Todd's Mischief Blog

Frankly, it's criminal that SCOTUS doesn't have a daytime round-table talk show. ~~~ Feminist: "Work sucks!" Nobody: "..." Feminist: "It must be because I'm a woman!" ~~~ 🏳️‍⚧️: “I was born this way.” Reality: “But you weren’t.” ~~~ In a way, everyone who has died since January 6 has died as a result of the insurrection. ~~~ Very unfortunate when the source of your conspiracy theory is the truth. ~~~ You may not like it, but this is what de-escalation looks like. ~~~ When you declare the police the bad guys, only the bad guys will join the police.  ~~~ I don't personally like Texas, but I recognize the need for Texas. ~~~ What we are witnessing across-the-board is an effort to push the adage of "history is written by the victors" to its end by simply declaring victory by writing a history. ~~~ When anyone says "I ♥ Public Schools" what they're really saying is  "I ♥ Systemic Racism" ~~~ It’s risky to start...

John Hayward, a.k.a. @Doc_0 , writer of thought-provoking Twitter threads, has been on a roll lately with examinations of how Democrats' methods of anarcho-tyranny come down squarely on the middle class. (Quick note, as I use it, this includes the working class.) I could easily post dozens of tweets from the thread, but I think this one really sums his thoughts up:  And as you might have noticed after the Year of the Pandemic, the Left wants Americans to live in fear. They hate red-state middle class communities where everyone feels secure and happy, insulated from the social crises the Left seeks to exploit for power. — John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 21, 2021 To read just a sampling of Hayward's thoughts on the subject, see  here , here , and here .  Hayward writes in an aggressive, fast-paced style that seizes attention and gets his readers nodding along. I enjoy his observations very much and and happy to share them. At the same time, I'm gifted (cursed) with a menta...

Late thoughts on the George Floyd/Derek Chauvin thing. NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with René Girard’s insights into the scapegoat mechanism, I'll probably be talking right past you. For a very  brief introduction, see here . If you have a long drive ahead of you, the CBC did a series on Girard that is well-received by scholars. I've linked to the mp3 files below:  Part 1  |  Part 2  |  Part 3  |  Part 4  |  Part 5 (If I were you, I'd download them, as the internet isn't nearly as forever as some claim it to be.) What does the scapegoat mechanism have to do with George Floyd and Derick Chauvin? While examples of the scapegoat mechanism abound, in this case I see a particularly illustrative example of how this mechanism, which is already very wrong in a moral sense, can go wrong further. Insistences that Floyd was a scapegoat for white supremacy or Chauvin a scapegoat for racial grievances are both are misapplications of the term. A scape...

People often like to ask what has been the biggest change of opinion you've had on a major topic. For myself, after coming to accept that hotdogs are in fact sandwiches, I would say my biggest shift is in how I regard corporations.  I used to be sold on corporations as private businesses. But really, corporations are government creations. I knew this for a long time before I eventually understood it. If government is prone to treating adults like children, it is equally prone to treating corporations like adults. But really, corporations are the children of government. This new understanding didn't turn me anti-corporate, and I certainly don't want to do away with corporations. Their benefits are indisputable, especially the liability protections they provide to individuals who create jobs and provide goods and services that make society function. Still, while men may be endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, that same Creator did not create corporations.  I real...

 If you assume people are liars, then you have to assume nothing works The above graphic is making the rounds on twitter. I came across it from Kyle Becker, who elaborates thusly: Good morning, mask fanatics. Take a good look at this chart. Blue are mask mandate states, red are *free states.* This is called *NO CORRELATION.* That means your mask mandates have no statistically significant effect fighting COVID. Just thought you should know.🔻 pic.twitter.com/StS4bU1wuq — Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) April 16, 2021 This, of course, meets with the usual challenges from pro-maskers. What counts as a mask mandate? What timeframe is this? How do we even know what percentage of people wore masks?  It's that last one that tears the challenger's entire argument apart. There are only two ways to get that information: observation or survey. Realistically, survey is really the only way to go. Yes, there could be people on corners in cities and towns across America acting like traffic ...

 Accept you child for who they are, not for who they say they are. ~~~ Christianity offers forgiveness to promote social change. CRT imposes guilt to coerce social change. In that, CRT is decidedly anti-Christian. ~~~ You can be anti-racist and still be racist. ~~~ Dear Sir: You have been identified as an individual who poses a potential risk to public health-safety. In order to fulfill our mission of maintaining safe and healthy spaces, you are no longer permitted access to WELL Certified sites. Thank you for your cooperation. International WELL Building Institute ~~~ Sneaking up on a kid playing Oculus is going to take a long time to get old.  ~~~ I don't understand what I'm reading. It must be hate speech. ~~~ @mmeJen asks , "When does politeness become deception?" @MTMehan replies , "When you lie." My thoughts: I think Matt is right, as long as we are clear what we mean by "lie." It's not as simple as falsehood, because we tolerate a lot of...

 Well... maybe two. I'm feeling rather optimistic today. And when I tell you why, at first you're going to think I'm crazy. But then (hopefully) you'll see what I mean.  For the past 14 months or more, the nation and the world have been in the grips of not one, but two moral panics. And as I look back at previous moral panics, I can't say that I see any time before when there have been two going at the same time.  The first panic is COVID-19 which, make no mistake, is first and foremost a moral panic. I'm not denying that there is a public health aspect to it, but the way the pandemic has played out in both the press and politics has been to assign good and bad labels based not on health outcomes, but on which playbook they choose to follow. Put more clearly: what's "good" and what's "bad" were both decided before anyone determined what worked.  That's how you end up with California and Florida having similar COVID-19 case rates, ...

Author's note: I dream every night. I don't know if that's common or not. I've heard many people report that they seldom or never dream. (I've heard it's a bad sign to never dream, but perhaps they merely mean they "never" dream.) Most of my dreams fade as soon as I wake up, and most of the ones that linger don't particularly deserve to. But I have a handful of dreams that stay with me after years and years. This dream is not one of them. This one I had last night. Maybe I should jot down some of the other ones, too. In my dream, I was reading a book. Or rather, I was following along in a book as the book's author read it to a group of us in a classroom setting. (I can't say if I was my younger self or just happened to be in a classroom.) I remember, I had barely made it to the reading on time, having decided at the last minute to forgo a stop for ice cream.  The book was a very slim volume, and the author was proud of that. The exact title...

Public policy is only as good as public compliance. I suspect govts have recommended about twice as much as what needs to be done because they expect people will do about half of what they are told to do. Do I think this is good policy? Absolutely not! It undermines long-term trust for short-term results. I also think it has resulted in a caution-spiral. But it does mean that you can relax a bit when people around you don't follow the rules to the letter. This bungled policy approach has led us to a strange place where officials are urging the public to get a vaccine that they (the officials) say is ineffective. But the public doesn't dare repeat what officials say about the vaccine. That would be anti-vax conspiracy stuff.

Trump proved how easy  it is to be a good POTUS: just put the interests of the US lower and middle class first. That's it. The conservative pundit class has done an exemplary job over decades of convincing the middle class that their interests are opposed to those of the lower class. Their purgation from the right, started under Trump, if completed, could be the most consequential thing that happens in the 21st century. The way forward for the GOP is a political alliance between the lower class and middle class, with the middle class accepting and promoting the lower class moving up as a plus for everyone. This isn't exactly "a rising tide lifts all boats" but it is a manifestation of it. This path forward means, first and foremost, taking on a new understanding of the relationship between lower and middle class. Too often, this is defined purely on an economic basis. Someone will always  be in the lowest 20%. But there is no reason why the difference between the bott...

How do you do, fellow kids? I'm no whipper-snapper, but I'm still hip and I can pick up the lingo that the kids are laying down. The kids these days, they keep talking about "based." Based this, based that, based stickman , based mom . You get the picture. What does it mean?  Essentially, "based" is the counterpart to "woke." As an in-group term, they both describe one who "gets it." Another way to understand it is that both the based and the woke would regard the other as cringe. But it's even more fun than that: "Based," as used above, comes from "basehead," meaning someone who freebases cocaine. The term was used frequently in rap, where the meaning shifted from getting high to merely acting high or eccentric, to not caring what anyone else thinks, and eventually meaning simply being true to oneself, exemplified in the self-bestowed nickname of rapper Lil B, "Based God."  Insofar as "based" m...

Woke rhetoric is always conflationary. If a word has more than one meaning, the Woke mean them both, always, all the time, but mostly whatever they need it to mean right now. If the sentence they just uttered requires an alternative meaning in the next moment, it has it.  The Woke only mean what they say when they say it. Afterward, they might have meant something else entirely, if that's what's required. "Whiteness" and "Blackness" have obvious racial overtones where the quality or state of being white or black is identified as racial. But the Woke have been smuggling in these "cognitive" definitions for some time.  A couple recent examples: the infamous Smithsonian NMAAHC poster and the subtle shift from "Black Lives Matter" to "Black and Trans Lives Matter" and then back to simply "Black Lives Matter."  Click to enlarge To explain the 2nd example: by adding "Trans" to the mantra-like slogan, an association...