Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:13 on 14 September 2018

This article is a textbook example of just how wrong a liberal can be.

The Economist is not a leftist publication. It’s politically centrist to libertarian in outlook. That anyone could just lump that publication in with actual leftist fora and publications underscores how uninformed Zakaria’s attempt at criticism actually is. What is being claimed about The Economist is not a critique; it is a baseless tantrum, nothing more.

Bannon is not a conservative. He’s a fascist. Fascism is not conservatism, even though (to conservatism’s lasting discredit) conservatives have time and time again made the error of thinking they can enter into mutually beneficial alliances with fascists. Some conservatives know better; is, say, Rick Wilson now a “leftist” because he cheers when Bannon and his ilk get deplatformed?

Fascists don’t really want to debate. They say that’s what they want, but Rule No. 1 about fascists is that they lie… a lot. Fascists want to project strength and growing numbers, and to intimidate. The best way to battle someone who wants to look strong is to make them look weak. Mock them, marginalize them, harass them, deny them platforms, make them run whining to the state and the cops begging for protection like the pathetic weaklings they can be made into.

It is possible to believe both in deplatforming fascists and in allowing conservatives to freely debate. Of course it is, because conservatives are not fascists. See the previous paragraph. Unlike fascists, conservatives generally do want to engage in debate in an open society. I, for one, think it’s a huge mistake to drive the likes of Condoleezza Rice off campuses. Let her debate, then rip her ghoulish and dishonest premises to shreds in the Q&A session afterwards.

It all comes down to the paradox of tolerance. This is something that Hannah Arendt, a Jew and a Holocaust refugee, came up with as a result of bitter experience with Fascism v1.0. In order for a tolerant, open society to persist long-term, it must paradoxically be intolerant of intolerance itself. And Arendt was hardly a fan of left-wing authoritarianism: she was a political centrist who fiercely opposed Stalinism.

How wrong can a liberal be? When begging that fascists be given respect: very, very wrong indeed.

Published at 08:27 on 11 September 2018

He’s the career national security professional who’s repeatedly criticized the Bush II regime for being asleep at the switch on 9/11.

We had a particularly incompetent administration in the White House on September 11, 2001. And we have an even more incompetent one in the White House today.

Published at 08:18 on 11 September 2018

Seventeen years ago this morning, the BBC hadn’t completely abandoned shortwave for Internet audio streaming. I had a newly-purchased Lowe HF-150 (still in my possession) struggling against the interference to receive the BBC World Service on 12095 kHz, as I usually did in mornings, to listen to their hourly world news broadcast.

But something was different that day. For some reason, the BBC was airing a drama rehashing the terrorist attacks, using truck bombs in the parking garage, against the World Trade Center in 1993. Or so I first thought, until I heard them start talking about airplanes. It was then that I realized that a new and far worse attack was underway. Shortly thereafter I heard the voice announcing through the radio noise that one of the towers has just collapsed.

It felt like I had been teleported into the plot of some sort of tacky Hollywood disaster movie, just too surreal. I headed in to work. When I got there, the conference room TV had been hooked up to a rabbit ears antenna and tuned to one of the local broadcast stations, which was replaying scenes of the attack and building collapses (plural by then).

Most in the First World, particularly most Americans, can tell similar stories of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.

But what about most Iraqis? Do they remember when their nation was first attacked? Or do they remember date of the first attacks on their cities and villages more? Or maybe the dates when their friends and relatives perished in the resulting orgy of violence sticks more in their minds?

Iraq was attacked by the USA in “retaliation” for the 9/11 attacks despite that nation clearly having absolutely nothing to do with those attacks.

The Wikipedia article on the toll of that war has a variety of estimates, ranging as low as 110,600 to as high as 1.2 million. Let’s throw out the highest numbers as outliers and use 200,000 as a very conservative weighted estimate. That’s still two orders of magnitude worse than the toll of roughly 3,000 for 9/11 in the USA, and that difference has not been adjusted relative to the populations of the two countries.

Do that arithmetic, and if what Al Qaeda did to the USA was as bad as what the USA did to Iraq, over 2.3 million Americans would have perished on 9/11/2001. Maybe we should ponder that a bit more, instead of simply dwelling in our “they hit us once, oh boo hoo hoo, we’re so picked on” rhetoric.

First-world superpowers ultimately can’t do much to choose, manage, and control the means used by the desperate (and badly misled and infected by retrograde beliefs) individuals that oppose them. They can much better influence the means they inflict on other peoples (and the retrograde beliefs within their own borders that enable such means).

Published at 17:49 on 10 September 2018

So many words from John Bolton today. Why didn’t he just say “Israeli apartheid today, apartheid tomorrow, apartheid forever” and leave it at that? Would have been a lot more concise.

Published at 14:15 on 9 September 2018

Apropos this post, Orange Julius Caesar appears to be (thankfully) squandering his opportunity to launch a diversionary military action against North Korea, because his authoritarian love for dictators is getting in the way.

It’s things like this that are why I can’t take Michael Moore’s hyperventilating over how Trump is an evil genius seriously. Trump is evil, all right, but he has barely a fifth grader’s smarts. He’s so astoundingly incompetent that he’s his own worst enemy. For that, we can all be thankful.

Hitler was an actual evil genius. Within six months of taking office, he had managed to:

• Legally acquire dictatorial powers,
• Ban all opposition parties, and
• Imprison his opponents.

We’re nearly two years into the Trump regime and none of the above has actually happened. I have no fear of being arrested and tortured because I oppose the president.

That’s not to say that Trump isn’t awful, or that he isn’t a fascist. But please, keep it in perspective: there is such a thing as a comically incompetent fascist. Trump is not a master at playing political chess. He can’t even play political checkers well.

Published at 08:12 on 6 September 2018

While some degree of schadenfreude is inevitable, it is not in fact the best of news that Trump’s handlers are working to actively frustrate his worst impulses. As the subject of this post alludes, it is in fact a literal example of what may quite accurately be termed a “deep state coup d’etat.” There is simply no legal justification for Trump’s unelected, appointed handlers to usurp executive authority like they apparently have been.

There is a 100% legal and above-board means of addressing the undeniable fact that Trump is unfit to hold the office of president. Two means, in fact: permanent removal from office via the impeachment process, and temporary removal from it per the 25^th Amendment.

None of this is to deny that:

1. The Republicans are complete, sheep-like authoritarian followers so are unwilling to cooperate in such processes, and
2. The world is doubtless a safer and better place as a result of Trump’s worst impulses being deliberately frustrated.

The problem is, as the old saw goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There’s two perils being created by the present, informal measures: an immediate one, and a more long-term one.

The immediate one is that the measures themselves rest on very shaky ground. Trump, as chief executive, is totally empowered and on firm legal standing in attempting to smoke out and dismiss his insubordinate employees. We are only a few simple executive actions from a far worse immediate crisis.

The long-term one is that unaccountable, extralegal means of governance are being legitimized. Too many people are expressing relief rather than unease at this recent news. The temptation to descend the slippery slope and engage in more such actions against increasingly less unfit presidents will inevitably present itself.

In short, the recent news is yet one more example of how the Trump regime and its enablers are normalizing abhorrent practices and ideas.

Published at 08:29 on 5 September 2018

In this article, Cliff Mass claims the recent spate of wildfires (and wildfire smoke) in this region doesn’t have much to do with climate change, and that we’re merely returning to normal, smoky summers. Cited as evidence are statistics for area burned in Oregon and historical anecdotes about fires and smoke in Washington.

Missing is virtually any mention of fires in British Columbia. That’s highly significant, for two reasons:

1. Most of the wildfire smoke the Seattle region has experienced in the last two summers has been from fires in BC, and
2. In BC, unlike Oregon, the area burned is setting all-time records. This happened both last year and this year, in fact: 2017 set an all-time record for the province, and then 2018 bested 2017’s record.

It gets worse: there is plenty of evidence that the unprecedented size and severity of BC’s fires is related to global warming. The worst fires in BC are in the interior, in areas of lodgepole pine forest. Those forests are burning because they are full of diseased and dying trees. So many trees are diseased and dying because the population of pine beetles has exploded. The population of beetles has exploded because winters no longer have the extremes of cold that they used to.

Winters with fewer extremes of cold are precisely the sort of thing one would expect in a warming climate. Winter cold waves originate in the arctic and move south, and it is the regions closer to the poles whose temperature changes the most as global average temperatures change.

Yet despite all the above, British Columbia is almost completely absent from Mass’s blog post. I find this highly curious, to the point that I find it difficult to understand how it could be a chance accidental oversight.

Mass prides himself on being a political centrist, and I believe he has just illustrated how centrism is an ideology like any other, and centrists are subject to their political biases blinding them to obvious realities, just like those to the left and the right of the center.

The biggest problem with centrism is that if one side claims 2 + 2 = 4, and the other claims 2 + 2 = 5, you do not arrive at a correct answer by averaging the two and concluding that 2 + 2 = 4.5.

Published at 09:52 on 30 August 2018

First they came for the undocumented aliens,
      but I didn't speak up because I was not an undocumented alien,
Then they came for the refugees and the Muslims,
      but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a refugee or Muslim.
Then they came for the Hispanics near the border,
      but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Hispanic living near the border.

Really, this gets creepier and creepier.

And yes, I’m camping. Just not in a remote area, so I can access the Internet this time. It’s still on the drizzly side here, so I’m doing inside stuff waiting for things to dry out a bit more before heading out on my bike.

Published at 08:04 on 29 August 2018

They have two main characteristics:

1. It is an accurate term. When a tipping point is triggered, change happens fast.
2. The exact mechanism of the tipping point tends to remain hidden until the tipping happens.

If, when it’s all over, you could go into a time machine and go back a few years, most people would find your news from the future surprising.

Consider the case of the USSR and its empire. In 1980, it seemed as strong and long-lasting as ever. Afghanistan had just been invaded, and the USA and its empire had been forced to accept this (because challenging it would have meant challenging the USSR directly, a big no-no in the nuclear era). Even in 1986, the USSR and its empire had a semi-permanent air to them. Yet by the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen.

Or consider the case of Suharto in Indonesia. His dictatorship was tolerated because at least the economy reliably grew. Then the banking system collapsed, in no small part due to the regime’s own crony capitalism. When Suharto went cap in hand to the USA, his normal benefactor, he discovered to his dismay that years of patient activism on the East Timor issue had made him mostly toxic to Congress. He got no bailout, Indonesian society quickly turned on him, and he was compelled to resign.

And so it may be with Trump. He’s managed to turn the GOP into a party of his slavish followers. However, much of this following in Congress is coerced; many GOP congressmen secretly dislike Trump. They only play along because he has them cowed.

If, as I fervently hope, the GOP gets severely punished by the voters in November, this may force a recalculation: Republicans in Congress may well see it as being more to their political benefit to distance them from a doomed cause than to ally with it. Such distancing becomes increasingly likely if the Democrats launch investigations of Trump and these investigations uncover dirt.

Suddenly, many of the GOP may well realize that their toast is buttered on the side opposite they thought it was. At that point, the end will come surprisingly (to many) quickly for Trump.

Or it may happen sooner or later than that. I’m merely speculating on one possible mechanism, and as mentioned earlier, the mechanism often remains hidden and unperceived to most.

The one difference is that Trump is unlikely to merely resign. His ego won’t support such an option. He will either have to be removed against his will, or he will end his life because he won’t be able to live with the existential crisis that acknowledging his own fallibility will produce.

Published at 14:10 on 24 August 2018

As predicted, the deal with North Korea has basically crumbled.

Now we move on to one of the other predictions in my earlier post: the stage where the deal makes the world less safe from the risk of war, because it means Trump realizes he was Baby Kim’s rube. Not only that, the deal crumbled at the moment when the noose really seems to be tightening around Trump’s neck with respect to the Mueller investigation, giving Trump an even greater motive towards bellicosity. There’s nothing like war to distract the masses from a domestic scandal, after all.

Tom Nichols doesn’t seem to think this is likely. I wish I could be as sanguine as Nichols on this one. Yes, Nichols is correct in that Trump is no master at quantum multidimensional political chess; events of the past several years have shown clearly that Trump is barely capable of playing political checkers. But Nichols is also a conservative and a member of the defense establishment, which will naturally tend to lead him to turn a blind eye to ideologically (and career-wise) inconvenient insights about ruling classes’ propensity to use war for domestic political purposes.

So while I certainly hope Nichols will be proven correct (and he might be, Trump is definitely incompetent), I can hardly be sure about that.