Blackcap Blog

Published at 07:21 on 10 October 2023

The criticism of Israel that Sharansky is worrying about is probably coming, there is a good reason for this, and for the most part it is not antisemitism.

It is very similar to the situation between Ukraine and Russia in many respects. When Putin sent troops into Ukraine, he started a war, and now he has one. Attacks against Russia by Ukraine are seen in this context. If Putin wants the war to end, he can order his troops out of Ukraine.

The situation between Hamas and Israel is quite similar. There is very little criticism of Israel’s right to forcibly apprehend or remove the invaders from its territory and re-secure its internationally recognized border. The issue is what happens after that mission is accomplished.

One difference is that in this case, the invaded is significantly more militarily powerful than the invader. Nobody with even half a brain doubts Israel’s ability to accomplish the above. In fact, it has already in large part been accomplished.

Then what? As I opined yesterday, an Israeli occupation of Gaza seems all but inevitable. That is when the real problems will begin for Israel when it comes to international public relations. As they should.

Ukraine has been warned by the West, multiple times, not to turn this into an excuse for occupying Russian territory. It is not antisemitism for the same standard to be applied to Israel.

Published at 17:50 on 9 October 2023

It has already been documented by reliable sources that Hamas gunned down unarmed civilians at a music festival, and it appears they might have lit houses on fire at Kibbutz Be’eri, shooting those who escaped. That, and rounding up people kidnapping them en masse are things right out of the Holocaust. Israel’s war crimes — while not justifiable — tend to be more indirect, such as taking risks with Palestinian civilian lives. Directly and deliberately targeting civilians is worse.

Published at 16:58 on 9 October 2023

It’s not that unusual for Israel to invade Gaza. This weekend, when I was away from the Internet, Hamas invaded Israel.

Because that’s what it was: an invasion. That is what it is called when one side’s military forces enter another side’s territory and takes land by force.

The more interesting question is who put Hamas up to it.

Because someone basically had to. The invasion makes no sense from a realpolitik angle.

You’re Palestinian, you want your homeland back. Is it really a practical strategy to try and get it back by invading and occupying Israel, who possesses what is indisputably the most powerful military in the region? Provoke a fighting war with Israel and Hamas loses. There really is no other realistic outcome.

Someone put Hamas up to it, by playing on their hatred for Israel.

That someone does not have the Palestinian (or even the Hamas) best interest at heart, because as I said earlier, the only realistic outcome one can anticipate is that Hamas will lose.

And when Hamas loses, it will be particularly humiliating for the Palestinian side. More than likely, Israel will respond by invading and (re-)occupying Gaza. Because, unlike Hamas, Israel actually has enough military power to occupy and hold enemy territory indefinitely, this occupation will last indefinitely. This is no doubt what the Netanyahu meant when he said the Hamas attack would “change the Middle East.”

So given how badly this is all set to backfire for Hamas, who could have put Hamas up to it, and why did they do it?

Published at 19:58 on 3 October 2023

McCarthy compromised to avoid a shutdown, and just was punished for it by being the first Speaker of the House in history to get fired. This makes it highly unlikely that whomever his replacement is will be interested in following in his footsteps.

The Republicans could have avoided this fate if they showed continued interest in compromising and cutting deals. The Democrats actually made some overtures in this direction, but McCarthy chose to snub them. So here we are.

Historically, these sort of antics have not turned out well for Republicans. If the Democrats are at least halfway savvy (not a given, sadly), they will now be preparing a messaging campaign painting the other party as irresponsible and incapable of governing.

Also expect a prolonged process for selecting a new permanent speaker. It took McCarthy fifteen votes to secure his speakership in this Congress. There is no reason to believe that his successor will have a significantly easier job of it.

Published at 19:21 on 18 September 2023

Seems India probably was involved. And I told you so.

Really, not a huge surprise that a right-wing Hindu supremacist government would resort to violence against a non-Hindu minority group like this.

Published at 12:24 on 24 August 2023

Of course Putin did it. There is a well-established history of Putin’s adversaries suffering unfortunate “accidents.” The chances of this being a bona-fide accident are somewhere between slim and none.

Putin had to do something like this to regain some strength after showing himself to be the pathetic weakling who ran away and hid when threatened and then thanked his challenger for standing down. That is emphatically not how a strongman deals with his adversaries. Unfortunate “accidents,” by contrast, are a classic.

The trouble is, Putin still turned tail last June, and still then thanked Prigozhin for standing down. He can’t undo those things. He’s regained some strength, but he has a ways to go before he looks once again like the strongman Putin of old.

More challenges to Putin’s authority are still possible. Likely, even.

Published at 22:33 on 23 August 2023

Trump has been warned not to threaten jurists or poison potential jurors.

So of course he will. He has no self-control, and his whole life up to this point has taught him that as a hereditary member of the wealthy class, the laws that apply to the little people do not apply to him.

At that point, again it becomes put up or shut up time for the legal system (just like it did when Trump instigated an insurrection). Norms that are not upheld cease to be norms.

Published at 19:21 on 9 August 2023

This spring, it was coming Real Soon Now.

The anticipated start date came and went, and it was still coming Real Soon Now.

Then it basically dropped off the news radar and we stopped hearing about it. There have been no stories about the sort of big territorial gains one would expect given a successful counteroffensive.

This is, by contrast, exactly what we would expect given a failed counteroffensive. No belligerent will ever admit their grand plans have failed. If the counteroffensive had yielded significant territorial gains, you had darn well better believe it would be all over the media. But a failure will just get swept under the rug and not talked about. As we have seen.

Overall, the conflict has still gone far better for Ukraine than originally anticipated (remember, I was expecting Kiev to fall and the situation to degrade into an prolonged occupation facing guerrilla warfare). It’s just that this particular phase of it has gone significantly worse than anticipated for Ukraine.

This should not be reason for despair. No war goes exactly as planned even for the eventual victor. The Confederates scored important battle victories over the Union. The Axis defeated the Allies in many battles, and even ended up completely occupying some of them.

This was always going to be a long, ugly, bloody slog. Like it or not, if the Russian leadership wants to be in Ukraine, Russian troops will be in Ukraine, and there is really not much Ukraine or the West can do to stop that (at least not overnight).

Russian troops will only cease to be in Ukraine there when the Russian leadership decides to withdraw them. This is a natural consequence of the disparity in military strength between the two nations. The Russian military is not particularly well run, but Russia is so much larger a country that it still is the more militarily powerful of the two.

It is a situation much like Afghanistan (for both the Soviet and US-led invasions). Both the USSR and the USA were (and in the case of the USA are) much more powerful than Afghanistan. So long as the occupier wanted to be there, it was there. It was only when the occupier decided that the costs of the occupation were no longer worth it that the occupier decided to leave. And getting to that latter decision took many years.

Published at 07:12 on 2 August 2023

From the indictment:

The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant [Trump] remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Them or us. They use the power of the State to destroy us (and with it, open society), or we use the power of the State to destroy them (and enable open society to be preserved). It was always thus. As I wrote in the wake of the insurrection:

We must win and the fascists must lose. It is as simple as that. Everything  that follows flows from this simple, elementary fact.

Fascists want a world where fascism is the only principle allowed. All debate, all activity, save for the glorification of the fascist order, will be sedition. Non-fascists span the whole gamut of ideologies outside fascism, and we do not want that. The vast, vast majority of us want a world where openness, debate, and dissent are not only allowed but valued. This latter state of affairs may be termed an open society.

There is simply no compromise possible between the two positions. Either open society prevails, or fascism prevails.

12 January 2021

This is why I was so worried about the lack of a prosecution of those at the top for the events of 6 January, and this is why I am so relieved to see prosecution finally commence.

Published at 23:05 on 1 August 2023

It seems as if American democracy might finally be getting serious about trying to save itself.

The basic nature of the indictment is plain: that Trump incited the insurrection on January 6th.

I am not personally averse to insurrections, if they are against a corrupt Establishment that deserves an insurrection. If Democratic operatives had really tried to steal a legitimate victory from a Republican candidate (or, of course, the converse), then the sort of thing we saw on the 6th would be both:

• Only to be expected, and
• Completely justified.

As such, the false claims on Trump’s part that he was cheated out of his victory had only one logical conclusion: the one we saw play out on the 6th.

Really, nothing could be more clear.

The question now is whether all the dilly-dallying on the way to getting here makes this a case of closing the barn door after all the cows have already escaped. But as the old saying goes, better late than never.