Blackcap Blog

Published at 13:48 on 29 July 2012

First off, I will have to say that I wince every time someone spouts off about the most recent heat wave (or hurricane, or tornado outbreak, or other episode of extreme weather) being obviously caused by global warming. No, it’s not. Extreme weather was happening naturally before the Industrial Revolution started changing the composition of the atmosphere. Its mere existence is evidence of nothing save the existence of extremes, and extremes always happen in any varying, natural phenomenon.

Of course, this cuts both ways: neither is the continued existence of cold snaps any definitive proof against global warming. But I digress.

Anyhow, it’s not surprising that one of local meterologist Cliff Mass‘s recurring themes is poking holes in such claims. Such hole-poking is well and fine. Up to a point. Because, of course, there’s far more stupid and dangerous behavior going on with respect to global warming than some misinformed comments made by advocates of doing something about it.

Sure, it’s fun to play Devil’s Advocate, and even useful to the debate for a healthy measure of same to go on, but there’s also this thing called scientific responsibility. And given what the downsides of continued, unabated modification of the atmosphere to future generations are, responsibility is not evidenced by being obsessed with debunking one sides’ errors, particularly when that side, flawed though it may be, is the one advocating for action to address the issue.

The real evidence for global warming looks more like this:

Extremes of cold are still happening, but global warming has loaded the dice. Not so much as in Krugman’s claim of 4 sides in favor of heat, 1 normal, 1 cool, but loaded nonetheless. Extremes of heat now really do happen more frequently than those of cold.

For starters, it would help if Mass discussed evidence like this more often.

Published at 08:19 on 30 May 2012

And that’s that the ill-considered initiative measure to privatize liquor sales in Washington State is certain to increase prices. The Establishment media is at this late hour, one week before the state liquor stores close for good, starting to feebly offer the caution that prices “might” go up.

Really, now, how couldn’t they? One of the measure’s selling points, trumpeted by its advocates, was that it would not reduce revenues to the state; the legislation was crafted to be revenue neutral. And capitalists are capitalists: in the retail liquor business, as in any business, the goal of business is to make a profit.

So, the state is still making its profit. To that picture, we now add capitalists taking their cut. Just where is that money going to come from? Does anyone honestly think the new for-profit liquor stores are going to harvest C-notes from a secret orchard of money trees and make their money that way? This is not rocket science we are talking about.

Sure, some of it is going to come from union-busting and pushing worker pay down. But that can only go so far. The advocates of paying workers less always overestimate the profits for owners that this will generate.

In short, prices will go up. It’s as close a thing to a future certainty that a simple economic analysis can predict.

Published at 20:12 on 1 May 2012

We won’t simply arrest you for having dissident views, because that wouldn’t stand court challenges.

What we will do is infiltrate your groups, and use every mind trick in the book to convince you and your comrades to go over the top and do things like plot to blow up a highway bridge, then we’ll arrest you and prosecute for that. That will stand up in court, because plotting to blow up a bridge is actually a crime.

And it’s obvious that’s exactly what the FBI did in this case. Both the dummy explosives (who else sells radical groups dummy explosives?), and this dead giveaway of a quote make it crystal clear:

Officials say the plot evolved from an idea to use smoke grenades to distract law enforcement while they destroyed financial institution signs on highrises across downtown Cleveland.

I mean, really now, how does the FBI know how the plot evolved over time without having infiltrated the group in the first place?

Keep that in mind while listening to the Establishment media hyperventilate over this story. This plot would have simply never happened in the form it did without the intervention of those who purport to be protecting society from such plots.

Published at 20:05 on 1 May 2012

Twenty years ago, May Day tended to pass unnoticed in most major American cities. There would be the odd small gathering or event here or there, many of them sponsored by creepy Stalinist cult groups aping the politics of the thoroughly disgusting Soviet bloc nations who had stolen the label of the radical Left and cloaked their tyranny in it.

It was but a dream that there would be enough people upset at what the capitalist hierarchy was doing to people and the planet to make a newsworthy disruption or two. That only happened in Europe, and served to reinforce that May Day as a political day of action was a European concept that was foreign to the United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. That meaning of May Day got its start in the heart of America, in Chicago in 1886. But I digress.

It was but a wish that anything close to that level of political consciousness could ever arise in the seemingly terminally passive and class-unconscious United States. Yet it has. Exaggerated and misreported though today’s events may be, it’s become a big enough thing in Seattle and a number of other cities that the one thing the Establishment media cannot do anymore is simply ignore it.

It’s a painfully slow process, and a messy one as well, but it’s underway at least. May it continue so that by the time I’m old and dying I can at least say I’ve lived through and participated in one of history’s more hopeful eras.

Published at 19:43 on 1 May 2012

I sat much of it out, having only recently stared a new job and thus being unwilling to take leave time so early on. I did catch a bit of the tail end of the day of demonstrations, however, and have several observations to share.

First, the fearmongering. At work they forwarded a e-mail from the Downtown Seattle Association (my job is downtown) basically predicting that the apocalypse was going to break out today. Nothing of the sort happened, of course. On the block where my employer’s building is located, nothing out of the usual ever became visible, and it is only a few blocks from Westlake Park, which was one of the focal points of today’s action. At Westlake, tourists were posing using the rally as a backdrop.

Second, the yellow journalism. Many of my co-workers were nervously following the Establishment media’s web sites today. Most were smart enough to figure out that there was something fishy going on with the reporting. One showed me a “paint bomb” that looked more like a mostly-empty paint container that had spilled. Which, in fact, is exactly what it was. When I stopped by Westlake, I saw an area with stocked with tempera paint, cardboard, and glitter, so that those so inclined could fashion their own protest signs. And some of the paint had indeed been spilled. Glitter had also been spilled. Maybe they could have breathlessly reported a “glitter bomb” as well.

Third, the hypocritical double standards, perhaps best exhibited here. Note how when some protesters use violence against reporters, it’s just an attack, but when the cops use violence against those same reporters, it’s all because of a “mistake.” They could have just has accurately said those protesters mistook them for the sort of reporters who collaborate with the police. Such reporters actually exist, by the way.

Published at 10:22 on 28 April 2012

Is that what the author of this article on pugetsoundanarchists.org is saying to anyone who does not currently self-identify as an anarchist when s/he says “groups other than our intended readership?” I certainly hope not, because if they are, it’s tantamount to a wish for perpetual irrelevance, because if anarchism is to ever to be a meaningful movement capable of having an effect on the world we anarchists must grow well beyond our current miniscule numbers.

Which, of course, means reaching out to those who are not currently “members of the club.”

Published at 21:24 on 16 March 2012

Given the well-established nature of the Sri Lankan government and the end of the conflict there, it can hardly be counted as much of a surprise that things like this are happening.

Published at 18:54 on 16 February 2012

After the strikers in Longview made it clear that they were willing to ignore the Establishment’s laws if management also was (it’s a little thing called contract breach), and after they were planning to escalate the confrontation further by inviting the Occupy movement to take place, suddenly the Establishment started to get interested in honoring that existing union contract.

Not because it was the honorable thing to do, mind you, but because they were starting to see how failing to do so was going to end up costing them more than agreeing to do so.

So it has always been: if you look at the times when the Establishment has passed reforms that blunt the fangs of capitalism, it has always been during times when there has been growing radical sentiment: the Progressive Era happened when the IWW and the early Socialist Party were going strong (and it’s main exponent, Teddy Roosevelt, got into the White House because his predecessor was assassinated by an anarchist), the New Deal happened at the height of the Communist Party, USA (why do you think it was so easy for Senator McCarthy to find so many people who had attended Communist Party meetings?), and the Civil Rights era in the Sixties also happened against a groundswell of radical movements.

And indeed, it’s also why the Establishment media tries as hard as possible to smear the Occupy movement by continually focusing on its problems. They know what forces them to kick down concessions, and they don’t want to have to do that.

Published at 12:19 on 14 February 2012

Just under a week ago I heard an interesting interview with a fellow called Jonathan Haidt  (sounds like “height”, not “hate”) on Bill Moyers’ new NPR program. Haidt’s stated premise is that liberals and conservatives fundamentally think differently, probably because their minds are wired differently.

I think there is some validity in that premise, but in general Haidt’s statements are also an example of Derrick Jensen’s statement about hidden premises:

One of the first rules of propaganda is: if you can slide your premises by people you’ve got them.

In this case,  the hidden premises that Heidt has (and which his interviewer, Moyers, apparently shares) seem to be the following two:

1. The presumption that the liberal-conservative spectrum as reflected in Establishment politics in the US represents all legitimate political thought.
2. The presumption that the current order is legitimate and is worth preserving.

I suppose the title of the program (How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?) should have been a dead giveaway to premise one. And indeed, nothing but Establishment liberalism and Establishment conservatism are discussed in Haidt’s interview. Premise two becomes evident when Haidt says:

Nothing gets us together like a foreign attack. And we’ve seen that, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. And, conversely, when there are moral divisions within the group, and no external attack, the tribalism can ramp up, and reach really pathological proportions. And that’s where we are now.

By this metric, the problem to be concerned about is not the groupthink that led the Establishment media to not question Bush’s lies about Iraq. That’s apparently merely “our moral sense binding us together into [a team] that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.” No, the problem is the mean old nasty “pathological tribalism” which merely raised the prospect that (yes, merely raised the prospect: the anti-war movement actually failed, because the Iraq war happened nonetheless) domestic opposition might manage to (horrors!) stop that same war machine from killing.

Getting back to that first premise, Haidt’s analysis of US politics is bereft of any mention of the role played by radicalism, and of how no capitalist state has ever voluntarily agreed to blunt the fangs of capitalism. Reforms to that end only get motivated by the rulers’ fear of what will happen to public sentiment if they don’t get enacted.

Therefore, Haidt’s theory is basically incapable of explaining the Progressive Era, the New Deal, or the Sixties. If there have always been conservatives who don’t agree with the liberal notion of fairness, and that notion is simply incapable of resonating with the majority of Americans, how have programs that profess inspired by that notion ever been put into law? Moreover, if it’s all a matter of the way our tribalistic brains are hardwired, how have most other industrialized nations managed to put far more such reforms into place than the USA?

That said, Haidt is not all wrong. He’s right that neither liberals nor conservatives (nor any other political ideology) has it all correct, and that ideologies in general tend to make it difficult or impossible for their adherents to acknowledge certain key, irrefutable facts, and that humans are in some sense probably born hypocrites and born pandering politicians. He’s not the first to stumble across this, either: it’s essentially what prompted Orwell to write his Notes on Nationalism in 1945.

In fact, Haidt goes beyond Orwell in certain ways that furnish useful insights. For example, he’s definitely correct about liberals’ strongest political motive being care about others:

Sure. So, if you imagine each of our righteous minds as being, like an audio equalizer with six slider switches, and the first one is care, compassion, those sorts of issues, liberals have it turned up to 11. And we have this on a lot of different surveys. Liberals really feel. When they see an animal being mistreated, they’re more likely to feel something than conservatives, and especially than libertarians, who are very, very low on this one.

The next two, liberty and fairness, when liberty and fairness conflict with care, are you going to punish someone, or are you going to be compassionate? Liberals are more likely to go with care.

It’s one of the reasons I consider myself an anarchist and not a liberal. Liberals care about others so much that they tend to reduce adults to the status of quasi-children, all for their own good, of course. It’s the liberal do-gooders who are the worst shoe fascists and who tend to eject me for being barefoot “because we care about you and don’t want you to hurt yourself”; I’ve had far more problems of this sort (or, in fact, of any sort) going barefoot in big, liberal cities than I have in small, conservative towns.

Then we get to:

In other words, care trumps liberty and fairness, even though everybody cares about all three of those. The next three, loyalty, authority and sanctity, what we find, across many questionnaires, many surveys and analyses of texts and sermons, all sorts of things, is that liberals don’t talk a lot about loyalty, you know, group loyalty. They don’t talk a lot about authority and the importance of order and authority, maintaining order. They don’t talk a lot about sanctity. Conservatives on the other hand, what we find is that, they value all of these more or less equally.

We’ve segued back to the hidden premise which says that every belief worth considering is reflected in Establishment politics. In this case, the only forms of organization Haidt is willing to discuss are the hierarchical, authoritarian ones which both sides of the Establishment coin consider as self-evident.

Finally (and ironically enough), Haidt is also correct when he says:

Wherever people sacralize something, there you will find ignorance, blindness to the truth, and resistance to evidence.

Ironically, that is, because with his unstated premises Haidt himself is sacralizing Establishment politics.

Published at 17:46 on 7 February 2012

So, Americans are borrowing more and this “could be a sign that Americans are more confident in the economy”. Of course, the very next sentence contains the catch: “consumers are also borrowing more and saving less at a time when their wages haven’t kept pace with inflation.”

In other words, it’s the same old capitalist Ponzi scheme that’s been playing out since the 1970s: declining unionization, stagnant or declining wages, and increased debt taking the place of increased wages when it comes to consumer spending.

Maybe the capitalists will again figure out how to make it last a few years before it collapses yet again, just like real estate and tech stocks did. Big deal. Anytime money is borrowed, it has to be paid back. This Ponzi scheme will collapse just like the previous ones did.

And each time the newest scheme collapses, it does so harder than the last collapse. So it will continue until either the capitalist class realizes that income inequality threatens the capitalist system itself, or the reemergence of class consciousness prompts the ruled to successfully rebel against their rulers.

Since we’re nowhere near either point at the present time, expect the boom/bust cycle to go through at least one more iteration.