Todd's Mischief Blog

This will be a post that I add to as more thoughts come   The GOP’s morality is a confessional morality. The highest good is to attest to what is good. Whether what is attested to ever follows is, at best, immaterial. At worst, failure to attain becomes a moral good, as it provides more opportunity for ever greater attestations!

Stepping into this subject late because I wanted to see how things played out before I stepped into anything icky. I'm glad I did. Also, I wanted to better understand the so-called concessions McCarthy made to get the speakership. But, more than anything, I’m on so many levels of disinformation, I don’t believe any of the framing around the 15 votes for Speaker of the House. Before I say more, I want to lay down that I simply do not see how the dustup damages the GOP in any sense with independents or winnable Democrats. This is inside baseball that those sorts don't even follow, much less remember two Novembers from now. The importance of the speakership vote can be and has been very easily overstated. Moreover, nothing about the vote was ever going to do diminish the prominence of figures like Matt Gaetz or Lauren Boebert, just as it didn’t raise the profiles of Michael Cloud or Anna Paulina Luna.  If the 20 holdouts had only gone for two or three rounds—that is, if McCarthy

Scripture and the Big Screen may offer some answers.  Recently, I was mulling over the not-inaccurate stereotype of powerful men carrying on with subordinate women. Some popular forms of this trope include: the corporate executive who takes his secretary as a mistress the college professor who is sleeping with his coed grad-student assistant the manor lord slipping behind the curtains with the scullery maid Then today, I saw an accurate tweet from Andrew Stratelates: Men don’t really care if the female lead is that attractive. As long as she’s a badass. https://t.co/J0Q06pbC7N pic.twitter.com/KZlkFYU7ni — Andrew Stratelates—Trad Anglican ⚓️ (@AStratelates) October 17, 2022 If the tweet is not visible (or deleted) Andrew responds to a post asserting that chuds only love strong female characters when they are conventionally attractive and conform to the male gaze by posting posters of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. In the pictures, neither woman is

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Despite its rise to popular prominence by way of a joke book , the concept of Hanlon's Razor has won credibility among many very serious people. No doubt, some who cite it with reverence believe the maxim to be coined by a respected philosophical thinker and not, as the case seems to be, some rando from Scranton.   The adage as made popular in the early days of the internet goes like this:  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.  The base notion holds some truthiness, no doubt. Winston Churchill once made a similar comment regarding the disposition of Charles De Gaulle. Then again, Churchill was a famous quipster, and no doubt intended the observation as such. My case against Hanlon's Razor isn't against a wry quip about human nature. After all, anything funny is most likely true. Rather, my issue is with the way an easy jibe has been elevated to a heuristic in absolute terms, a

It's not "ego." It's a claim that you encounter a lot—an insult really—that people are buying bigger and bigger trucks to compensate for… something. Here's one particularly cringeworthy example, because the person making it doesn't seem to realize the go-kart he's praising doesn't meet US emissions standards.  whenever americans say that they *need* a massive pickup truck that gets 12mpg just show them the Subaru Sambar utility vs. ego pic.twitter.com/NqexDbQcok — sam (@sam_d_1995) May 11, 2022 In response, a lot of people will defend their big truck purchase by saying they need a larger vehicle for their family, their business, or just because they like it. And to an extent, market forces are partly responsible for the increase in truck sizes, particularly when it comes to features like crew cabs. But it turns out that even a lot of people who like the big trucks don't know the full story of how their trucks got so big. The rest of the story