Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:00 on 6 April 2018

Actually, there’s a silver lining to this dark cloud. It’s going to hurt the farmers and the capitalists, and both groups tended to lean towards Trump in the election. Thus, it’s going to hurt Trump’s base of support.

But we’re only beginning to enter the woods on this one, and this case the woods is more like a jungle full of vipers ready to strike and jaguars ready to pounce. The worse the economy gets, the more likely the regime is to start a war in order to distract from it, and a war with North Korea in particular could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict with China.

Much of it depends when the Republicans in Congress start deciding they need to pay more attention to the wishes of their Wall Street paymasters than the adult toddler in the Oval Office, and consequently act to seriously rein in or remove Trump.

Published at 08:42 on 5 April 2018

I don’t do this often, but this article raises some points I feel compelled to comment on.

The Democrats’ Rightward Tilt on the Economy Hurt Them

After for decades supporting trade policies that gave the middle finger to the working class, increasing numbers of the working class decided to give a middle finger to the Democrats:

Union leaders in Ohio and elsewhere watched in frustration during the 2016 election as significant portions of their workforce ignored union endorsements of Democrat Hillary Clinton and voted for Trump instead. Jack Hefner, president of United Steelworkers Local 2 in Akron, estimated around a third of his membership voted for Trump despite the leadership’s support for Clinton.

“Labor’s been beating the drum that these trade deals are bad, so here comes Trump saying the same thing, which made it really hard for us,” Hefner said. “He stole our playbook.”

Given how close the election was, the conclusion is therefore even more damning: The Democrats’ rightward tilt probably cost them the election.

Trump’s Tariffs are a Disaster

That’s because Trump overall is a disaster. He has no real concept of empathy, no ability to put himself in another’s shoes. It’s all about his ego, all the time.

That makes him highly likely to do things, particularly delicate ones, in ways that merely serve to needlessly provoke and inflame others. Things like rapid changes in trade policies that will serve to provoke harmful trade wars.

Prior Administrations’ Free Trade Policies Are Not Much Better

None of the above is to say that Free Trade has been good for society overall. It clearly has not. The rich have gotten richer, while those on the bottom have seen their incomes stagnate or backslide. This has been the case during administrations run by both parties.

The Takeaway

A retreat from free trade was needed, but not the one that Trump is giving us. The most likely outcome of what we’re getting is a trade war that will do far more harm than good.

Trade wars are a bad thing and very easy to lose. In fact, the most common outcome of a trade war is for all sides to end up worse off than if there had been no trade war at all.

Published at 08:07 on 5 April 2018

It’s become increasingly obvious that he did willingly choose to collaborate with the Trump campaign, despite Trump’s well-known fascistic, authoritarian tendencies (which even other Republicans were commenting on during the campaign).

Doubtless, this decision was part of a way to retaliate against Hillary Clinton for her role in an administration that persecuted him, but that’s just a juvenile temper tantrum. I don’t like Hillary much either, but Trump was clearly the worse of the two choices.

After all, what did Assange’s efforts get him? A superpower led by its most corrupt, least transparent regime ever, one threatening to start wars in various spots worldwide, one of which could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict between China and the USA. That’s in addition to a tremendous impediment to progress on global warming.

Assange has shown he was willing to gamble the world’s future for the sake of his petty personal feud with Hillary Clinton. Fuck you very much, Julian.

Published at 13:23 on 3 April 2018

Exhibit A is Honduras, where then Secretary of State Killary Clinton endorsed a coup that installed an regime with a horrible human rights record, and Donald Adolph Bone Spurs Trump now stigmitizes the inevitable refugees from.

Published at 11:58 on 1 April 2018

In war, it tends to be best to worry more about defeating the enemy more than it is to worry about being nice to the enemy in order to make him like you.

In politics, therefore, “If they go low, we go high” is not always the best policy. What is the best policy depends on the particulars of the situation. What exactly do “going low” and “going high” mean? What are the chances of victory with each strategy? Are there any principles which must be compromised to follow either? If so, how important are those principles? And so on.

What made me think of this is the case against gerrymandering that is currently in the Supreme Court. The chance of an anti-gerrymandering verdict has been increased because it’s not just Republicans doing dirt to Democrats; in Maryland, the Democrats are quite reasonably being accused of doing the converse.

Nobody much likes to admit it, but the show that Supreme Court justices put on about adhering to higher principles rather than just going for what their gut wants is quite often just a show. Witness how often conservative justices forget about states’ rights the minute they are asked to rule against a state doing something they consider unacceptably too far to the left.

If it were just red states doing gerrymandering to the disadvantage of Democrats, it would be much more likely that the conservative justices would find some pretext for ruling in favor of a state’s right to gerrymander. Instead, Maryland has helped to give them motive to find some pretext for ruling the opposite way.

Published at 07:16 on 30 March 2018

The Washington post said: The vegans came to protest his restaurant. So this chef carved a deer leg in the window.

First, there is no such protest group as “The Vegans.” Saying there is makes about as much sense as reporting that “The Jews” did something when only a particular subset of them did. Veganism is a dietary choice, full stop. All you need to do to become vegan is refrain from eating any animal products. There is no organized movement you must join and adhere to.

Second, the restaurant was targeted not because it simply served meat, but because:

• It served a particularly cruel meat product, foie gras, and
• Its advertising crassly tried to portray the establishment as an ethically responsible dining choice.

In other words, the restaurant’s owners basically painted a huge target on their backs, then act surprised when that target starts attracting brickbats.

And yes, foie gras is a particularly cruel meat product, far worse than the norm.

Published at 00:09 on 28 March 2018

Even an unrepentant pro-war neocon like George Will is now worrying that Bolton and Trump will start wars. It should have been set further forward some time ago, but it definitely should be now.

Published at 04:55 on 25 March 2018

Hundreds of thousands of right-wing Americans held marches protesting the violence and crime committed by immigrants and Muslims, featuring tearful testimonials by friends and relatives whose of those whose lives were cut short by acts of immigrant and/or Muslim perpetrated violence.

Long-established First and Fourth amendment rights were held to be obsolete relics of an earlier era and impediments to urgently-needed laws for addressing the crisis.

Conveniently overlooked were well-established facts indicating there is no crisis, given that crime is not increasing and immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than the native-born.

Overall, it was portrayed in the media as an inspiring example of citizens getting motivated to address a long-standing social problem, and hope was held out for progress that might lead the USA to becoming a more safe, modern, and orderly society like Japan or Singapore.

Oh, wait…

Published at 08:53 on 11 March 2018

That happened in this article, whose account of the famine basically jibes with my own understanding of it.

The Bengal Famine is a historical fact, one of many which make the imperialism of the capitalist nations far less distinct from the imperialism of the Soviet world when it comes to ghastly acts of oppression and mass murder than many believe it to be. This tends to be inconvenient for many capitalism fans, who find it useful to use the USSR’s many crimes as a brush to tar all of socialism with. Typically this is done by pointing out things like the Holodomor, the implicit point being that at least the capitalist West didn’t create famines for reasons of political expediency.

Well, sorry, but the capitalist West did. It’s just that the subset of history which most get taught leaves the ruling class’s own side’s greatest crimes out of the picture.

And yes, of course, Churchill indeed did a great good by fighting the Nazis—but then again, so did Stalin. Fighting Nazis shouldn’t be a blank check that gets one excused from all one’s crimes.

Published at 07:12 on 3 February 2018

First, let me begin by repeating (for those already unaware) that I am queer myself and that even if I wasn’t I’d totally support LGBT liberation, because it’s part of the struggle for human liberation. But, reread that last bit: it’s only part of the struggle for human liberation. Such can be said about any identity politics issue.

The Democratic Party in particular and the Left in general have in the USA tended to focus mainly on identity politics issues in recent decades. This has overall been nothing short of a disaster, as many members of the white working class have been presented with very few messages explaining how left-wing politics are in their own best self-interest.

Which brings us to this campaign. If it succeeds, it will be seen by many as nothing more than another brick in the wall of an elitist corporate/liberal conspiracy to keep the heartland poor and backward. If it fails, it will be celebrated as a victory in “making America great again” and a triumph over the same conspiracy.

Part of the problem is the broader context that the campaign is being conducted in. What if instead there was a large and powerful organized labor movement participating in it, because many of those same anti-LGBT states are also anti-organized-labor?

However, even though organized labor is currently nothing but a shell of its past self, unions still exist, and of course it’s still possible to articulate a more class-and-labor-based argument against Amazon moving to most of those same states. Yet that wasn’t done; the site’s opening page is completely silent on labor issues, despite Amazon having not precisely the best record on these (just type “Amazon warehouse workers” into your search engine for a whole bunch of examples).

As a political enemy of mine might conclude in one of his tweets: Sad!