Tag: eBooks

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2019

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Today’s post is the first in my SubscribeStar Saturday series.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page.  For the first installment of SSS, ALL subscriber levels, including the $1 tier, will have access to this list.

Three years ago, I released my popular “The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2016.”  It featured three must-read books for your summer, including a fourth “Honorable Mention.”  The same criteria from 2016 will apply to this year’s list.  To quote myself:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!  These books have shaped my thinking about the many issues I’ve covered over the past two months.  I highly encourage you to check them out.

In that spirit, here is the definitive Summer Reading List 2019:

1.) Patrick J. Buchanan, The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority (2014) – I have to be honest—I’ve been reading this book off-and-on for nearly two years, and am about 75% through it.  That pace is not because it’s a bad book.

Quite the contrary, The Greatest Comeback is a must-read for any political history junkies.  After twin defeats in the 1960 presidential and 1962 California gubernatorial elections, Nixon was a national loser.  Buchanan, who worked for and traveled with Nixon during the long decade of the 1960s as a researcher and writer, gives a first-hand account, culled from what must be a filing cabinet’s worth of handwritten notes and newspaper clippings, of Nixon’s historic, unlikely rise to the presidency.

Nixon’s reputation now suffers from the railroading that was the Watergate scandal.  Lost in the Left’s never-ending victory lap is how shrewd Nixon’s political instincts were.  Nixon’s tireless support for Republican congressional candidates in 1966 led to historic gains in those midterm elections, likely hastening Lyndon Johnson’s political demise and restoring Republicans’ spot as a viable alternative to Democrats.  That loyalty paid off for Nixon in spades.

Consider, too, the challenges that faced Nixon going into the 1968 presidential election:  he had to defeat liberal Republicans within his own party (Buchanan expends a great deal of ink explaining the odious treachery of George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller), while also fending off potential challengers to his right, namely California Governor Ronald Reagan.  An increasingly-unhinged anti-war (and all-too-often pro-Communist) Left reviled the old “Red Hunter,” and their dominance of the press continued to hound Nixon’s every move.

And through it all, Nixon persevered, engineering the titular “greatest comeback.”  He would go on to win a forty-nine-State landslide in 1972, losing only deep-blue Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.  For that story, check out Buchanan’s sequel, Nixon’s White House Wars:  The Battle that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (2017), which I will probably finishing sometime during Nikki Haley’s second presidential term.

To read the rest of The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2019, subscribe now for $1/month or more on SubscribeStar!

State of the Portly Update – Summer 2019

The Portly Politico3 Comments

As of today, my glorious summer vacation has begun.  Time to whip out the Hawaiian shirts.  Everyone knows the three best reasons to teach:  June, July, and August.

In all seriousness, I thought it would be useful to do a “State of the Blog” update now that TPP 3.0 has been going strong for nearly a year.  With summer ahead, it’s an opportunity to work on the blog a bit more, and to get cracking on some long-delayed eBook ideas.

With daily posting, I’ve found that readership has gradually increased.  It seems that I get the most views when I have posts ready to go at 6:30 AM, perhaps because they’re in readers’ inboxes when they awake.  I’ve also been sharing links to relevant posts in comments on more prominent bloggers’ pieces, which has really driven traffic to the site.

The daily readership on average has gone from around thirteen per day at the beginning of the year to around twenty-two per day.  The overwhelming majority of readers are from the United States, but I’ve had visitors from all over the world (even one guy from Nepal!).

As far as changes to the site, most everything will stay the same.  I’ll continue to post daily (schedule-permitting), maintaining my average of ~670 words a day (but, of course, focusing on quality, not quantity… hopefully).

One minor change:  I’ll be designating Saturdays as “SubscribeStar Saturdays.”  I’ll give a short “teaser” of the Saturday post on this website, then link to my SubscribeStar page for the rest of the post.  Subscribers will have instant access to these posts.

One of the first posts there will be my 2019 Summer Reading List.  I haven’t done one since 2016’s list, which was quite well-received, and I’m overdue for a new one.

Re: SubscribeStar:  as I start pushing out some longer-form essays and short eBooks, subscribers at the $5-per-month level and above will gain access to those works as they’re published (likely as PDFs) as part of their subscription.

I’m still kicking around the Portly Podcast idea, which will mainly depend on my schedule this summer.

Speaking of, outside the blog I’m running a course called History of Conservative Thought.  I’ve had the idea for this course in the back of my mind for some years now, but decided to offer it this summer at the little private school where I teach.  This first run will be an independent study, but I’ll be sharing some updates on the course as we go through the history of conservatism.  We’re starting, of course, with the American and French Revolutions, particularly with Edmund Burke, as well as the question “what is a conservative?”  I’m quite excited.

On the non-political front, I’m gearing up some more gigging.  I’m also working on some new songs; perhaps I can slam out another EP or a full-fledged album one of these days.  If you want to learn more about my musical noodling, visit my website, or listen to my tunes on Bandcamp.  I wrote an entire song cycle about the rise and fall of civilizations… with unicorns!

That’s it for today.  Back to regular programming tomorrow.

Happy Summer!

–TPP

Walls Work, Part II: Sailer on Walls

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Demographer Steve Sailer’s been nailing it lately in his book reviews.  On Wednesday, I wrote about his review of Spotted Toad’s new book on education.  Last week, Sailer reviewed another work, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, by David Frye.  The key insight of the book:  walls make civilization possible (a corollary:  barbarians and invaders build bridges).

The book sounds fascinating, and like Spotted Toad’s work, it’s one I intend to purchase and read soon.  Sailer hits some of the highlights:  walls were, for thousands of years, the thin line between civilized societies and barbarians.  Where walls ended, barbarians ruled.

Walls provided effective protection against attacks until the Age of Gunpowder and heavy artillery ended their efficacy.  Constantinople withstood conquest for a thousand years before the Turks breached its great walls with the mighty bombard.

The current mania for “building bridges” is at odds with most of human experience.  Sailer points out all of the instances in which invaders have used bridges to attack their foes:  Persians crossing the Hellespont lashed pontoons together—a feat repeated when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453.

Indeed, walls don’t just keep bad guys out; they also protect the freedoms of those within.  To quote Sailer (with an embedded quotation from Frye in italics) at length:

Frye pithily sums up:

[Where] there are no border walls, there will be city walls, and where there are no city walls, there will be neighborhood walls….

Thus, Walls concludes with a quick history of the gated communities favored by Hollywood celebrities, such as the Malibu Colony, Hidden Hills, and Beverly Park.

Of course, where there are no neighborhood walls, there will tend to be walls around yards, often with broken bottles on top.

Granted, in the United States, the Jeffersonian tradition was to defend the country with a strong navy, which allowed, among many other benefits, houses to have open front lawns. But traditional American neighborliness seems racist now, so we’ve undertaken to import millions of people from more clannish and hostile cultures.

Put another way:  a strong national defense—bolstered with well-maintained, well-defended barriers—promotes freedom at home.  You don’t need a wall around your house when law enforcement protects against criminals, the military protects against foreign invaders, and sound immigration policy keeps out criminal riff-raff.

Hungary’s border wall is nearly 100% effective at keeping “refugees” out.  There is nothing un-American or unpatriotic about a wall, and open borders are a moral hazard for citizens and immigrants alike.

History—the sum total of human experience, not the “moral arc” dream-state of progressives—supports President Trump’s border wall.  The burden of proof is on the anti-border crowd.  History suggests that societies without border barriers cannot long remain free, and will soon become militaristic conquerors devoted fully to warfare.  Walls allow the people inside to be safe and free, and to specialize beyond a constant fight for survival.

Let’s hope many more Americans read Frye’s book—or, at the very least, Sailer’s excellent review of it—and come to support the border wall and a strong immigration policy.

Totalitarian Leftism Strikes Back

The Portly Politico13 Comments

Readers versed in the recent skirmishes of the Culture Wars may have heard about the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies campaign to win back the Hugo Awards—science-fiction’s biggest literary awards—from entrenched social justice Leftists.  photog at Orion’s Cold Fire has a brief piece up, linking to a piece on The Federalist about the recent controversy.

The quick takeaway is as follows:  having destroyed the Hugo Awards rather than let independent, apolitical authors get a fair shake, SJWs are now targeting a group called 20Booksto50K, an online community dedicated to getting independent authors published.  It’s an organization that is entirely harmless, from what I can tell on the surface, but it’s a threat to the SJW-dominated publishing industry.

The Left is all about dominating the institutions.  If they can’t control an institution, they’ll destroy it.  Independent organizations are a huge threat to the Left’s Cultural Marxism, as the existence of alternatives inevitably loosens the Left’s grip on power.  People aren’t allowed to have alternatives; they must accept and embrace Leftist ideology and goals, whatever they happen to be at the moment.

Not surprisingly, sci-fi writers don’t like that they can only win major awards if their stories don’t involve convoluted, high-tech battles over gender nonconformity or intergalactic diversity training.

The major figure in this field, from the little I know about it, is dissident writer Vox Day, who has created his own publishing house and distribution platform.  Vox Day anticipated deplatforming from Amazon, and was prescient in creating his own means to distribute his work to fans.

The Internet was a bastion of freedom for conservatives and dissidents of all stripes.  Now the tech giants are clamping down on the Right, and even the heretofore apolitical.  Remember:  merely being apolitical is, to the totalitarian Left, the same as being against the Left.

Like the Borg of Star Trek, all will be assimilated into the Left’s Marxist ideology.

Reality Breeds Conservatism

The Portly Politico6 Comments

There’s a piece in the Washington Post about how progressives (“liberals,” as the article puts it) and conservatives think differently.  Like many such pieces, it essentially reduces conservatives to being more fearful, and touts that, in the absence of fear, conservatives become liberal.

I don’t entirely disagree with the basic findings of the Yale researchers; beloved Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson makes similar claims.  Peterson argues that progressives are risk-takers, the ones who explore over the mountain or innovate new businesses, while conservatives are the managers (and conservators) of the new institutions that arise from innovation.

Obviously, this basic analysis is a generalization, a reduction that makes it a little easier to understand the world around us.  As such, there are broad exceptions:  we all know conservatives who fight hard in the culture wars, who build new businesses, and who support new ideas or techniques—many at great personal, financial, and political risk.

Meanwhile, progressives politically are still clinging to the same failed ideas that have motivated their policy proscriptions for decades—increasing the minimum wage, expanding the welfare state, pushing identity politics.

That said, the article linked above—which chillingly says “we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals” in the title—points to the fear factor as the key to determining conservative vs. progressive viewpoints.  In doing so, it points to said experiment, which is deeply flawed at its core.

To wit:  researchers conducted an online poll (a bit iffy) of 300 U.S. residents, only 30% of whom were Republicans.  Two-thirds of the survey-takers were women, and 75% were white, with an average age of 35.  This collection isn’t exactly heavy on conservatives to begin with, and it’s unclear who was offered the opportunity to take the survey, which itself has a very small sample size.  I’m picturing a group of undergraduate psychology chicks posting a link to a SurveyMonkey survey on Facebook, which is about the amount of rigor I would expect from the “academic” social sciences these days.

Besides the small sample size and lack of diversity, the core flaw is the methodology.  Those surveyed were asked to imagine a scenario in which they were given one of two superpowers:  half were granted the power to fly, the other half granted the power “to be completely safe, invulnerable to any harm.”  The participants then completed the aforementioned survey.

What they found was not all that surprising, although the researchers feign as such:  it turns out that, in the absence of physical harm, conservatives become much more progressive, which—in the context of this study—basically means that they’re more open to people or situations that are different from them, and therefore inherently riskier.

Well, duh—in the absence of objective reality—to be free of any risk of physical harm, broadly-defined—I would partake in all sorts of risky activities that I would be reluctant to attempt when the threat is real.  That’s because I wouldn’t bear the costs of any of those risky actions (and as someone who broke a wrist falling from a ladder last fall, I can say that those costs are very high).

The late Kenneth Minogue wrote an essay in 2001 entitled “The New Epicureans,” in which he pointed out that, historically, only the very wealthy—the aristocratic elites of society—could afford to partake in risky behaviors, things like casual sex, drug abuse, and the like—while the rest of us plebes had to adopt a more Stoical approach to life—avoiding undue risk, living life cleanly and simply, dutifully serving our families and communities.

With broadly-spread wealth and widely-available contraceptives, however, modern chumps can mitigate the risks of a “live fast, die young” lifestyle in the same way ancient elites could—to an extent. What used to be the self-indulgent indolence of a very small group (the hated 1%!) has now become the self-destruction of a majority of modern Westerners.  And, of course, it doesn’t work out well, as most folks don’t have the means to pay for their immoral-but-convenient choices.

While we might be able to avoid more of the consequences of our actions—and, therefore, participate more eagerly in the temptations of a hedonic existence—there are still consequences, often dire ones.  I’ll write about some of these in my upcoming eBook, Values Have Consequences:  Why the West Needs Social Conservatism, but take one lethal example:  abortion.

What could more self-destructive, for more selfish ends, than to snuff out a human life?  Looking at this in the most dispassionately, economic way possible, it boils down to a calculation:  do I buckle down and adopt the Stoic lifestyle necessary to provide for this new life, thereby sacrificing my own personal enjoyment, or do I get rid of this “clump of cells” and avoid the huge costs and time-commitments of childrearing?  The major legal hurdles being removed via the disastrous Roe v. Wade ruling—and in the absence of a deep-rooted moral framework—many women, sadly, have opted for the latter option (which many, sadly, come to regret).

So, yes, if you strip away external costs and the threat of pain, people of any political or temperamental persuasion will indulge in more risk-tasking, for good and for ill, and might be more welcoming of strangers or alternative lifestyles.

But a healthy dose of Stoic skepticism about life is not detrimental.  We should not live our lives in fear, but we should govern sensibly—for example, by enforcing our national borders.  In short, conservatism is rooted profoundly in reality—it responds to real threats, prepares for real dangers, and seeks to build a life that, rather than relying on vague abstractions, grows organically from the nature of things as they are.

***

One final note:  the study found that, when witnessing acts of physical violence or hearing about one group or another causing trouble, liberals will become more conservative, even if temporarily.  This was true of the original “neocons” in the 1960s and 1970s, who were “mugged by reality.”

I believe it also holds true for those soft-liberals and centrists who saw the electoral chicanery, cultural division, racialized politics, and violent tactics of the Left in the 2016 election; having been “mugged” once again, they voted for a safety and reform.

Thank God Trump is a risk-taker.

European Disunion

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Back in 2016, I wrote a series of essays on the then-approaching Brexit vote.  Just like the American presidential election that autumn, there was a great deal of misinformation and obfuscation about the “Leave” side—the Leavers were racist and xenophobic; voting “Leave” would cause the world to collapse and the Universe to fold in upon itself; boorish working-class Brits would rebel once they realized they’d lost their sweet European Union bennies.

Even I—a profoundly pro-Brexit advocate—predicted there’d be a long-term economic downturn as a result of voting “Leave” (but I believe liberty is worth far more than material security).

Of course, the Brexit vote was a major blow against supranational tyranny, and a major victory for liberty and national self-interest.  The European Union does not function like the United States and its federal system of semi-sovereign entities; rather, it’s largely ruled and governed by a small cadre of unelected, hyper-progressive, cosmopolitan bureaucrats with little regard for national differences or interests.

It was this philosophical and foundational tack that I sought to take with Brexit.  Brexit was not a policy matter that presented two sets of pros-and-cons, although that was part of the discussion.  Rather, Brexit posed a fundamental question:  does a nation have the right to determine its own national destiny—to act in its own self-interest, as it and its people see fit?  Further, did the European Union provide a framework in which nations could maintain sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of union?

I believe the Brexit vote—and the ongoing discussions about what Brexit will look like—reflected these timeless questions, and though the vote has long-since passed, the topic maintains a perennial quality for those interested in political philosophy.

To that end, I’ll be compiling, re-editing, and otherwise modifying my 2016 Brexit essays into a new eBook, Tyranny Denied:  Reflections on Brexit.  I’ll also be adding some chapters and historical notes.

That book, along with my long-planned eBook on social conservatism, Values Have Consequences, should appear later this summer or autumn—just in time for Christmas.