Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:21 on 16 August 2012

First, it’s great that Ecuador chose to grant Assange asylum from politically-motivated persecution.

And, make no mistake, that’s precisely what it is: politically-motivated persecution. Assange offered to let Swedish investigators interrogate him at the Embassy; the Swedes refused his offer. They also refused to promise not to extradite him to the USA, despite his likelihood of facing the death penalty here. (European nations have universally abolished the death penalty, and typically refuse to extradite wanted persons if that would place them in jeopardy of being judicially murdered.)

Second, yes there are indeed double standards at play here. Ecuador’s record on basic freedoms is not precisely stellar. It’s not difficult to find human-rights groups complaining about it; here’s Amnesty International’s collection of documents on Ecuador, just for openers. Really, this should not be a surprise: hypocrisy is one of the key defining characteristics of authoritarian power structures.

Third, given the recent threats the British made (see my previous post here), and given how Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa styles himself as one willing to tweak the noses of those who rule the current global imperialist order, it’s not surprising at all to hear he decided to say “yes” to Assange’s request. It’s a perfect tit-for-tat, one in which Correa cannot help but to come out the winner in the court of domestic political opinion.

Even if the British do decide to throw international law to the wind and storm the embassy, he will then very convincingly be able to portray himself as an opponent of a lawless and thuggish international order. This would only help his domestic popularity.

Fourth, the way the Establishment media continually harps on the second point, virtually never failing to mention it in any of their coverage of this story, points out somebody else’s double standards. Were stories of Soviet bloc dissidents receiving asylum in the UK or the US always mentioned complete with tales of, say, how the CIA teaches torture techniques to the secret police of US-friendly dictatorships? Of course not.

And did such misdeeds of the West disprove that those Soviet refugees were indeed fleeing persecution, and needed asylum? Again, of course not. The validity of an asylum claim is independent of any misdeeds of the claim’s grantor. We do not live in a simplistic melodrama world where all actors are either purely good or purely evil.

Fifth, this whole story illustrates that even though authoritarian power structures are universally hypocritical, there is value in their not having a monopoly on power. If nobody was willing to defy the world’s sole superpower, its power would be absolute, and it would be a much more dangerous world for those resisting such power.

Finally, what should be done? As a start, anyone in or near London who can spare the time to be there should gather in front of the embassy to make it as difficult (and costly, in terms of both domestic and international politics) as possible for Britain to storm it.

There’s ultimately nothing that can be done to stop such a storming, if the powers that be are dead-set on it. But it is possible to make it very, very costly for them.

Published at 23:13 on 15 August 2012

Britain is threatening to mimic what Iran did in 1979 and storm an embassy?

If the governments of the West didn’t have double standards, then they’d have absolutely no standards at all.

Actually, I’m being unfair in my comparison here… unfair to Iran, that is. The decision to storm the US Embassy was made by a non-governmental group of young radicals in Iran, and then subsequently supported by their new Islamic government. If the Ecuadorian embassy is stormed by the British, it will be done directly by the British government, with its support and advocacy, from Day One.

Published at 22:51 on 14 August 2012

Yeah, I’m more than a little slow here. So sue me. I don’t watch TV. I saw a picture in the print media showing a scene with what looked like hospital beds at the Olympics opening ceremony, thought that odd, and made a mental note to investigate. I only just now got around to investigating.

So it was only this evening that I found out what that whole scene was about. Britain is an old country, far older than the USA, so they had a lot of picking and choosing to do when it came to things about their country to celebrate in the opening ceremony. And one of those things they celebrated was making health care available to all, regardless of circumstances.

Sure, the NHS has its problems. And the corporate media in the USA never tires of reporting them. What they don’t report are the successes. Such as Britain’s remarkable accomplishment in achieving less inequality in health access than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

And mind you, they do so at first-world standards. This isn’t an equalizing downward like they have in, say, Cuba. In fact, Britain has better infant mortality and life expectancy statistics than the USA.

And how much does all of this generosity this cost? One of the lowest per-capita costs in the developed world. (Probably a little too low, in fact: if Britain spent more, it could be at the top of health statistics, instead of 10 or 15 slots down from the top like they are.)

Back to the corporate media for a moment. You hear so little of the NHS’s successes in the US media that even columnists in erstwhile left-leaning publications are left puzzling over why the British would want to celebrate the NHS. And that is part of why politics in the USA is so divorced from any sense of reality: even the Left in many cases buys into all-pervasive right-wing lies and misinformation.

But I digress. Instead of only celebrating mindless garbage like war and conquest, Britain chose to celebrate a major accomplishment in creating a more just society for all. That’s pretty remarkable.

Published at 13:48 on 29 July 2012

First off, I will have to say that I wince every time someone spouts off about the most recent heat wave (or hurricane, or tornado outbreak, or other episode of extreme weather) being obviously caused by global warming. No, it’s not. Extreme weather was happening naturally before the Industrial Revolution started changing the composition of the atmosphere. Its mere existence is evidence of nothing save the existence of extremes, and extremes always happen in any varying, natural phenomenon.

Of course, this cuts both ways: neither is the continued existence of cold snaps any definitive proof against global warming. But I digress.

Anyhow, it’s not surprising that one of local meterologist Cliff Mass‘s recurring themes is poking holes in such claims. Such hole-poking is well and fine. Up to a point. Because, of course, there’s far more stupid and dangerous behavior going on with respect to global warming than some misinformed comments made by advocates of doing something about it.

Sure, it’s fun to play Devil’s Advocate, and even useful to the debate for a healthy measure of same to go on, but there’s also this thing called scientific responsibility. And given what the downsides of continued, unabated modification of the atmosphere to future generations are, responsibility is not evidenced by being obsessed with debunking one sides’ errors, particularly when that side, flawed though it may be, is the one advocating for action to address the issue.

The real evidence for global warming looks more like this:

Extremes of cold are still happening, but global warming has loaded the dice. Not so much as in Krugman’s claim of 4 sides in favor of heat, 1 normal, 1 cool, but loaded nonetheless. Extremes of heat now really do happen more frequently than those of cold.

For starters, it would help if Mass discussed evidence like this more often.

Published at 08:19 on 30 May 2012

And that’s that the ill-considered initiative measure to privatize liquor sales in Washington State is certain to increase prices. The Establishment media is at this late hour, one week before the state liquor stores close for good, starting to feebly offer the caution that prices “might” go up.

Really, now, how couldn’t they? One of the measure’s selling points, trumpeted by its advocates, was that it would not reduce revenues to the state; the legislation was crafted to be revenue neutral. And capitalists are capitalists: in the retail liquor business, as in any business, the goal of business is to make a profit.

So, the state is still making its profit. To that picture, we now add capitalists taking their cut. Just where is that money going to come from? Does anyone honestly think the new for-profit liquor stores are going to harvest C-notes from a secret orchard of money trees and make their money that way? This is not rocket science we are talking about.

Sure, some of it is going to come from union-busting and pushing worker pay down. But that can only go so far. The advocates of paying workers less always overestimate the profits for owners that this will generate.

In short, prices will go up. It’s as close a thing to a future certainty that a simple economic analysis can predict.

Published at 20:12 on 1 May 2012

We won’t simply arrest you for having dissident views, because that wouldn’t stand court challenges.

What we will do is infiltrate your groups, and use every mind trick in the book to convince you and your comrades to go over the top and do things like plot to blow up a highway bridge, then we’ll arrest you and prosecute for that. That will stand up in court, because plotting to blow up a bridge is actually a crime.

And it’s obvious that’s exactly what the FBI did in this case. Both the dummy explosives (who else sells radical groups dummy explosives?), and this dead giveaway of a quote make it crystal clear:

Officials say the plot evolved from an idea to use smoke grenades to distract law enforcement while they destroyed financial institution signs on highrises across downtown Cleveland.

I mean, really now, how does the FBI know how the plot evolved over time without having infiltrated the group in the first place?

Keep that in mind while listening to the Establishment media hyperventilate over this story. This plot would have simply never happened in the form it did without the intervention of those who purport to be protecting society from such plots.

Published at 20:05 on 1 May 2012

Twenty years ago, May Day tended to pass unnoticed in most major American cities. There would be the odd small gathering or event here or there, many of them sponsored by creepy Stalinist cult groups aping the politics of the thoroughly disgusting Soviet bloc nations who had stolen the label of the radical Left and cloaked their tyranny in it.

It was but a dream that there would be enough people upset at what the capitalist hierarchy was doing to people and the planet to make a newsworthy disruption or two. That only happened in Europe, and served to reinforce that May Day as a political day of action was a European concept that was foreign to the United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. That meaning of May Day got its start in the heart of America, in Chicago in 1886. But I digress.

It was but a wish that anything close to that level of political consciousness could ever arise in the seemingly terminally passive and class-unconscious United States. Yet it has. Exaggerated and misreported though today’s events may be, it’s become a big enough thing in Seattle and a number of other cities that the one thing the Establishment media cannot do anymore is simply ignore it.

It’s a painfully slow process, and a messy one as well, but it’s underway at least. May it continue so that by the time I’m old and dying I can at least say I’ve lived through and participated in one of history’s more hopeful eras.

Published at 19:43 on 1 May 2012

I sat much of it out, having only recently stared a new job and thus being unwilling to take leave time so early on. I did catch a bit of the tail end of the day of demonstrations, however, and have several observations to share.

First, the fearmongering. At work they forwarded a e-mail from the Downtown Seattle Association (my job is downtown) basically predicting that the apocalypse was going to break out today. Nothing of the sort happened, of course. On the block where my employer’s building is located, nothing out of the usual ever became visible, and it is only a few blocks from Westlake Park, which was one of the focal points of today’s action. At Westlake, tourists were posing using the rally as a backdrop.

Second, the yellow journalism. Many of my co-workers were nervously following the Establishment media’s web sites today. Most were smart enough to figure out that there was something fishy going on with the reporting. One showed me a “paint bomb” that looked more like a mostly-empty paint container that had spilled. Which, in fact, is exactly what it was. When I stopped by Westlake, I saw an area with stocked with tempera paint, cardboard, and glitter, so that those so inclined could fashion their own protest signs. And some of the paint had indeed been spilled. Glitter had also been spilled. Maybe they could have breathlessly reported a “glitter bomb” as well.

Third, the hypocritical double standards, perhaps best exhibited here. Note how when some protesters use violence against reporters, it’s just an attack, but when the cops use violence against those same reporters, it’s all because of a “mistake.” They could have just has accurately said those protesters mistook them for the sort of reporters who collaborate with the police. Such reporters actually exist, by the way.

Published at 10:22 on 28 April 2012

Is that what the author of this article on pugetsoundanarchists.org is saying to anyone who does not currently self-identify as an anarchist when s/he says “groups other than our intended readership?” I certainly hope not, because if they are, it’s tantamount to a wish for perpetual irrelevance, because if anarchism is to ever to be a meaningful movement capable of having an effect on the world we anarchists must grow well beyond our current miniscule numbers.

Which, of course, means reaching out to those who are not currently “members of the club.”

Published at 21:24 on 16 March 2012

Given the well-established nature of the Sri Lankan government and the end of the conflict there, it can hardly be counted as much of a surprise that things like this are happening.