Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:47 on 10 March 2015

In this story.

Before I go on, let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Yes, the human rights situation in Venezuela sucks (and I’ve not been shy about admitting it here). The government is getting increasingly authoritarian there, and anytime opposition leaders are routinely jailed it’s outright creepy.

But, Venezuela is hardly the only place where the human rights situation sucks. Let’s compare two other petro-states.

First, Malaysia. It’s probably the closest situation to Venezuela of the two I’m comparing, because like Venezuela it’s (in theory) a democracy. It’s also a place where opposition leaders get jailed (and sometimes tortured). Venezuela has been dominated by the Chávistas since 1999. Malaysia has been dominated by its ruling coalition (without interruption) since 1957.

Second, Saudi Arabia. Here there’s not even the pretense of democracy. It’s a flat-out absolute monarchy. Remember all the hand-wringing about the evils of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and how they were thoughtlessly demolishing their country’s historic legacy and had a tyrannical “Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue” enforcing the strictest possible interpretation of Islamic law with an iron fist? Well, Saudi Arabia has both those attributes: Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

And please, cut the crap about Venezuela being a security risk to the USA. What’s happening there isn’t nice, but it’s also internal nastiness and not an external security threat. It bears pointing out that this is in distinct contrast to Saudi Arabia, which has proven itself to be a breeding ground for terrorists.

It’s not a surprise Venezuela is coming up again in US Establishment politics. First, the regime there is looking increasingly shaky. Second, there’s presently an oil glut (which is in fact a big part of why the regime is losing its popularity). That means that if worse comes to worst, the ruling class won’t be provoking a big oil shortage if the US loses access to Venezuela’s oil as the spat escalates. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that it’s taken this long for the ruling class to bring the issue up again.

But please, get real. The issue isn’t human rights (as much as the US ruling elite might assert it is). It’s merely that someone other than who the ruling elite desires is in power there. Just look at what’s happened in Honduras since the US ruling class installed a regime there if you have any doubts about that.

Published at 08:52 on 3 March 2015

A for-profit prison with a long history of complaints for inhumane conditions has been shut down after the inmates organized an uprising and rendered it uninhabitable. Links to the Establishment media’s coverage of the event can be found here (NYT) and here (NPR).

I chose the words in my opening sentence very carefully, particularly the “organized an uprising” part. It is a common trope on the radical Left to label any outbreak of unrest an “uprising” or “insurrection”. This is a mistake. There is a big difference between an uprising and a mere riot, even though both typically appear same in the eyes of the law. A riot is spontaneous, chaotic, and unplanned; an uprising is planned and much more organized (though still plenty chaotic by its very nature). The Rodney King riots, for example, fell short of the criteria to be considered uprisings. That one might wish something were so does not make it so.

But it’s not that hard to read between the lines about what happened in Willacy County last month and see that it was not a spontaneous and unplanned outburst. In the NPR link above, even the spokesman for the now-shuttered facility spills the beans about how it was organized and planned in advance in his attempt to downplay the story. And it didn’t simply spring out of nowhere: as I said in my opening sentence, there was a long, sorry history of poor conditions at that prison.

And what were the results of the uprising? Not murder and mayhem like what happened at Santa Fe decades ago (an actual prison riot). There were only a handful of injuries (pretty much inevitable in such a situation) when it was all over. The damage was mostly confined to the inanimate structure of the facility itself. Moreover, the damage was severe enough to cause the facility to be closed indefinitely for repairs; apparently the prisoners had decided to plan and focus their efforts in that direction, and not let themselves be distracted by petty retributions against guards or disputes between rival groups of prisoners.

The outcome was the shuttering of a facility that had persisted in operating despite repeated attempts by Nice Liberals to work within the system and reform it. All in all, it appears to be a most inspiring example of direct action.

Published at 20:35 on 2 March 2015

Rojava being a set of three disconnected regions from what has traditionally been a part of the Syrian-controlled part of Kurdistan. In the chaos of the Syrian Revolution, a form of social organization with many anarchist characteristics seems to be emerging there.

Apparently, their main source of inspiration is the PKK, who’s leader has apparently discovered the works of Murray Bookchin while in prison and been inspired by them to change his ideology from orthodox Leninism to something more decentralized and anarchistic in nature.

I am hesitant to flat-out call what is happening there anarchism; there’s some stuff on libcom.org which points how it falls short of anarchism, or at least what the group of anarcho-communists who run that site say “anarchism” is. Which, while not identical to my own definition of anarchism, is not completely dissimilar, either.

But, we’re talking about something that would be a major social change even in the West. In a part of the world that has historically lagged when it comes to individual liberty, the level of change is even more profound. And we live in an imperfect world, where nothing will ever achieve any ideal.

What seems inspiring about it all are the positive developments that have apparently happened there. Probably most revealing were actually my attempts to find embarrassing bits dirt on the revolution there.

One of them was about the checkered past of Gil Rosenberg, a Canadian-Israeli woman who went there to fight and was enthusiastically welcomed into their ranks. The standard “See? They will accept anyone, that’s how low their standards are.” rhetoric was trotted out.

Well, guess what? Joining foreign military organizations as a way to run away from and forget an unpleasant past is something that’s been around for a very long time. There’s even an entire fighting force that is based around precisely that concept as a recruitment strategy; it is called the French Foreign Legion. And if you’re a struggling revolutionary movement and someone offers you help, you say YES and you say it with great enthusiasm and thanks (did the American Revolutionaries refuse the offer of help from the French monarchy)?

And this was for an Israeli Jew, mind you! That alone speaks volumes as to how revolutionary values are changing traditional prejudices.

To this can be added how a collective that I generally trust a great deal has come out with a book which concurs that remarkable things are happening in that part of the world. There’s also a fairly good BBC report on the subject.

Published at 11:38 on 18 February 2015

That basically describes US housing policy in a nutshell.

What prompted me to write this was receiving a letter from Freddie Mac (a government-sponsored enterprise) last month. They’re buying my mortgage so that US Bank (the original lender) can be freed up to make more home loans to other people. That’s in addition to the subsidy from the government I get by paying my interest on that loan with pre-tax dollars.

Both forms of government intervention in my favor came about simply because I decided to purchase a home. I didn’t have to spend years on a waiting list or enter a lottery to receive the largesse. It just flowed to me. Such it has long been for homeowners.

Meanwhile, the working poor (who cannot afford home ownership) do have to enter lotteries (where like all lotteries, the odds of “winning” are slim) and sit on waiting lists, often for years, to become eligible for Section 8 vouchers or public housing apartments. And rents, unlike mortgage interest, receive no income tax deductions. Again, such it has long been.

Why is the government giving subsidies to upper middle class software engineers to purchase homes in upscale suburbs while mostly ignoring those who truly need help with their housing situations? Because we’re a class society, that’s why. The higher you are on the class hierarchy, the more your life matters.

Keep that in mind some affluent right-winger (no doubt a recipient of the same sort of largesse I am receiving) starts getting all sanctimonious about the baleful effects of the “culture of dependency” on the less-well-off.

For more of the ugly details, go here.

Published at 20:15 on 9 February 2015

What’s happening with the ongoing gentrification of the inner cities is the end of the real great inversion: those decades following World War II when the cities were abandoned pretty much wholesale throughout the USA as desirable places to live.

The inner city basically hit rock bottom in the 1970s, after several decades of accelerating decline. That was the decade when large areas of the Bronx burned and New York City almost went bankrupt. By the end of the 1980s, historic preservation was starting to make people appreciate those older urban core areas and they began a gradual, ongoing process of revival.

Those postwar decades of urban decline are an anomaly in an overall historical record in which cities have traditionally been seen as the most prestigious places to live. That those same decades encompass most of the lifespan of the Baby Boomer generation does not make it any less an anomaly.

Published at 08:23 on 4 February 2015

The latest Republican effort to repeal it proves my point. It contains a provision to work on coming up with something to replace it. From that article:

Unlike previous GOP bills to repeal the health care law, this version did instruct key House committees to report back within six months with new legislation that would provide health care coverage without increased costs.

The debate on whether there should be some social responsibility for health care (as opposed to it merely being each to his own in a capitalist market) is therefore over. Both sides now agree that health care should be more than just an individual responsibility. The debate is now moving on to how exactly to define that social responsibility and its relationship to individual responsibility.

The latter, of course, will always be a big part of the equation, as it must in any free society. It would take an Orwellian world of total surveillance and total lack of personal privacy for it to be otherwise.

Even in the UK, which probably has the most socialized medical system in the First World, there’s still a lot of individual responsibility: choosing which risky behaviors to engage in (or avoid), adopting good hygiene habits, reporting symptoms to one’s doctor, choosing which doctor to have as one’s primary care practitioner, etc.

But I digress. Back to the emerging consensus as to the coming parameters of the debate: It is precisely why the Right fought any sort of health-care reform so tenaciously. They knew it would come to this; they knew it would be a Social Security moment, a time when a move to a more collective responsibility for something (then: retirement, now: health care) would become widely accepted by society.

That’s true despite any of the very real flaws in Obamacare (it’s basically a welfare program for the wasteful and inefficient private insurance industry), or no doubt in any of the GOP proposals that emerge to change or replace it. The basic parameters of the debate have now shifted.

Published at 21:04 on 3 February 2015

Basically, they are dead set on pissing as many people as possible off, and their ideology prevents them from being able to acknowledge this. So they’re doomed to gather increasing numbers of enemies, and increasingly provoke said enemies, until those same enemies feel compelled to crush the Islamic State. It’s precisely the same reason why Hitler was doomed to fail.

A look at their English-language magazine should be enough to convince one of that. It’s packed with rhetoric about how what they’re doing is God’s will. So any criticism of their aggressive expansionist doctrine amounts (in their eyes) to criticizing the Almighty, which is of course a capital offense according to their ideology.

And, unlike with Al Qaeda (a non-state actor), war will be possible to wage against the Islamic State. It’s an actual nation-state (albeit not an internationally recognized one). It has an identifiable territory which can be attacked, invaded, and conquered. The well-understood concept of war can be easily applied.

And what sort of state is it? A landlocked one, in control of a badly conflict-scarred infrastructure, surrounded by nations which hate it. And which it is fated to provoke even more.

It’s doomed.

Published at 21:18 on 29 January 2015

The top-down sort of state socialism that the late Hugo Chávez implemented had its inefficiencies, but it survived for two reasons:

1. Venezuala is a petro-state and could afford to throw enough money around to (mostly) paper them over, and
2. The status quo Chávez upset had such gross inequalities that it didn’t matter for most Venezuelans that there were shortages of certain key consumer goods from time to time, since access to same had still improved for them (they had gone from often not being able to afford things to much less often occasionally running into shortages).

But with the collapse in oil prices, the strains are now starting to show.

Unlike Saudi Arabia which has a lot of oil and only a few people, the situation is reversed in Venezuela. Maduro isn’t sitting on piles of money that he can draw on in the lean times. Plus, despite some of first Chávez’ and now Maduro’s admittedly authoritarian policies, Venezuela is still much more free and open a society than Saudi Arabia.

As a result, Nicolás Maduro’s popularity is now plummeting. So it’s safe to make a prediction that his days are probably numbered. Absent an unexpectedly sudden turnaround in oil prices, I expect him to be out of power within two years.

Hopefully that can happen without a total sell-out to the forces of imperialism and class rule.

Published at 07:08 on 21 January 2015

Random stuff, because I’m still very much alive despite not posting much here recently:

Charlie Hebdo. Yes, their cartoons do have a well-established history of being crude and insensitive. That’s absolutely no justification for the violence (though it does help explain it; justification and explanation are two different things). There is no right to not be offended. What probably sucks more than the loss of life, however, is that France does not seem to be taking the same moral high road Norway took after their recent terrorist attack. There’s way too much talk of “war” happening in France. Neither Al Qaeda nor terrorism is a country with a defined land mass (the first is a non-state actor, the second is a tactic), therefore it is is pointless to wage war on either. I’ve discussed this latter point before, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Construction at home. It’s was a week of not really having my home to myself, because I’m having the carpet replaced with hardwood flooring. And it looks like this disruption is going to last longer than expected, because the adhesive used to attach the stair tread really stinks, so I’m now coping with that issue for at least a week after the work ends.

Durian. Speaking of strong smells, I did finally have time to treat myself to a durian smoothie in celebration of moving and defeating the bedbugs. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered, and now that the experience is fresher in my mind the addictive urge resurfaced. I actually tasted an almond aspect to it this time, which I believe is a first. One of the joys of durian is that it never tastes quite the same twice.

Sometimes, it’s best not to even try. That’s a statement that will make every motivational speaker cringe, but it’s true. One’s plans must be at least somewhat realistic. Consider the fate of the Kalakala. This historic vessel was “saved” from its fate of housing a fish-processing plant in Alaska by being towed back to its old home to await historic restoration. Alas, that latter part of the plan was very expensive, and funds to perform it never materialized. The vessel ended up bleeding its owners white in moorage fees year after year. Its current owner has decided to end the financial bloodbath and recoup at least some of his losses by scrapping it. If it had been left in Alaska, it would either still be a fish processing plant, or be sitting there abandoned (because in a rural area the moorage would be cheap or free and the cost to tow it south for scrapping would exceed the scrap value). It would, in other words, be waiting indefinitely for the right restorer to show up.

Sometimes, one has to try harder. Realism again. It’s a fact of life that some misfortunes, like bedbug infestation, are extremely difficult and expensive to manage. The “experts” will tend to lie to you about the effort and expense required in an attempt to manage the shock value. Absent being one of the lucky few who resolves the problem with minimum effort, the effect of the lies is to draw out the process, because instead of making the full effort needed, weeks and then months get wasted on half-efforts. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way battling scabies, and one I put to use again last year on bedbugs. I hit them harder than the experts recommended, and planned for the initial treatments to fail (which they did). I took stronger precautions than recommended to prevent infesting my new place. I might still be battling them if I hadn’t followed that strategy.

Published at 20:09 on 21 December 2014

How dare they!

That’s basically what comes to mind when gripes like this catch my attention.

And before anyone complains: No, I am not celebrating anyone’s death. I am merely pointing out that well-established historical patterns have expected consequences. It may be politically incorrect to say so in Establishment circles, but that doesn’t make it any less of a fact.