Blackcap Blog

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.

Published at 18:52 on 18 January 2012

Probably the worst thing about both is something that most opponents are not focusing on. Yes, such legislation will probably cause economic harm by making life more inconvenient for Internet entrepreneurs.

The worst threat, however, is that such legislation will provide both a rationale and an obligation to create an infrastructure of censorship, one that could later be exploited by the government in ways detrimental to civil liberties. And recent trends in the USA (warrantless searches, incommunicado detention, death squads, torture, etc.) have been worrying enough for civil liberties as it is.

Published at 10:19 on 4 January 2012

Gotta love the color that Fox News chose to represent Santorum on their map of how Iowa counties voted last night.

Published at 10:41 on 3 January 2012

That’s probably the best summary for the recent spate of shootings (including one of a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park). The suspect was both trained as a killer and then psychologically damaged further by his combat experiences.

Probably the most tragic thing about such killings is that the victims tend to be normal working-class folks as opposed the the ruling elite bastards who started the whole war in the first place.

Published at 18:57 on 19 December 2011

Of course I made a point to listen to (and record) Voice of Korea today. The executive summary of the broadcast is given in the title; the “news” pretty much followed that summary to a ‘t’, segueing from an eulogy of the “Great Leader” to praise for the “Great Successor”.

Unwittingly, the station in that land of shortages and hardship for the vast majority of its people also gave Kim Jong-Il a most appropriate send-off, being interrupted twice by power cuts. At least, that’s what I assume they were because both transmitters went off the air simultaneously each time.

The edited (I deleted the static during the total of 11 minutes and 46 seconds of dead air in the two interruptions) audio may be found here. If for some reason you want to hear everything in real-time, breaks in transmission and all, that audio may be found here.

Note that if you’re not that interested in hearing the two praise songs (one to Kim Il-Sung, one to Kim Jong-Il) that start each broadcast, the main “news” broadcast starts about 7 minutes and 50 seconds in.

Published at 12:41 on 9 December 2011

Maybe.

Both sides have every reason to lie and make the claims they are making. Admitting Iran did bring the drone down would be embarrassing for the USA, so of course Iran is going to assert they brought it down and the USA is going to assert Iran just got lucky when the drone came down due to a malfunction.

Regarding the latter claim, it’s interesting to note that the assertion US drones are often programmed to land if they lose communications is a statement consistent with both sides’ claims. It obviously lends credence to the US claim, as it explains why Iran was able to retrieve the drone intact as opposed to scoring only a few bits of charred debris.

It also lends credence to Iran’s claim. First, any communications for controlling the drone would obviously be very securely encrypted. Managing to crack such encryption in real time is highly unlikely. That leaves Iran with the option of simply jamming the control signal, by using high-powered transmitters to overwhelm it. If a drone is programmed to land when it loses contact, then jamming its communications link is effectively sending it a command to land. Note, however, that such jamming is hardly (as Iran claims) “sophisticated;” to the contrary, it is rather crude and brute force measure.

The only truly sophisticated technology Iran needs is a radar system capable of circumventing whatever anti-radar measures US drones typically have, so that such drones can be detected and intercepted. Interestingly, Iran claimed to have acquired precisely that capability last October.

At this point, however, it’s strictly a “he said, she said” story. What would definitively lend credibility to Iran’s claims is for a second drone to be captured by them in say the next six months. Such a feat would be more than can be explained simply by getting lucky.

Published at 11:03 on 8 November 2011

OK, you’ve just seen (in my last post) how much better than shortwave Internet audio quality can be. One might be tempted to conclude that demonstrates shortwave broadcasting is now obsolete. Not so fast.

First, this is an example where shortwave fares unusually poorly, even by its own standards. The signal paths between India and the USA are so difficult that India has never even tried to target the USA for their shortwave broadcasts. Even though I’ve been lucking out with a strong signal and low local interference the past two mornings, the signal still ends up seriously degraded by being forced to take a multi-hop path over the polar regions. That’s why it has such a fluttery character to it.

If India were to rent time on a transmitter in Eastern Canada or the Caribbean, for example, my audio recording would have had significantly better quality. It still wouldn’t have been as good as the Internet download, of course, but the newscast would have been completely intelligible instead of only partly so.

Second, the US Government does not particularly care if I listen to news broadcasts from India or not. So the government is not blocking my ability to download podcasts of their news bulletins, or requiring ISPs to report the names of their customers that attempt to do so. The Chinese are not so fortunate. If they want to hear news that has not been subject to their government’s censors, the Internet is of little or no use to them. On shortwave, they often end up in cat-and-mouse games with jamming transmitters, but in such games sometimes the mouse wins.

Basically, any communications medium that requires either payment for access and/or third-party (beyond the producer and consumer, that is) infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to censorship. Governments can track or block payments, or pressure the third parties into not carrying the offensive material. Pretty much any satellite or Internet-based means of delivering information ends up falling onto this category.

Direct-broadcast satellites could theoretically provide a real alternative, once there are free (to the consumer) options and they get to the point where there are a large number of such options under a wide diversity of ownership. Those latter points are critical, and current satellite broadcast options do not satisfy either one.

Therefore, shortwave is still really the only option for getting information into an area against the will of the government which controls it. Crappy audio quality beats no audio any day.

Published at 10:50 on 28 October 2011

Simply put, it will end up being litigated in court. It blatantly violates the Washington State Constitution’s single subject clause, so a legal basis for challenging it exists. Nowhere in the title or text of the measure on the ballot is scrapping light rail to Bellevue mentioned, yet (if allowed to stand unchallenged) it would most likely achieve that end. Based on the ballot measure that implemented the project, extending light rail to Bellevue has the support of both the majority in the Sound Transit district and the majority in Bellevue itself.

Therefore there exists both a means to challenge the measure in court and a motive (an electorate annoyed at falling for a bait-and-switch) to do same. And the absence of any mention of light rail in the measure will furnish ample evidence that the voters did not intend this outcome when they voted for it, which will probably cause any court-interpreted revision of the measure to gut the provisions of it which interfere with the proposed light rail line.

It may even get overturned by a subsequent bill in the legislature before it gets through court. Normally, the legislature is reluctant to touch the text of voter-approved laws, but again, the bait-and-switch nature of this one might bias the legislature in the opposite direction to the normal trend.

Moreover, the system listens to what Big Money has to say, and with the exception of Kemper Freeman, Jr., Big Money does not want I-1125 to pass. Transportation in the Puget Sound region is a horrible mess, this mess is making it hard for the Big Money crowd to do business, and the initiative will complicate the process of doing things to help relieve the transportation mess.

Naturally, when the inevitable happens, Eyman is going to go into conserva-victim mode and whine about how the evil courts and legislature are subverting popular will. Which will be something of a rich comment when one considers that the measure was obviously deliberately crafted to be a bait-and-switch. It’s not as of the single-subject clause is any big secret or anything: it’s right there in the state constitution, and Eyman’s initiatives have ended up being reinterpreted by the courts in the past because they’ve run afoul of it.

Of course, Eyman’s main motive in the thing is money. He earns it by hawking his services to the highest bidders in the right-wing crowd; he will laugh all the way to the bank no matter how much the legislature and the courts end up gutting the measure. Whether or not the thing eventually flies is completely beside the point.