Blackcap Blog

Published at 00:44 on 7 November 2018

What happened today is basically what the polls were in aggregate saying would happen: the Republicans kept the Senate and the Democrats took the house. The projected number of House seats that flipped is still (even as more are getting settled) right around the number of 35 that the polls had converged on in the past fortnight.

A lot of my friends are expressing disappointment and saying otherwise. That’s more their fault than the pollsters’. A cherry-picked subset of rosy outlooks (what many of them were going on) is not representative of the overall data set.

The anomaly that happened in 2016 when the polls failed to predict the Trump win seems more and more likely to have been a one-off anomaly. For a horrifying hour or so, it appeared that might not be the case. The earliest results had the Democrats doing significantly worse than forecast. Thankfully, those districts in the Eastern US (then the only time zone where polls had closed and results were available) were themselves an unrepresentative sample.

As to what happens now, caution is advised. Remember my recent post about refusing to accept or honor election results. That hasn’t happened so far. But wait a bit; there’s no telling what Trump or Fox News might say in the coming days and weeks. Even Evan McMullin (a conservative, not a leftist like yours truly) is predicting things are likely to get ugly.

Published at 20:09 on 5 November 2018

Instability may well increase as a result of it. Here’s one example why.

Because of course they will. Any election that does not give fascism a victory will be proclaimed illegitimate by the fascists. I would not in the least be surprised to see losers refuse to give up their seats. The leadership in Congress may well even get in on this game.

Published at 16:13 on 3 November 2018

A bunch of people are flying off the handle at Sarah Lawrence College in suburban New York because one of the professors there happens to be politically conservative (or at least not liberal or leftist) and penned a mildly-worded op-ed in the New York Times. This basically proves that left-wing political correctness on campus is not a total myth.

The off-campus reaction to it further proves that right-wing political correctness isn’t a myth, either. Cue Reason magazine, which claimed “Abrams’ office door was vandalized” in response to the op-ed, but furnishes absolutely no evidence of this claim. They do show pictures of an office door covered in signs and notes, some using strongly-worded (but still nonthreatening) language. Sorry, taping notes and signs to a door is not “vandalism” by any stretch of the word.

It is still an overreaction, however. If Prof. Abrams had opined that LGBT students or students of color had no right to expect fair and equal treatment (he did not), and as such should basically like it or lump it (again, he did not), then plastering his door with notes that he should shut up or leave would have been appropriate. It would have been giving an intolerant bigot a taste of his own medicine.

It’s not the first time Abrams has penned such an op-ed, and it probably won’t be the last. If your ideology (wherever it falls on the political spectrum) is so fragile and weak that the only way it can prevail is if competing ideologies are not allowed at all, then your ideology is basically useless. There’s no way it can prevail in the big, bad world off campus.

What would have been a fair response? Prof. Abrams’ most recent op-ed contains a bunch of claims about statistical sampling Abrams has done, without divulging anything about how the sampling was done. Skepticism is certainly in order here: Abrams should be challenged to show his homework and furnish evidence that the sampling he did was conducted in a rigorous fashion. And if Abrams refuses the challenge, he should be dismissed as a hypersensitive right-winger with a persecution complex who is prone to blow smoke.

But, as it stands, his critics are the ones that have done the most to demonstrate hypersensitivity.

Published at 08:46 on 2 November 2018

That should be obvious, but Netanyahu’s apologists find the conflations useful, aggressively promote them, and manage to sucker all too many into falling for them. That, despite how the Netanyahu regime has grown increasingly corrupt, nationalistic, and distant from the norms of a free society over the years.

It’s not just hardcore right-wingers that fall for it, either. The more moderate right does, too: Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot recently reiterated the meme that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement was nothing but a left-wing version of antisemitism in the wake of the shootings in Pittsburgh. It’s not just those on the political right, either: Cory Booker has fallen for it as well.

The conflations are easier to make than they should be for those who believe Israel can do no wrong, because feigned concern over the plight of the Palestinians is a trope sometimes employed by actual antisemites. That anti-Israel views can be motivated by antisemitism does not imply that they are necessarily motivated by it, however.

Furthermore, there is a difference between being opposed to the Netanyahu regime and being opposed to Israel. It’s entirely possible to support sanctions against Israel as a form of tough love.

The converse to the subject of this post is true as well. Supporting the Netanyahu regime is not the same thing as supporting Israel or supporting the Jewish people as a whole. In fact, the USA’s most rabid Netanyahu supporters tend to be fundamentalist Christians. Their support is motivated by the Book of Revelation, which prophesies a restored Israel as a prerequisite for an Armageddon and Second Coming that sees Israel being destroyed and the Jews condemned to eternal hellfire. Concern for the Jews has nothing whatsoever to do with their support for the Netanyahu regime.

Published at 07:48 on 1 November 2018

Tom Nichols recently tweeted:

I just visited the World War I museum in #KansasCity and it filled me with dread, because I feel like we’re in danger of heading toward another disaster fueled by ignorant nationalism. I have always been less worried about a reply [sic] of 1933 than about a mad rerun of July 1914.

First, when people talk about history repeating itself, they don’t mean that entire complex scenarios literally go into a scene-by-scene replay. Nobody named Adolf Hitler is going to be appointed chancellor of Germany, repudiate the Versailles sanctions, rearm, and start a new war. No archduke is going to be assassinated in Sarajevo and trigger a series of complex, interlocking, secret mutual defense pacts into touching off a world war. When “history repeats itself” it happens via a theme happening again in a different context, not as a whole complex context replaying itself.

Second, there’s a false dichotomy here: it’s not either/or. The resurgence of fascism is a real thing, as are the attacks on the multilateral internatonal institutions that emerged after World War II (fascism is nationalistic and opposed to that order). It’s entirely possible that we could be headed for a repeat of both 1914 and 1933. In fact, if we get a repeat of 1914, it will probably also involve the 1933 elements.

Published at 13:39 on 18 October 2018

I don’t know what’s more remarkable—the galling nature of Trump’s submissiveness to foreign tyrants, or that his followers still manage somehow to reconcile said weakness with the mythos of being an “alpha male” who puts “America first.”

Published at 09:48 on 16 October 2018

Remember when the last carbon tax, I-732, was being voted on? The one whose corporate-funded Big Green backers failed to consider the wishes of tribes and minority groups? The one that those of us on the left, by and large, held our noses and voted for despite its warts? The one that Cliff Mass dishonestly blamed the left for its failure at the polls?

Fast forward to the present moment. There’s a new carbon tax measure coming up on the ballot, I-1631. You’d think that maybe Mr. Suck-it-up-and-compromise (in relation to I-732) would be advocating people who share his center-right politics to suck it up, compromise, and support I-1631 even though it has a laundry list of lefty things in it?

Ha, ha. Think again.

Probably nobody knows more about local weather patterns than Cliff Mass. His blog and book have significantly helped me understand the complex weather patterns of this region and why forecasters often fail to accurately predict what’s going to happen (although on that latter point, their accuracy has improved significantly in the decades since I first moved here).

But when he comes to politics, he’s a total crank, a complete victim of his own strong emotions and biases.

Published at 07:53 on 16 October 2018

First, she orders a genetic test.

Then, she loudly trumpets the results.

She chooses to do this in October of a critically important midterm election year, when it is important to stay on message as being a responsible check on Trump.

She chooses not to first run this harebrained scheme past Native Americans (i.e. known Native Americans, with more than a minute trace Native American blood in their veins) first.

Now it’s all predictably blowing up. She has effectively handed a gift on a silver platter to the fascist side.

And she’s trying to portray herself as having the sort of judgement it takes to make a good president?

 

Published at 07:28 on 8 October 2018

Some examples:

• It forces a restrictive intellectual property rights regime on all signers, making copyright law significantly more oppressive in Canada and Mexico,
• It expands patent protection so that US-owned drug companies can gouge the ill and desperate for a longer time,
• It contains exemptions for the oil industry, to protect it from attempts by Mexico to re-nationalize it, and
• It enshrines the concept of corporate personhood.

See here and here for details. Carp on these, and the Democrats have a good pretext for deep-sixing it.

Published at 08:14 on 7 October 2018

Earlier I wrote:

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.

Now even some Establishment pundits are starting to say the same thing.

It’s sort of a lost opportunity at the moment. I firmly believe that the perjury (and Ed Whelan slander conspiracy) lines were more powerful ones to pursue than the Ford allegation ones. As much as the Ford allegations are a big red hot button for anyone with feminist sensibilities, they did still allegedly happen over thirty years ago, when Kavanaugh was in high school.

Both factors served to dilute the force of the allegations. (What would liberals think if Republicans blocked a liberal Supreme Court nominee because of what he might have done in High School? Think about it.) By contrast, the alleged perjury and slander conspiracy happened this year. That makes them much more relevant as an insight into Kavanaugh’s character, particularly when coupled with Kavanaugh’s outbursts before the Senate committee. Would it have been easier to make a few GOP senators waver if those allegations were the ones that had been carped on? We will now never know.

It’s a pity, really. Tom Nichols and other anti-Trump conservatives were pointing this out. Some prominent liberal voices like Dana Milbank were saying the same thing. But it generally was considered somehow politically incorrect and disrespectful of women to aggressively pursue the slander and perjury lines—as if someone cannot continue to believe Ford and believe it is politically more strategic to pursue a line that’s more likely to win you a few crucial allies.

Politics is war by other means, and in war you don’t have the luxury of ignoring information just because it’s not as fun for you to pay attention to it as it is to pay attention to other information (or because you don’t admire the bearer of it as much as you do the bearer of other information). Not, that is, unless winning the war is important to you. Here’s Saul Alinsky writing in Rules for Radicals:

The basic requirement for the understanding of the politics of change is to recognize the world as it is. We must work with it on its terms if we are to change it to the kind of world we would like it to be. We must first see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.

Here’s Sun-Tzu in The Art of War:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

So here we are. Now what? Above, I’ve shown how ignoring voices on the moderate Right hurt the fight against Kavanaugh. Now we’re in a place where ignoring the insights of the radical Left will most hurt the fight. There is no inconsistency here; in fact, there is a consistency: ignoring relevant information hurts the struggle, no matter where that information comes from.

Congress, even a Congress with a Democratic Party majority in both houses, is highly unlikely to do so much as lift a pinky finger against Kavanaugh unless forced to by pressure from below. Impeachment is merely a tool, nothing more. The tool is now usable. The real battle must move to the grassroots: create organizations capable of disrupting the status quo, then at strategic times disrupt it, and do it in ways that offer the ruling class the hope of less disruption if they use impeachment to remove Kavanaugh.

I’ve written here time and time again how history shows ruling elites (and the Democratic Party is merely one wing of the ruling elite Establishment) almost never do a damn thing for the masses unless forced to. Either way this thing ends up playing out, we are about to see another example of this.