Lazy Sunday CCX: MAGAWeek2023 Posts

Well, another MAGAWeek is in the books.  It was a star-spangled affair, with biographies of four important historical figures (one of recent vintage, the others from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).  $5 and up subscribers also got three bonus editions of Sunday Doodles (here, here, and here).

Of course, to get access to my four detailed biographies—as well as all past MAGAWeek posts—it’s just $1 a month.  One measly buck!  As of the time of this writing, there are 429 posts on my SubscribeStar page, over half of which are available for just $1 a month.  At $5 a month, it comes out to one cent per post as of right now, and I’m adding new content every single week (with rare exceptions).

Even at just $1 a month, and assume (conservatively) that you only get access to half of the posts (about 215 posts), it works out to just $0.0047 per post—less than a half-cent per post!

At $12 a year—the price of a single, one-topping large pizza—you can a.) support your favorite chubby content creator and b.) gain access to an ever-growing library of long-form essays.  For $60 a year—what most of us pay for Internet access for one month—you get everything—doodles (which often contain additional commentary), bonus doodles, bonus posts, exclusive election coverage posts, etc., etc.

Thanks to those who have donated and subscribed in the past.  Please help spread the word!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

MAGAWeek2023: Benjamin Franklin

This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the people and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

In looking through the extensive TPP archives, I’ve apparently only written the name “Benjamin Franklin” in a single post—9 May 2020’s SubscribeStar Saturday: Liberty and Safety.  Much like Franklin’s classic canard about trading liberty for safety and losing both, the lack of Franklin’s presence on this website is shameful.

That’s especially true considering that Benjamin Franklin is one of my personal heroes.  He was a skilled writer, editor, printer, inventor, politician, diplomat, wit, international playboy (seriously), statesman, and citizen.  He was the king of the nerds, at a time when nerds were celebrated not because of their weird Japanese body pillow fetishes, but because they were strong, smart, witty, and curious.

No single man’s life better exemplifies eighteenth-century colonial America.  Born in 1706 and passing in 1790, Franklin’s long life extended nearly the full breadth of that eventful century—eventful in large part because of him!

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2023 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

SubscribeStar Saturday: Liberty and Safety

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!

Every liberty-loving American can recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  It’s become also cliched to quote Franklin, but those words bear repeating, cliched or not, in The Age of The Virus.

The response to The Virus has been something akin to mass social and economic suicide, coupled with plenty of scorn for those not willing to go along with the kabuki theatre of our national hara-kiri.  It seems that the early attempts at “flattening the curve” have worked at preventing hospitals from turning away afflicted patients, so much so that our hero nurses and doctors are staging elaborate Internet dance routines (and yet will also be the first to urge us to take their advice to shut everything down forever).

What I’m beginning to realize is that people truly fear The Virus.  I don’t just mean they’re worried about getting it—I certainly don’t want to succumb to it—they’re worried about dying from it.  That’s not an unrealistic concern for the elderly or those with preexisting health conditions, but I think that fear runs deeper.

Consider:  the people most hysterically concerned with The Virus, in general, are deep progressives.  Progressivism, at bottom, is a materialist philosophy:  it can only conceive of existence in this realm.  That’s not to say it isn’t a religion; rather, it’s a religion without an afterlife.  That’s why progressives spend so much time attempting to create Heaven on Earth—to immanentize the eschaton, as William F. Buckley, Jr., warned us not to do.

It’s an ideology that constantly sacrifices the good to the perfect, because anything less than perfection isn’t paradise.  And because there is no life after this one, the fear of death takes on a terrifying new dimension.  Coupled with progressives’ lust for power and perpetual revolution, and you have half of the population ready to sacrifice everything—including liberty—to appease The Virus.

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