Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:14 on 19 July 2016

If you go here and scroll down, you’ll get to a picture of Inner Southeast Portland showing some old houses adjacent to a newer factory captioned “Bullseye Glass Company’s proximity to residential properties is born of Portland’s desire to avoid urban sprawl, and has neighbors worried about its effect on their health.”

This is right-wing BS, and it’s sad to see a news outlet like The Guardian (which normally doesn’t fall for such things) fall for it. The factory may be newer, but the houses reveal the age of the neighborhood, which has always, since its founding in the nineteenth century, featured factories close to homes. There’s plenty of old brick factory buildings in that part of town. I should know; I lived there myself.

Oregon’s Growth Management Act dates from 1973. That’s about 100 years after the factories started being built next to homes in inner Portland. Any city that’s been around for over 120 years as a larger city features factories next to homes. Before the widespread use of either automobiles or electric mass transit, homes had to be built next to factories, for the simple reason that there was no means of transport affordable to the typical factory worker other than walking.

Late 20th century planning efforts have very little to do with problems like the one discussed in that Guardian article.

Published at 09:03 on 18 July 2016

I’ve been out of town for a few days, and was listening to the news from Turkey on the radio yesterday afternoon as I drove home.

As someone pointed out here, it’s a strange coup. Priority Number One for any military that stages a coup d’etat is to deal with the leadership the coup is unseating. Priority Number Two is to make sure as much of the military as possible is going to support the coup.

The “attempted coup” in Turkey failed miserably at both of these priorities, yet it was staged by a military that has ample experience in staging successful coups d’etat. It was staged against a government with an authoritarian streak, one that has in the past used alleged coup attempts to engage in repressive measures.

It’s enough to really make one go “hmmmmm.”

Published at 08:22 on 14 July 2016

This is a tragedy, but it is almost certainly not happening simply because the international community is failing in its duty to aid the less fortunate.

Nigeria is actually quite a prosperous nation, or rather, should be. It has a huge amount of oil wealth, wealth that is monopolized by a corrupt, kleptocratic elite instead of being shared in any even remotely egalitarian fashion.

Yes, there is the legacy of colonialism to contend with. However, Nigeria achieved full independence in 1963 when it repudiated the last vestiges of its ties to the British empire and declared itself a republic. That is over 50 years ago, yet the improvement in the quality of life of the average Nigerian since then has been frankly pathetic.

Contrast that to the amount of improvement in the life of the average South Korean or Singaporean. Korea suffered particularly egregiously from imperialism (the Japanese were truly brutal there), and Singapore had no great gift of oil wealth to fall back upon (or most other natural resources, they even have to import a big chunk of their drinking water). Both have gone from the Third World to the First.

Even India, which remains a poor nation after nearly 70 years of independence, has managed to at least arrange its economy so that all-out famine has been a thing of the past there for many decades. There still is poverty, malnutrition, and hunger there, but there hasn’t been mass starvation anywhere for decades.

More dramatically, we have Kerala, one of India’s poorest states, which due to class conscious politics forcing government to act in the interests of the many, has life expectancy and literacy rates approaching that of developed Western nations despite a per capita income of under $1000 per year.

No, it’s not fair to expect Nigeria to instantly become as wealthy as, say, Switzerland. But it’s completely fair to hold the Nigerian ruling class responsible for the famine there. There is simply no valid excuse for such a thing. None.

How to correct that? Ultimately, the pressure must come from within Nigeria itself. The alternative — change in response to pressure or intervention from abroad — has a word for it: imperialism. And we all know how that one inevitably plays out.

So yes, be compassionate and provide aid to defuse the immediate crisis if at all possible. But don’t harbor any delusions about that being any real solution, and be very careful lest the aid just end up prolonging the reign of a kleptocracy by artificially defusing sort of domestic outrage which might offer the best hope for addressing the problem at its roots, by provoking change within Nigeria itself.

In fact, might that not be a covert aim of the aid? It’s well known that Western imperialists don’t like revolutions in what amount to their resource colonies. Witness what happened to Iran when Mossadegh became Prime Minister. Something to ponder.

Published at 17:54 on 12 July 2016

In related news, the ocean is salty and it was another dry day in the Sahara.

Really, this is about zero surprise. Sanders isn’t dumb; he knew where he stood. He just wanted to maximize his influence in the process, and the point of no return had been passed: the good he did by pulling Hillary to the left was being cancelled by how his non-endorsement of Hillary was sowing division and thereby helping Trump’s chances.

And as distasteful as Hillary is (and her role in destroying democracy in Honduras is reason enough to dislike her), she still has one huge thing going for her: she’s not Donald Trump.

Published at 08:16 on 11 July 2016

The claim that they have is in fact predicated upon some very racist hidden assumptions, as I shall now explain.

Police have been shooting unarmed Black men for decades and getting away with it. Until the era of social media and smartphones, such killings were inadequately documented and typically didn’t receive coverage outside of the local media.

Now that technological progress has changed both of those facts, the killings are getting nationwide attention and sparking well-deserved outrage. And it is those reactions that inspire the claim that race relations have gotten worse under the Obama presidency.

Race relations, in other words, are being judged to be more acceptable when suspicious killings result in passivity and widespread social acceptance than when they provoke outrage. Society is judged to be running off the rails not because racially-correlated killings are happening (again, they are nothing new), but because those being killed are no longer passively accepting this, as is apparently their duty.

In turn what does this imply? Obviously that Black people must be inferior. Such a belief only makes logical sense if Black lives aren’t as worthy of news coverage or outrage, much like the lost life of a young raccoon or opossum who dies as a result of a car running over it doesn’t warrant the news coverage that a human child suffering the same fate should.

And if it’s not racism to assert that it is the duty of some races to realize they are inferior and to passively acquiesce in this inferiority, then I don’t know what is.

Published at 08:57 on 10 July 2016

After exhibiting curious silence about a police shooting of a Black gun owner who was dutifly complying with police orders while legally carrying a concealed weapon, the NRA rushes to vociferously condemn the murder of the police officers in Dallas.

Link here.

Because, of course, the Right is (contrary to its professed aims) neither pro-individual-liberty nor anti-big-government. They have no problems with big government when big government is doing things they personally like, and are frightened of individual liberty when it applies to people doing things they personally dislike.

Published at 08:07 on 8 July 2016

It really should not come as a big surprise that something like this would eventually happen in a society as racist, militarist, and armed as the USA. It was inevitable.

The question now is: will it work? It’s an unpleasant fact that sometimes violent tactics work when non-violent ones don’t. The system values some lives more than others, so the loss of some more-valued lives might end up prompting the sort of action that the loss of less-valued ones failed to do.

Or it might just as easily provoke some sort of backlash. Most likely, it will do bits of both, much as the “propaganda of the deed” era circa 1900 did. History is a messy process that doesn’t precisely correspond to anyone’s pet theories or values.

Published at 08:06 on 7 July 2016

It’s something most people, even Marx’s biggest ideological enemies, don’t get: ideological flexibility (and the lack thereof).

Marx theorized that the proletariat, who had everything to lose under capitalism, would therefore be motivated to be the most open to alternatives such as socialism and communism. Conversely, those who gained the most from laissez-faire capitalism would be motivated to be its most rigid and staunch defenders, and prevent any reform from being possible.

Intrinsically unstable, capitalism would proceed to tear itself apart as the swings of the business cycle inevitably got more and more dramatic and the great masses of the proletariat became increasingly immiserated. When Marxian socialism would finally be tried, it would almost immediately outperform capitalism; even though central planning might have its inefficiencies, those would prove far less destructive than capitalism’s wild swings. Socialism would prosper while the capitalist world crumbled and ended up in history’s dustbin.

But it didn’t work out that way. Huge chunks of the proletariat clung to traditional social structures and refused to even entertain the idea that something different might be to their benefit. At the same time, the bourgeoisie proved to be something less than totally rejecting of the idea of making changes to the laissez-faire formula. Some were worried about the consequences of unrest (which was building, despite falling short of revolution) harming them. Some thought they could profit from regulation by influencing it. Many thought both.

In short, the proletariat was not so ideologically flexible and the bourgeoisie so ideologically rigid. Both sides had (and basically still have) an intermediate (and approximately equal) level of flexibility.

It’s something that this story brought to my mind this morning.

Published at 17:37 on 29 June 2016

It does go to show that the sentiment which gave birth to the Trump phenomenon is not unique to the USA. As if there was ever any doubt. Italy had Berlusconi (and before that, Mussolini), France has the LePen family, Austria has a popular right-wing nationalist party, and so on. Smug Europeans have nothing to be smug about.

It’s a problems that has its roots in hierarchical class society. It doesn’t benefit the majority who live in it. The only way electoral democracy (or any open society) can be maintained under such a system is to have a powerful system of propaganda to keep the masses convinced to act counter to their best interests. And it has been shown, repeatedly, that the level of propaganda needed to do that, and the level of propaganda needed to sell fascism are dangerously close to each other

Reality-based politics is the only practical antidote to fascist myths, and that same reality is fatally toxic to class society, so absent revolutionary change it won’t happen and fascism will be an ever-present risk.

Published at 07:56 on 17 June 2016

Partly it’s a misunderstanding of his democratic socialist politics. Partly it’s an understanding but a personal disagreement with them. It’s lead to several smear pieces about him on their site, some of which come across as downright conspiracist, predicting he will do his darndest to defeat Hillary even if that means helping Trump.

It seems the latter have just been proven wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about not letting your personal emotions about something get in the way of being able to perceive and interpret facts.