Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:56 on 1 July 2024

Six fascists on the Supreme Court.

It’s dead, Jim. The Republic is dead.

Published at 20:37 on 28 June 2024

First, if Biden really was sick, why did we only learn this after the fact, when his team was desperate to make excuses for his poor performance? Why didn’t the White House warn us beforehand, so that expectations could be tempered?

Second, it is conceivable that he might have indeed had a cold (his voice was hoarse, after all), and his team wanted him to persevere because they were afraid of the damage admitting frail health might do.

Third, it doesn’t much matter in the end analysis whether or not Biden had a cold. He works at, and is campaigning for another term of, the hardest job in the world. One of the things that makes it a hard job is its physically demanding nature. You really don’t get much of a chance to rest and recuperate during physical illness. You are generally expected to plow through periods of sickness and keep working a demanding schedule.

Those are the terms of the job, and Biden just showed to all that he is no longer capable of them. And that is the most favourable honest assessment possible of Biden’s performance. If, as is more likely than not, he was not actually fighting a cold, he is even less up to the physical and mental demands of the job.

Published at 08:08 on 28 June 2024

1. Growing power of reactionary populism.
2. Insurrection by right-wing populist movement.
3. Elected government unwilling or unable to punish insurrectionists effectively.
4. Frail octogenarian selected to be president by pro-democracy forces (we are here).
5. Transition to fascist dictatorship.

Published at 22:04 on 27 June 2024

Really, Biden just about ticked all the boxes in the “frail old man who has no business running for the most difficult job in the world” department. Because that is precisely what he came off as.

F*ck you very much, Democratic Party leadership. First Hillary in 2016 and now a Biden second term attempt. You people have a talent for running sure losers. Yet you continue to act as if you are the smartest people around, and talk down condescendingly to anyone who dissents.

It doesn’t bode very well for a last-minute course correction.

Published at 13:09 on 20 June 2024

What would give me hope, in the event of a Trump win, that a transition to fascist rule in the USA is unlikely? I think the answer is best found where I recently wrote that who ultimately prevails will mostly be “a question of which side manages to best triumph over its own internal incompetence.” The answer is, in other words, a question of how the opposition to Trump might manage to best triumph over its own internal incompetence, and how many signs of this appear.

I think the most promising such sign would be the appearance on the scene of what I will term, for lack of a better phrase, a “none of the above” opposition that quickly attracts a large degree of popular support. By “none of the above,” I mean that it won’t be associated (at least not explicitly) with either the Democratic Party establishment, or with the radical Left subculture. Many, perhaps most, involved in it won’t even personally identify as either Democrats or leftists, and neither will most of its initial leadership and/or public figures.

The necessary factors for such a movement appearing will exist, namely:

1. Trump’s extremism.
2. The self-evident incompetence of existing oppositional actors.

The first will motivate people to oppose Trump, and the second will make them realize that they can’t rely on existing organizations to do the opposing and must therefore create something new and more effective. The question is whether or not the motives will bear the desired fruit.

This also means that the best contingency plan would be to start laying the groundwork for facilitating the appearance of such a movement now.

Published at 10:10 on 19 June 2024

He Probably Will

Biden has been very consistently underwater in the polls for some time now. I don’t think that can be simply waved off. Trumpers were waving off how Trump had been consistently underwater by this stage in 2020, and we all know how that election ended up.

But He Might Not

I said probably in the above section, and I meant it. Polls are not infallible. The polls were saying that Hillary would probably win in 2016, and again we all know how that one ended up. Probably more pertinently, the Democrats have overperformed compared to polling for every election since and including 2018. This is probably due to several reasons. Speculating on what those reasons probably are is outside the scope of this post, but suffice to say the most likely reasons still all exist.

At any rate, a Trump win in November is likely enough that it is worth speculating on.

There Will Be Chaos

That is the one and only certainty. Trump is an agent of chaos.

It won’t be as much of a global shock as Trump’s 2016 win, because pretty much everyone knows that a Trump win is not just an idle hypothetical but is very much in the realm of possibility. But there will still be chaos nonetheless.

For openers, there is Trump’s (and Trumpers’) ego-driven “own the libs” mentality at work. “Owning” the other side by rubbing their noses in their defeat might feel good, but it is seldom good political strategy. The best strategy is to make the other side feel somewhere on the spectrum from bored to reassured, because that robs them of the motive to oppose you. “Owning the libs” accomplishes exactly the opposite.

So expect the new Trump era to begin with something like the 2016 Womxn’s Marches, i.e. historically big protests. This is particularly likely if Trump once again wins in the electoral vote despite losing the popular vote.

So Many Unknowns

Beyond that, it becomes increasingly hard to say.

On the one hand, he’s a fascist, set on doing fascist things. And this time, unlike in 2016, the fascists are actually expecting to win and have planned for it.

On the other hand, he’s incompetent at most things. The last time Trump was in the White House, he was continually stumbling over his own dick and making one stupid unforced error after another. This started very early on, when he ran his mouth off and earned a Special Counsel investigation for it. Project 2025 is very real and very scary, but it is quite likely that Trump himself would unwittingly sabotage efforts to put it fully into place.

And we then have the opposition, both the so-called “opposition” of the Democratic Party, one of the world’s most politically incompetent major parties, and the latent or potential opposition from the grassroots. And given the inward-looking and subcultural nature of the radical left in the USA, the Democratic Party is hardly the only potential oppositional actor that can be described as likely to be incompetent.

So it’s really a question of which side manages to best triumph over its own internal incompetence. That’s not a question that I (or likely anyone else) can answer right now.

The Big Takeaway

What it does mean, however, that if Trump wins those on the Left should not give up hope and throw in the towel. Real opposition, opposition capable of derailing Trump, will still very much be possible, and the time to start opposing will be the instant the election is called for Trump. And the time to start making contingency plans for such opposition is now.

Published at 16:07 on 17 June 2024

CNN has released a summary of the rules for the upcoming Trump/Biden debate on the 27th. Some comments:

Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak. While no props or pre-written notes will be allowed on the stage, candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water.

So it’s pretty obvious that the mike for Candidate A will be dead whenever it is Candidate B’s turn to speak. This means no more interrupting by Trump. Sort of a surprise that Trump would agree to this, and I would expect Trump and the sheep who follow him to bleat about “censorship” post-debate because of it.

That’s assuming Trump even shows up, of course, but given that his team has agreed to these rules, my money is on him showing up. If he believed beforehand the rules rigged the debate against him, he simply wouldn’t agree to them, and there would be no debates scheduled.

What’s not so obvious is what happens when a candidate runs past his allotted time to speak.

Ideally, the mikes should be on an automated timer, with a count-down clock, visible to both the audience and each speaker, showing time remaining. The instant it goes to 0:0.000, down to the millisecond, the mike gets cut. If it gets cut mid-syllable, so be it. Should have paid better attention to the clock.

Anything less than the above, and Trump will abuse the situation to gain an unfair advantage by speaking more than his opponent.

Some aspects of the debate – including the absence of a studio audience – will be a departure from previous debates. But, as in the past, the moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion,” according to the network.

Second part first: don’t make me laugh by writing such whoppers, CNN. Lax enforcement of rules made the so-called moderators putty in Trump’s hands four years ago. They let Trump interrupt Biden, contrary to the rules, over and over and over again. This, CNN, is why I suspect your moderators will let Trump run over. The only thing I will trust is cold, hard, simple, merciless technology. Use an automated timer or Trump will repeatedly run over time.

Regarding the lack of an audience, this is probably to Biden’s advantage. Trump feeds on crowds in a way that Biden simply does not.

Published at 19:04 on 30 May 2024

Guilty on all counts! Mind you, this was the least important of all of Trump’s trials (the Georgia vote-tampering and Federal insurrection charges are far more important), but the precedent that presidents and ex-presidents are above the law has been completely broken and repudiated. Ex-presidents can be charged, prosecuted, and convicted.

Not that it will matter one whit to Trump’s base of loyal fascist followers. Any real repudiation of the Trump legacy must involve a second defeat in at the polls in November.

Published at 09:13 on 29 May 2024

Why? Simple arithmetic.

The USA is about ⅓ fascist (that is the rough fraction of diehard Trumpers), and it only takes a single fascist on the jury to block conviction. In Manhattan, the statistics are not quite so dismal: about 12% voted for Trump in the last election. Let’s be generous and assume some of those did so while holding their noses and that the true measure of the hardcore fascist base is half that.

In other words, Manhattan is 6% fascist. Or, looking at it from a glass half-full point of view, 94% non-fascist. But here’s the rub: the odds of all 12 jurors being non-fascist are 0.94¹² or about 48%. In other words, odds are better than even that there is at least one fascist on the jury.

And no fascist will vote against their führer.

Published at 23:21 on 28 May 2024

Just in the past few weeks we have seen a series of ignored international court rulings, plus statements from the USA that Israel will be allowed to ignore the rulings (thus showing how hard it is to turn the ocean liner that is foreign policy), plus three Western European nations, two of them NATO members, recognizing Palestine as a fellow nation.

Not much more to say other than the decline continues, and to reiterate that this is all meaningless feel-good stuff until suddenly, at some point in the future, it won’t be.