Tag: ideas

SubscribeStar Saturday: Unreality

The Portly Politico4 Comments

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There is a distinct sense of unreality hovering over the West lately.  I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this sensation—if you have, please leave a comment—but the Zeitgeist of our age seems to be a sense of alienated disconnection from Reality itself.  We’re living in a profoundly unserious time, led by unserious people, debating unserious problems.

Men can have babies.  Children can choose their gender.  Everything is just a social construct, after all; in such a world, anything imaginable is possible.  And while there is no fixed morality, we’re told, questioning the social construction that everything is a social construction is an assault on a truth that doesn’t exist—but it’s still bad, so don’t do it!

The pretzel logic of nihilistic relativism twists us into macabre perversions of ourselves.  Such is the consequence of embracing the unreal and rejecting Truth and Reality.

But Truth and Reality are there, whether we accept it or not.  And they hit hard.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Ponty’s Top Ten Worst Films: #1: Batman & Robin (1997)

The Portly Politico42 Comments

After many grueling months, Ponty and I are nearly done with our Top Ten Worst Films lists.  Today marks the end of Ponty’s inglorious run.

I have to applaud Ponty for both conceiving of this “worst of” idea and for his execution.  The man has a talent for unbridled hatred, at least when it comes to bad movies (otherwise, he seems like a lovely, gentle spirit).  The Bible does teach us to hate that which is evil (it’s in one of the Psalms, I promise), and what could be more evil than big budget flicks that waste money producing tripe?  I mean, I guess some gaffers got some work, so that’s good, but, dang!

That said, Ponty’s pick here will be a controversial one for some.  I remember 1997’s “Batman & Robin” somewhat fondly… but I was twelve when it hit theaters.  I remember watching it at home and, in my pubescent boyhood, thinking Poison Ivy was hot (never mind that Uma Thurman looks like an alien).  I also liked Mr. Freeze’s ridiculous ice puns, which I still enjoy saying (“Ice to see you”).

Ah, such innocence.  After reading Ponty’s review, I may have to rewatch the flick after twenty-five years to see if my opinion has matured more than I have myself (I’ve heard that director Joel Schumacher is kind of a freak, which might explain all the nipples on the Bat Suit).  Of course, the point of this list, in part, is to help readers avoid watching bad movies, so would I be violating the implicit spirit of the worst films lists?

Such heady, philosophical conundrums.  Nothing quite like that in Batman & Robin, as I recall.

With that, here is Ponty’s #1 pick, 1997’s Batman & Robin:

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TBT^2: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus

The Portly Politico6 Comments

The Virus is like a bad movie series that just refuses to die.  There was a controversial but impactful first release that everyone was talking about, even if they didn’t see it.  Then there was the lackluster sequel, which still enjoyed some popular support, even though ticket sales were down.

Now it feels like we’re on the tired third film, which is a watered-down, ineffectual finale (one hopes) to a premise that is played out.  Sure, critics love it, but audiences are tired of its antics.

What still seems to make it into the script of every one of these films is the part where the government bureaucrats lock everything down and release a bunch of ghosts into Manhattan (uh, wait, what?).  Meanwhile, we all kind of sit by and twiddle our thumbs and put our masks on dutifully.

What happened to the band of merry wastrels who tossed tea into Boston Harbor, rather than comply with an odious monopolization of the tea trade?  Or the plucky scofflaws who made it impossible to enforce the Stamp Act?  I’d rather disguise myself as an Indian (feather, not dot) and caffeinate the water supply than put a mask on again (but that would be cultural appropriation, of course).

In short, why don’t we get a backbone, instead of cowering behind masks and locking ourselves indoors?  We’re literally cowering before an invisible enemy with a 99%+ survival rate.

Well, liberty is never easy.  Better to stay inside watching movies and disconnecting from reality, eh?

With that, here is 29 July 2021’s “TBT: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus“:

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MAGAWeek2022: John Paul Jones

The Portly Politico8 Comments

This week is MAGAWeek2022, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 4 July 2022, this year’s MAGAWeek2022 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.

As MAGAWeek2022 rolls on, it’s my pleasure to feature the indefatigable John Paul Jones as the third entry.

Yes, with his hypnotic bass lines, workmanlike studio skills, and steady reliability, John Paul Jones provided the backbone for Led Zeppelin’s bluesy, protometal sound.

Wait, wait—not that John Paul Jones!  Although he is an amazing bassist, I’m dedicating today’s edition of MAGAWeek2022 to an even greater John Paul Jones:  Captain John Paul Jones of the American Continental Navy (and Rear Admiral in the Russian Imperial Navy).

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2022 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

TBT^2: Leftism in a Nutshell

The Portly Politico7 Comments

When I first wrote about the “degrowth movement” three years ago, it seemed like another kooky Leftist spin to cover for an economy that would inevitably decline under a Democratic president.  When I revisited that post last summer, it was after five months of Biden the Usurper’s economic misery and malaise, and after a year of shutdowns thanks to The Virus.

In other words, we’d tried involuntary degrowth, and it’s made us poorer.

A year on, the economy has gotten even worse.  We’re all quite aware that gas prices are through the roof.  Food prices have skyrocketed as well.  One reason I’m dieting this summer (besides the fact that I need to return to my lean, pantheric form) and skipping breakfast is because it saves a few bucks (and because I need my massive spaghetti ration to last a lot longer—I can down a pound of spaghetti with shocking rapidity).  Groceries are too expensive for binge eating.

The most recent print issue of Backwoods Home Magazine (Issue #189, July/August/September 2022) features a cover story entitled “The Return of Victory Gardens.”  That piece discusses not just the high prices of groceries, but the scarcity of items on shelves.

For years, I’ve boasted about how cheap food is.  Just a few years ago, you could pick up a loaf of bread from Dollar General for eighty-eight cents.  Granted, it wasn’t good bread, but it got the job done.  Eggs were cheap.  Butter was maybe a dollar for four sticks.  Pretty much everything you could need was easily affordable, even if it wouldn’t make for the most exciting meals.

Now, none of those items are particularly cheap.  The lowest price for a loaf of crummy (and crumbly) white bread I can find locally is around $1.49 a loaf.  I have a hook-up for eggs, so I’m covered there.  But my egg supplier tells me that I should start canning butter, because the price of that is about to go way up.

And forget about eating meat.  It looks like the grand dream of the globohomo super elites—that we’ll all be eating cricket burgers, safely isolated and subdued in our living pods—is getting closer and closer to reality.

It became a BoomerCon cliché to point to Venezuela as an example of what happens when socialism runs amok.  But the BoomerCons were right.  Unless we want to be eating pet rabbits and zoo animals, we’d better do something to shore up our food stores and increase our independence from the supply chains stat.

With that, here’s “TBT: Leftism in a Nutshell“:

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TBT: Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory

The Portly Politico22 Comments

We observed Juneteenth, the new Independence Day for black Americans, here in the United States this week.  The “national” holiday is an extremely regional celebration that dates back to 1866 in Texas.

To state the obvious but controversial:  the only reason we have Juneteenth is because of a summer of racial violence two years ago.  Apparently, our entire political system and culture has to bend over backwards to accommodate a handful of disgruntled race-baiters.

But all of that traces back to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which I described last year as an odious blend of “identity politics, Foucaultean power dynamics, Cultural Marxism, and Nineties-style corporate diversity training.”

Race-baiting isn’t anything new in America, but now it’s taken on a quasi-systematic, pseudo-intellectual, cult-like quality that has major corporations and government entities at all levels cowed.

But appeasement clearly doesn’t work.  Indeed, I’d argue it undermines CRT’s alleged goal of racial reconciliation.

I said as much in 16 June 2021’s “Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory“:

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TBT^2: Hungry Like the Wolf

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Seeing as yesterday was my dog’s birthday, I figured I’d throw back to a piece that I seem to come back to each June, “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Tech magazine Gizmodo ran a piece some years ago that poses the question (in its title) “What Happens to Wolves When They’re Raised Like Dogs?”

My thinking on dogs has done nearly a 180-degree turn—maybe a 150-degree turn?—over the past few years.  I’ve always liked dogs (so I was already thirty degrees in their favor), but I disliked dog people.  I still would not classify myself in that way, though I do serenade my dog, so maybe I’m just in denial.

Regardless, what chapped me was the way people would use dogs as surrogate children, or would invest huge amounts of their personal identity in their dog.  Again, perhaps I’m in denial, or blind to reality, but as much as I love my dog, I’d like to think I’m not pouring misdirected paternalism into her.

But dogs do provide wonderful companionship, and can be a great deal of fun.  Murphy does something comical or amusing just about every day.  And her adenoidal snoring and “talking” crack me up.  I actually sleep better when Murphy is snoring her brains out—she’s like a living white-noise machine.

Pretty crazy these chunky furballs used to be wolves, eh?

Here’s 24 June 2021’s “TBT: Hungry Like the Wolf“:

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TBT: Disincentives to Work

The Portly Politico12 Comments

I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom this week, but it sure feels like things are falling apart all around us:  food shortages, rising unemployment, riots.  I think we’re in for a really nasty summer, but I hope I’m wrong.

We’ve been muddling through longer than we realize.  While gas prices have only shot up in the past five months, people have been dropping out of the workforce for a good while now.  Back in the Obama years, conservatives used to mock (rightly) the government’s unemployment figures for leaving out the labor force participation rate, which was pretty paltry back then (something like only 60-70% of working aged people were actually actively looking for work; the unemployment rate was based off that portion, rather than all working aged adults).

Now we’re in the midst of what the mainstream media is calling “The Great Resignation,” with millions of Americans quitting their jobs.  That’s due in part, I believe, to the generous government largesse during The Age of The Virus.  We’ve all gotten a taste of easy money—inflation be damned!—and now we want the gravy train to keep on rollin’.

But I think it goes deeper than that.  My generation in particular—prone to wokery, alas—legitimately has gotten the short end of the economic stick, entering the workforce during a recession, saddled with billions in student loans and overcredentialed.  Granted, some of those problems were our fault—we fell for the siren song of expensive degrees—but we were largely following the advice that had worked for our parents’ generation.

Understandably, many of my peers did not want to go back to waiting tables and pouring coffee for strangers—or going back to other thankless jobs.  Not all of those folks are deadbeats or mooches—some of them are just worn out.

Regardless, the government’s sticky hands are in all of this mess (for example, college tuition is so astronomically high because the government will keep extending loans to anybody to get them to go to college, even if that person isn’t going to earn much with his degree).  Work is annoying, stressful, and demanding—but doing it makes us better people.

With that, here is 26 May 2021’s “Disincentives to Work“:

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Social Justice Jokers for Hire

The Portly Politico16 Comments

Everyone here on the Right knows that the Left can’t meme.  Just like conservatives are better at talk radio, we’re better at making hilarious, spicy memes.

Perhaps it’s because the Left is firmly in the driver’s seat of culture and the institutions, so they’re just bad at humor, which requires poking at officialdom.  Perhaps it’s because their worldview is so inherently warped and cringe, what they think is riotously funny doesn’t translate to the rest of us.  Their hypersensitivity and adherence to identity politics make it impossible to poke fun at anyone or anything without suffering the consequences of their own cannibalizing cancel culture.

If anything, Leftist attempts at meme-ing just come across as propaganda.  Propaganda is not clever or subtle; it’s certainly not funny.  It just comes across as sanctimonious and pushy, which is probably why the Left loves it so much.

(At the risk of being even more controversial, it probably doesn’t help that the primary consumers and creators of Leftist memes are women, and with few exceptions, women aren’t exactly known for being riotously funny.  It explains why so much of female “comedy” resembles paying a visit to one’s overly detailed gynecologist.)

On the Right, we’re pilloried for making memes about a cute cartoon frog living a traditional life.  Hillary Clinton even attacked Pepe as a symbol of “white supremacy” while running for President of the United States, attempting to garner votes and donations by stirring up hysteria about frog.

Not only can the Left not meme; they can’t help but ruin existing memes with their overly-earnest moralizing.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Life Finds a Way

The Portly Politico6 Comments

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The winning just keeps coming—first Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, which is a major victory for free speech; now, what appears to be the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973), one of the most egregiously unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings ever made.

Conservatives have fought for nearly fifty years for this very outcome.  I did not think it would happen in my lifetime—or ever—given the extreme leftward drift of the country.

But elections matter, and this likely ruling demonstrates why.  All of those conservatives who reluctantly voted for Donald Trump because of the prospect of his nominating constitutionalists to the bench have been vindicated, as have those who supported Trump from the get-go:  his Supreme Court nominations clinched the reversal of this terrible, destructive ruling.

(I note with some degree of amused irony that it was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stubborn refusal to vacate the bench that made it possible for President Trump to replace her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett; seeing how feminists glorify “RBG” as the protector of their “right” to murder children, it was her tight grip on her SCOTUS seat that, ultimately, doomed Roe to the ash bin of history.)

The social media backlash from disenchanted floozies has been ludicrous.  One friend on Facebook even argued that abortions are a form of mental health treatment, as they spare would-be mothers from the struggles of postpartum depression.

But even ladies who I thought weren’t so hung up on a fictitious constitutional “right” to abortion have been bemoaning the end of their “reproductive freedom” or what not.  The “abortion is mental health treatment” girl also bemoaned conservatives’ desire to “control” women.  I don’t want to control anyone, but I don’t want murder to be legal.

Regardless, that hysteria is grounded in constitutional ignorance and the terrifying normalization of infanticide over the past fifty years.  As I’ve patiently explained to many hysterical women over the past week, overturning Roe just means that the debate over abortion returns to the people and the States.  Now, instead of one imaginary constitutional “right”—note that the Constitution is completely silent on the issue of abortion, as it is on almost everything, leaving it up to the people to decide through their State legislatures—there will be fifty different State level policies.  Some States will put loads of restrictions on it (though I doubt any State will completely ban it); other States will probably allow two-year olds to be murdered if they prove to be too much of a nuisance.

What the reversal of Roe is, then, is not just a major victory for the life of the unborn—it’s a victory for federalism.  It might also mean that feminist floozies will have to exercise a little more self-control—or move to California.

It also marks an important moment of spiritual redemption for the United States—I hope!

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