Blackcap Blog

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.

Published at 07:32 on 20 August 2018

1. Create a religious dogma where the only acceptable sexual orientation is heterosexual,
2. Place on all a burden of expectation that one will marry the opposite sex and raise a family,
3. Have a single exemption from this burden if you take a vocation in the church,
4. Create a power hierarchy in those vocations,
5. Promote the idea that said hierarchy should be unquestioningly trusted (including with children), then
6. Act shocked, shocked, that said hierarchy is full of self-hating gay men who abuse their authority for sexual gratification.

Published at 11:54 on 19 August 2018

The explanation touches on this principle.

Analogous to how fascists (and Trumpism is a form of fascism) believe that whatever the fascist leader says is by definition always right, fascists believe that only political outcomes that create fascism can ever be legitimate. Therefore any election that undermines Trump’s power must by definition be illegitimate.

A blue wave election will be said to be the result of millions of illegal aliens voting, the result of foreign collusion, the result of Deep State collusion, or any number of other pretexts. Even if the winners are allowed to take office (and it’s an open question if all of them will be), the resulting Congress, and anything it does, will be “illegitimate” in Trumpist eyes.

The same will apply to any presidential election in 2020 that fails to return Trump to office, or to place Trump’s annoited successor into office. It will be “illegitimate.” Odds are high that Trump will declare a state of emergency and refuse to leave office if he runs and loses in 2020. And that’s if he doesn’t declare one and try to override a Democrat-controlled House or Senate first.

Ultimately, the only solution is likely to be a willingness to fight Trumpism via various means of direct action. For the time, I do plan to support electoral means of reining Trump in, but I don’t expect widespread success.

I’m mainly doing it for sake of argument so that I can confront liberals later with an example of the demonstrated impotence of their chosen method: I chose to suspend my doubts and help you try it your way, it didn’t work, now can we discuss other means?

I only hope that this works. A big part of me worries that liberals are in general so terrified of taking any personal risks that they will by and large opt to choose submission to fascism over struggling for liberty.

Published at 08:49 on 17 August 2018

Can you see the many parallels between Donald Trump and the regime (first Chávez, now Maduro) that rules Venezuela?

It’s not biased to either the left or the right. The politically deluded on the right will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Trump’s misdeeds. The politically deluded on the left will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Chávez’s or Maduro’s. It’s an equal-opportunity screen.

If you are not for liberty and against authoritarianism, then you and I really don’t share that much in common, sorry.

Published at 08:14 on 13 August 2018

In case there’s any doubt that Assange is a creepy, pro-right-wing, untransparent character, this should help clear it up.