Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:37 on 29 July 2025

Back in January of 2024 I asked if what was going on in Gaza was a genocide. My answer was essentially “probably yes, but genocide has a definition that includes acts of mass violence other than the stereotypical scenes of mass death in ghettoes and concentration that many associate with the term.”

Well, there’s really no need to delve into technicalities anymore: what is now going on is clearly genocide, even if one restricts the term to mean the more narrow and stereotypical meanings it has in popular usage.

The parallels are just so many.

Published at 10:55 on 14 July 2025

By which I mean, literally fighting. Some examples:

• On 4 July (the date was almost certainly chosen intentionally, for political reasons), there was an armed attack on an ICE facility in Texas. Both fireworks and firearms were discharged, property was vandalized, and one local police officer was hit by a bullet.
• ICE agents raiding a pot farm in Ventura County, CA retreated in chaos when people fought back by throwing rocks.
• Overall, attacks on ICE agents are up nearly 700%.

Why do you think wearing masks is so popular amongst ICE agents? In their own words, they fear doxxing and its consequences.

On the less explicitly violent front, the most popular iPhone app is now a tool for reporting ICE activity and the Trump regime is not happy about it.

And honestly, what do you expect people to do? Electing Democrats failed to stop fascism. Court cases have failed to stop fascism. As it was pretty obvious they would, given the already-well-established moral rot pervading the system in 2021.

Ultimately, nothing motivates like good old-fashioned self-interest. It’s why the capitalist profit motive has proven itself to be such an effective motivator of human behaviour.

Like it or not, the sort of decentralized actions I have detailed above make life decidedly less pleasant for those employed as members of the ICE gestapo. If the unrest grows, and more follow in the footsteps of Luigi Mangione, life could become decidedly less pleasant for many of those at the very top who are profiting from oppression.

The undeniable fact of self-interest explains why all societies, throughout all of human history (and prehistory), have punished wrongdoers.

Many of these individuals know their actions are oppressive. They know, and they don’t care, because of the perceived benefits to them, personally. Maybe their millions or billions are more secure in a society distracted by scapegoats like immigrants, leftists, the nonwhite, and the non-straight. Maybe they profit from cushy government contracts or cushy government jobs that are part of such oppression. Maybe they derive benefit simply from seeing individuals they dislike suffer.

To reiterate, nothing motivates like self-interest. As such, a world where self-centred sociopaths personally suffer consequences for their self-centred sociopathy is highly likely to exhibit less self-centred sociopathic behaviour than a world where such consequences are not routinely suffered.

Argue, if you wish, that it would be better for such consequences to be doled out by a cautious process subject to legal safeguards. Such arguments are, in fact, generally quite convincing. The rub is, what happens when (as appears to be the case) a system is so morally rotten to the core that it is no longer willing or able to mete out such consequences?

My conclusion is that, like it or not, rough justice can in some situations be preferable to no justice at all.

Moreover, the new, aggressive resistance already seems to be bearing fruitful consequences. The spectacle of masked ICE goons is alienating increasing numbers of Americans. That is one of classic tactics of a resistance movement: giving the Establishment the choice of looking weak by giving in to resistance, or looking like thugs for persevering in the face of resistance.

So yes, I do view recent trends of a more aggressive resistance in a generally positive light. Not because I enjoy the spectacle of violence, but because I abhor fascism and I understand human nature.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
— John Stuart Mill

Published at 13:05 on 10 July 2025

So far, they appear to be doing so. But so have many — at first. Then comes the cave.

This has got to end sooner or later, and the sooner it ends, the better, because as I have written earlier, when it comes to bullies, it is not resistance but acquiescence that ultimately has the highest price attached to it.

Brazil has the sort of left of centre government and nonaligned global affiliation that I have long believed would most likely characterize the nation to first stand tall against Trump fascism.

It has to start sometime. It has to start with someone. Might as well start now. Might as well start with Brazil.

Published at 09:06 on 5 July 2025

Quite a bit has happened this week, which I have yet to comment on.

Carney Cravenly Caves

Oh, sure, there’s technically a chance it was, as Carney’s apologists say, all pre-planned. But let’s get real here. Occam’s Razor says it is far more likely to be just what it appears to be, which is just what I said it was in the title for this section.

What’s particularly worrying is not the specific policy caved on, but the general policy area of the cave; namely, regulating social media. There has long been something toxic to a free and open society about social media. The Trump era, with the US capitalist class lining up in support behind fascism, as the capitalist class inevitably does, makes the problem all the more acute. What once was a bug is now most definitely a feature. You can take it to the bank that the social media giants are doing their level best to make their algorithms as fascism-friendly as possible.

As such, it is incumbent on the remaining free societies of the world to regulate the hell out of these social media giants. (There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, which I will get into sometime.)

Now Carney has just had Canada concede to its hostile neighbour that yes, it is only reasonable for Canada to accommodate that neighbour’s wishes when it comes to social media. This is precisely the wrong sort of precedent to be setting.

It is the year 1950 in an alternate history timeline. The USSR is trying to gain control over domestic US media via dummy holding companies. Would the United States have just sat there while the USSR gained control of CBS and NBC? Yet this is basically the analogue of what Carney has now set precedent that Canada do. Social media are that influential in public opinion.

The Enabling Act

It’s a crude analogue, because decades-long precedents and trends, plus recent friendly Supreme Court rulings, have accomplished a lot of it, but if anything is the American analogue to the Enabling Act, it is how the big ugly bill has allocated an obscene and shocking amount of money to the ICE gestapo (long one of the most powerful and least accountable law enforcement agencies). The first concentration camp, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, has already opened, and Trump fascists are gleefully celebrating America’s new Dachau with commemorative merchandise.

You can take it to the bank that those camps will not only be used for oppressing immigrants.

Lots of people smell the corpse now.

Left Rhetorical Incompetence

If the political Left had any rhetorical competence, the alliterations “big bad bill” and “alligator Auschwitz” would now be entering common use. It’s seemingly a little thing, but it’s not really a little thing: good labelling and sloganeering matter a lot in politics.

Zohran Mamdani Is in Personal Peril

Odds are that within two years, he will either be dead, disappeared, incarcerated, under house arrest, or in exile. Because of course he will be. Authoritarian states do not stand idly by and let true opposition arise.

Since (overall, individual exceptions do not disprove the general rule) the Democratic Party has been a co-participant in, not an opponent of the USA’s transition to fascism, it may well be allowed to continue existing. Authoritarian regimes often allow sham opposition parties, and the Democratic Party has long been effectively functioning as such voluntarily, anyhow. A transition to a more formal arrangement would thus represent a relatively minor change.

The real question is whether, and how much, the paradox of repression manifests when the inevitable happens to Mamdani.

Published at 09:53 on 3 July 2025

I have been toying with the idea of purchasing a Kobo ebook reader for some time now. But I keep coming ’round to it being a questionable value proposition.

This is mainly due to capitalist avarice, not the base technology itself (which, while not perfect, is actually pretty good by now).

Available ebook titles (at least those in open, non-proprietary formats) seem quite limited in comparison to traditional paper book ones, so for books I would have to purchase, an ebook would not be an option in many cases. To this can be added how ebooks do not tend to sell at much of a discount off traditional paper books, which makes it even harder to recoup my investment in a reader. Note that I have a limited time window to do that (probably in the 5–10 year range, while paper books last indefinitely) due to the rapid pace of technological obsolescence in the computer and electronic fields.

That paltry discount starts looking like a non-discount once one I realize how much fewer use rights I would have with ebooks. Given all that sleazy capitalist garbage, I would expect an ebook title to be sold for half or less of what a traditional paper book is. This is seldom the case.

In particular, that discount often vanishes entirely or becomes negative once the option of used paper books enters the picture. You can’t buy a used ebook, for the same reason you can’t sell one: ebooks don’t come with that right of ownership. On the subject of selling books, for paper books I no longer need, I can recoup yet more of my acquisition cost by selling them.

Given all the above, I doubt very much that ebooks in general offer any price advantage over paper books.

Kindle ebooks offer a far greater title selection than do open formats, but I don’t trust Amazon. No, scratch that. I do trust Amazon. I trust them to act in ways which are advantageous to their own bottom line and disadvantageous to mine. I am quite certain that Kindle (and the proprietary ebooks sold for the same) are not exactly what they seem. Maybe Kindle spies on the reader. Maybe its OS is programmed for obsolescence in a few years, so Amazon can force the user to replace a device which otherwise still works perfectly. Maybe its ebooks have particularly awful end user licensing agreements. Maybe more than one of the above. Maybe something else.

I don’t know for sure what it is, but I do know that it almost certainly is something. It’s Amazon. There has got to be a catch or three.

Unless some of the above changes, or I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don’t seem to make much sense to me.