Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:06 on 1 September 2025

Some U.S. presidents are what can be called transformational presidents. Lincoln (abolition), FDR (welfare state), LBJ (civil rights), etc.

All evidence points to Trump being in the same category, at least as transformative as LBJ and possibly as transformative as Lincoln. My reasoning is as follows:

1. What Trump did in his first term (significant expansion of presidential powers, coup attempt).
2. The comparatively very limited response to it, which cemented the legitimacy of what Trump did to expand presidential power, and set the precedent that coup attempts are now a mostly legitimate political tactic to be used as needed, at least by the Right.
3. What Trump is doing in his second term.
4. How muted the current response is in relation to what Trump is currently doing.

My initial wording was about the responses of the Democratic Party and the politicians who belong to it. Wording it as such is factually correct, but also factually incomplete, because it is not just the Democratic Party.

We could have the same old weak-willed Democratic Party we do in this timeline, but if we had a public that valued a free and open society more, there would have been massive public outrage at what Trump and the political parties (the Republicans, by enabling him, and the Democrats, by failing to vigorously oppose him) were doing. This would have prompted some combination of the Republican Party abandoning their president (like what happened to Nixon), and/or the Democratic Party pandering to the outrage and no longer being afraid to arrest, prosecute, and jail Trump and his top cronies.

Instead, we saw none of the above. Trump engaged in significant transition towards the principles of right-wing authoritarianism, and it was largely accepted by the vast preponderance of Americans. Oh, sure, there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end, the outcome was acceptance. Acceptance with grumbling is still acceptance. Acceptance with denial grounded in the mythology of American exceptionalism is still acceptance.

Sure, some inconsequential nobodies were prosecuted with much fanfare. So what. The ringleaders got off scot-free. That was the main lesson of the whole escapade.

And now we have his second term, in which Trump has ramped up his transformational initiatives, and the response has been amazingly acquiescent. A few protests here and there, more grumbling, but so far still business as usual. Trump is proposing dictatorship and Americans are generally accepting of the proposal.

Yes, yes, I know: opinion polls show Trump is underwater. Big deal. That is merely a form of grumbling. What matters is action, or lack thereof, and so far it has been primarily the latter.

If you want to see what a lack of acceptance looks like, look what happened in Greece when the Greeks decided not to accept the current state of their nation’s rail transport safety. Look what has happened in France when the French decided that reducing retirement benefits was unacceptable. Look at what South Korea and Brazil are doing in response to excesses by their chief executives.

Yes, yes: I know. There have been protests. A day of protest is planned for today. Some noises are being made about soft secession if Trump does stuff like deploying troops to Chicago. Vote blue no matter who and maybe Lucy won’t pull the football away this time. Colour me skeptical.

And yes, some are vigorously opposing it. The key word here is some. There is nowhere near the degree of opposition happening needed to stop the transformation. Focusing on the exceptions to a general trend is not the correct way to assess a situation.

This gets to why I reworded my list to remove explicit references to the Democratic Party. It’s not just the Democratic Party. Sure, it’s possible to blame a failure to lead on the Democrats. But it’s also the case that the Democrats have genuine reasons to believe that Americans by and large don’t want to be led to defend freedom. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: the Democrats don’t lead because there’s not much sentiment from below for them to pander to, and there’s not much sentiment from below because the Democrats aren’t leading.

Ultimately, the Democrats’ institutional spinelessness wouldn’t matter if more was happening in the grassroots. Being filled with spineless panderers, the Democratic Party could in that case pander… to the resistance movement. It would be spineless pandering, but it wouldn’t matter: the necessary things would be getting done, and that, more than the mechanics of why they are being done, is what would really matter.

Advocates of revolution would point to the success of the popular mobilization. Advocates of electoral reformism would point to the big blue wave and how the Democrats delivered. The endless reform-versus-revolution arguments would continue without resolution, both camps having some facts with which to argue.

But that, sadly, is all hypothetical. The vast preponderance of currently-available evidence points to Trump being a transformational president.

Published at 09:46 on 31 August 2025

Tom Nichols, normally a cautious voice about such speculations, thinks it may not be long.

But really, we don’t know. This is the least transparent presidency in history. We know that Trump is old (the oldest man to ever take the presidential oath of office). We know that he’s not as healthy as he once was.

But he has access to the best health care money and power can buy. The absolute best. Even those with lesser access can linger in an old and frail state for surprisingly long. So there is really no way to tell.

The one thing I can say is that I doubt he will live to serve out the full four years of his term. Beyond that, I cannot say much. The obituary may come this afternoon, or it may not come for several more years.

Published at 19:49 on 26 August 2025

I believe I read this long ago, before I purchased a Dragonfly. Then I forgot about it.

Anyhow, one of the annoyances with the Dragonfly is, no matter how much you let it burn down, it always seems to dribble a little fuel when you take it apart.

Then I realized that in the instructions for their similarly-designed liquid fuel stoves, Optimus tells you that when shutting the stove down, the first thing you should do is flip the bottle over. Then you wait for the flame to die (which takes about a minute but which happens real suddenly when it does). Then wait for the hissing to cease. Then, and only then, turn off the valves and disassemble. (Optimus even labels the fuel connectors for their bottles with “on” and “off” to indicate which orientation does what.)

What flipping the bottle over does is cause the dip tube that is normally on the bottom edge of the fuel bottle to be on its top edge instead. Instead of admitting fuel, it now admits pressurized air. This air then purges the fuel line.

And, despite the MSR instructions being silent about this trick, it works. Of course it does. MSR’s stoves have the same basic design.

No more dribbles!

Published at 09:00 on 21 August 2025

I have had one since 2021 so I guess an experience-based update is past due.

Executive summary: High-end stove with high-end performance at a high-end price.

I have yet to take it bikepacking or backpacking (although I expect that to change fairly soon), but I have used it a lot during strict fire bans, thanks to its CSA certification. Otherwise, I typically continue using my vintage Coleman 425E two-burner “suitcase” stove, simply because having a second burner can be a real plus at times.

That Coleman stove works well in the cold and well in the wind, but the Dragonfly still has it beat on both aspects.

The Coleman can be a bit fiddly to light when the temperature is below about 5˚C. (And yes, I sometimes camp in such chilly weather.) The Dragonfly is just rock-solid. It doesn’t matter how cold it is, it primes as easily as it does on a summer afternoon.

Likewise, although I have always been impressed by how well the Coleman stove works on windy days, the Dragonfly just does better yet.

None of this should be a surprise. The MSR stoves, particularly their liquid fuel ones, were designed for mountaineering use in extreme conditions.

Quality often comes with a price, and that is no exception here. I think I paid close to CAD $200 for mine in 2021, and a quick check shows the current price to be in the CAD $250–350 range (yes, it varies that much, which shows how much it pays to comparison shop). Even at the lower end of that range, I would not blame people for thinking twice.

I would, however, caution against saving money buy buying a Chinese white gas stove (there are a number of such models for sale online), unless I could be certain it has a valid safety certification from the UL or CSA. There is simply too much unsafe crap from China being sold online.

Instead, try to find a used, late-model MSR or other name brand stove (Optimus is another well-established brand). A quick check on eBay shows it should be possible to get one for about half the price of a new stove. Or, if you don’t live someplace with strict burn bans like I do, a used older stove in good condition.

And yes, it can simmer (something many white gas stoves, which often are designed for boiling water and not much else, have difficulty with).

Bottom line is that the Dragonfly does live up to its reputation for quality, performance, and flame control.

Published at 07:55 on 19 August 2025

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s autobiographical account of his 1952 journey through South America is something I have been wanting to read since seeing the movie based on it about two decades ago. (Talk about procrastination.)

I had been hoping to, in part, gain some insight into Che’s eventual support for authoritarian leftism.

On that latter term, some leftists disagree with it, saying leftism is intrinsically anti-elite and therefore “leftist” regimes like the one in Cuba (which do have a ruling elite) are in fact anti-leftist. I find such arguments unconvincing, because the motives of the authoritarianism in such regimes are different from the motives of it in right-wing authoritarian regimes. One strives to use force to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system (and tends to not much concerned with preservation of traditional values), the other strives to use force to maintain traditional hierarchies and values.

Trying to overthrow traditional hierarchies on the grounds that they are unjust is classic leftism, therefore I feel the “authoritarian leftism” label is both fair and descriptive. Moreover, it jibes well with conventional terminologies, and I see value in not adopting a rhetoric so divorced from conventional usage as to impede comprehension. It is the mission of the political left to engage with society and to change it, not to retreat into inward-looking subcultures that are mostly irrelevant to the masses.

But I digress. Back to insights into how Guevara became the political force he eventually became. In this respect, I was not disappointed.

The appendix of the book I have contains the translated text a retrospective speech given by Guevara in 1960, in which he claimed “When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.”

I disagree with that assessment, or at least I find it highly misleading. The young Guevara does express core sentiments that stayed with him throughout his life, so far as I can see, and while these core sentiments might be outnumbered by his later insights, they stayed with him and profoundly guided him to become what he became.

Namely, it is clear that Guevara did not in any way reject authoritarianism. This became obvious when reading his near-admiration for Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia and his “indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority” (“Abaca Chile,” “The End of Chile”).

Authoritarianism has been, sadly, part of the scene in Latin America, where nations have, despite the aspirations of many for something better, tended until quite recently to be led by a succession of one strongman after another. Guevara came of age in Argentina under Perón, and writes in his diaries of how, as Argentines, he and Alberto Granado (his travelling companion), were often admired as being from the nation where Perón had won some gains for the working class and the poor.

Many decades ago I read an essay on Guevara that claimed he was, in a sense, a Peronist. At the time, I thought the charge preposterous. Now, I think it has a lot of truth in it. He wasn’t strictly a Peronist (Juan Perón was not a revolutionary and in fact was quite the traditionalist in some aspects), but Guevara did, like Perón, see politics as an exercise in using strongman power to improve the lot of the less fortunate.

To this we can add how Guevara’s personal experiences with liberal democracy as practiced by the USA ranged from somewhat to profoundly unpleasant. First, there was his unplanned stint in Miami at the end of his 1952 journey, in which he got to experience the injustice and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow-era South first-hand.

Even more tragically there was Guatemala, where by a minor miracle (it is always a miracle when left values triumph in a bourgeois society), a leftist, Jacobo Árbenz, won a presidential election and set about reforming Guatemalan society. Árbenz was not a strongman, and did respect civil liberties. The changes happening in Guatemala inspired Guevara, who travelled there to assist the Árbenz government.

But the liberal, democratic values of the Guatemalan revolution didn’t matter. The response of the USA to the democratic, peaceful social revolution Árbenz was trying to create was to sponsor a coup d’etat and overthrow him. Forty long years of bloody repression and civil war followed.

In a world where resistance does not have to be small-l libertarian, in a political culture where pro-liberty values were the exception more than the norm, where a nonviolent revolution that tried to espouse these values till the end had seen them exploited as weaknesses by the forces of superpower imperialism, and where there was a competing superpower holding the promise of leftist revolution with competing values, it is pretty obvious where on the political spectrum Ernesto “Che” Guevara would probably end up.

Which, basically, is where he did end up.

Published at 10:45 on 18 August 2025

It was clear back in 2020 that the historic mission of MAS was now to find a way beyond the cult of personality that had grown up around three-term ex-president Evo Morales, and to transition from the party of Evo into a party of ideas.

Well, they didn’t. Part of MAS wanted to move on, part clung stubbornly to the cult of personality, and the party basically disintegrated as a result of compromise not being possible between two such factions. And yesterday, the inevitable happened.

It didn’t help that MAS also failed to find a way forward after its initial (and initially very successful) plan of using nationalized natural gas revenues to drive spending on economic and social development started faltering as a result of declining revenue. A logical next step would have been to turn to Bolivia’s lithium reserves and use those similarly, but that was never done.

Except it wasn’t inevitable. It could have also ended in left authoritarianism, as one MAS faction used force to impose its will on the other (and on Bolivians in general). Well, it could have, but it didn’t, because of the decentralized nature of the Bolivian social revolution, which has always been big part of my admiration for it, made such a thing highly unlikely.

The most likely end result is now a bourgeois democracy led by the Christian Democrats. Freedoms to organize for something better will in all likelihood remain, and when the new government sells Bolivia short to foreign capital, as it inevitably will, there be an opening for new social movements to arise. Hopefully they will learn from the failures of the past.

Despite Bolivia’s growing debts and inflation, the end result of the social revolution that began with the popular uprisings of the early 2000’s has been net positive. There has been significant economic growth, infrastructure development, and improvement in public health in the past 20 years.

No, it didn’t usher in a new era of socialist utopia in which Bolivia rocketed to first-world levels of development and became a worker’s paradise. No serious observer expected this: this is the real world we are talking about, where miracles and utopias do not exist. But it also, contrary to the consensus of Establishment naysayers, did not end in tyranny and economic ruin.

Popular revolution can work, if decentralism is embraced and authoritarianism is resisted.

Published at 14:08 on 15 August 2025

Some policy proposals have only lengthy, complex arguments in their favour. This one ie easy.

What Israel has done to Gaza is worse than what Russia has done to Ukraine. If you can’t acknowledge this than it is time to acknowledge that your internal biases might be getting in the way of your ability to perceive obvious facts.

Russia has had the hell sanctioned out of it for what it is doing to Ukraine. And rightly so.

Yes, the two situations are not precisely the same. News flash: no two conflicts ever are. The salient point here is the amount of civilian suffering being imposed, and how the Gazans are indisputably suffering far more than the Ukrainians are.

The conclusion seems inescapable to me. Fairness and proportionality say that it is time to sanction the hell out of Israel.

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.