims of many conservatives and Trumpists that it was the latter just didn’t make sense.

Now we know: Feinstein only released the story under duress, after it had been leaked by The Medium. And Feinstein’s claim about the source of the allegation was indeed correct: Christine Ford did not want the publicity of having her name exposed in that way, and Feinstein was honoring her preference.

Published at 11:27 on 15 September 2018

Really, why would anyone take Tony Blair seriously? Absent any serious, honest process of re-evaluation and self-criticism on Blair’s part, that is (and there has been none).

First, Blair’s arguments are unhinged and all over the place. He asserts that for those of us in the USA: “You have a resiliency in your institutions that will pull you through.” Other than a generic mention of “checks and balances,” no specific examples of those resiliencies are offered. Instead, Blair changes the subject to the economy. Well, sorry, the economy isn’t really a political institution, and just because it’s doing well today doesn’t mean it always will (remember the crash of 2008). In fact, the public debt is exploding in the USA, and the very limited measures passed in the wake of the last crash are being undone. The road to another crash has been well-paved, and when it happens the government won’t have the fiscal breathing space to deal with it.

Then Blair starts wringing his hands about populism. When elites are puzzled by the appeal of populism, they need to take a good long look in the mirror. Despite all his lies on particular issues, in a very important meta-narrative Trump was more honest than any other 2016 candidate save Bernie Sanders. The system is rigged against the many, and has been for a long time. Ever since the 1970’s, inequality has increased. People are not nuts for perceiving they are being left behind. That goes particularly for those who have been the big losers in international trade deals, because the pain has been disproportionately doled out to them.

It goes beyond mere economics, too. Blair’s signing onto the Iraq War is a textbook example of that: being a moderate, he assumed that the right just had to be correct about things a certain proportion of the time, and one of those times was Iraq. If Cliff Mass claims 2 + 2 = 4.5, then Tony Blair was claiming that in the case of Iraq 2 + 2 = 5, because he had asserted the answer was uncomfortably close to 4 enough times in the past that it was time to up his running average.

Trump’s fascist faux-populism (it’s not really in the interests of the masses, nor does it even have majority popular support) is definitely not the answer. Thomas Frank is correct: the problem is not populism, but elitism. The nominally “left” parties in most democracies have been badly infested with it (and Blarite politics is an instance of this). Populism, an honest left-wing populism based on factual criticisms of power, privilege, inequality, and injustice, is not the disease: it is the cure.