Blackcap Blog

Published at 16:56 on 4 August 2020

It’s necessary to process some insights which I think are very difficult for many to process, because they require a conception of how broad the universe of belief systems is.

Human society is a very large and complex thing, and we struggle to understand it. By virtue of its very nature, different people get subjected to different aspects of it. That, plus different individuals’ preconceived biases, all interplay to create a world in which different individuals firmly adhere to vastly different ideologies.

And the thing is, for each adherent’s belief system, said system perfectly explains various things that life experience has demonstrated to the believer are beyond the shadow of a doubt true. These things are often the very same ones that have played a disproportionate role in that individual’s life.

The easiest and most natural conclusion for an individual to draw is that he or she (and his or her ideological comrades) are merely acting logically and rationally, while the entire rest of the world is either lying, evil, naïve, ignorant, or foolish.

And so it is on the issue of reform versus revolution. The reform camp sees the various revolutions that have gone very wrong (and there is no shortage of such examples, alas), the numerous examples of elections having demonstrable consequences, and comes to one conclusion. The revolution camp (disclaimer: this is the one yours truly aligns with) sees how political orders inevitably become ossified, how revolution played an indisputable role in securing the freedoms that do exist in bourgeois society, and comes to quite the opposite conclusion.

And the thing is, there is an iron-clad historical narrative, supported by clearly-demonstrated facts, to back up both Weltanschauungen.

Which brings us to the subject of the coming election. Adherents of Establishment politics, be they liberals or (never-Trump) conservatives, see the coming election as the critical thing, the only practical way of unseating Trump. That is despite all the evidence that history has already for the most part moved on from that old political order, like it or not.

Such is the natural outcome of mankind being for the most part a rationalizing, not a rational, animal: intellectual facilities are engaged, not to replace the emotional world of gut feelings with one of logic, but out of a desire to find a more lofty pretext with which to justify pursuing those gut feelings. The evidence in favor of the (to Establishment types) revered status quo being already mostly dead points to an unpleasant truth, therefore in the name of ignoring the truth, the evidence in favor of it is also overlooked.

The presence of such people is in turn an unpleasant fact that many radicals refuse to face. That is unfortunate, as our numbers are small: we are vastly outnumbered by adherents of Establishment politics. Complaining about how unfair this state of affairs is does nothing to challenge the indisputable fact that it is the current state of affairs.

What it all boils down to is that while it probably will take a popular revolution to unseat Trump, such a revolution cannot happen until electoral politics first fails, or at least shows all signs of failing to, achieve this same outcome. Trump’s successful interference with electoral politics appears to be the most likely motivator for vast masses of liberals and centrists to be radicalized into pursuing change via direct action. Absent that, we will simply lack the numbers needed for a successful insurrection.

Until this happens, it is the duty of radicals to quietly prepare for the opportunity and to wait for it. When the opportunity manifests, it will be our duty to not push people away from the struggle because they’re upset about the bourgeois concern of the election being meddled with. Revolutions must be pursued with the masses that actually exist, not the masses that radicals might wish existed.

There is a chance we won’t get there after all. Mind you, Trump definitely wants to give cancelling or indefinitely postponing the election the old college try. The question is how much support from the rest of the Republican Party there will be. Moscow Mitch definitely did not sound very enthusiastic about that idea when it was floated. Maybe he perceives that there’s limits to how much they can push things, particularly in light of how much unrest there has already been this summer. Maybe he has enough lingering garden-variety conservatism in him to still be repelled to some degree by fascism. Who knows? What matters here is what he does more than why he does it.

I’m following some insider Establishment type pundits, and they all say that the world may start moving after Labor Day; individual Republican politicians may perceive Trump as doomed and their personal chances as being better if they turn on him. If this happens, it will be a tipping point, and tipping points happen suddenly, unexpectedly, and rapidly.

But if Trump’s party does not turn on him (and, please note, the GOP has proven itself to be quite receptive to the idea of being a fascist party in recent years), then he very likely will be able to successfully cancel, postpone, or sufficiently invalidate the election to stake a claim to continuing in office.

If that happens, norms and laws (up to and including the U.S. Constitution) won’t help very much. Widespread popular insurrection will be the only option. It is the duty of those of us capable of seeing this to prepare for it, and to realize the nature and limitations of the sort of insurrection that will be possible.

Published at 21:36 on 30 July 2020

You had better believe he could.

Yes, yes: I know. The law. The US Constitution.

Wake up. Those have already been demonstrated to be mostly irrelevant.

Trump has spent billions on a border wall despite not having the authorization
from Congress, and has gotten away with it.

He has refused to allow Congress its power to subpoena witnesses, and he has
gotten away with it.

He has received foreign emoluments, and he has gotten away with it.

Assertions that the election must happen on time, as scheduled, just because
some dusty old pieces of paper have words saying they must are Establishment
types whistling past the graveyard. The old order has already died, and they have yet to realize it.

He’s already deploying goons to the major cities. They could easily intimidate people into staying home on Election Day, or even be dispatched to polling stations to disrupt them. Many states are controlled by Trumpists, and would gladly obey their fuhrer’s orders to not hold the elections if so requested.

The rule of law can’t save freedom. Only mass pressure from below can.

Published at 07:58 on 28 July 2020

Say you’re doing some coding and debugging using the command line. You change directories to where the source code is and thenceforth, until you explicitly change to some other directory, you have set the default directory for all editors, compilers, debuggers, file-filtering utilities, and so on. It’s automatically understood that, unless you explicitly specify otherwise, if you specify a file name, it will be in the current working directory.

No graphical user interface that I’ve used has had anything analogous. As such, I’m forced to continually spend effort manually specifying source and destination directories. This constitutes repeated work that I don’t have to do when using the command line.

Each utility starts out relative to the home directory, or, in some cases, the directory where it was last used. It’s hard to say which is worse, but I think my vote goes for the latter: it’s a pathetic attempt at user-friendliness that ends up being incredibly user hostile: in order to predict where the files for a given application will go, I must memorize, for each application, where the last file I specified with it lived.

It all results in continual violations of the principle of least surprise. I’m persistently having to use find to determine which seemingly random and bizarre place a GUI application just created an output file in.

This, more than anything else, is why, decades into the existence of the graphical user interface, I inevitably have one or more terminal windows open, and opt to do a significant amount of my work at the command line.

Published at 08:09 on 18 July 2020

It’s sort of confusing. There’s a lot of ways to do it. And by “a lot” I mean a lot.

Despite the range of options, my initial attempts at downsizing images were disappointing, yielding ugly results. As an example, consider this:

To fully appreciate how bad that is, here’s what Gimp produces when asked to do the same thing:

Yes, the same thing. In both cases, I am requesting the image be scaled with the bicubic algorithm. Clearly, there is more processing going on in Gimp than simply bicubic scaling. Despite my attempts, I kept getting this sort of disappointing result as I experimented with the various ways of doing it.

Finally, I ran across a magic combination of API calls that yields acceptable results:

val nWidth = (imageIn.width * ratio).toInt()
val nHeight = (imageIn.height * ratio).toInt()
val imageOut = BufferedImage(nWidth, nHeight, imageIn.type)
imageOut.createGraphics().run {
    drawImage(imageIn.getScaledInstance(nWidth, nHeight, BufferedImage.SCALE_SMOOTH), 0, 0, null)
    dispose()
}

That code produced the following:

Not quite as good as what Gimp yields, but close. The takeaway is that getScaledInstance does at least some necessary extra processing, above and beyond the standard scaling, which is needed to produce acceptable results. I probably wouldn’t want to use it for high-resolution production work, but for generating screen-resolution images for sharing on the Web it’s perfectly adequate.

Update: Some more research reveals that getScaledInstance  with BufferedImage.SCALE_SMOOTH doesn’t use the bicubic algorithm after all; it uses an area-averaging algorithm which is even slower. Those details are mostly irrelevant, however: the important thing is that for my application, it delivers acceptable quality in an acceptable amount of time, which is more than can be said for all the other API calls.

Published at 11:46 on 5 July 2020

Recently, I wrote:

We also have the threat of right-wing terrorism, or should I say the virtual certainty of it. The American Right is an overall fascist political movement. Fascists believe in seizing power ruthlessly, and that nobody but themselves have any business being in power (or even are fully proper members of the nations they reside in). (One only has to consider the trope, long present amongst right-wingers, particularly rural ones, that they are the “real Americans” and theirs is the “real America.”) They also have guns, and lots of them. There is really only one logical takeaway from all this, and that is that they will start using those guns to fight those whom they believe unworthy of ruling the nation.

Right-wing domestic terrorism is already the dominant variety in the USA. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

At that point, we will have a national domestic security crisis. The logical response to that will be to enact new measures aimed at targeting and suppressing the violent subversives.

So as to avoid cluttering up that article with a digression, I left out the point that the menace from those domestic-security measures will not be merely a future one, when a fascist takes power. Far from it: the temptation will be nearly as great for Biden to use them against the radical left as it will be against the far right.

This is the case, even in the absence of any equivalent proclivity towards political violence on the part of the American left. That is merely a fact, and facts and logic often prove little or no obstacle to the exercise of political power. Authoritarianism is, at its core, both illogical and highly destructive, yet this has done little to prevent it from being exercised throughout history.

The Democratic Party has plenty of centrists in it, Biden is himself one of those centrists, and he is likely to appoint many centrists as his advisers. Targeting both ends of the political spectrum is just the sort of thing that a centrist (who believes both sides to be approximately equally off-base as a core part of his or her weltanschauung) would find inherently appealing.

So the centrists, self-professed enemies of authoritarian extremism, might themselves get suckered into becoming precisely the sort of enemies of liberty they believe to be defending against.

They are, in fact, uniquely vulnerable to it.

As a left-wing anarchist, I have had to contend with the unpleasant fact that anti-capitalist revolutions have a sad record of creating, not greater liberty and equality, but greater tyranny. As a person opposed to both capitalism and authoritarianism, I have been compelled by my beliefs and my knowledge of history to explore the pitfalls that led revolutionaries astray. I am hardly unique; such interests are common amongst anarchists.

They are not nearly so common amongst centrists, securely ensconced in their firm and deeply-held emotional attachment to both-sides-ism. Most centrists are well aware of the Terreur (and will eagerly base sermons to radicals around it), yet blissfully ignorant of the Semaine Sanglante (where in a week at least as many were slaughtered in the name of keeping society safe from radicalism as the former did in ten months).

In the application of the security measures, therefore, there is every reason to be concerned that centrists will be smug, cocksure, and ignorant. That is a dangerous combination of characteristics, to say the least.

Published at 07:50 on 3 July 2020

Let’s be optimistic and assume that Biden wins in November and is allowed to take office in January. If so, we may well be heading into a period of history which will later prove to have been a battle with a mostly phantom menace, one which let a real menace grow and fester.

The phantom menace would be the power of the political right to frustrate Biden’s agenda, and the real menace would be the continued dismantling of checks and balances against autocracy, particularly the continued growth of the imperial presidency.

On that latter point, what simpler and easier way to counter the opposition than for a Democratic president (one with a popular mandate behind him, unlike the opposition) to assert his prerogative to continue the decades-long growth of the power of the presidency at the expense of the other two branches of the Federal government? Obama did it, and in doing so unwittingly helped create the monster that is Trump.

Then there is the Senate and its antimajoritarian traditions to contend with. The Democrats chipped away at those during the Obama Era, too, only to bitterly regret it later. If the Democrats take the Senate (as they might) they almost certainly will not earn a filibuster-proof majority, so the temptation to dismantle the filibuster will then likely prove too great to resist.

We also have the threat of right-wing terrorism, or should I say the virtual certainty of it. The American right is an overall fascist political movement. Fascists believe in seizing power ruthlessly, and that nobody but themselves have any business being in power (or even are fully proper members of the nations they reside in). (One only has to consider the trope, long present amongst right-wingers, particularly rural ones, that they are the “real Americans” and theirs is the “real America.”) They also have guns, and lots of them. There is really only one logical takeaway from all this, and that is that they will start using those guns to fight those whom they believe unworthy of ruling the nation.

Right-wing domestic terrorism is already the dominant variety in the USA. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

At that point, we will have a national domestic security crisis. The logical response to that will be to enact new measures aimed at targeting and suppressing the violent subversives.

Meanwhile, it is highly plausible that the Republican Party will continue to be a fascist party. Fascism of the Trumpist variety is still quite popular within its base, and it while it is possible that a big humiliation at the polls will prompt a recalculation (and the GOP falling into the hands of Never Trumpers), it is hardly certain this will be the case. Moreover, Trump is not an anomaly; the GOP had been trending fascist well before Trump came on the scene; reversing such a trend is going to prove harder than purging the party of one particular corrupt con-man’s influence.

A de-Trumpified GOP would be an improvement, mind you. It’s just that it would still be a danger; it would represent a return to the status quo ante Trump, and that status quo has been demonstrably shown to be vulnerable to a fascist takeover.

As such, another fascist presidency remains highly likely, and once it happens, odds are that president won’t be as incompetent as the current one is. (That incompetence has been the sole saving grace about Trump; Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and so on were much more effective at consolidating power than Trump has ever been.) This gives us the worst of both worlds: a more competent and ruthless fascist taking the helm of a Republic whose guardrails have been further weakened, and with a package of anti-subversion legislation in his toolbox with which to use against the left.

What’s particularly perilous in all this is that there is not necessarily always an easy way out. Consider the Senate filibuster: absent dismantling it, it is likely that Biden will prove to be a failed president, unless he asserts unitary executive power to a degree that makes the dangers of scrapping the filibuster pale in comparison. And if Biden is a failed president, the most likely result is that fascism comes roaring back and liberty dies.

Thus, in the name of not going morally bankrupt today, a loan of political capital, one which makes going morally bankrupt in the future when it becomes due more likely, will be taken out.

All I can say is: Beware the phantom menace.

Published at 22:15 on 2 July 2020

So, CHAZ/CHOP is no more. This is very much not a surprise; anyone with so much as half a brain could see it coming as soon as the pattern of shootings and the reportage on them became evident.

Not only were there multiple shootings, many of them fatal, at regular intervals, but they were reported as all being in or associated with the CHAZ/CHOP zone, even though at least half of them were not in fact inside the CHOP zone but merely in the same neighborhood as CHOP.

More significantly, information on the perpetrators of the shootings has, up until recently, been basically non-existent. That’s a huge information deficit. Absent any knowledge as to who the shooters are (and what their motives were), it becomes basically impossible to take away anything in the way of an informed conclusion from the shootings.

To understand why, consider the possibility that the police were involved somehow, either directly (we don’t know who the perpetrators were, so we can’t say that off-duty or plainclothes cops are not involved) or indirectly (i.e. the shooters weren’t cops but were encouraged by them) as part of a plot to discredit CHAZ/CHOP.

I do not think it is possible to rule this scenario out with any great degree of certainty, given all that has become known about the pervasive institutional corruption of policing in the USA. I think it can safely be assumed that neither the mayor nor her chief of police are involved, but it is not necessary for either to be involved; any such conspiracy could easily be lower down. In fact, it’s more plausible for it to be so, because it would make for a smaller conspiracy, and smaller conspiracies are easier to keep secret.

It is important to state at this point that all the above is mere conjecture and I have no hard evidence whatsoever to suggest that it is the case. The rub is, the narrative that the shootings are all directly the fault of the protesters also has no hard evidence in its favor, given the almost total lack of information about perpetrators and motives.

The above is the maximally-damaging plausible scenario for the Establishment. A somewhat less-damaging scenario for it is that the shootings are mostly the work of violent right-wing extremists set on discrediting the movement.

Note that (in contrary to the Establishment narritive that it’s the protesters fault) there is actually some evidence in favor of the right-wing extremist conjecture. (Note also that it is not incompatible with the police-corruption conjecture; it is plausible that corrupt cops could have reached out to right-wing extremists and encouraged them.)

Bottom line here is not to be squarely in favor of any of the scenarios above, as all the puzzles are missing a lot of pieces, only to point out that the Establishment narrative (that the zone was a shit-show that had to be ended) is itself one of those puzzles missing most of its pieces, and that to accept it on face value is to fall for Establishment propaganda.

Published at 11:35 on 22 June 2020

He’s now all but admitted that his regime deliberately slowed down COVID-19 testing for political purposes.

Of course it did. It’s something that made sense to suppose was happening at the time (i.e. February and March), because they USA was doing such an astoundingly bad job at testing that it was hard to chalk it all up to mere random chance.

Remember, community spread in the USA was first detected in Seattle, for the simple reason that Dr. Helen Chu, a researcher Fred Hutch, decided to ignore the regulations and conduct unapproved testing for COVID-19 anyhow. And then there’s the strange and (otherwise mystifying) decision for the Trump regime to develop its own testing, during a crisis, when time is critical, even though the WHO was distributing a test that was already successfully being used in the rest of the world.

Yes, it’s that bad.

So, the most logical answer to the question “Is Trump really meaning it when he talks about deliberately slowing the pace of testing?” is: “Yes he is and yes he did.” It is the answer that jibes best with observable reality.

Published at 11:58 on 21 June 2020

Mind you, I’d really like it if I could wholeheartedly endorse Linux as an alternative to Windows or MacOS for a general-purpose desktop operating system. But I just can’t.

Linux is great for some things. Servers, for instance. I run a Linux server at a colocation site for a variety of purposes. It was basically a no-brainer: it’s a rock-solid server OS. Linux on the desktop has improved to the point that for basic use (e.g. browsing the Web, reading email, maybe typing a document or two, or downloading and editing digital photos) it is now a totally viable alternative to Macs or Windows.

The problems happen when one moves beyond basic desktop use: one all-to-quickly ends up in a maze of twisty little passages of UNIX system administration arcana. Hardware support, in particular, seems to be a bane of Linux. I couldn’t even get one of the most common digital radio interfaces running with one of the most common ham radio applications on one of the most common desktop Linux distros!

Yes, yes: there’s distros expressly designed for ham radio. Well, what if I want to use that computer for more than just ham radio? I’m S-O-L, that’s what: instead of delving into system arcana trying to get ham software working, I’ll doubtless be delving into system arcana trying to get normal desktop productivity software running.

In fact, the very existence of such ham radio-specific distros puts the lie to the claim that Linux interoperates well with ham radio hardware. If Linux did interoperate well, it wouldn’t be necessary to create such specialized distros in the first place! (Why create a specialized distro, if all one needs to do is install a few packages and make a few quick, easy tweaks to a mainstream distro?)

Then there’s my experiences with the Raspberry Pi. Not having an HDMI monitor, and not wanting to clutter up my limited space with one, I opted to order a serial interface cable with my Pi. It worked: the Pi booted and used the serial console when I connected it. Until they “upgrade” the Raspbian distro to remove that feature, that is, and fail to properly document how to re-enable it. After pissing away half a week trying to get the thing to boot on the serial console, I give up.

Forget it. I retired from systems administration because I was sick of it. Doing systems administration for “fun” as a “hobby” holds precisely zero appeal for me. If it doesn’t work with a modicum of effort on my part, I’m simply not interested. Ham radio is the hobby. Linux systems administration is not.

Linux has definitely gotten better as a desktop system over the years, but it’s still not fully there. Sorry, fanboys.

Published at 11:10 on 10 June 2020

When it comes to social revolution, the ball is at this point pretty much in Trump’s court. He’s backed down, to the point of taking the temporary wall down (and the Smithsonian is saving some of the protest art added to it for its archives, which should give some indication at how significant historians believe this era is likely to prove).

So it goes. As I wrote earlier, politics is war by other means, and in war one is never in complete control of the situation.

The question is: what does Trump do next? He is an idiot, so he could well do something monumentally stupid that once again puts him in an extraordinarily weak position. The only thing to do is wait, see, and be ready to pounce if the opportunity once more arises.

At the very least, Trump is continuing to tank in the polls, making it increasingly likely that another big blue wave is coming and will sweep him out of office.

The above may in fact prompt the next revolutionary opportunity. What happens if Trump refuses to honor the result of that election? It is, in fact, more likely than not that he will so refuse. It is totally in keeping with his character, much more so than conceding defeat would be.

It is also possible that the total overall effects of the uprising that is now winding down have yet to materialize. If Trump’s popularity continues to decline, a tipping point may be reached where his Congressional allies turn on him. At that point, his rule has been so lawless that any number of things could form the basis for a second impeachment, one which this time would succeed.

Who knows? As for now, we are in wait, see, and be prepared mode.