Tag: ideas

Remembering Ravi Zacharias

The Portly Politico1 Comment

On Tuesday this week—19 May 2020—the great Christian apologist and evangelist Ravi Zacharias went Home to Christ.  The obituary on his ministry’s website details the story of his radical conversion to Christianity in a hospital bed in India, where he heard the Gospel while recovering from a suicide attempt, and then on through his remarkable ministry.

Ravi Zacharias brought intellectual heft to Evangelical Protestantism; even his radio program was called Let My People Think.  Zacharias recognized that emotional appeals alone would not always win people to Christ; there had to be compelling reasons for what made Christianity True, not just one religion among many.  The knee-jerk response among Evangelicals (one I have been guilty of many times) is not the bold, intellectual defense of the faith, but denunciations of other faiths in a sort of Truth-by-elimination, something Zacharias warned against in an address in 1983.  From the obituary:

In front of 3,800 evangelists from 133 countries, Zacharias opened with the line, “My message is a very difficult one….” He went on to tell them that religions, 20th-century cultures and philosophies had formed “vast chasms between the message of Christ and the mind of man.” Even more difficult was his message, which received a mid-talk ovation, about his fear that, “in certain strands of evangelicalism, we sometimes think it is necessary to so humiliate someone of a different worldview that we think unless we destroy everything he holds valuable, we cannot preach to him the gospel of Christ…what I am saying is this, when you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable.”

Zacharias profoundly shaped my own walk with Christ.  I am very thankful for my Pentecostal upbringing, which bathed me from the time I was a child in God’s Word.  But Southern Pentecostalism in the 1990s tended to be extremely emotive—I would say, at times, even performative.  The emphasis of the (often agonizingly) long church services of my youth were more about creating an atmosphere of worship—at worst, attempts to tempt the Holy Spirit to move, at best sincere responses to the Moving of the Holy Spirit—than about digging into the hard Truths of the Gospels.

At least, that sometimes seemed the case to my thirteen-year old self, who often wondered what my problem was when I wasn’t getting caught up in everything the way the rest of the congregation was.  But then one of my aunts—probably my Aunt Marilyn, though it could have been my Aunt Cheryl, the best one-eyed piano player in Aiken County—introduced us to Ravi Zacharias in Sunday School.  We did a study using the youth version of Zacharias’s Jesus Among Other Gods, a masterpiece of Christian apologia.

Suddenly, here was a man who debated Ivy League philosophers—and got the better of them!  For a bookish teenager who didn’t always respond to the emotive side of faith, Zacharias was a powerful role model.  Here was a man who thought critically about faith, and who used his intellect to defend ours.  The fact that he came to Christ out of a totally alien culture and religion further demonstrated the power of the Holy Spirit to reach anyone.

I should note that, while the church services were often heavy on emotion, our Sunday School classes were where the deep digging occurred; we didn’t just shut off our brains.  Southern Pentecostalism—probably as a result of its strong Scotch-Irish roots—is inherently skeptical of all worldly claims.  The default position towards the world’s wisdom is critically analytic.  There’s also a scrappy outsider mentality, which, at its best, serves to embolden our tenacity, even if it makes us wary of potential faith allies.  In other words, it wasn’t all just pew-hopping and thirty-minute altar calls:  that plucky skepticism of worldliness is one of the best qualities of my religious upbringing.

But I digress.  Zacharias drew others to a deeper understanding of their faith in Christ.  White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany—talk about a spunky Scotch-Irish fighter!—gave a tearful interview to CBN News in which she detailed Zacharias’s influence:

When asked where the tears were coming from, she explained further. It goes back to her days developing her faith at Oxford University in England of all places.

“To have someone from an academic place, as an apologist could equip you with those arguments where you didn’t have to check your brain at the door when you became a Christian where there is the intellectual foundation for everything we believe,” McEnany explained. “There’s prophecy. There’s the human cell. There’s the amazing creation of the human body and all of its complexity and the planet, the universe.”

“And he put a philosophical and academic rationale for the heart that I had for Christ, but gave me the ability to go to Oxford, where there are renowned atheist scholars who try to say there’s no intellectual undergirding for Christianity,” she continued. “Ravi Zacharias, who happened to have an office at Oxford was the person who provided the counter to that, the intelligence behind why we believe what we believe.”

Amen.  Ravi Zacharias’s influence will reverberate through the lives he won for Christ, and his bold, intellectual defense of Christianity will continue to win souls.

Rest in Peace.

Thalassocracy

The Portly Politico4 Comments

The Internet is a funny thing.  Anyone that’s ever gone down a Wikipedia hole realizes that, pretty soon, that one thing you needed to look up can turn into a two-hour deep dive into barely-related topics.

It’s also weird.  There’s so much content—so much that we can’t really quantify it—you’re bound to stumble upon something interesting.  It is, perhaps, a sad commentary of the human condition that, given unlimited access to information and knowledge, we use the Internet primarily for mundane purposes, and frequent the same dozen websites everyday.

Of course, that’s also the problem of abundance.  People can’t handle that many choices, and there are only so many spare hours to cram in unorganized knowledge.

That’s how I came to stumble upon the topic of today’s post, thalassocracy, or “rule by the sea.”  I recently purchased a very nerdy space exploration strategy game called Stellaris (itself a recommendation from a member of Milo’s Telegram chat).  Stellaris has a steep learning curve, so it’s a game that basically requires the player to do homework to figure out what they’re doing (my race of peaceful, space-faring platypus people has surely suffered from my ignorance).

That homework assignment (no, seriously, it’s a fun game!) sent me down a rabbit hole on the game’s wiki, and one of the in-game events involves a group called the Bemat Thalassocracy.  I’d never heard the term before, and searched out its meaning.  That brought me to a website called Friesian, which is apparently a site promoting the philosophy of Jakob Friederich Fries, an eighteenth-century philosopher opposed to that ponderous windbag Hegel.  The website dates back to 1996, when it began as a community college website.

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Lazy Sunday LXII: The South

The Portly Politico9 Comments

Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that the American “West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.”  The American South may be the same, but it’s more—it’s a country in the soul.  It’s the culture, the faith, the land, the people—these elements truly make the South “the South.”

The South has been changing for a long time, but those old virtues are still present here, even if they are fading.  The wickedness of modernity probes its tentacles into every crevice of every society, and the South is no different.  We’ve managed to capitalize on the material benefits of modernity without sacrificing our souls entirely—yet—but the unrealized dream of the Reconstruction Era Radical Republicans to remake Southern society into the image of the North is rapidly becoming reality.

That said, the South and its more adventurous cousin, the West, have managed to hold onto the important things in life, namely faith, family, and work.  In the United States, the vast belt from my native South Carolina in the east, driving westward to Texas, and up through at least Nebraska (that’s for you, NEO), still maintain sanity in a nation that is increasingly unhinged with an addiction to postmodern progressivism.

Not to say that Northerners don’t love their families or God, but the governing ethos of Yankeedom is materialist efficiency über alles.  Even the terse attitudes and abrupt styles of conversation suggest little room for even the most cursory pleasantries.  The propensity with which Northerners sling around f-bombs is one of the more dramatic reminders of what cultural differences exist between America’s two great regions even to this day (although, alas, I hear more and more Southerners engaging in sloppy manners and foul language).

But I digress.  I’ve made enough sweeping generalizations for one Lazy Sunday.  You can read more of my sweeping generalizations about vast swaths of the country in these essays, all about fair Dixie:

  • “Southern Conservatism: John Randolph of Roanoke” – I somehow had never learned about John Randolph of Roanoke (outside of a reference in Richard Weaver’s Southern Essays) until teaching History of Conservative Thought during Summer 2019.  This post was all about the feisty—some might say ornery—Virginia statesmen who constantly strove to keep Virginia strong and the federal government weak.
  • “Reblog: Conan the Southern?” – This post looked at a better post from The Abbeville Institute about Texan Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.  Howard’s tough Texas upbringing and Jacksonian derring-do inspired the ferocious barbarian hero, a self-made man in a world of evil wizards and sinister forces.
  • “The Hispanicization of Rural America” – After driving through some parts of western South Carolina and noticing there were only Hispanics, I wrote this post, lamenting the replacement of white and black Southerners.  Here’s the key paragraph:

    I don’t like seeing my people—the people of South Carolina—being displaced in their communities by foreign invaders who speak a different language, who don’t care about our Constitution, and who don’t want to adopt our hard-won culture of liberty.  It took from 1215 to 1776 to get from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence; do we really want to throw away 561 years of Anglo-Saxon common law and careful cultural-political development in the name of multiculturalism?

  • “The Invasion and Alienation of the South” – The Abbeville Institute is the gift that keeps on giving.  This post discussed an essay called “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” about a young Louisiana woman’s sense of total alienation in an ostensibly Southern city, Dallas.  She also details the leftward shift, politically, of Southern cities, which I have observed in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina—increasingly a colony of Ohio.
  • “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” – An instant-classic in the TPP archives, this post originated as a LONG comment on “What Do You Think?,” a post on NEO’s Anglophilic blog Nebraska Energy Observer.  I make some bold claims about the good that was lost following the Civil War—like liberty.

Bless your heart,

TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Conservative Revolution

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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!

Friday’s post, “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War,” has enjoyed more traffic than my usual posts thanks to a.) the controversial topic of the American Civil War (gasp!—someone’s not denouncing the South!) and b.) and Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown graciously sharing the post far and wide.  Thanks, Doc!

It’s put me in a bit of a historical mood.  In history, the important points—the Truth—is often in the details, but I’ve always appreciated the contemplation of the philosophical implications of historical events.  Thus, my mini-essay on the American Civil War focused more on the cultural and political costs of the war than the nitty-gritty details.

The costs were, of course, considerable.  Historians of a conservative bent will sometimes refer to “reconstitutions” in United States history, with the Progressive Era and its immediate offspring, the New Deal, often cited as a major “reconstitution.”  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which elevated anti-racism and social justice above the freedom of association, was another such reconstitution.

Similarly, the American Civil War, as I detailed yesterday, resulted in a reconstitution of the Constitution, as it served to centralize more power in the hands of the federal government, curtailing States’ rights in the process.

An observant reader will note that each of these “reconstitutions” reflected some revolutionary fervor or upheaval:  the horror of war, the agitation of Progressive reformers, the privations of the Depression, and the struggle for equal rights.  They almost all resulted in an increase in federal power, too, often to intrusive degrees.  In each instance, the ratchet turned towards more centralization and fewer liberties overall.

But the American Revolution—which made the Constitution possible—is nearly unique in the annals of modern history—much less American history—in that it was a conservative revolution.  That is, it was a revolution that sought to conserve—or, perhaps more accurately, to preserve—a set of traditions and privileges, rather than to tear them up, root and branch.

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The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War

The Portly Politico11 Comments

On Wednesday, 13 May 2020, blogger Audre Myers posted a piece at Nebraska Energy Observer entitled “What Do You Think?”  The piece prompted readers to answer the question “Would we be the America we are if the Civil War had never been fought?”

Below is my response, which you can also view here.  The TL;DR summary of my answer is that, while it was good that the Union was preserved and that slavery was abolished, it came with some heavy fees—the expansion of federal power (and the loss of liberty inverse to federal expansion), the erosion of States’ rights, and—most importantly—the triumph of Yankee progressivism over Southern traditionalism.

The temptation is always to reduce the American Civil War to being ONLY about slavery.  Slavery was, obviously, a huge part of the Southern economy and culture, and motivated a great deal of Southern politics at the national level.  But slavery was not the be-all, end-all of the “Lost Cause.”  There were legitimate constitutional questions at play.  Indeed, an open question—one the American Civil War closed by force of arms—was that, having opted into the Constitution, could States later opt out?  John Randolph of Roanoke, among others, seemed to believe this question was legitimate, and such an exit was allowed—even acknowledged.

Of course, the slavery narrative serves modern progressive ends.  It allows for throwing the baby—States’ rights—out with the bathwater.  Suddenly, States’ rights becomes “code,” in the progressive mind, for justifying slavery or segregation.  Yes, States’ rights was invoked to support wicked things.  Nevertheless, it is fully constitutional—just ask the Tenth Amendment.

Nullification and secession were dangerous doctrines, but the loss of them also meant that the federal government could expand with far fewer limits on its power.  The States lost the nuclear option, so to speak, of bucking unconstitutional acts (although, to be fair, States can challenge such acts more peacefully through lawsuits against the federal government—even if those cases are heard in federal courts).  Seeing as we’re living in times when a peaceful separation between fundamentally opposed ideologies may be the most attractive option for the future of our nation, it’s worth reviewing the history of these ideas.

Well, that’s enough preamble.  After two days of self-indulgent, girly navel-gazing, it’s time for some substance:

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To the Moon! Part III: Moon Mining

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In this blog’s long and storied history, I’ve been a consistent advocate of space exploration, with a particular interest in lunar colonization.  An enduring frustration of this blog is that the United States has satiated its thirst for exploration with the numbing effects of consumer technologies.  Yes, we can FaceTime one another from halfway around the globe and can set our thermostats remotely so the house is cooled down before we arrive—all wonderful conveniences—but is that truly the apex of human endeavor?  Is being comfortable really the point of it all?

There was a time when we dreamed of exploring the stars, or at least of visiting our nearest celestial neighbors.  But that drive for adventure dissipated—or, perhaps, exploded—sometime in the 1980s.  The Age of The Virus further highlights our society’s obsession with safety, an obsession anathema to the derring-do necessary to explore the stars.

To paraphrase Bill Whittle, we’ll know we’re serious about space exploration when our graveyards are filled with astronauts.

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The Joy of Spring

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Seasons in South Carolina are not the stately procession of one phase of life from one to another, with flowers poking through snow, or a crisp autumnal chill sneaking into the night air in late September.  Instead, it’s as hot on Halloween as it is on the Fourth of July (well, maybe just a tad cooler, but you’d never know from the humidity).  I often joke with out-of-Staters that we get about two weeks of spring and two weeks of fall, with about nine months of summer and two months of winter—and even the winter is interspersed with some summery days.

This year, South Carolina has been blessed with an unusually long and mild spring.  It’s 11 May, and I’m still wearing sweatshirts in the mornings.  We had a brief foretaste of the long summer a couple of nights last week, when the cloying thickness of summertime humidity hung menacingly in the air—the threat of summer’s oppression.  But God has seen fit to grant us at least a few more days of mild springtime.

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Lazy Sunday LXI: The Tuck

The Portly Politico14 Comments

You can’t cuck him—Tucker Carlson, that is, the pie-faced Fox News host with an infectiously boyish laugh and a gift for destroying Leftist shibboleths.

Tucker Carlson says that he’s not a populist—he’s an elitist—but that our current elites aren’t up to the job.  Further, they’re not even doing the job correctly; that is, our elites aren’t looking out for the interests of the people they govern, which is pretty much their only job.  Instead, they’re working for their own interests at our expense.

Well, that’s good enough for me.  An elitist on the outs with our current crop of “elites” is a populist in my book.  Carlson’s commentary certainly suggests as such.  This look back at my posts about his ideas will demonstrate that:

  • “Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis” (and “TBT: Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis“) – This post was about a monologue Tucker gave in early 2019 (I think the monologue was actually delivered on my birthday).  That monologue really opened my eyes to the folly of pursuing economic efficiency at all costs.  A key quote from The Tuck:  “We are ruled by mercenaries, who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck” – This short piece was about “some cheeky remarks” Tucker made on a raunchy radio show over a decade ago—true but politically-incorrect statements not to be uttered in polite company (or where the social justice commissars can hear).  Rather than issuing a whimpering apology, The Tuck demonstrated his uncuckability and refused to apologize.  He’s still pulling in three million eyeballs a night.
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck: Immigration” – Another short post; in this one, Tucker calls out the folly of unlimited immigration of people who hate the United States, and points to Somalian immigrant Ilhan Omar as a “living fire alarm” to the American people.  Let’s wake up and ban immigration from places and cultures that hate everything we love.
  • “Tucker Carlson’s Platform for Victory in 2020” – A sobering bit here from Tucker:  in order to win in 2020, Trump and Republicans need to improve people’s lives.  Tucker’s key insight is that whichever candidate and/or party makes it easier for a thirty-year old to get married and own a home is the candidate that is going to win in 2020.  Get on it, Republicans!
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck III: Liberty in The Age of The Virus” – I was worked up when I wrote this post, as was Tucker.  We keep watching our liberty die in exchange for the illusion of safety.  Tucker, in true fashion, offers a full-throated defense of liberty, and denounces the incompetent “experts” who keep insisting that we cower in fear.

That’s it for this weekend!  It’s Mother’s Day, so be sure to give Mom a call.

Happy Mother’s Day!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Liberty and Safety

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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!

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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Flynn Flies Free

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A big H/T to blogger buddy photog at Orion’s Cold Fire for sharing Tucker Carlson‘s latest Truth Bomb.  photog helpfully shares Tuck’s summary of the Flynn fiasco:

Michael Flynn’s coerced guilty plea is one of the many puzzle pieces clumsily assembled in the vast coup conspiracy against President Trump.  Our ursuline Attorney General, Bill “The Bear” Barr, has pushed for a dismissal of the bogus case against Flynn.

The commentary from the Left boils down to, “But he plead guilty!”  Yes, he plead guilty, out of desperation, to spare his son from a similar witch hunt—a father taking the fall to save his son.

More importantly, the entire investigation was based on FISA warrants obtained under false pretenses.  If your local police department bust into your house without a warrant and went through your underwear drawer, every judge in the country would throw out the case, even if they found bags of cocaine tucked away with your Fruit of the Looms.

The entire Mueller probe was a farce.  James Comey is a sanctimonious a-hole who self-righteously mismanaged the FBI because of his own apparent moral superiority.  Two agents involved in an extramarital affair—presumably our moral betters, or least smarter than the rest of us—plotted the overthrow of President Trump.

And yet they all waltz about, consequence-free, while a military man who served his country was facing five years over a guilty plea for something that AG Barr says wasn’t even a crime!  Per Barr:

[P]eople sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes. … And the Department of Justice is not persuaded that this was material to any legitimate counterintelligence investigation. So it was not a crime

It’s the same situation with Roger Stone, who is literally facing four years in prison for forgetting he sent an e-mail, while other, actual convicts—like slick extorionist Michael Avenatti—are being released from prison because of The Virus.  Stone mixed up some dates while being interrogated as a part of—again—the bogus Mueller investigation.

In both cases, the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence—a clear violation of the right to a fair trial, in which the defense is supposed to have access to all the same evidence as the prosecution.

Our federal justice system is a farce.  Barr made this point in a CBS News interview:

I was concerned people were feeling there were two standards of justice in this country. … I wanted to make sure that we restore confidence in the system. There’s only one standard of justice.

But our elites are content to destroy due process and rule of law in order to get Trump, or anyone near him.  They’ll violate the spirit and letter of the law with impunity whenever it suits their purposes.

If there was any justice in this world, the Clintons would be in prison, Ilhan Omar would be deported, and James Comey would be dime-store philosophizing on third shift at the 7-11.

Instead, we’re destroying our economy over the flu and arresting salon owners for feeding their families.

Can we just have an amicable divorce from these weirdos?