Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:51 on 25 January 2018

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doomsday clock, that is. When it was last 2 minutes, the leaders in the nuclear standoff were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Joseph Stalin. Stalin was a truly awful guy, but he was not mentally unstable like both Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump are. The danger of nuclear war is thus far, far greater this time.

Two mentally stable leaders, both with nukes versus two mentally unstable ones, both with nukes. No comparison. In making the clock two minutes to midnight, the Bulletin is guilty of normalizing Donald Trump.

Published at 19:15 on 21 January 2018

What’s up with Glenn Greenwald and others on the left who generally deny the possibility that Russia successfully interfered in US domestic politics, tipping the election?

I think part of it is the desire to avoid facing an unpleasant fact; namely, the fact that the preponderance of evidence indicates that Russia acted in a hostile way that merits serious consequences in return. Note that this does not mean war; it does however mean an end to any sort of normal, routine relationship that one would have with a non-hostile nation.

If you emotionally invest a great deal into a political theory which paints the US military/industrial complex as nothing but a conspiracy to inflate foreign threats in the name of sucking down tax dollars, then it might be awkward to have to admit that some threats from abroad actually do exist. It can be even harder if you remember a time when bloated military spending (and thoroughly evil imperialistic interventionism) were being justified on the basis of a military confrontation with the (largely ethnic Russian) USSR. It can be harder yet if your name is Glenn Greenwald and when you were a reporter for the Guardian, you helped Edward Snowden expose some crimes of the US national security establishment.

Of course, a more nuanced view that allows room for there to both be actual threats from abroad and for there to be mostly fake ones hyped up by a self-serving national security state is also possible. But it tends to be emotionally very easy and seductive to operate in a world where actors get reduced to simplistic good or evil characters, even if on an intellectual level one knows better (Greenwald is not stupid).

It’s not the first time that many on the left have fallen into such a trap. In the 1930s, many pacifist leftists found it impossible to admit that Nazi Germany was a military threat. For many of those leftists, opposing World War I was a defining experience, and there was much merit in the claim that WWI was largely a result of the foibles of an imperialist ruling elite first squabbling over how to best steal land and oppress Africans then siding with the side their bankers had lent a lot of money to. One of the reasons Neville Chamberlain found it so easy to appease Hitler is that appeasement had broad support from across the political spectrum in the UK.

None of this is to say that the US ruling class is blameless in all this. As I’ve written before, the US and its allies basically laid the foundations for the current state of affairs, by encouraging and supporting Boris Yeltsin when he staged a coup against parliament and proceeded to create a strong presidency in Russia. Putin simply inherited that presidency and started putting it to uses other than the originally intended (by the West) one of ramming through a transition to a fully capitalist economy.

Likewise, Britain was not blameless in the rise of Hitler. Together with the rest of the European Triple Entente countries, the UK ended the war on terms extremely humiliating for Germany. This undermined the German economy and created a fertile environment for demagogues like Hitler to arise. Such humiliating peace terms (and their paving of the way to a later, more brutal war) were in fact correctly predicted by socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1915.

But that no more proved that Hitler wasn’t a threat than the US history of intervention in post-Cold War eastern Europe proves Putin isn’t a threat.

Published at 14:09 on 8 January 2018

I mean, sure, she’d almost certainly be better than the current occupant of the White House, but “better than Trump” is an extremely low standard to set.

Plus, judging by the speech she gave, her candidacy would represent a doubling-down on identity politics (and a continued de-emphasis of class politics) on the part of the Democrats, which is just about the last thing we need.

Published at 13:58 on 17 December 2017

Doug Jones won election from an overwhelmingly conservative state despite having liberal views on abortion that would normally cause the chattering classes to proclaim him “unelectable” there. And his other views tend to the left end of the political spectrum (by Alabama standards, anyhow) as well.

Yes, of course Jones won because Roy Moore was a tragically flawed candidate. Of course that means a non-tragically-flawed, garden-variety Republican would have mopped the floor with Jones. But a garden-variety Republican wasn’t running against Jones. Moore was.

Likewise, Sanders wouldn’t have been running against a garden-variety Republican, either. He would have been running against deeply flawed, faux populist Trump. Sanders’ genuine (or at least more genuine by far than Trump’s) populism would have enabled him to mop the floor with Trump in the debates.

Yes, Trump would have played dirty and tried to paint Sanders as an unrequited Stalinist. It probably wouldn’t have worked. Vermont is far less thoroughly liberal than most give that state credit for (it currently has a Republican governor, and for a long time its other, non-Sanders senator was a Republican).

Yet Sanders’ rhetoric has managed to successfully sell himself to many who don’t generally identify as leftists. Plus Sanders’ own experience selling himself to such voters would have led him to campaign seriously in swing states and normally Republican-leaning areas that Hillary Clinton decided weren’t worth wasting her time on. That in turn would have stopped certain key states from swinging to Trump.

One of the biggest errors politically moderate pundits make is assuming that because they, personally, happen to be highly ideological people, everyone else is, too. (Adhering to political moderation is as ideological a behavior as is adhering to any other political ideology.)

I do not believe the describes most swing voters, who are what I call “non-ideological pragmatists.” They’re not tightly committed to the left, right, or the center; they’re more focused on individual candidates and their messages than they are on any ideology. If a candidate does a good, convincing job of explaining him or herself, these pragmatists tend to be seriously willing to give him or her a try. It’s a huge part of the reason Ronald Reagan (who wasn’t labeled “The Great Communicator” for nothing) was so successful.

Bernie Sanders is another of those great communicators and as a such would have had a real chance, particularly when you figure in the high negatives of his opponent.

Published at 08:08 on 7 October 2017

What astounds me is how much the Establishment media are downplaying the grave and imminent danger of war between two nuclear-armed states both led by irresponsible madmen.

I was going to post something on this, then decided to shelve such plans when the news that Tillerson was secretly talking with the North Koreans came out. Which brings me to these points that Jennifer Rubin recently raised.

What’s wrong, I think, is that Tillerson is cracking under the stress of his job. That also explains why he’s trying to stay on: he has first-hand experience that the US president is in fact a madman, and fears what will happen if his influence attempting to moderate same is gone.

Of course, Rubin’s points are still valid, which means that Tillerson is probably on his way out. But keep in mind that Tillerson’s apparent worries are also valid.

What it all means is that Trump’s handlers are not able to rein in his worst attributes.

Make no mistake, the danger we are facing is now extreme.

Published at 13:16 on 19 September 2017

Probably doesn’t even see the irony in making a speech that contains both this:

Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.

and this:

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.

Published at 10:06 on 2 August 2017

First, Trump’s Russia Reset is Dead

Trump’s possibly treasonous Russia collusion backfired, bigly. It was too galling even for most members of today’s Republican Party. With its sanctions bill, Congress has hobbled Trump with respect to Russia.

It’s somewhat surprising that Trump didn’t decide to force the issue with a (doomed) veto. He’s certainly immature and short-tempered enough to do just such a thing. His handlers probably had to argue with him quite a bit to get him to acknowledge the inevitable, and accept today’s humiliation of having to sign a hated bill into law rather than tomorrow’s humiliation of an overwhelming veto override.

Onward to a New Cold War?

In the short term, definitely. Even through the medium term, quite likely. That really sucks, but with the successful (and unrepentant) Russian interference in the US (and other nations’) political systems, non-sucky immediate-term outcomes simply don’t seem possible.

Of the sucky outcomes possible, a new Cold War seems to me the least sucky. It exerts consequences on the Putin regime, whose domestic economy is quite weak already and which was counting on a Russia reset in the West to end sanctions, create domestic economic growth, and boost the regime’s popularity.

Now all Putin gets is a short-term opportunity to rally Russians around the flag while he copes with a long-term set of economic constraints that will act to undermine his regime’s popularity.

Karma Has Bitten the West, Too

Don’t think Russia is the only nation hoisted by its own petard for interfering with other nations’ politics. The West interfered with Russian politics in a huge way by backing Yeltsin’s 1993 coup against Russia’s constitutional government. That coup created the imperial presidency that Yeltsin’s successor Putin used to create the dictatorship that ended up destabilizing the USA and other Western nations.

Kompromat? Probably None of That

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the alleged (and it was always alleged; there never was any hard evidence of it) extreme dirt Putin had on Trump probably doesn’t exist. US/Russia relations are now totally in the doghouse, so Russia has every possible reason imaginable to retaliate against Trump with every diplomatic weapon in its arsenal. If it doesn’t come out in the next week or two, it’s safe to conclude the kompromat simply doesn’t exist at all.

Published at 08:37 on 8 June 2017

So, I’m in this basement where a washing machine has just been installed. Two plumbers are there, having just added the supply and drain lines for the machine. There is also a washtub sink in the basement.

The basement lies below the level of the sewers, so both washtub and washing machine drain to a small tank which has a lift pump in it. Note I said small: the tank was intended to serve the washtub sink only and has not been upgraded to reflect the new washing machine. I point out to the plumbers that it’s almost certain to overflow and flood, and they both dismiss my claim, pointing out my lack of professional experience as a plumber.

The first load of clothes is loaded and the machine started. When it reaches the end of the wash cycle and drains, sure enough, the tank overflows. The plumbers express surprise about this mystifying and unexpected (to them) outcome, and propose solutions that fall short of expanding either the tank and or pump capacity sufficient to prevent further such incidents.

I point out that at minimum, the tank needs to be able to accommodate the maximum volume expected to be drained from the sink at any one time plus the volume of water from the machine, or the pump must be able to accompany the sum of the two corresponding flow rates. My objections are dismissed; there is insufficient space for a large tank and it is considered too costly to replace the line from the pump with a larger one.

At this point I wake up.

Published at 07:59 on 18 May 2017

The excerpts below are from this article by the New York Times.

Enemies from within have launched a “deep-state” smear campaign, news organizations are acting with ulterior motives, and the worst attacks are yet to come.

The term “deep state” is not a neologism; it’s been around for a long time and applied to many political situations. And there does appear to be such a thing at work in the USA presently. That’s a good thing, in this context, since it’s acting for the preservation of an Establishment that while deeply flawed, is greatly preferable to the sort of fascist state Trump desires to create.

The worst attacks are indeed probably yet to come, but it must be pointed out that the most effective attack strategy so far has been to simply tell the truth about how awful Trump is. If Trump stopped violating the norms of a free, open society, he’d be brutally effective in disarming his adversaries (who in turn would dwindle in number and diminish in militance as motives to oppose Trump vanished).

The bit about the media I will cover after the following excerpt:

Pushing back against the biggest threat so far to Donald Trump’s young presidency, his most fervent supporters are building alternative narratives to run alongside the “establishment” media account — from relatively benign diversions to more bizarre conspiracies.

Sources such as the New York Times are definitely the Establishment media. There is no inaccuracy on the part of anyone (including the far right) describing them as such. And they are out to get Trump. For good reason; Trump violates numerous basic norms of a free and open society.

With varying degrees of credibility and credulity, conservatives have fed stories that Mr. Trump is the victim of sabotage by an adversarial intelligence community full of Trojan horse holdovers from the Obama administration.

“There is someone burrowed into the intelligence community who wants to hurt Trump,” the conservative author and radio host Laura Ingraham warned.

There are individuals in the Intelligence Community who want to damage Trump. For good reason: Trump violates basic norms. These acts on the part of the Intelligence Community are not a violation of duty. These agencies do serve under the command of the president, but the oath they pledge to upheld is not one of loyalty to president; it is one of loyalty to the US Constitution. Intelligence agents have not merely the right but the duty to disobey orders, regulations, and even laws if doing so is, in their sober judgement, the best practical way to uphold the Constitution they pledged loyalty to.

This goes for more than just the Intelligence Community, by the way. All civil servants (as well as all members of the armed forces) take similar oaths. The wording of the oaths was deliberately chosen long ago, for the express reason of helping to incite precisely the sort of resistance from within which we are now seeing, should an enemy of a democratic republic ever take possession of the White House.

The “deep state” is very real, but far from being an unforeseen aberration on the body politic, it is a deliberately created check against the sort of situation we find ourselves in.

The part about the Obama administration is mostly baseless smoke-blowing. While it is true that there are many in the civil service who were hired during those years, the civil service has long been operated at arm’s length from the presidency. Moreover, the civil service is full of individuals who have been in it for many decades; there’s plenty of civil servants who were hired under Republican administrations.

For many Trump loyalists, the issue is not whether his presidency is messy and chaotic and dysfunctional. Many of them seemed resigned long ago to the fact that it would be. The more relevant question is whether they see anyone else who is equipped to change Washington in the way Mr. Trump promised he would.

None of the above should be construed to deny that many of the motives for voters to choose Trump are in fact valid. The Establishment has ignored the desires of many working-class people, for many decades. This is true for both political parties.

That anger will not vanish when Trump vanishes from the White House. Nor should it. It needs to be given a more fact-based and less hateful outlet by creating a left-wing populist movement. This may prove easier than many assume (witness how the Occupy movement emerged seemingly out of nowhere).

Trump supporters will feel plenty bitter and let down when their führer falls, but the vast majority of people have shockingly short political memories. After the anger dies down, many will become potentially receptive to alternate messages.

Any alliance the Left makes with the Establishment should therefore be a temporary one aimed at addressing the current crises the Trump presidency represents. If not, the anger will remain, searching for an outlet, and there will always be demagogues on the Right willing to exploit it.

Ultimately, the Establishment is untenable and cannot stand in its present state for long. If one desires to preserve basic freedoms, it is going to be necessary to move society leftwards.

Published at 21:31 on 17 May 2017

But it is encouraging to see how much the Trump regime has unraveled in the past week or so. Trump is a supreme threat, both to this country and the planet as a whole, and the sooner he goes, the better.

At this stage, it bears observing that everything publicly observable about Trump is consistent with the thesis that he is a Putin puppet. This includes the bombing of that Syrian air base (remember, he warned Russia first so they could move their planes out). When it’s topped off by first firing the FBI director for refusing to stop a Russia-related investigation, then the leaking of classified information to the Russians, things really smell fishy.

No this doesn’t prove anything, of course, but the Putin puppet thesis is the simplest explanation going, and even if ultimately proven false, the willing obstruction of justice is itself an impeachable offense.

Now we wait. Investigations take time, and while that happens it’s likely the “downward spiral” will continue. I do not necessarily think it will continue to happen at the rate it has this week, based on Trump’s campaign (he had his epically bad weeks, but then he’d have better ones, and even occasional times when he appeared mostly normal).

But, who knows, it just might. Trump is extremely thin-skinned and emotionally immature (on the latter point, he himself has admitted he’s basically the same person he was in the first grade), and leaks from the White House indicate he is taking recent events very poorly. Things may well have passed a tipping point wherein bad news has created an emotional breakdown which ensures further erratic behavior (and thus further bad news).

It also bears pointing out that the Trump regime may end sooner than most people think, if Trump chooses to resign in frustration. If the latter happens, expect no small amount of purile outbursts about how the evil system and ungrateful public have deprived a now unworthy country of its greatest president ever. According to Trump, everyone is potentially responsible for Trump’s problems save for Trump himself.

Who knows, it may even end in Trump’s suicide, particularly if damning enough news comes out during the investigations. The motivating factor would be an existential crisis caused by being forced to acknowledge that far from being the greatest ever, he’s a miserable failure the likes of which the presidency has never seen before.