Month: July 2020

Island Living

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Hippies are annoying and filthy creatures, but you’ve got to hand it to them:  behind all the patchouli and Grateful Dead bootlegs, they’re a resourceful lot.

A Canadian couple in British Columbia, Catherine King and Wayne Adams, have been living for nearly three decades on a floating, man-made island off the western coast of Vancouver.  Like good hippies, they built the island—which weighs over one million pounds—from recycled materials, mostly lumber.  In a particularly Boomer hippie detail, Adams would trade artwork to fishermen for scraps of lumber and other cast-offs.

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Conservative Girls are Prettier

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Way back in 2001, good ol’ John “The Derb” Derbyshire wrote a column for National Review called “Hillary’s Style Crash.”  That was back in the days before NR kicked Derb to the curb for writing his controversial piece for Taki’s Mag “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” in which Derb dropped some unpleasant nuggets of wisdom.  That piece went up during the first round of the past decade’s worth of race riots, back before most of us realized it was mostly ginned up controversy.

Regardless, while I don’t agree with Derb’s race realism overall, he does offer up some remarkably insightful commentary.  His weekly podcast is often the highlight of my Saturday mornings, and he comes across as an intellectually curious, gentle man who sincerely cares about his adopted country.  His best commentary involves cultural matters, and that 2001 piece offers up a great insight:  conservative girls are prettier, but progressive girls are easier.

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Lazy Sunday LXX: Phone it in Fridays, Part IV

The Portly Politico4 Comments

We’re rounding out the month of Phone it in Fridays this week with the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth editions.  I’ve intentionally avoided doing more PiiFs while going through them, although I’ll likely write more in the future (because they’re easy and quick), and there will likely a “Phone it in Fridays, Part V” at some point (because it’s easy and quick).

Like last week’s installment, The Virus cast a long, sickly shadow over these entries.  For a time, that’s pretty much all bloggers and the commentariat were discussing, to the point that it got boring and tiresome.  We also settled into our oppressive new normal like slowly boiling frogs, and now every trip to the grocery store looks like a Japanese subway station.

Here are Phone it in Fridays X, XI, and XII:

  • “Phone it in Friday X: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part III: Working from Home” – One of the silver linings of The Age of The Virus was teaching from home.  At least, I quite enjoyed it—virtually all of my colleagues hated it.  I’m fortunate to teach in a field (History) that is easy to port to an online format, and I’ve been teaching online since 2015, so I have a good sense for the kind of feedback and communication necessary to make distance learning smoother for students (and myself).  This post had me musing about the future of work, and my hopes that we’d see more white-collar work done from home.
  • “Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus” – One of the more astonishing aspects of the lockdowns, quarantines, shelter-in-place orders, mask ordinances, etc., was the ready compliance of most Americans to shutting down their lives.  I think everyone was copacetic to the “two weeks to flatten the curve” mantra, but that two weeks turned into “indefinite oppression because we said so.”  As cases have shot up in South Carolina, even our more conservative municipalities have put mask ordinances into place, albeit relatively mild, with tons of exemptions.  Had I won my that Town Council election on Tuesday, I would have voted against any such ordinances, on the grounds that a.) law enforcement doesn’t need to waste their time enforcing the unenforceable—and the non-criminal, and b.) mature adults and individual businesses in a free society can make their own best decisions about masks, etc.  Regardless, we all seemed to forget about the Constitution the minute a plague hit—unlike our plague-ridden ancestors.
  • “Phone it in Friday XII: Good Reads” – The point of PiiF is to churn out some quick content on Fridays when I’m ready to relax for the weekend.  This PiiF ended up being one of the longest ones yet.  I read a ton of blogs every day, schedule-permitting, so I come across some good stuff from time to time.  This post shared great pieces from Rachel Fulton Brown, Z Man, and photog.

That’s it!  Twelve Fridays in one month of Sundays.  Lots of numbers divisible by 2 and 3 there.  I hope these PiiFs brought some joy to your life.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Lamar Special Election Analysis

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.  NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

As readers know, I ran in the Lamar, South Carolina special election for Town Council this past Tuesday.  Former Town Councillor Tamron McManus resigned earlier in the year, triggering a special election.  The election was originally slated for 12 May 2020, but was rescheduled to 14 July 2020 due to The Virus.

I posted the results on Wednesday, after I spoke with the Darlington County Election Commissioner.  Of the two filed candidates—Buzz Segars and myself—neither candidate won.  There was a surprise, sleeper, dark-horse write-in candidate, Mary Anne Mack, who blew both of us away.  The final tally was 86-28-23, Mack, Cook, Segars (read Wednesday’s post for the full breakdown).

In my results post, I wrote that “I will offer more detailed analysis in this Saturday’s edition of SubscribeStar Saturday.  Some of my insights, while I believe accurate, are a bit spicy, and should be behind a paywall.”

So, as promised, here is my analysis of this highly unusual election.  While Lamar is a small town of just under 1000, I think this election has some important implications for small municipal elections, especially in the South.  The Mack Strategy of running a quiet write-in campaign among a tight-knit group, thereby catching the publicly announced candidates off-guard, could be hugely effective.  Implementing it—or learning to combat it—could significantly change municipal elections in rural and small town communities.

The rest of this post will be available on my SubscribeStar page shortly.  I am attending a family wedding this afternoon and will be a tad delayed completing the post.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Resist the Black Pill

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Lately, it’s been easy to give in to despair.  Trump is way down in the polls, we’ve suffered reversals on DACA (and Trump’s own reversals on rescinding foreign student visas for colleges going online-only in the fall and on suspending foreign worker visas through the end of the year), BLM is murdering people for saying “All Lives Matter,” and so on.

Despair is a sin.  Like most situations in life, doing the opposite of what you feel is virtuous.  Wallowing in self-pity (or shouting angrily during one of Tucker Carlson‘s litanies of unpunished progressive malfeasance) is the emotionally satisfying approach, but it’s not very productive.

I’m noticing that a number of folks on our side of this great culture war are taking the “black pill.”  Z Man railed against Trump in this week’s podcast, and in a post earlier this week (which I referenced yesterday).  Milo had all-but written Trump off until the Roger Stone commutation.

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TBT: Flight 93 Election Follow-Up

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It’s been a big election week for yours portly; even though I lost to a surprise write-in candidate, I feel pretty good about it.  It’s also, of course, a huge (yuge?) election year, with the fate of the United States dangling in the balance.

Right now, President Trump is down in the polls, and there’s a lot of black-pilled commentary on our side (I’m certainly guilty of it).  Z Man wrote a scatching post yesterday—entitled “Flight 93 Crashed“—that argues that Jeff Sessions’s defeat in the Alabama US Senate Republican primary to former football coach Tommy Tuberville marks the end of any significant, mainstream nationalist and immigration patriot influence in national politics.  Sessions was, indeed, a John the Baptist in the Senate, crying out in the wilderness of the cheap labor lobby, a lone voice for immigration restriction.

I do think President Trump has treated Sessions shabbily at times, but when Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, he allowed hostile forces to take the reins, resulting in two years and millions of wasted dollars on a politically-motivated investigation that nearly put Roger Stone in jail for a meaningless process “crime.”  More importantly, it stymied the Trump presidency, putting a stop to the energy and excitement of those early days of his administration.

Sessions was, I believe, doing what he thought was right, but his fatal error was he assumed we were still playing by the old playbook of political decorum and fair play.  By taking that path—however honorable in the particular—he unleashed incredibly dishonorable forces, albeit unintentionally.  To add insult to injury, Democrat Doug Jones won his Senate seat away from Judge Roy Moore, a huge hero for social and religious conservatives.

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Lamar Town Council 2020 Special Election Results

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Yesterday Lamar held a rescheduled special election for a vacant Town Council seat.  I was hoping to have the results last night, but when I drove by Lamar Town Hall around 8:30 PM, the results were not posted to the front door.

I spoke with Darlington County Election Commissioner Hoyt Campbell this morning, however, and he gave me the results over the phone.  He also said the poll workers might have posted the voting machine receipts to one of the side doors of Town Hall.  Sure enough, I drove down there this morning and they were on a side door.  That occurred to me last night, but the prospect of lurking around a public building at dusk struck me as a tad sketchy.

The results were surprising—shocking, really.  This little off-cycle, middle-of-summer, Age of The Virus election came with an interesting twist.

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Special Election Day 2020

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Last November, my little town held town council elections.  Neither of the people I voted for won, and the two incumbents won reelection (there were two separate seats up, so we got to vote for two separate candidates).

In March, one of the Town Councillors resigned for reasons still unknown to me, which triggered a special election. I filed to run for Town Council on Friday, 13 March 2020—the Friday before all the schools in South Carolina shut down and went to distance learning.

With The Virus hitting, the special election was moved from its original date on Tuesday, 12 May to today, Tuesday, 14 July 2020.  My plan was to keep it simple, just talking to people and maybe going door-to-door, but quarantining—as well as a good bit of time on the road this summer—prevented that.  It also didn’t help that I was cooped up inside for two weeks with a gnarly virus (fortunately, I tested negative for The Virus, but I’m skeptical as to the accuracy of that test).

But that’s mostly me making excuses for myself.  I could have done more.  I did talk to my neighbor and a few other folks.  One older man approached me while I was loading my car up one morning and complained about a house with caged pit bulls in the backyard; he wanted me to introduce an ordinance banning pit bulls “when you get elected.”  I’ve actually given that a great deal of thought, and might explain my thinking on that proposal in a future post.  It will certainly become more relevant if I get elected.

As for the campaign, I resolved to spend $0 campaigning.  I didn’t do any fundraising, or even funded anything myself (other than spending $31 for the filing fee).  There’s no need to spend scads of money in a local election in a town of approximately 950 people.  Public office should be attainable to anyone, especially at the local level, and I want to see if that’s doable.

I did, however, create a small (free!) Facebook page eight days ago.  I wrote a short post explaining my vision for the town:

My basic pitch:  Lamar is centrally-located in a rapidly growing part of South Carolina.  Working families, especially young ones just starting out, are finding it more difficult to buy homes in the larger neighboring municipalities.  Lamar is well-positioned to welcome those young families with friendliness, affordable real estate, low taxes, and proximity to the three large towns in the area (not to mention two Interstates).

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Populism Wins

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A major lesson of the 2016 election was that the neoliberal consensus of the prior thirty years was not the panacea its advocates claimed.  Trump’s candidacy was premised on the notion that the national government should work for the interests of the nation’s people, not on behalf of globalist concerns and aloof cosmopolitan elites.  Government could be reformed to strengthen the nation, rather than operating as the piggy bank for and protector of internationalists.

It’s interesting to reflect how entrenched the assumptions of neoliberalism were prior to 2015-2016.  When Trump began his historic campaign, virtually no one on the Right was talking about tariffs, other than Pat Buchanan (and a long essay on the necessity of a trade war with China that Oren Cass wrote for National Review in 2014).  The outsourcing of jobs overseas was assumed to be a short-term sacrifice that would result in more efficiency (ergo, lower prices on consumer goods) and more skilled jobs here.  We were a “nation of immigrants,” so we’d better throw the doors wide open.

With Trump’s election, a long-dormant populist wing reemerged, consisting both of conservative Republicans and disgruntled Democrats.  Tariffs became an important foreign and domestic policy tool.  A trade war with China soon began, and the United States renegotiated the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada.  Manufacturing jobs began returning to the United States, and immigration laws began to be enforced (so long as those Hawaiian judges didn’t get in the way).  The economy, rather than contracting as the free trade hardliners warned, grew exponentially, and even now is recovering at a remarkable clip after The Age of The Virus temporarily sidelined it.

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Lazy Sunday LXIX: Phone it in Fridays, Part III

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We’ve celebrated another with the  posts (here, here, here, and here).  Now we’re on the long march toward the 2020 election, which will hopefully be a triumphant landslide for GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus.

For now, it’s time to continue our month-long review of past Phone it in Friday posts.  This week makes for an odd trio:  the first post, “Phone it in Friday VII: Universal Studios,” looks back to a family trip to the Florida theme park at the end of February, on the eve of The Age of The Virus.  Only dimly did I realize at the time that we were living in the twilight days of The Before Times.

The next two posts both deal with The Virus, which dominated blog discussion in those early, fretful days of The Age of The Virus.  If we’re basing the quality of the posts on the lightheartedness and fun of the posts, then these match up nicely with their counterparts in the new Star Wars trilogy:  one good, fun movie (because it’s basically The New Hope) followed by two dreadful SJW escapades.

You can decide (especially you purple-haired schoolmarm star fleet captains out there):

  • “Phone it in Friday VII: Universal Studios” – This post is the ultimate example of a “Phone it in Friday” post, as I slammed it out on my tiny netbook computer while babies were screaming (probably) in the hotel room.  It regales readers with some highlights from my family’s trip to Universal Studios, a rare during-the-school-year vacation.  It was worth burning through my three annual personal days, that’s for sure.  My brothers and our significant others and/or children will be heading back there later in the month, in fact.
  • “Phone it in Friday VIII: Coronavirus Conundrum” – I wrote this a week after the Universal Studios post, when everything was still up in the air regarding The Virus, at least here in South Carolina.  We’d had very few cases by that point in SC, but the Pacific Northwest was getting hammered.  Ten days later, we transitioned to distance learning.  At the time, we didn’t know much about The Virus, other than it was China’s fault; as I wrote at the time, “My hope is that after all is done, China will be a pariah, no longer vaunted as a power on the rise, but maligned as a malicious, mendacious regime.”  We’ll see.
  • “Phone it in Friday IX: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part II: Attack of The Virus” – The title of this post actually drew from the second episode of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Attack of the Clones.  That afternoon, we had a huge, emergency faculty meeting to figure out distance learning.  Two days later, on Sunday, 15 March 2020, Governor McMaster announced that schools were shutting down through the end of March, and they ended up staying shut for the rest of the year (with distance learning, of course).  I also filed that day to run in Lamar’s Town Council election, which was supposed to be 12 May 2020, but will now be this Tuesday, 14 July 2020.  Wish me luck!

That’s it!  I would like to note that today’s post marks eighty weeks of consecutive posts, and the sixty-ninth edition of Lazy Sunday.  Wooooot!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments: