Tag: race riots

Postmodern Iconoclasm

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Statues are coming down all over the United States.  A few years ago, during our nation’s last bout of racialist temper tantrums and looting, the calls were for Confederate monuments to come down, on the premise that our nation shouldn’t celebrate “losers” and “traitors.”  For an historically illiterate population that just knows that “slavery was because of bad white Southerners,” it was a compelling, if ultra-simplistic and stupid, case.

At the time, many conservatives pointed out that, hey, if you start tearing down statues of former slave owners, you’re inevitably going to move onto George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Should we really judge great men of the past solely based on one practice, one that we now acknowledge as immoral, but that was widespread—and, let’s not forget, practiced globally, with particular zest and gusto among Muslims—during their lives?  And let’s not forget that many slave owners wished to see the ultimate demise of the “peculiar institution.”

What we’re seeing now is an orgy of presentism, one that fits nicely with the orgy of animalistic rioting.  These ignorant, borderline illiterate (they are, in fact, excessively educated in Grievance and Victim Studies, but uneducated in actual knowledge and Truth) progressives and their pawns live in a perpetual present, in which the only good is whatever the social justice commissars decided at the last struggle session.  “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

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TPP Summertime Update

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Even with cities burning and an election mere months away, the summertime doldrums have hit.  “Doldrums” isn’t exactly the right word, as things are going pretty well, but the long (for me) Father’s Day weekend distracted me from the woes of the world.

There’s also the issue of unlimited free time that is summer vacation.  Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining—but when I have one slender hour in the day to get my blog post done, I tend to be much more productive and focused.  It takes pressure to make diamonds—or 600-word blog posts full of sweeping generalizations.

I’ve fallen a bit behind on SubscribeStar content.  I still owe $5 subs a couple of editions of Sunday Doodles, which I will have up soon.  All subscribers missed out on a SubscribeStar Saturday post, which I will also attempt to make up soon.

History of Conservative Thought is going well, and we have two more meetings before the Fourth of July break.  This Wednesday we’ll be reading documents from John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists/Northern Conservatives.  Next week we’ll dive into Southern Conservatism with John Randolph of Roanoke and (possibly) some excerpts from Richard Weaver‘s Southern Essays.

So that’s it for a quick Monday update.  Be on the lookout for more substance tomorrow.

—TPP

Lazy Sunday LXV: Rioting

The Portly Politico13 Comments

The rioting and looting in major American cities continues as mobs continue to demand—and get—the “defunding” (effectively, the abolition) of police departments and occupy city blocks as “autonomous zones.”  It’s a dark time for the United States, but we’ve been through worse and have survived.  I’ve been a bit blackpilled these past couple of weeks with everything going on, but it’s important to remember that God is in control.

It’s also important that we don’t forget about these violations when the Leftist mobs inevitably (one hopes) disintegrate in a couple of weeks or so.  As such, this week’s Lazy Sunday looks back at some of my recent posts on the looters:

  • “Disorder” – Americans love to focus on our rights and our freedoms, but we often do so at the cost of understanding our obligations that flow from those rights.  We also tend to neglect that Burkean wisdom that liberty, to be truly liberty, must be ordered.  One of the most shocking elements of these riots is the continued violation of legitimate authority—of order.  The disorder and chaos these looters have unleashed threatens not just real people and property, but the very foundations of a stable, free society.
  • “Lessons from the Riots” – In school, occasionally some student will have the perennial insight that “we can’t all get in trouble.”  As usual, the Code of the School Yard has some kernel of Truth to it.  The Leftists have demonstrated that their sheer numbers (as well as having all of officialdom on their side in some of these cities) have made them somewhat impervious to police action.  But a determined show of resistance from conservatives can bolster the police and keep wild Lefties at bay.
  • “Dignity” – Never grovel to the Left.  It does not work, and they will only demand more.  Maintain your dignity.  Apologizing to the Left is like being a medieval flagellant, constantly whipping yourself in a vain attempt at progressive salvation.
  • “SubscribeStar Saturday – Leftist Utopia” – The “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or “CHAZ,” is an example of Leftist mob foolishness that is so cartoonish, it’s as if a conservative created it as a rhetorical straw man in some collegiate debate.  Unfortunately, this cartoonish nightmare is all too real—and the animation is coming our way if we don’t act now.

Well, that’s it for this Sunday.  Hopefully it’s not too much of a downer.  On the plus side, the horrid humidity here in South Carolina has broken, at least briefly, so it’s possible to go outside again without immediately gaining a dewy aura of salty sweat.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Leftist Utopia

The Portly Politico9 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.  NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

As the nation continues to burn and authorities cede ground, rioters in Seattle, Washington have established the so-called “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or “CHAZ,” an area of around six-to-ten city blocks in downtown Seattle in which the mob rules.  Seattle municipal officials have essentially given up the area to the rioters, allowing them to setup their own Leftist utopia.

Besides representing the wholesale abandonment of authority, law, and order, it’s also a fascinating bit of political science.  What happens when a group of ideological hooligans are allowed carte blanche to run a section of a city?

The results are in, and it doesn’t look good for CHAZ.

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

If the South Woulda Won

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Amid all the upheaval of the past few weeks, conservatives are wondering, “What next?” and “Where did we go wrong?”  There are multiple answers to both questions.  To the latter, there are the familiar suspects:  the 1960s, the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, the influence of the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism, etc.

One possible answer—one that’s been pushed aside in our historically incompetent and racially hypersensitive era—is the victory of the Union in the American Civil War.  I wrote extensively about “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” a few weeks ago; in that essay, I wrote that

…[T]he biggest legacy of the American Civil War was that it marked the victory of a certain Yankee political philosophy and political economy over the rest of the country. The North and the South took fundamentally different views of the world….

…[T]he larger point was that the South existed in a far more traditional version of the world than the Yankee.

The Yankee, instead, came from a Puritanical/Calvinist perspective. Weaver argued that the Southerner recognized and named evil, but rather than try to stamp it out—thereby breeding a multitude of smaller, more insidious evils—he sought to fence it off, to mark it. The Northern Puritan sought to eradicate evil–thus the radical abolitionist impulse (in the context of the Civil War), on down to the modern-day “Puritanism” of the SJWs, for whom nothing is ever good enough.

Immediately after the Civil War, the South, being out of national politics in the Reconstruction Era, could not stop the political-economic alliance of the North and West, which put into place high protective tariffs and expanded federal authority….

And so on.  Essentially, the victory of the Union, which brought many material blessings, and the moral good of abolishing slavery, also brought with it the totalizing influence of Yankee imperialism and the erosion of legitimate States’ rights at the expense of expanding federal power.

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Lessons from the Riots

The Portly Politico9 Comments

A bit H/T today to photog at Orion’s Cold Fire, whose blogging and re-reporting on the riots have helped me keep abreast of events amid my illness.  I’ve linked to several of his posts throughout as reference.

One thing that’s struck me about the rioting is the utter lack of response from authorities in large cities.  It seems that the prudent response should have been, from the moment the first brick flew through the window of a Wendy’s, an overwhelming yet restrained show of force.  Make some arrests, crack some skulls judiciously when warranted, and send the clear signal that rioting is not allowed.

Instead, blue cities are completely kowtowing to the rioters.  Minneapolis’s City Council voted—ludicrously!—to disband the Minneapolis Police Department.  The mayor of Minneapolis—a radical Leftist—has washed his hands of the looting, essentially endorsing it.  In Massachusetts, the Attorney General has justified rioting as a positive good, saying, “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

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Disorder

The Portly Politico11 Comments

It’s been a scary week in the United States as the nation’s cities engage in an orgy of violence and looting in reaction to the death of George Floyd.  From all accounts, it seems that Floyd’s death was unwarranted, but my experience with these situations is that more evidence quietly appears after the fact that breaks down the “gentle giant” narrative (see also: Ahmed Arbury, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc., etc., etc.).

Regardless, the reaction from blacks and white Leftists is completely reprehensible and evil.  One man’s (allegedly) unjustified death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer does not justify a week of pillaging and death.

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