Tag: culture wars

Albino Giraffes Poached

The Portly Politico4 Comments

As if dancing plagues and Chinese viruses weren’t enough, albino giraffes are getting poached.

From the BBC:

Two extremely rare white giraffes have been killed by poachers in north-eastern Kenya, conservationists say.

Rangers had found the carcasses of the female and her calf in a village in north-eastern Kenya’s Garissa County.

A third white giraffe is still alive. It is thought to be the only remaining one in the world, the conservationists added.

Their white appearance is due to a rare condition called leucism, which causes skin cells to have no pigmentation.

Apparently, no one knows why these giraffes were killed; the poachers’ “motive is still unclear,” per the BBC.

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The Revival of Traditionalism?

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Milo Yiannopoulos posted a screen shot yesterday of an essay from The Atlantic reading “How the Coronavirus Will Send Us Back to the 1950s” (the piece, by Helen Lewis, is now called “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism“—a silver lining to this pandemic, I suppose).  His caption reads, “HOLY SH[*]T YES PLEASE[.]”

The Lewis piece is the usual feminist hand-wringing about the disparate impact of the coronavirus on women.  Feminists always find a way to make global catastrophes about them, and not about everyone who is truly suffering.  The attitude seems to be, “yes, yes, people will die, but why do I have to make any sacrifices or trade-offs for the people I ostensibly love?”

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Phone it in Friday VIII: Coronavirus Conundrum

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It’s been another crazy week here in the world of yours portly.  The quarter is coming to a close, and I’ve got a mountain of ungraded quizzes and tests to slog through to appease the gods of higher education admittance.

Ergo, it’s time for a very special coronavirus (or “COVID19,” for your cool kids) edition of Phone it in Friday!

  • Tomorrow’s SubscribeStar Saturday will be a detailed rundown of what I’ve been doing to prepare for the extremely remote possibility that we all get quarantined in our homes and have to practice social distancing to avoid spreading the bug any further.  Here’s the short preview:  I bought a bunch of rice, beans, and spaghetti.
    • On that note, I’m yet again flummoxed by fears of everyday hunger in America.  Ten pounds of rice came to about $7; same with the spaghetti.  Twenty cans of beans cost around $12.  You can eat—maybe not well, but enough to survive and function—for a month for extremely cheaply.  Whining about “hunger” in the United States is a farcical outlier.
    • I am thankful to live in the United States, a country with the best medical system in the world, and the means to treat most diseases.  I’m optimistic that the virus will pass through quickly
  • Was it bat soup, or a Wuhan biological weapon?  Either way, I think we’ve seen the wisdom of the trade war with China, even though we weren’t anticipating something like a Chinese-created pandemic.  The coronavirus exposes the weaknesses and contradictions at the heart of China, and puts lie to the notion that this is a “Chinese century.”  I’ll be glad to be done with such rubbish.  The Chinese have come far, yes, but it turns out a totalitarian regime built on a culture of death and lying (“saving face”) can only snooker people for so long.
    • That doesn’t mean that China will no longer pose a threat.  Indeed, I believe China to be our biggest geopolitical competitor.  All the more reason to relocate industries back to the United States, or at least to friendlier countries like Vietnam, rather than deal with the Chinese.
    • For the best treatment of this subject, read blogger Didact’s essay “Corona-chan Comes for You.”  He spells out the economic threat of the coronavirus, and how the whole thing is likely the result of Chinese incompetence and the insane cultural concept of “face,” in which it’s better to lie (in the Chinese mind) than to risk bringing shame to your family.  Concepts like that make me glad to live in the United States.

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.

That’s it for this brief Phone it in Friday.  Wash your hands, stock up on dry goods, and stay healthy!

—TPP

Delusional Crone (Almost) Divorces Husband over Trump

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If you’re ready for your blood pressure to spike before you even eat your cholesterol-thick breakfast, here’s an example of the delusional loonies on the Left:  a California woman (almost) divorced her husband because he voted for Trump.

This story is a bit old, as it dates back to early 2017, but it’s indicative of where our nation is.  It not only demonstrates the intense loyalty of the Left to their progressive dogma, but also how cheaply marriage is held.

The short version is thus:  73-year old Gayle McCormick threatened seriously to divorce her husband of twenty-two years when she found out he voted for Trump (ultimately, they merely separated permanently).

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Nevada Feels the Bern

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Well, the Commies and “natural conservatives” in Nevada have spoken, and it looks like Bernie Sanders is going to sweep the state’s caucuses.  That means he’s currently leading in Democratic delegates heading into South Carolina’s primaries this Saturday.

Joe Biden appears to be in second place, somewhat surprisingly, with l’il Pete Buttigieg in third.  That’s going to make South Carolina a big showdown between Sanders and Biden.  Biden is banking on blacks in South Carolina to buoy his flailing campaign.  Buttigieg will likely flame out (no pun intended) in SC, and the rest of the South, because of those same voters—blacks do not like homosexuality.

All that said, Bernie appears to be in the driver’s seat.  While folks are predicting Trump will mop the floor with the ancient socialist, a Sanders nomination is a very dangerous development.

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Lazy Sunday L: The Best of Lazy Sunday

The Portly Politico23 Comments

It’s finally here—FIFTY WEEKS of Lazy Sunday.  I started this little feature with “APR Pieces” (the feature of last week’s TBT) one year ago, and today marks the fiftieth edition (that’s what the little “L” in the title means, for those not familiar with Roman numerals).

When I took the blog daily in 2019, I realized I needed at least one or two days of easier posts, as churning out seven totally original posts a week is tough (even writing five is challenging sometimes).  Thus, Lazy Sunday and TBT were born.  While TBT is a fun way to look back at past scribblings, Lazy Sunday is useful for grouping disparate posts thematically.

Naturally, Sunday is one of the slowest days for views, and I don’t often put a “read more” tag on Lazy Sunday posts, so they have pretty low views overall (I imagine many subscribers read the posts in their e-mails, then click-through to the linked pieces; my limited data from WordPress suggests as much).  So that’s all to say that the “Best” of Lazy Sunday is still way below my most-viewed posts.

Anyway, that’s enough sausage-making.  Here are some of the most-viewed Lazy Sunday installments:

  1. “Lazy Sunday XIV: Gay Stuff” (36 views):  If ever I lose my job for something I’ve posted, this compilation would likely be “Exhibit A” in the Ministry of Truth and Diversity Reeducation’s case against me for wrongthink.  June is now Pride Month, as every television show and Internet advertisement flamboyantly reminds you.  And yet, they’re the oppressed ones.  When do we get Middle Class Straight White Guy with a Steady Job Pride Month?
  2. “Lazy Sunday IV: Christianity” (33 views):  As much as my readers seem to enjoy reading about outrageous same-sex antics, they also seem to like posts about Christianity and Christian faith.  This one is probably due for a sequel, as I’ve written a lot more about the topic since last March.
  3. “Lazy Sunday XXX: Trump, Part I” (33 views):  Speaking of Christianity, the flawed but awesome vessel God has appointed to defend religious liberty is tied for second place with the “Christianity” post.  GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus got two Lazy Sunday features, so I’ve really got to get a second one on “Christianity” done.
  4. “Lazy Sunday – APR Pieces” (28 views):  The Lazy Sunday that started it all, featuring my pieces for the blogging portion of the online radio station American Patriot Radio.  Note, too, that for the first one I used a dash in the title, rather than a colon.  I’ve maintained the dash for the long list of Lazy Sunday features below, but titles since then use the colon.  Just a formatting note for you grammar and style folks.
  5. “Lazy Sunday V: Progressivism, Part I” (26 views):  One of the frustrating elements of conservatism today is that we’re constantly defining ourselves against progressivism, rather than as our own, truly alternative worldview.  Part of that is because, in the Kirkean understanding of conservatism, it’s not an ideology, and certainly not universal in nature.  Progressivism, being an outgrowth of classical liberalism (as most modern conservatives consider themselves to be), is universal—and totalitarian in its universalism.  Regardless, here are a bunch of posts about the bad guys.
  6. “Lazy Sunday XLVI: Man Time” (26 views):  The most recent Lazy Sunday to make the list, buoyed in part due to traffic from some popular manosphere sites.  It’s ironic that I published this post and my girlfriend dumped me that afternoon.  Well, it just goes to show you that the modern-day Sophists of the red-pill world aren’t always right.

There you have it!  Six beefy Lazy Sundays to reread and re-enjoy.  There are forty-nine other good ones, too!  Show them some love.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Moral Outrage about Moral Outrage

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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.

Teaching is a profession that attracts complainers.  Teaching requires some risk-tasking, but it’s fundamentally a job for folks that want great degrees of stability.  When that stability is disrupted, teachers, being creatures of habit and order, get ornery.

That might explain, in part, the high turnover in the teaching profession.  We live in an increasingly disordered world, even in the classroom.  Part of that disorder is the assumption that children are somehow wiser and more morally pure than their elders.

That’s a notion that goes back at least to the counterculture movement of the 1960s (not to blame, pedantically and predictably, all of our problems on that misguided, suicidal decade):  the youth a moral vanguard, crusading against the long-established order and its absurdities.  The outraged shrieking of a youngling carries with it, the culture suggests, greater weight than the elderly master with decades of experience and accumulated wisdom.

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

The God Pill, Part III

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I’ve written a couple of pieces (here and here) about the so-called “God Pill,” and specifically Roosh V‘s remarkable conversion to (Orthodox, it seems?) Christianity.  Roosh’s conversion, it seems, is quite sincere, and he’s put his money where his belief is by unpublishing many of his books dealing with “game,” the art of seduction.

Roosh wrote an essay about a month ago, “How I Turned To God,” in which he explains the events and influences that led to his conversion.  Roosh was the archetype of the atheist materialist:  an evolution-espousing microbiologist, who then began a successful—if only in the material sense—career as a professional Don Juan.

He literally had sex and wrote about it for a living.  As he writes, “How could a man who was so far from God come to have complete trust in Him practically overnight?”

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Long Live Rush Limbaugh

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For conservatives, one of the most powerful moments of last week’s State of the Union Address was when President Trump awarded talk-radio legend Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow.  This morning, NEO at his blog Nebraska Energy Observer has a piece up, “The Era of Limbaugh,” which is a must-read summary of Rush’s legacy.

It’s hard to understate El Rushbo’s influence.  For many of us, he was our first exposure to conservative talk-radio (I even named the microphone we used for announcing football games “The Golden Mic”).  He is a tent pole in the 12-3 PM time slot—unwavering, unshaking.  I remember back in 2012 when a local Florence, South Carolina radio station dropped Rush—and he was unavailable in the Pee Dee for a few days (until another station picked him up a few days later).  It was pandemonium!  Well, at the very least, listeners were quite irate.

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Lazy Sunday XLVIII: Culture

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A paradox of blogging is that the more I write, the more difficult (at least some weeks) it is to think up a good theme for Lazy Sunday.  Part of the problem is that the earliest editions often featured very broad categories; thus, the proliferation of “Part II” posts throughout.

Of course, that’s probably a problem for me, the writer.  You’re just looking to scan through a list of hyperlinks while enjoying your pre-church coffee (or—given my tardiness posting of late—your post-church nap).  Such is the nature of the relationship between creator and consumer—thirty minutes put into crafting a blog post equates to about thirty seconds of skimming.  But it’s worth it to have your eyeballs (eww…) for those thirty seconds!

On that note, I’m dedicating this week’s Lazy Sunday to matters of culture.  In compiling this short list of recent pieces, I came to realize that I way overuse the “culture” tag on my blog posts.  In my defense, I do so because I see most issues as cultural (or, even more deeply, theological and philosophical), rather than merely political or economical, in nature.  The major political battles we’re fighting in the West today are, at heart, about culture.

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