Category: Ideas and Policy

Meetings are (Usually) a Waste of Time

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Here’s something a bit lighter for your Friday morning:  Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day series on Ballotpedia from 23 January 2019 claims that, in a 40-hour workweek, Americans spend an average of 11.8 hours of that time in meetings.  That’s over two hours a day, and over 25% of the entire week!

Despite all that time in meetings, Rasmussen writes that “just 54% of workers leave most meetings with a clear idea of what to do next.”  That’s not a ringing endorsement for meetings.

Every fiber of my being is anathema to lengthy, tedious meetings, of any kind.  My time is precious (and valuable—it comes at ~$50/hour for private lessons), and I rarely need someone telling me out loud what could have been sent in an e-mail.  With rare exceptions, I almost always believe that time spent in a meeting could be spent more efficiently working on my own.

Apparently I’m not alone.  From Rasmussen:

The biggest problem workers have with meetings is that many of them are unnecessary. Seventy-six percent (76%) of workers have experienced that frustration. Also high on the list are meetings that don’t stay on topic (59%) and repetition of things that have already been said (58%).

The precise cost of ineffective meetings is impossible to quantify, but estimates range from $70 billion to $283 billion each year.

So not only are meetings ineffective, unnecessary, repetitious, and frequently off-topic, they’re potentially expensive in terms of productivity.

Of course, these numbers coming from a poll, it could be that workers merely perceive meetings to be ineffective and unclear—and they feel it’s okay to admit as such to a pollster—but this data rings true.

There are those who thrive in meetings, either in the roles of leaders or attendees.  Some enjoy preening in front of a group—the busybody types who seek out power, the narcissists who want some fluorescently-accented limelight—and some who like to use meetings as a forum to demonstrate their own cleverness.  For a small few, they need the opportunity to ask questions, either out of a genuine need for additional information, or because they want to virtue-signal to their colleagues.

In recent years, I’ve come to suspect that a large chunk of our workforce consists of people who essentially have meetings and push paper for a living.  With an average of 11.8 hours of meetings per week, this suspicion seems to be gaining concrete support:  that’s an awful lot of time in which to justify your position’s existence.  I imagine public sector bureaucrats at the federal level inflate that number, and not insubstantially (remember that the next time a conservative seeks to cut funding to some government program, and progressives wail—they’re crying about the lost make-work job, not the people who allegedly benefit from the program).  Regardless, just as the bureaucracy expands for the sake of its own self-preservation, it seems that meetings expand to justify their hosts’ jobs.

When dealing with specific technical questions or getting a quote on some expensive piece of equipment or installation, yes, meetings are important and necessary.  Long-term strategy planning requires regular meetings, and a weekly administrative meeting to set goals for the week and to review what’s coming up on the calendar is a prudent idea.  But rambling, two-hour meetings stretch to the point of ineffectiveness—no one can focus, people need to use the bathroom, and the original thread is probably long-since lost down a rabbit hole of objections and side topics.

So, here are my practical guidelines for effective meetings:

  • No more than one hour for infrequent or monthly meetings, but ideally, thirty minutes in length, tops.
  • Have a clear-cut agenda with maybe two or three items; don’t have ten agenda items that you know you won’t be able to cover adequately
  • Be willing to table important items that are not time-sensitive, with a plan to revisit them later.
  • Explain as much as possible via e-mail in advance.  In my experience, if you send a good e-mail in advance, you can wrap up a meeting in fifteen minutes—you’re mainly meeting at that point to confirm that everyone knows what’s going on, and to address any lingering questions and to clarify certain points.

I generally follow these guidelines when I’m required to hold a department meeting, and they make for smooth, quick, efficient meetings.

As a rather solitary worker, I tend to forget that some people want or need more direction—my whole career I’ve just figured stuff out as it’s come up—so I understand the necessary evil of meetings.  That said, I also value other people’s time.

So, the next time you schedule a meeting, make it quick.  People have real work to do.

TBT: Rustics Have Opinions, Too

The Portly Politico6 Comments

I first launched The Portly Politico on Blogger back in 2009.  It was a different world back then, and I was a different conservative.  I was probably still deep in my Randian-libertarian economic conservative phase:  I sincerely believed neoliberal economics and mostly unbridled capitalism could solve almost all of the world’s problems, which meant I was fundamentally progressive in my outlook, “progressive” in the sense of taking a Whiggish view of human history—yes, some things are bad now, but they’ll inexorably get better as we expand free trade and free movement of peoples across borders.  Heck, I even thought that, as a Christian nation, America should take in illegal immigrants!

Such are the follies of youth.  Intervening years of lived experience—not to mention the increasingly overt radicalism of the Left—have convinced me that, as wonderful as free markets are, we’ve tended to sacrifice real lives and communities in exchange for cheap plastic junk.  I’ve also considerably altered my views on immigration; at this point, I think America needs 150 milligrams of Deportemal (and a healthy dose of limiting legal immigration, too).

One thing that hasn’t changed:  I still identify with the struggles and values of rural America.  In this 2009 post, I pointed out the growing contempt for rural Americans that the Democratic Party now openly embraces.  I think I was overly-generous to the author of the piece discussed herein, however; upon re-reading Kevin Baker’s essay “Barack Hoover Obama,” I’m chilled by how openly he argues for the usurpation of usual constitutional order and division of powers in order to push for “change.”  I apparently missed it completely ten years ago, much to my current chagrin.

Back then, I remember conservatives having some mild optimism that President Obama would govern as a pragmatic moderate—left-of-center, to be sure, but reasonable.  Then he forced through the Affordable Care Act on a purely partisan basis, alienating Republicans and contributing to the deep ideological divide in America today.  His administration doubled down on identity politics, reopening mostly-healed racial wounds.  Much of the cultural chaos we suffer today is the result of the twin evils of Senator Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration bill and President Obama’s politics of racial grievance.

So, that’s my apology for my naivety as a young, portly man.  That said, here is 2009’s “Rustics Have Opinions, Too“:

I’ve noticed something about the American Left, specifically those members who claim to be “cultured”: they share a distrust and even hatred for rural Americans. They constantly mock the values, feelings, and politics of this oft-derided constituency, framing them as stereotypical “rednecks” or “good ol’ boys” who spend most of their time polishing their guns drunk while watching NASCAR.

Let’s face it: stereotypes exist for a reason. Think of any offensive stereotype and there’s a kernel of truth to it. But that doesn’t mean we should go around judging people based on those stereotypes. Liberals are making that point all the time, and in this case they’re actually right. As usual, though, they fall back into their old, hypocritical ways when it comes to rural Americans. It’s “hate speech” if someone insinuates that an Asian is good at math, but it’s perfectly acceptable to laugh at someone who’s only skin pigmentation is on the back of his neck.

I’m not saying that having a sense of humor is wrong. Maybe white guys really aren’t as cool as black dudes when they drive. Dave Chappelle had tons of great material and Boondocks deals with race relations in the United States today better than any other show out there. I want to make it clear that I have nothing against humor. By laughing at stereotypes, we rob them of their power, rather than adding to it.

The same holds true for “rednecks” or “white trash” or whatever label one uses. If it weren’t, Jeff Foxworthy would be out of a job. The problem arises, however, when we start to marginalize those Americans because of the stereotypes that exist. Such marginalization of African Americans, for example, would be roundly denounced by the left, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, liberals often celebrate when such marginalization is applied to the rural white American.

In an otherwise excellent article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “Barak Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow it Again,” Kevin Baker indulges in this marginalization to a sickening extent [Note–at the time of this writing, the full text of the article is only available to Harper’s subscribers]. The bulk of the article draws historical parallels between Presidents Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama. Baker’s research is impeccable and his understanding of an oft-maligned (and extremely intelligent) former president is refreshing. He implicitly challenges the more common “Obama-is-to-Roosevelt-as-Bush-is-to-Hoover” analogy and draws some pessimistic conclusions about Obama’s approach to passing many of his long-promised, radically liberal reforms.

A large part of Baker’s argument is that President Obama is proceeding with excessive caution and is relying too heavily on Congress to enact the changes he seeks for the nation (naturally, many conservatives would argue that the opposite is true, but suffice it to say that Baker is approaching Obama’s proposed reforms from the point of view of a liberal supporter–he actually thinks that cap-and-trade is a good thing). Baker maintains that congressional Democrats from states with small populations like Montana are stepping up after years of quiet service to challenge many of Obama’s efforts.

The language Baker uses to describe these representatives and senators is thick with disrespect. He talks about their states as filled with tumbleweeds and ignorance. He implicitly challenges the notion that these congressmen–and by extension their constituents–have no place in contemporary American politics and that they should be brushed aside and ignored, all because they’re impeding Ossiah’s democratic-socialist vision. This viewpoint is shared implicitly and explicitly by most liberals and leftists. The thinking is that because these states have small populations–and don’t have a good place to get sushi or gourmet coffee–they don’t deserve to have a place in the American political system (not to mention the fact that Baker is encouraging Obama to squelch dissent and open discussion, supposed bedrocks of modern liberalism).

What’s most disturbing about this reasoning is that it is anathema to the very structural philosophy of the United States Constitution. The Constitution clearly sets out to create a structure that gives states with large populations more power in the House of Representatives, while allowing states with small populations to maintain an equal footing in the Senate. The same theory exists behind the Electoral College. If our system was not balanced in this way, New York and California would always pick the next president and would exert a dangerous amount of control over national politics (with only conservative Texas able to balance things out a bit). Regional interests do not necessarily coincide with national interests, and what’s good for New York may not be good, and may even be bad, for Iowa.

Yet liberals consistently ignore this inconvenient truth and view it as a stumbling block to their pet projects, whatever they might be. At the risk of sounding like a blowhard conservative talk show host, leftists in America today have no respect for the Constitution except when it is politically advantageous or convenient. Now, I am willing to admit that there are plenty of conservatives who probably treat the Constitution in the same way, but they are much, much harder to find. This disrespect cannot endure for long, regardless of the side.

Therefore, I applaud what these rural Democrats are doing. Maybe they are dusty old relics of the party, but that’s for the Democrats to sort out themselves, and that should not invalidate what these men have to say. Maybe most of them are blowhards and are simply seizing their moment to be in the spotlight or to play to their base, but some of them have useful objections and suggestions. I don’t want to give liberals any additional aid, but it seems to me that they could use all the help they can get in the more rural parts of the country. Taking the interests of rural Democrats more seriously would be a great start.

Kevin Baker and his ilk live in a world of trendy green advertising and mocha lattes. They have no respect for hard working rural Americans–oh, heck, we’ll call them “rednecks”–who help make this country into the wonderful tapestry of ideas and cultures it is today.

Besides, who wants to watch Jeff Gordon race in a Prius?

The Left’s Cluelessness on Gun Control

The Portly Politico3 Comments

As a rule, I don’t write about guns, gun control, or shootings, mainly because I have nothing to add, and because there doesn’t seem to be much to discuss:  either you support gun rights, or you don’t (in other words, you either read the Constitution literally, or you simply want to reinterpret it to fit your ideology more conveniently).

My basic take on the issue is as follows:  the personal right to bear arms is constitutionally safeguarded in the Second Amendment.  That right is necessary for two reasons:  to protect personal property, yourself, and your family; and to protect against an overly oppressive government.  To be clear, I’m not advocating any kind of violent overthrow of or resistance to the government; rather, I’m arguing that the Second Amendment is our last resort against a government that becomes so hostile to our rights, we have no other recourse but to fight it (see also:  the American Revolution).  I do not think we have reached that point, as we still have ample constitutional means to correct and reform the government.

As for shootings, I believe it’s a spiritual and mental issue, not a gun issue.  Godlessness seems to be the real root issue of many of our social maladies, coupled with a nihilism whose logical conclusion is “if everything is meaningless, then I can do whatever I want,” and “if everything is meaningless, then life is worthless.”  Connect the dots, and it’s no surprise we have nihilistic suicides and mass murders.  Add in the grotesque, macabre fame such acts bring in an age of social media, and the sick motivations for violence are further heightened.

Regardless, I couldn’t help notice this piece from Pacific Standard, a far Left rag known (to the extent it is) for its radicalism and overly-earnest headlines.  I get PS‘s daily e-mail of stories, and occasionally read its pieces to see what the other side is thinking (occasionally, they’re actually interesting).

I’ve been sitting on this one for awhile, but here is the context for the piece:  it was written shortly after the shooting last November in California.  Heads collectively exploded when word got out that progressive utopia California, with its robust gun control laws, was the site of a tragic mass shooting.  Without cheapening the deaths of those unfortunate, innocent souls, the question that came to my mind was, “If gun control is so effective, then how could this happen in California?”

Of course, it’s a straw man question:  gun control isn’t effective.  Indeed, arming responsible, law-abiding people is far preferable to disarming them (and, in effect, arming the bad guys, who will break the new gun control laws).  What struck me, then, was the head-exploding of the true believers on the Left.  The subtitle of this piece says it all:  “A quick look at the regulations and numbers doesn’t necessarily suggest the state’s laws are useless.”

In short, pro-gun control Leftists scrambled to explain away this shooting.  For the Left, shootings are never about man’s fallen nature and capacity for sin (unless that man is a white police officer and the person shot is some kind of favored minority), but instead a technocratic problem to be solved with increasing government control—enforced, ironically, with guns.

 

Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The Portly Politico17 Comments

The Right prides itself on its ability and willingness to police its own, and that impulse is usually healthy.  It would be inconceivable, for example, for congressional Democrats to overwhelmingly support investigation and even impeachment of a Democratic president the way congressional Republicans did with President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal (for what it’s worth, I think Nixon was railroaded—more on that another time).

That impulse, though, can easily morph into SJW-esque virtue-signalling, which is exactly what happened in response to the Covington Catholic non-troversy over the weekend.

Remember, every time there is some accusation in the news of conservatives or Trumpists behaving badly—especially if the allegations involve some form of bigotry against protected classes of the rainbow coalition—wait 24-48 hours, and it will invariably be revealed to be either a hoax or a willful misrepresentation of the facts.

There is some truly lurid stuff circulating about the high school students who were attending a pro-life march.  The iconic image is of a young man smirking as an elderly Native American war vet bangs a drum in his face.  Somehow, that smirk is a form of aggression, while an aging hippie provocatively banging a drum inches from your face is peaceful protest.

I expect swift denunciations and lengthy, navel-gazing think-pieces from Leftists about the “male gaze” and “white privilege.”  I don’t expect them from National Review (except for famed hand-wringer David French).

Of course, I should have learned by now, just as noodle-wristed neocons should have learned to wait for all the facts to come out before rendering judgment:  a substantial portion of the Right, sadly, simply seems to be “loyal opposition” to the Left.  That is, they accept the paradigm the progressive Left has foisted upon us, and instead of trying to chuck that paradigm, merely attempt to exist in a tiny corner of (barely) permitted dissent within it.

Nicholas Frankovich, a deputy managing editor at NR, wrote a piece comparing the elderly Native American man to Jesus Christ, and the pro-life Catholic students who almost literally turned the other cheek to the wicked Roman soldiers that crucified our Lord.  Never have I seen a more egregious example of virtue-signalling:  Frankovich, from the first sentence, is saying, “I’m holier than you because I take the Gospel account of the Crucifixion so seriously that I see it everywhere; the rest of you have just forgotten it.”  That pithy paraphrasing is not far from what he actually writes (from the second paragraph):

For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.

John Nolte of Breitbart gives a humorous but accurate analysis of Frankovich’s melodramatic piece, which you can read here:  https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/01/21/fake-news-never-sleeps-national-review-falls-for-more-anti-trump-media-hoaxes/

Of course, if you listened to conservative talk radio at all yesterday, all of the hosts relayed the full story (I heard, throughout the course of the day, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark “The Great One” Levin cover the events).  Here is my quick recap:

Essentially, this group of teenagers was waiting for their bus, when an extreme black nationalist fringe group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, began pelting them with obscenities.  That apparently went on for some time, before Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist and war veteran, came between the young men and the BHIs.  The boys were unsure whose “side” Phillips was on, but when he began some kind of war chant, they began to sing school songs (the source of the media’s claim that the young men were “mocking” Phillips and his Native American heritage).  Then someone snapped the picture of the young man “smirking”—and, out of context, it does look like a sh*t-eating grin—at the Native American, and the rest is revisionist history.

The truth about these events came out very quickly, to the shame of National Review and notorious Never Trumper Bill Kristol.  A member of the Polish Parliament has invited the boys to speak there in a sign of solidarity and to help get out the truth.

Sadly, rush-to-judgment virtue-signalling continues to live on.  Why play the Left’s game?  Are you that desperate to get a spot on morning talk shows?  Conservatives shouldn’t fall for it.  Ethically, we should at the very least wait for the full facts to come out about any negative story, whether it involves a conservative or a progressive.

Frankovich, Kristol, and their ilk might gain some temporary encomiums from the Left, but—as I’ve written before—their accolades will be short-lived.  The hot knife of progressive perfidy will find its way into their bent backs as soon as their political usefulness is dried up.

The Impermanence of Pop Culture

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File this under “obvious but profound”:  culture critic Kyle Smith at National Review writes about the impermanence of pop culture icons in his piece “The Great Forgetting.”  His thesis is simple:  the household names of today will almost universally be forgotten within two generations, lacking the immediate import and significance they currently hold.

An interesting point that Smith makes is that some of the biggest films, books, and music of a given age are often quickly forgotten, and we never know which particular work of art or artist will become the “shorthand” for the entire time period.  He poses the question:  which rock band will be the one that serves as the “definitive” stand-in?  My money would be on Led Zeppelin, but even giants of past genres are swiftly lost to time, with only a shrinking handful of fastidious acolytes discussing their works.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon first-hand with my students.  Teaching keeps you young in some ways, but it has a knack for reminding you of the inexorable march of time.  Pop culture references that would resonate with students a decade ago are now almost completely foreign to them, outside of a few well-trod, well-remembered classics.

When I first began teaching, I could make South Park references (surprisingly germane when you’re teaching US Government classes) and probably half of students understood and appreciated them.  Now, I’m lucky if one or two students in a class of fifteen or twenty have ever seen an episode of the show, much less the specific episode I’m referencing.

What I’ve found cuts against this “Great Forgetting” is music.  Current acts follow the broad trend:  they’re all the rage for a year or two, then are forgotten.  But “classic” acts—by which I mean music from the 60s-80s (and, increasingly, the 90s) are remembered (at least, their songs are) better and more enduringly than acts from other ages.  Almost every middle school boy I’ve ever taught has, among the list of forgettable rap and country acts of their time, loved AC/DC (perhaps regrettable in and of itself).

I suspect that has more to do with trends in the music industry than with any particular purchase bands like AC/DC have on popular culture.  The economics of big label touring have changed to benefit legacy acts (see also:  The Rolling Stones), and the AOR or classic rock radio format hasn’t changed much since I first started listening to Eagle 102.3 FM as a junior in high school nearly 20 years ago (example:  classic rock stations still play too much Lynyrd Skynyrd).  Grandparents are taking their grandchildren to see KISS.

Besides notable exceptions in music, this trend seems even more intense in the other fine arts.  Don’t get me started on the visual arts, which produce politically-correct garbage more than actual artists these days (lest you think I’m a rube, I more-or-less taught myself art history by visiting the Columbia Museum of Art’s excellent permanent exhibit on Sundays, when it’s free, and Roger Kimball’s Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art eruditely backs up this position).  Film stars fade from memory with shocking rapidity—remember when Ben Stiller was in every movie?—and I doubt anyone outside of the ballet world can name many current dancers, much less ones from fifty year ago.

Further, we live in an age in which all of the information we could ever want about any artists is immediately available at our fingertips.  Of course, we have to know what to look for in order to find it—the paradox and conundrum of life in the Internet Age.

Most of what Smith writes about probably deserves to be forgotten, not because it’s bad, but because it’s not particularly great or memorable inherently.  But there is much excellent art that fades away, like tears in rain.  As I’ve grown older and have listened to more classical music, I’ve come to realize there’s much more than “The Big Three” of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

One final reflection:  Smith’s piece touches on a desire of many, if not all, humans:  the desire to be remembered, to be immortalized.  This idea has preoccupied me as I’ve grown older, and begun to think about what kind of mark I might leave on the world (hopefully, I still have ample to leave such a mark, but there’s no guarantee of tomorrow).  We can approach that question with a sense of hopelessness—no matter we do, eventually it will be forgotten—or with carefree aplomb—do what you have to do for those around you, and don’t worry about the fleeting evanescence of fame.

The latter is the only reasonable response.  Fame is fleeting.  Do what you can to help your fellow man for the sake of building Christ’s Kingdom—the only thing that is truly eternal—and not to build up your own.  Enduring greatness in man’s eyes is the private reserve of a small few.  Eternal fulfillment in Christ is for everyone.

Fire Furloughed Feds?

The Portly Politico8 Comments

In a remarkable op-ed for The Daily Caller, an anonymous “senior Trump administration official” blows the lid off the Deep State in the most sensible of ways: he talks about the good the government shutdown can do for the federal government’s efficiency, and how President Trump can use a prolonged shutdown to drain the swamp effectively.

The explosive piece argues that roughly 15% of workers in Washington, D.C.’s sprawling bureaucracy are committed patriots who want to fulfill the president’s agenda (after all, that is their job). 80% are unmotivated to do anything, because it’s virtually impossible to fire them.

The remaining 5% are Marxian change agents (my description) that are actively involved in the Resistance and are seeking to undermine Trump’s agenda with bureaucratic rigmarole. These are the folks that believe it is they, not the American people, who know best how to manage and direct our lives. Trump represents an existential threat to these sleeper agents for Cultural Marxism and technocratic elitism.

Apparently, an extended government shutdown empowers agency heads and the president to remove non-essential personnel far more easily—they can simply be fired like anyone else, instead of having recourse to a lengthy appeals process that can take years.

Perhaps the most absurd and chilling part of this op-ed is when the writer discusses the mindless fealty to “process,” which fuels agency growth—the bureaucracy exists to expand the bureaucracy:

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.

Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.

I can’t help but think that many of these federal gigs are just overpriced ways to give excessively-credentialed but essentially useless workers something to do to keep them busy for forty years. No doubt there are plenty of good, hardworking civil servants in the federal government, but they would seem to constitute the minority. The incentives clearly favor inertia and lack of initiative over real drive and pluck. Indeed, there seem to be strong disincentives against making any changes.

As I wrote recently about education, one of the biggest problems any institution can face is excessive bureaucratization. Yes, as an organization grows, administrative oversight and the establishment of procedures—the dreaded “process”—must grow alongside it.

I’ve experienced this necessity first-hand working in a small private school that ballooned from just shy of 100 students eight years ago to about 285 now. That’s still a small school compared to large public high schools and middle schools, and we still get a lot done through what we might call “informal” procedures and custom, but we’ve increasingly had to adopt more standardized procedures to complete certain duties more efficiently.

But there’s streamlining, and then there’s needless obfuscation. Of course, the byzantine structure of the administrative state is designed to protect its beneficiaries and to expand its size and scope. The more arcane and confusing its procedures, the more folks must be hired to tend to the holy cow of process.

Let’s hope President Trump is listening to whoever this official is, and takes an ax to the loafers and traitors that make up 85% of our federal workforce, then let the Freedom Fifteen Make America Great Again!

National Review Carries Water for The Rock

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The cuckier writers at National Review are apparently obsessed with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a potential Republican presidential candidate.  It’s almost as if they acknowledge that a charismatic celebrity with massive name recognition is a political boon, they just don’t like the guy that had the guts to pull it off.

The publication ran a cover story about The Rock—by noodle-wristed particularist and moral scold David French—back in 2017, and Jim Geraghty wrote glowingly about him in 11 January 2019’s “Morning Jolt” newsletter.  The occasion for Geraghty’s blurb was an interview in which The Rock gave a “full-throated defense of freedom of speech”; however, Johnson now says the entire interview was fabricated.

I don’t have anything against The Rock.  He makes movies that people enjoy and is personable.  That said, I know precious little about his politics (everyone’s favorite source, Wikipedia, isn’t much help).  The NR guys seem to think he’s a “natural conservative” (not a direct quotation), and we all know how that works out.

This plumping for The Rock may very well be part of Conservatism, Inc.’s tendency to declare progressive ideas actually conservative, something The Z-Man discusses in his various podcasts (unfortunately, I can’t find a specific example quickly on his blog, though I’ve heard him make this point in numerous podcasts).  As conservatives, I don’t think we can really trust anyone who isn’t explicitly conservative.

Granted, Trump isn’t so much conservative as he is anti-Leftist, but his instincts are fundamentally conservative; his Supreme Court and federal judge nominees are constitutionalists; and he’s surrounded himself with solid conservatives.  Trump possesses a gut-level conservatism, the kind that is more practical than philosophical.

Maybe The Rock has that, too—Trump certainly surprised us—but I don’t get the fascination with him here in 2019.  Of course, I was dead-wrong about Trump back in 2015, so what do I know?  If he runs as a Republican in 2024, I’ll hear him out.  Despite my purist ravings, I’ll take a flawed, uncertain Republican over a Democrat 9999 out of 10,000 times.

Fictitious Frogs and Bureaucratic Despotism

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Thanks to blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire for sharing this piece about federal overreach and Chevron deference, “The Celebrated Fake Frog that is Taking Down the Deep State” by Karin McQuillan:  https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/14/the-celebrated-fake-frog-that-is-taking-down-the-deep-state/

One of the key problems conservatives face today is the unelected, unaccountable “fourth branch” of the government, the massive federal bureaucracy.  This bureaucracy is so vast, even presidents can’t seem to rein it in (although President Trump is making an effort to drain the swamp).

The size and scope of it wouldn’t be so terrible if it weren’t so powerful.  Thanks to bad Supreme Court rulings and Congress’s willingness to give the hard task of legislating to federal agencies, bureaucrats have the power to write regulatory rules that have the force of law.  As McQuillan details in her piece, Congress passes vague, broad laws that leave politically-costly questions for the agencies to answer.  In turn, those agencies—shielded as they are from accountability to the voters—write whatever rules they wish, and the American people bear the brunt of these technocratic fiats.

That’s one source of President Trump’s woes from within the government:  there is surely an insulated, upper-crust of old Beltway hands that fully expect that they will call the shots.  McQuillan’s piece describes the absolutely wicked absurdity of this overreach, as exemplified by that most heinous of federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Seasoned conservatives are familiar with the EPA’s history of insane, downright anti-human rulings, like preventing farmers in drought-stricken California from receiving much-needed water because they sought to protect the tiny delta smelt (fun fact:  the EPA killed more delta smelt when taking samples of their population sizes than would have died had irrigation systems been activated).

McQuillan’s piece details an example of a Louisiana farmer who was unable to use his privately-held land because it was a potential habitat for species of endangered frog—except that biologists argued the land could not support the frog even if someone put it there!  The farmer won against the EPA at the Supreme Court, setting the stage for potential dismantling of some of the Deep State, and its odious grant of power from Chevron deference.

It’s no wonder that the Deep State tried so hard to oust former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and that it continues to punish President Trump with the pointless, costly, politically-motivated Mueller investigation.

As such, let’s continue to encourage President Trump—and the farmers in Louisiana, playing host to fictitious frogs on their dewy lands—to DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Proud Boys

The Portly Politico7 Comments

An enduring challenge for conservatives is the constant campaign of disinformation from the Left regarding our organizations, tactics, and beliefs.  Conservatives are limited to a few bastions of barely-tolerated resistance:  the Republican Party, the Cato Institute, National Review, etc., organizations that fastidiously hold to an ever-more-narrow range of acceptable discourse.

That, of course, is a huge source of President Trump’s appeal—he smashed through the barriers the Right’s enemies imposed upon it, and it won him the presidency.  You could feel Americans breathing a nearly-audible sigh of relief that, finally, someone was saying the things we were all told we weren’t supposed to say.

It was in the heady days of 2016, then, that edgy, fun-loving dissidents like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes rose to prominence in the conservative movement.  McInnes tells some sordid stories about his wild, punk rock past, but largely his advice would have been deemed commonsensical just sixty years ago:  get married, have kids, work hard, love God, love Western civilization and the freedom it brings.

Now, uttering some of those same tenants gets you sent to the cultural gulags.  Take, for instance, McInnes’s fraternal organization, the cheekily-named Proud Boys.  The organization has come under fire lately as an allegedly sexist, racist, xenophobic order (it allows men, women, immigrants, and all races to join), and because it is proudly “Western chauvinist,” meaning it champions Western civilization as the best civilization.  Given Western civilization’s inherently universalist claims to human rights and liberty, it’s clearly open to all peoples of all backgrounds who accept its basic premises.

Primarily, however, it’s been criticized for engaging in self-defense.  Instead of taking beatings from radical, violent Antifa terrorists, the Proud Boys fight back.  Their whole maxim is that they don’t start fights, but they will fight back in self-defense.

Not surprisingly, noodle-wristed hand-wringers of the NR persuasion foppishly bemoan this completely reasonable response to unwarranted assaults with their usual appeals to decorum (the comments on that linked piece are instructive of how out-of-touch NR has become even with its own readers).  “Just take the beating” is apparently the primary admonishment.

While we could certainly have some discussion about Christ’s famous instruction to “turn the other cheek,” it seems completely permissible to strike back at the masked hooligan waving a piece of rebar at you.

At the risk of breaking my general injunction against telling people to watch lengthy videos twice in one month, I’d refer you to this excellent explanation from McInnes himself:

To alleviate the unnecessary legal suffering of some of the group’s members, McInnes reluctantly but decisively backs out of the organization.

For further reading, here is Milo’s piece about the libelous death of the Proud Boys:  https://www.dangerous.com/50463/i-too-must-bid-adieu-to-the-proud-boys-a-spunky-pro-western-mens-club-defamed-to-death/

 

E.T.A. Hoffman & Romanticism

The Portly Politico5 Comments

As a Roger Kimball fanboy, I appreciate the cultural commentary at The New Criterion, his publication dedicated to covering high culture.  Kimball proves that you can appreciate, understand, and analyze the best of Western civilization’s cultural output while still supporting Donald Trump.  If these “artistic” types on the Progressive Left were truly tolerant, they’d read The New Criterion.  Yes, Executive Editor James Panero sounds like someone you’d want to give a wedgie, but he’s a bonafide cultural conservative (side note:  check out that link to his lecture on Russell Kirk’s ghost stories).

Regardless, Hannah Niemeier wrote a charming piece about E.T.A. Hoffman, “The man who made Romanticism“; it is well worth the read.  Hoffman is a somewhat forgotten figure whose literary works inspired (and were inspired by) some of the great composers of the classical and Romantic periods.  For example, Hoffman wrote the short story that served as the source for Tchaikovsky’s beloved The Nutcracker.

His life eerily mirrors one of his most famous devotees, Robert Schumann:

Both were reluctant lawyers, right-brained men in a left-brain profession, with personalities subject to extreme moods that bordered on mental illness. Schumann’s music famously spans the creative continuum between mild and wild, and in his compositional method, he was like Hoffmann’s Kreisler: “sometimes mad, sometimes lucid.” He wrote the eight-movement Kreisleriana, a representative work of Romantic-period piano music, in four days in 1838.

Yet both men were aware of the dangers of artistic passion. Schumann was a genius, but an unstable one. He often went into creative depressions in which he could hardly function, let alone make music. Haunted by the idea that creativity and madness came from the same place, he said his greatest fear, which increased along with his musical mastery, was of losing his mind. But it was a fate he couldn’t escape; in 1856, at the age of forty-six, he died of syphilis. In a coincidence that seems to belong in one of his “uncanny stories,” Hoffmann had died at the same age, and of the same disease (though more than three decades earlier).

That moody artistic temperament is distinctly Romantic.  It no-doubt influenced some of the cultural instability of the 1960s counterculture, with its emphasis on the individual as his own god, ironically a slave to his inner emotional turmoil.  But it also served as a powerful counterbalance to the cold, mechanistic progress of the Enlightenment, reminding us that we have deep connections to God, to the land, and to each other.

Like the Romantic period his work inspired, Hoffman was a man of contradictions and tensions; a fascinating, brilliant individual.