Tag: liberty

TBT^2: A Discourse on Disclaimers

The Portly Politico2 Comments

What a difference a year makes.  It seems as though the election of Donaldus Magnus last November ushered in a profound cultural shift.  Being Left is cringe and gay.  It always was, but now normies are saying it out loud.

Sure, there’s still a lot of weirdos out there, but it’s fascinating to see how the culture has moved so wildly in such a short amount of time.  The age of needless disclaimers may very well be coming in—or, perhaps, it will intensify during the death throes of hand-wringing.

Well, we’ll see.  In the meantime, life is too short to bottle everything up.  Drop Truth Bombs, my friends!

With that, here is 27 June 2024’s “TBT: A Discourse on Disclaimers“:

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TBT: A Discourse on Disclaimers

The Portly Politico29 Comments

Last week my Dad sent me a link to an old piece of mine, “A Discourse on Disclaimers.”  When I wrote it, I was still undergoing a based transformation.  This piece represents one of those many little turning points that moved me to the point of realizing that there is no reasoning with the Left.  After all, how can you reason with an ideology that has no fixed moral center, which is always shifting its own goals in the name of some amorphous, perpetual revolution?

The failure of the modern Right has been to attempt to point out the hypocrisy of the Left, based on the unspoken assumption that if we just keep pointing it out and keep using logic, they’ll see the light and convert to reason, logic, and Truth.  It’s like arguing with a pit bull when your baby is dangling from its jaws:  it’s fatally ineffective and will cost you something precious.

Fortunately, while the Left possesses all of the irrational insanity and ferocity of the pit bull, it lacks the animal’s strength.  Yes, there is a strength the Left possesses in delusion and with its control of the institutions, but even that edifice of institutional control is crumbling.

It’s time for us to be bold.  Doing otherwise is tantamount to doubting God’s Promises.  Yes, we should be wise—no good will come from shouting red-pilled Truth bombs in the wrong context—but we should be brave, too.

With that, here is 20 June 2018’s “A Discourse on Disclaimers“:

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TBT^4: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Don’t be alarmed:  it’s Thursday.  I’ve “thrown back” to this classic edition of Phone it in Friday twice before, and even though The Age of The Virus is now over, it’s worth remembering the massive social and economic costs that came from the years of lockdowns.

The line from the Left now is, “oops, sorry, we overreacted, but we can let bygones be bygones, yeah?”  Forgiveness is important, but it’s also important to realize how self-righteous busybodies with an untrusting faith in “science” berated all of us into wearing diapers over our faces and putting kids in online classes for two years.

Masks don’t work.  If you can smell a tangy fart through an N95 mask, viruses can get through.  About the only sensible advice anyone received during The Age of The Virus was to wash our hands regularly.

Yet we turned our civil and medical liberties over to a handful of unelected “public health” bureaucrats based on the flimsiest of information.  Granted, those first “two weeks to flatten the curve” were scary, because we knew so little, but in hindsight, it looks like an attempt to see how much the American people would put up with before we revolted.  The answer, sadly, was quite a lot.

One other note:  I appreciate doctors for their training, though my faith in them has always been equivocal at best.  But the real problem seems to be nurses and public health officials.  The former is a profession that seems to attract its fair share of self-important nut jobs, and who hasn’t known a nurse who insists she knows better than the doctor?

The latter are people who couldn’t hack it as either a doctor or a nurse, so they got a relatively new degree (I first heard of people majoring in public health only about fifteen years ago) that somehow grants them enormous power to curtail individual liberties in the name of “public” health.

That’s a scary Pandora’s Box:  where do we draw the line?  I imagine there are all sorts of personally harmful but socially benign health choices that deviously creative public health officials could spin into activity that must be stopped in the name of “public health.”  Even when we knew that masks did nothing—I remember folks saying, “Well, the mask doesn’t protect you, but it protects other people,” which makes no sense at all—it was always couched in terms of helping other people.  It was the same way with The Vaccine—“if you don’t get this shot, you’re endangering others!”  Malarkey.

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

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Guest Post: The Year Before the Year After Next Year

The Portly Politico2 Comments

This week is unofficially “Ponty Week 2023,” as good old Ponty/Always a Kid for Today sent me three excellent pieces over the long July Fourth week (his third will pop this Friday).  It’s great to see one of our most steadfast and lively contributors back on the blog.

It’s interesting to think that The Age of The Virus, which so dominated our lives and thoughts for nearly two years, now seems like a distant memory, a bad dream best forgotten when one wakes up, returning to one’s senses.  That is certainly how the worst of the self-proclaimed public health czars and czarinas hope we will regard it:  a well-intentioned nightmare that we needn’t talk about any further.  They know they eroded civil liberties, wrecked the economy, and made anyone without a diaper on their face feel like crap, all over a highly survivable virus.  Better to sweep all that under the rug and let bygones be bygones.  Forgive and forget, right?

We can forgive individuals—we all had family members who hysterically insisted that flimsy paper masks would save us from ourselves—but we should never forget the heavy toll of our public health tyranny.  As Ponty points out, they’re going to try it again, and it’s going to be worse next time.

It is perhaps a bit conspiratorial (and even hysterical on my part), but I sincerely believe The Age of The Virus was a test-run for the End Times Beast system.  Just as people willingly lined up for The Vaccine, which was promised to be the ticket to a normal life, people will line up to take the Antichrist’s Mark so they can continue shopping at Niemann Marcus.  What is one’s eternal soul when there is a sale on capris?

Even if I am wrong about that particular claim, The Age of The Virus was certainly a trial run to see how obedient we’d all be.  The answer, sadly, was, “very.”  Sure, we had some ructions after the first month or so of the “two weeks to flatten the curve,” but most Americans went along sheepishly with the dictates.  Yours portly wore his mask as little as possible, but even I took two shots of The Vaccine (not because I wanted to be “normal” again, but because I didn’t know any better at the time—and I should have!).

Ponty argues that inquiries into The Age of The Virus in Britain serve no purpose other than to strengthen the regime the next time around.  I think he is only missing one point:  these inquiries remind us, the sane, about what they did to us.  We should never let them get away with it again.

With that, here is Ponty’s “The Year Before the Year After Next Year”:

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TBT: Counting Blessings

The Portly Politico2 Comments

In searching through some old blog posts recently, I stumbled upon one from April 2020 about being thankful for the blessings in our lives.  The day before I’d written what I thought at the time was a doom-and-gloom post, but reading it now, it wasn’t too bad.  I do seem to remember being in an exasperated mood when I wrote it, so that probably explains, in part, the sense of contrition I experienced after writing it.

Regardless, it yielded “Counting Blessings,” a post giving thanks for God’s many blessings in my life.  It’s rather serendipitous that I stumbled upon this post again the other day, because the theme of counting one’s blessings is one I’ve been contemplating quite a bit lately.

Life is going well enough for yours portly (I’d better not say that too loudly!).  Work is clipping along and I’m hustling big time with lessons.  I have a great (and godly) girlfriend, dog, and house, and a supportive family.  Things could be worse.

With that here is 29 April 2022’s “Counting Blessings“:

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

The Portly Politico3 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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SubscribeStar Saturday: Homesteading in the City

The Portly Politico8 Comments

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.

Recently I’ve taken subscriptions to Backwoods Home Magazine and its sister publication, Self-Reliance.  Both magazines are treasure troves of information on how to be, well, self-reliant.  Backwoods Home focuses more on handy projects around the homestead and garden, sprinkled with articles containing recipes for canning veggies and baking homemade bread.  Self-Reliance seems to cover many of the same topics, just maybe with fewer recipes.

A major emphasis of both publications is establishing and maintaining a functioning homestead that is as self-supporting and sustainable as possible.  The authors often acknowledge that such an ideal may be impossible to realize in its truest, Platonic form, but point out that it is still an ideal worth striving toward.  Besides that grand ideal, though, the publications are very practical—how does one go about doing all of the tasks and completing all of the myriad projects that maintaining an independent homestead requires?

The goal of near-self-sufficiency is maximal liberty—if you can grow your own food and raise your own livestock, who cares if your employer mandates The Vaccine for work?  You can just live off your land, at least until you can find a job that doesn’t force you to inject yourself with an experimental drug.  That requires a great deal of hard work and focus, but the reward is freedom from the whims of the workplace and the world.  We all know corporations and even smaller employers are growing more woke by the day; in the case of big corporations, following the popular “morality” of the day to keep up appearances is more important than the well-being of their employees.

As someone who would like to raise a few crops and maybe some chickens on my little half-acre, a local story here in Darlington County, South Carolina, caught my attention.  A couple in Society Hill, the Dukes, has around thirty-one animals on their forty-four-acre property, which sits within the town limits of Society Hill.  Their livestock includes “chickens, goats, cows, horses, hens, a duck and a rooster.”

The Town Council for Society Hill passed an ordinance limiting livestock to six chickens and two “equines”—horses, mules, donkeys, etc.—on property within town limits.  The Dukes were apparently in violation of an older ordinance from the 1970s that limited livestock numbers on property within town limits.  I’m not sure what those limits were, but it seems Society Hill’s Town Council believed it needed to update the ordinance.

There are multiple issues here, which are reflected in the Council’s 3-2 split on the ordinance.  The Dukes claim that the current Mayor of Society Hill, Tommy Bradshaw, is targeting them because Dwayne Duke seeks to challenge Bradshaw for mayor.  The Dukes also claim that their animals are used for emotional support therapy for trouble kids.

Neighbors, however, fear that the Dukes plan to turn their home into a petting zoo of some kind, and there have apparently been repeated complaints about the livestock (no one wants a rooster waking them up at the literal crack of dawn).  Even before the new ordinance was passed, the Dukes were already in violation of the older ordinance, which was nearly fifty years old (a reminder to town governments to update their ordinances periodically, lest they be forgotten from lack of use).

So, who is right?  Should the Dukes give up their livestock—and their chance at homesteading freedom?—so their neighbors can get some peace?  Or should they be allowed to keep the animals they raise?

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

The Portly Politico17 Comments

Earlier this week I was having a conversation with someone on Milo’s rollicking Telegram chat, in which we were trying to figure out the name of a short story involving people living in underground cells, communicating only via the Internet.  I had a feeling I had written about it before, but could not remember the name of the story.

Turns out it was E.M. Forster’s novella “The Machine Stops,” originally published in 1909, and I wrote about it in this catch-all post from the early days of The Age of The Virus (so early, in fact, I was not capitalizing the first “the” in that moniker, which I have texted so much, my last phone auto-predicted “The Age of The Virus”).  I compared the story to Kipling’s “The Mother Hive”–a story that apparently is assigned regularly in India, because pageviews for it always seem to coincide with large numbers of site visitors from the subcontinent.

But I digress.  The story sounded eerily like what our elites asked us to do during The Age of The Virus:  stay home, get fat, consume mindless entertainment, and don’t socialize.  Granted, some of us could go outside and plant gardens (I still got fat, though), but the messaging was not “become more self-sufficient so we can mitigate disaster” but “buy more stuff and don’t do anything fun.”  It was depressing to me how many people embraced this line of reasoning, turning government-mandated sloth into some kind of perverted virtue.

I appreciated the break that The Age of The Virus afforded us, but it came with the severe curtailment of liberty—and Americans ate it up!  Instead of people boldly throwing ravers and partying down, laughing at our elites, we instead retreated into our hovels, shuddering in the dark.  When I did through a big Halloween bash, it was a massive success—because, I suppose, people had finally had it.

I guess that’s the silver lining.  With that, here’s 3 April 2020’s “Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus” (perhaps the longest title of any blog post ever):

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Bric-a-Brac

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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.

This week I’ve been thinking and writing about home, as well as the idea of self-sufficiency.  Home is certainly a space that serves a utilitarian purpose:  a place to sleep, a shelter from the elements, a piece of land for growing food.

But the concept of “home” encompasses far more than the practical.  There is a distinct difference, both aesthetically and spiritually, between a cookie-cutter, white-washed apartment complex flophouse and a home.  Anyone who has moved out of such a space, only to move back into one, realizes how depressing such places are.

Naturally, many enterprising and decorative sorts have turned divorced dad domiciles into homey spaces.  For many people, especially young people, such complexes are necessary, and I don’t mean to demean anyone living in one (I lived in such a place, once, and it suited my needs at twenty-two; it would be a nightmare for me now).  But it’s those little decorative touches that really help bring a home to life.

I’m not much for decorating myself, but while washing my dishes, I was contemplating some of the odds and ends I have over the sink.  My kitchen sink has a window over it, facing into my mudroom, which ages ago was a screened-in back porch.  Now the mudroom is closed in, but the window remains.  On the sill I keep a number of little figurines—bric-a-brac:  some unpainted plastic Chaos Marine miniatures from Warhammer 40K; an Energizer Bunny sticker dispenser; a pewter figurine of an Imperial Ordinator from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind; a folk-art figurine made from nuts, bolts, and washers, holding a sign that reads, “Visit Stone Mountain”; a little Jack O’Lantern stress ball; and an icon of St. Thomas Aquinas, a gift from an aggressively Catholic colleague.

What I realized is that these little figurines aren’t just the nerdy detritus of my youth, accumulated on my kitchen windowsill; they’re fun little expressions of home—and of liberty.

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When Does it End?

The Portly Politico3 Comments

At my second Town of Lamar Council Meeting, my colleagues outvoted me 4-1 to renew Lamar’s mask ordinance for another sixty days.  They also shot down my proposal that we reopen council meetings to the public, who can currently only attend online via Facebook Live and Zoom.

That’s precisely what I expected to happen, and I appreciate their reasons:  concerns about safety, etc.  The big, lingering question—one I can’t get out of my mind—is “when does it end?”  At what point are we safe “enough” to remove our masks?

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