I've updated my Amazon Wish List to include some gear that would come in handy for self-preservation, video coverage of events, etc. Nothing I can't get by without if necessary, but it's stuff I'd like to have.
Live blogging/podcasting is probably just not going to be feasible, but I'll try to get as much worthwhile material up as soon as possible after the fact (assuming none of the various more dire possible outcomes, e.g. jail, hospital, morgue ...).
My guess is that unless the university either folds or gets ordered by a court to provide the requested rental venue, things will go down outdoors on Turlington Plaza. But that guess could be wrong. I'll be watching for more info as Der Tag approaches.
Request: Hey, how about posting a review of the book at Amazon? Positive, negative, your call, but it would be nice to see some opinions there. If you don't want to pop $1.99 for the Kindle version to read it for review purposes, there are other versions, including a free PDF (see here).
Why move? Well, a month after saying they were going to support Bitcoin Cash, Jaxx still isn't supporting Bitcoin Cash. If you had Bitcoin in your Jaxx wallet as of the "user-activated hard fork," you own the same amount of Bitcoin Cash. You just can't get to it, or spend it, or receive more of it, in Jaxx. That was understandable for a few days. Now it's just getting dumb. So ...
Coinomi does support Bitcoin Cash, and with a little work (not much work, and there are tutorials) you can get your balance out of Jaxx hell and into usable form.
Not that my travails are over.
If I had my druthers, I'd exchange my measly Bitcoin balance (about $20 worth at the moment) for Bitcoin Cash. But at the moment the miner and ShapeShift fees for doing that would run about $12, meaning I'd only actually get about $8 worth of Bitcoin Cash at the other end.
I doubt that Bitwala will turn out to be the only lying turd in the Segwit2x pile of feces, and Bitcoin can only remain a speculation toy / high-redemption-cost bearer bond for so long before the market migrates away from it and toward a real cryptocurrency. I don't know if that real cryptocurrency will be Bitcoin Cash, Dash, ZCash or something else, but the Segwit2x people -- especially the ones who won't even keep their word on half of that deal -- are inflating a bubble that has to pop sooner or later.
Side Addendum: I've updated the sidebar addresses/QR codes to direct Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash donations to my Coinomi wallet. Hint, hint.
Ask me anything (anything) in the comment thread below this post; and
I'll answer in comments, on a coming podcast, or both.
Now in beta: Make it worth my while -- $1 gets you a guaranteed reply by email. I haven't decided yet whether this will eventually be a requirement, or even whether popping for a buck will increase the likelihood that your question will be ... "featured." Mainly I'm just testing the idea as an application for 21.co's offering of a "pay to email" service. Click the graphic for more info.
Some animals I love, some not so much. But I hate fire ants with great passion. Because of diabetic neuropathy that has left my lower legs fairly numb, if I get into a mess of them (it happens once or twice a year when I'm doing yard work -- did I mention screw lawns?) I may not notice for a couple of minutes. That is, until the venom from, say, 50-100 bites gets far enough into my compromised nerve network to find pain receptors. And then it's ... bad.
A few years ago, a contractor friend of mine who went down to the Gulf coast -- New Orleans, and also Mississippi -- to get houses built/rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina told me that he would never have been able to keep up with demand (I think his words were "we would STILL be trying to get shit done") had it not been for the thousands of undocumented (mostly Mexican) laborers who showed up and busted their asses for very reasonable wages. He had trouble getting workers who were used to going home every night to relocate from Missouri for several months, and the ones who did commanded premium money.
I wonder if Texans will be as supportive of Trump's border wall fantasy a few weeks from now as they were a few weeks ago?
After more than two decades of lawlessness, the most the "justice" system was able bring itself to give terror kingpin Joe Arpaio was a six-month slap on the wrist for contempt of court.
Actual justice would have involved, at a bare minimum, confiscating every dollar he had and every possession he owned and garnishing any and all future income until such time as restitution had been made to his victims.
But okay, six months.
Except that Trump pardoned him.
So, question:
If one of his past or potential victims takes matters into his or her own hands to correct the "justice" system's failure and reverse Trump's evil abuse of his pardon power, should we think of the end of Joe Arpaio as freelance capital punishment, or, given that he's already threatening to find a way back into the reign of terror biz, as self-defense?
I already had a follow-up in mind, and as it happens Brad himself provided the perfect text for that follow-up in an email exchange so I will just use that text:
Has anyone been denounced, or even criticized, for not signing it?
Antifa isn't an organization. It's a word that a number of completely autonomous organizations of varying compositions, characters and activity types, connected only by the general descriptor "anti-fascist," use to describe themselves.
As for "terrorist," that word has been so loosely and wildly interpreted for the last couple of decades as to effectively lost any meaning it might once have had, but with respect to Antifa it's a looooooong stretch for any meaning other than "a bunch of people I don't like, some of whom occasionally use violence that I consider unjustified."
I don't remember how it came to my attention, nor do I recall anyone asking me to sign it, let alone demanding that I do so. When I found out about it, I read it, I agreed with it, I decided I wanted to add my voice to it, and I used the contact form at that site to do so.
On an episode of The Jason Stapleton Program today, Tom Woods explains why he declined to sign Liberty Against Fascism's "open letter" from libertarians who wanted to clearly distinguish themselves from the Charlottesville thugs:
When it comes to this whole, I have to get on the Internet and tell everybody how much I'm against the Nazis thing, I just, I don't go for that. ... The whole thing is so ridiculous, it's an insult to ask libertarians in effect to sign a petition saying "we're against fascism." Obviously we're against fascism, and if you're dealing with people who are so vacant that they can't see that, then get away from those people, there's no helping those people.
What he doesn't mention is that he's a founding member of one of the groups marching for fascism in Charlottesville. He was one of the few people known as libertarians who would really have benefited from a chance to disassociate himself from that shit. But it turns out that those of us who signed it were, in part, disassociating ourselves from him.
He obviously doesn't want to openly own his associations, but neither does he want to openly repudiate those associations. There's a word for that kind of thing. No, the word isn't "principle." It's "cowardice."
Update: The paleos, as they usually do when confronted with inconvenient facts, immediately start whining about how anyone who criticizes any of them for anything is engaged in "character assassination" (or, better, a "smear"). @AfroLibertarian links to this piece by Woods from 12 years ago, presumably by way of proving ... well, something. Summary: "It's not fair to mention anything I wrote in the past or to assume that my associations actually mean anything."
h/t Brad at WendyMcElroy.com: Cloudflare has seemingly escalated from cutting off a hate site to cutting off a libertarian site.
I'll be interested to see whether or not this is true. At the Activist Post story Brad links to, the screen shot of the email from Cloudflare is from their billing department and just indicates that ghostrunner.net's subscription to a pro plan is ending, not that Cloudflare is cutting the site off for ideological reasons. So there may be some jumping to conclusions going on here.
That is an easy one: it is the alt-left. Proof? Once upon a time, a long time ago (1977) there was a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, IL. That town was comprised to a large extent not only by people of the Jewish faith, but many who had personally experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. Was there any violence on that occasion? To ask this is to answer it: there was not. Why not? Because in them thar far away days, the alt-left had not yet begun their pattern of intimidation of the sort suffered by Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos and other conservatives and libertarians.
If you're against the death penalty as all decent human beings should be, here's a petition you should sign.
If you support the death penalty, but prefer a reasonably high, rather than abysmally low, standard of proof before having someone killed, here's a petition you should sign.
If you just like signing petitions, here's a petition you should sign.
As a multi-platform, multi-currency blockchain wallet, over the past many days, we have been flooded with requests to support Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Yesterday, we officially made the decision to work towards full integration.
Since Jaxx users are always in control of their private keys, corresponding Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will be safe in your Jaxx wallet. However, please know that you will not be able to access/send/receive your Bitcoin Cash (BCH) until the integration takes place.
The process of downloading and indexing the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain is lengthy. We are currently downloading the blockchain and expect indexing to start shortly. The indexing of a blockchain as big as Bitcoin’s has an unknown duration and could take anywhere from a few days to 1 to 2 weeks. You will be then able to claim them once Jaxx fully integrates Bitcoin Cash (BCH) into the wallet.
Thing Two: Yesterday, Jamie Redman of Bitcoin.com reported:
On August 16 at approximately 8 am EDT the mining pool Bitclub Network mined an 8MB block on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain. Block #479469 cleared over 37,000 transactions from the mempool making it the largest block found so far on the BCH chain. Meanwhile, the BCH network continues to capture infrastructure development and industry support.
Thing Three: As of now, I'm still waiting on Jaxx to "fully integrate Bitcoin Cash into the wallet." Presumably I'm not some outlier awaiting a wallet update that others have already received -- as of three hours ago, the Jaxx area on Reddit had a comment titled "Any ETA on bitcoin cash support?"
One line I hear frequently in internal libertarian movement debate is that it's entirely possible to be both a bigot and a libertarian. That is, one could conceivably have an aversion to some group (racial, gender/sexual minority, whatever) without advocating for the initiation of force against that group.
True as far as it goes, I guess. And it could also be said that it's entirely possible to be a libertarian and also to really like goat feces, diesel fuel, and fire.
But I'm betting that if there are media and public inquiries to the Libertarian Party after some idiot rolls around in a mixture of goat feces and diesel fuel, then sets himself on fire in his front yard while screaming "LIBERTARIAN! LIBERTARIAN!" the response is going to be "yeah, that's not us."
Amid serious concerns for safety, we have decided to deny the National Policy Institute's request to rent event space at the University of Florida.
This decision was made after assessing potential risks with campus, community, state and federal law enforcement officials following violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., and continued calls online and in social media for similar violence in Gainesville such as those decreeing: "The Next Battlefield is in Florida."
I find the racist rhetoric of Richard Spencer and white nationalism repugnant and counter to everything the university and this nation stands for.
That said, the University of Florida remains unwaveringly dedicated to free speech and the spirit of public discourse. However, the First Amendment does not require a public institution to risk imminent violence to students and others.
The likelihood of violence and potential injury - not the words or ideas - has caused us to take this action.
Warm Regards,
W. Kent Fuchs
President
University of Florida
I do not expect that this will stop Spencer from coming to Gainesville and speaking, and he probably has good grounds for a 1st Amendment suit if UF is departing from normal policy here.
I expect Spencer to come, and I expect his thug army to arrive with him. In other words, I don't think the situation has really changed.
A couple of days ago, I put up a reader poll on "Using Twitter to crowdsource identification of the Charlottesville white nationalists with the intention of getting them fired from their jobs," with a promise to come back later and offer my own response to that poll. Current results:
1 vote (4%): Yeah, they're fair game, but only because they're racist scumbags.
16 votes (64%): Yeah, anyone who takes part in a public political action is fair game for being publicly identified with possible negative consequences.
6 votes (24%): No, that's not cool. You should be able to participate in public life without risking your job, even if you're on the side of evil.
1 vote (4%): Who cares?
1 vote (4%): Other, user-created -- "Raise the hate on both sides so that Civil War becomes inevitable."
I'm personally with the 64% -- anyone who takes part in a public political action is fair game for being publicly identified with possible negative consequences. And as I explain in my latest Garrison Center column, I find the whole @YesYoureRacist project to be a really cool example of how to crowdsource negative social preferencing.
The Taliban called on President Donald Trump on Tuesday to review the strategy for the war in Afghanistan and to hold peaceful dialogue directly with Afghans instead of engaging "corrupt" politicians.
Written in a tone of negotiation, the Taliban asked Trump to study the "historical mistakes" of his predecessors and to withdraw troops from Afghanistan completely.
The letter urged the US to interact with Afghans "generously" instead of imposing war.
...
In a press conference on Monday, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said all options for Afghanistan remained on the table, and a full withdrawal of troops is one of them.
Trump has yet to announce a strategy for Afghanistan, but Mattis said one is "very, very close."
Like Colonel Kilgore said, "someday this war's gonna end."
Mattis is wrong on one thing. It's not going to end in anything resembling "victory" for the US. That option is not on the table.
The best-case scenario is for the US to exit Afghanistan on its feet rather than on its knees.
If Trump just comes out soon and says "that was a 16-year clusterfuck and I'm putting an end to it," he secures at least one positive legacy.
Or, he and/or his successors can keep messing around until it turns into something like this:
So, there's this. The idea is to identify the white nationalists from Charlottesville and make sure e.g. their employers know what they're up to when they're not mopping floors, servicing septic tanks or designing particle accelerators. What do you think? I'll tell you what I think ... later, in a separate post, so as not to press my own biases.
Disclaimer: I'm still a free speech fundamentalist. If some idiot racist knothead wants to get up on a soapbox or a stage and preach his nonsense, I believe he has a right to do just that and that anyone who attempts to forcibly stop him is at least as much an enemy of humanity as he is. On the other hand, there's a good chance I will be found standing nearby with a sign pointing out that he's an idiot, racist, and knothead, which I also have a right to do.
Over the last few months I've been told by some -- including some I respect -- that the above position is too lenient, and that to the extent that these idiot racist knotheads are allowed to organize unmolested, they are being empowered to actually pursue their actual goals, e.g. boxcars and gas chambers.
There's a respect in which I'm beginning to come around to the possibility that the people telling me that are at least partially right and that I've been at least partially wrong. Here's my current thinking:
In February, Augustus Invictus publicly threatened to murder his political opponents (between the 7 and 8 minute mark in this video):
A few weeks ago, Augustus Invictus announced, in conspiracy with others, a "March on Charlottesville" to "Unite The Right":
The night before the scheduled march, Augustus Invictus announced, in words and graphics, that his intention was no longer just to hold a "march on" Charlottesville but to fight "The Battle of" Charlottesville:
You've probably heard about what went down in Charlottesville the next day, so I won't belabor it at length. Summary:
The people named on the poster above, including Augustus Invictus, came to Charlottesville with an army, looking for a fight, and they got one. One of them even strapped on some testosterone and actually did what Augustus Invictus and his co-conspirators have been threatening, both explicitly and implicitly, to do, murdering a 32-year-old woman in the street. Of course, now they're pulling their typical identity politics schtick about how they're really the victims in all this, but the record is pretty clear.
Now, one of of Augustus Invictus's co-conspirators, Richard Spencer, is coming to my town (I'll be surprised if Augustus doesn't show up as well).
I remain a free speech fundamentalist. I respect Spencer's right to babble nonsense in public and will, to the extent I'm able, defend that right.
But I rather expect that he's going to show up with a gaggle of morons in tow, sporting their gang colors and implements -- helmets, baseball bats, swastika flags, etc. -- and looking for a fight.
I plan to be among the natives waiting here to greet said gaggle of morons. And based on what happened in Charlottesville, I'm of the eminently reasonable belief that they intend to engage in the use of unlawful force and the commission of forcible felonies, and that they represent a threat of imminent death or great bodily harm to others present.
Gee, that language sounds familiar. I wonder where I've heard it before?
Florida Statute 776.012: Use or threatened use of force in defense of person
(1) A person is justified in using or threatening to use force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. A person who uses or threatens to use force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat before using or threatening to use such force.
(2) A person is justified in using or threatening to use deadly force if he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony. A person who uses or threatens to use deadly force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground if the person using or threatening to use the deadly force is not engaged in a criminal activity and is in a place where he or she has a right to be.
If it's trouble they're looking for, they probably shouldn't expect to get off quite so smart and easy in Gainesville as they did in Charlottesville.
Note: I'm told that the word "climbdown" in the title may be unfamiliar or, due to multiple definitions, confusing. I'm using it to mean "a retraction of a previously held position."
He finally made the Washington Post! Photo 6 of 9 up top. Caption: "An officer helps a white nationalist after tear gas was sprayed." I'm sure several friends of mine will enjoy seeing that (not that they would likely look any better after going unmasked in a cloud of CS -- I've had that pleasure many times). Face crop:
In photo 3 of 9, is that Ryan Ramsey of Florida taking a selfie there on the left? [Update: Ramsey says it's not him and that he wouldn't treat a tiki torch that way] I can't tell and I'm thinking probably not (he and his wife just had a new baby a couple of days ago), but inquiring minds do want to know:
Update --Hat tip to the aforementioned Ryan Ramsey (who doesn't seem to be in Virginia) for this ...
I don't have my copy of Frederick Pohl's autobiography The Way The Future Was handy (I assume it's still packed away from the move nearly five years ago as many, many, many books are), so I have to relate this from memory and it may not completely correct:
During World War Two, before Pohl managed to get into the military (he started trying right after Pearl Harbor, kept getting turned down, then got drafted and became an Army Air Corps meteorologist in Italy), he was working for one of the big editors (probably John W. Campbell) on one of the pulp magazines (probably Astounding), and ran a story featuring an atomic bomb.
Most ricky-tick, FBI agents showed up to find out who knew what, and how they'd found it out. Of course, no one knew anything. It was just science fiction, for the love of Pete. So the feds grumbled and demanded to be contacted before any more of this atomic bomb stuff got published and went away.
If the atomic bomb was just being invented today, right now, and a story like that got published, would the author/editor/publisher end up wearing a hood and shackles en route to some black site, or would FDR/Trump have a public meltdown about treasonous leaks, or would the whole thing just get ignored and/or dismissed as bizarre fiction and/or conspiracy theory?
FYI, Pohl's book is a great memoir both of early science fiction fandom and of being a Depression-era rank and file American member of the Communist Party.
[Trumbo, as editor of the Screen Writer] insisted, perhaps a little disingenuously, that his only standards were literary quality, general relevance, and respect for the [Screen Writers] Guild and its policies and objectives. Richard Macaulay, a screenwriter of conservative leanings and a vigorous anti-Communist, put him to the test with an article, "Who Censors What?" on movie content which was in rebuttal to an earlier piece by Alvah Bessie. As editor, Trumbo rejected Macaulay's article, taking the same shaky position that Herbert Marcuse would two decades later, as he argued, "It is difficult to support your belief in the 'inalienable right' of man's mind to be exposed to any thought whatever, however intolerable that thought might be to 'anyone else.' Frequently such a right encroaches upon the right of others to their lives. It was this 'inalienable right' in Fascist countries which directly resulted in the slaughter of five million Jews.'"
Sounds a lot like the same action/justification as the formal "no platform" policies popular on what's passed for "the left" since the 1970s (once they'd taken full advantage of the '60s Free Speech Movement, etc. to firmly establish their own platform access) and at present by e.g. Antifa groups, doesn't it?
Of course, the right-wing blacklist campaign that hit Trumbo and many of his friends a few years after the incident above was a variation on the same theme -- a variation that seems to be popping up again in tech and other fields, albeit from the putative "left" and without the HUAC-style fireworks (to the extent that there's government influence, it's mostly in the use of general federal equal opportunity regulations as cover for sanctions and dismissals a la James Damore at Google).
Anecdotally, it seems to me that whenever I come across the word "discourse" near the beginning of an essay, there's a far better than even chance that I'm about to read some bullshit.
I'm not quite sure how I got on Demand Progress's email list. Maybe I subscribed to it to track this or that political issue, or maybe someone subscribed me to it without my knowledge. Either way, while I don't mind getting their emails, I can pretty reliably predict that those emails will be full of fail. Like this:
Dear Thomas,
Verizon Wireless was just caught in the act of what looks like a blatant violation net neutrality.
Last week, without warning or permission from its customers, Verizon throttled bandwidth speeds down to 10Mbs. Users trying to stream video or use certain apps were caught in an internet slow lane and couldn't do anything about it.
This doesn't look like a violation of "Net Neutrality" to me. In fact, it looks like an implementation of "Net Neutrality." Per Wikipedia:
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet must treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.
If Verizon had reduced its speeds only for particular content -- say, Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video only got 10Mbs speeds while Bing, Gmail, and the Hamster Dance got 20Mbs speeds -- well, that would be a violation of "Net Neutrality."
But simply moving all data from all sources in the same way and presumptively at the same speeds is precisely what "Net Neutrality" calls for. And if that means that someone streaming Rogue One in high definition gets a choppy picture? Well, that's how it goes -- their data got treated exactly like the data going to the user checking her email and the junior high kid spanking the monkey to Chelsea Manning's Vogue swimsuit pic (not being a junior high kid, I actually read the accompanying article, of course).
So suck it, "Net Neutrality" megalomaniacs. You demanded it, you got it.
Open US military operations versus North Korea within ~30 days.
Why I think so:
First, while it's easy to discount Trump's outbursts, his "fire and fury and frankly power" "if [North Korea] does not stop threatening the United States"* statement yesterday is coupled with the leaking of "intelligence" -- actually preparatory propaganda -- intended to justify just that. From the WaPo story linked above:
Trump's statement also followed a report in The Washington Post that North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its ballistic missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. The report quoted a confidential assessment by U.S. intelligence officials.
In actuality, 1) North Korea still seems to be at the stage of producing bulky fission weapons; 2) the recent claims (from both Pyongyang and DC) that the North has developed an ICBM capable of reaching US targets seem pretty sketchy; and 3) even if the North has produced real nukes (fusion weapons) and even if the North does now theoretically have the capacity to hit the US with missiles, miniaturizing those hypothetical nukes and mating them with those hypothetical missiles and expecting them to detonate at the far end of an arc taking them to the edge of space is another giant leap.
Secondly, I've previously predicted that in the event of such a conflict, the Chinese regime will be tuned up and ready for an invitation from the North's military to intervene as "peacekeepers" after a brief US air war and the collapse of the Kim regime. They seem to be rattling sabers as prelude to such a scheme.
As I've previously predicted, I don't think a US ground invasion of the North is part of the plan. For one thing, that would take a major, highly visible, time-consuming ramp-up. The North would likely decide to kick things off themselves long before the US gets its ginormous mass of troops, tanks, etc. landed and in position.
What US ground combat there is will take place along the 38th parallel "demilitarized zone" (which of course means the opposite of what its name implies). That will get ugly, and there will be casualties, but I don't expect the North to be able to wreck, let alone occupy, Seoul as some people like to predict -- some artillery/rocket fire at extreme range in the first hours, trailing off as the North's guns are turned into twisted piles of metal by US air and artillery, if they don't run out of ammunition first (resupply won't be happening).
The US, from the air, will first of all destroy any and all ballistic missile and/or atomic sites it knows of (and it knows of most, if not all, of them), followed by C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) targets and road/transportation targets. The first objective will be to make it impossible for the North's military to function as an offensive force at the DMZ or outside the Korean peninsula. The second will be to make the North's military come apart at the seams in general. And the third will be to ensure that the Kim regime loses any ability to direct its military forces, presumably culminating in one or more generals deciding that it's time to march Kim Jong Un and friends around back for a bullet party right before asking Beijing to come in and restore order.
Obviously, the more detailed predictions above are more risky than the one in the first sentence. But I think it's coming soon, and I do think that's how it will go ... now let's see whether or not I'm right so I can either crow or eat crow (frankly I'd much rather do the latter on this one).
* It's worth noting the content of the "threats" Trump cites as reason for his own threats. To wit (WaPo op. cit.):
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told diplomats that his country will never negotiate away what he called a rational "strategic option" against the threat of attack from the United States.
Bombast notwithstanding, the North's "threat" is that it will defend itself if attacked and that it will build and maintain a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to attack.
When I first published the book in print/epub/mobi/PDF versions, I tried to tickle the funny bones of would-be entrepreneurs by noting that it was in the public domain, that anyone could do anything they liked with it, and that it was not available on Amazon. Nobody took the bait. I finally talked Neil into it, and thank him for making it happen.
If you haven't read the book, or if you have read it but would like it for your Kindle, hey, it's only $1.99, and I'm aware that Neil could use the money. So read a pretty good book and help a movement hero out at the same time.
... here in a couple of hours, although there will be dislocations/issues early on. Bitcoin is going to split into BTC (Bitcoin) and BCC (Bitcoin Cash).
To the extent that I "go long" (I have very little cryptocurrency), my plan is to probably do so on BCC. Here's why:
Regular old Bitcoin is going to implement a "solution" (Segregated Witness) to a problem that's entirely artificial, created by "Big Mining" to preserve its big take at the expense of the cryptocurrency becoming slower and more expensive to use than it should have become.
Bitcoin Cash is going to solve that "problem" by doing exactly what its creator envisioned (increasing the block size so that transactions can get back to being processed quickly and cheaply).
It's not so much that I expect Bitcoin Cash to "win" as that I want it to, because I want a working cryptocurrency -- something I'll eventually be able to use to buy a Coke at a convenience store. If either of these two currencies might become that, I think Bitcoin Cash is the one to bet on.
I do expect BCC to almost immediately crash in price and BTC to gain -- and if I can move fast enough and predict the equation well enough to take advantage of that, I will be exchanging my BTC for BCC. Because in the long term, I expect BCC to do well, regardless of how BTC does.
If you think BCC is crap and is going to quickly become worthless, I encourage you to donate yours to me -- as soon as my preferred wallet starts taking BCC, I'll get a QR code up for you to do so :) You can, of course, send me regular old BTC via the right sidebar already.
