Todd's Mischief Blog

To mangle a phrase from Groundhog Day , well, it's election season...again. While lots of attention gets paid to ads and speeches, debates and town halls, interviews and more ads, not a lot of attention gets paid to candidates' websites. Which is kind of odd this far into the internet age, but also, perhaps not. Since political campaign websites became a thing, they've generally been rather lackluster, reminiscent of the mom and pop business that has a Wix site because they figure they have to in the digital age. The typical campaign website includes ways to donate (of course), ways to volunteer, a newsletter signup, a swag store, and somewhere beneath all that a fairly concise list of the candidate's achievements and policy proposals. What should be the meat-and-potatoes of a campaign is boiled down to a resume-length document that's more fat-and-sugar. This season, the official Joe Biden campaign website ( joebiden.com ) is no different. One is immediately greeted...

 

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 ...

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 t...

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 ...

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Yours truly, the friendliest fox you've ever known, has officially been sent to Twitmo.  I always thought I'd either avoid Twitter jail completely, or totally lose my cool one day and go down in a blaze of glory.  But no... Where did I go wrong? I mean, yeah, I've fallen in with an unsavory crowd of free speechin', gun totin', far alt right neo reactionary red hat conserva trads on Twitter, but that happened a long time ago. What happened lately to push me over the edge? When did I become a threat? It was when I told some rando commie to "Get slapped." That's apparently worth 12 hours in the slammer. And since, y'know, context don't count for shit on Twitter, I figured I'd provide it here, where no one will see it. Now, I'm not a follower of @MattWalshBlog, but he pops up in my feed from time to time. And I couldn't help but click on this disturbing video of a grown adult chasing down and slapping a child. Somehow, my eye...

Both Ron Coleman and Jesse Kelly dropped brilliant insights in the last 24 hours that I think dovetail each other. We keep calling them socialists but they have no interest whatever in seizing the means of production (a concept they have no familiarity with), ending private property (which they love when it's theirs) or even leading the proletariat (whom they openly despise) — Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) November 23, 2021 If you’d like to know why statues matter to the communists and why you shouldn’t grab your ankles when they point out a military base named after a Confederate general, do some reading on Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It will explain WHY they do it. (HINT: It’s not about slavery.) — Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) November 23, 2021 Communists destroy the history of a nation. Lenin did it. Stalin mastered it. Mao was fanatical about it. But why? What sense does it make? A statue of Robert E. Lee? A statue of Jefferson? Fort Bragg? What do they get out of it? — Jesse...

  These are my thoughts in response to a misread question. As they don't pertain to the question actually asked, I won't copy it here. But I felt these observations worth preserving. First we have to decide what we mean by "influence." As a term, I'm sure you know, the concept of the political "right" originates in revolutionary France, where in the National Assembly, supporters of the king sat to the right and supporters of the revolution sat to the left. Suffice it to say, those on the right proved to be less influential than might have benefitted France in the long run. One could look at the history of modern revolutions and come to the conclusion that the right loses all influence once revolution is seriously on the table. Of course, this is mere consistency of terms. Almost by definition, the left is the revolutionary side. Thus, revolutions occur when the right loses most or all of its influence. By that reckoning, the right enjoys influence most o...

I miss old Hollywood, when they were full of original ideas.

But I fixed it. Da Silva, Chantal. (2020, January 29). Activists Erect Billboards Comparing Abortion Bans to Rape Across New Mexico, Saying Both Are About 'Power And Control' https://www.newsweek.com/activists-erect-billboards-comparing-abortion-bans-rape-new-mexico-power-control-1484657

 A while back, I told a friend that I struggle with my NFL fandom because I assume that a lot of the players I admire probably consider me a racist. He immediately pushed back, and maybe he was right. I didn't respond at the time, because it felt like any explanation I gave would sound like McGruber being more racist trying to not be racist. But I think I can explain it better now, with the way things have gone in the United States with Critical Race Theory and Democrats in general. Just recently, the top general in the US said he believed Trump wouldn't step down after losing the 2020 election . This is just one example among dozens of how divided we've gotten in the US along partisan lines.  The more I look into it, the more convinced I am that the "insurrection" on January 6th really was just a protest, not even a riot. I've seen videos of capitol police waving people in through the gates, talking with them calmly, taking pictures with them. I’ve seen vide...

Guest post by Dar One of the problems with socio-political issues in the US is the Right and Left have fundamentally different understandings of basic words. Regarding the "teaching CRT" issue, I think we are running into incompatibility on definitions again.  Allow me to digress: The Left sees "choice" as "total control over all outcomes." As in, "I didn't choose to get pregnant, therefore I should have abortion rights." or "I didn't choose to be poor." They want power to determine outcomes and avoid bad consequences.  The Right sees "choice" as "input" that brings about consequences. If you don't like a certain set of consequences, make different/better choices. You didn't choose to be poor, but you didn't make choices that lead to wealth, so in a way, you did choose to be poor.  There are other words we disagree on. "Access" to the Left means "free and convenient to the user...

Dar observes, "It *feels* like things are getting crazier because we're close to a tipping point where the Leftist propaganda gets widely rejected. It's like we have to try everything else first." I find this very likely—and satisfying—from a theological perspective. Note, when I apply religious ideas to politics, it is only because I see God as the Master of everything. I know what I am about to say isn't exactly mainstream eschatology; I've been chastened by more than on M.Div. for suggesting it, but I think (a) it makes sense and (b) I'm probably just not explaining it in terms an M.Div. would go for. I'm going to assume it is uncontroversial that in the end, God will render a perfect Judgement and restore perfect Justice. But what does this mean? I think the answer has great implications for the so-called Problem of Suffering and the Problem of Free Will. Justice is as much an affair of the heart as of the mind. Perfect justice must needs satisfy b...

There are few topics as perennial on the political right as that of "principles." Sadly, that talk more often has less to do with what principles are and more to do with handwringing over who is abandoning them. If you don't see the irony there, I'll point it out: If you can't name your principles, you've probably lost them. I've written many tweets, threads and emails about principles, mostly as replies. This post is my first attempt to organize them into one place, if not something coherent. Older posts as you go down. ~~~ So many things called "principles" nowadays simply do not fit the definition. Perhaps that is why the word is subject to so many redundant adjectives: "first," "bedrock," "fundamental," "basic." All of these ideas are built into "principles," but people obviously need reminding. To the extent that those professionally engaged in politics show any recognition of the proper sens...

or  How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Hate the Brand It will never cease to amaze me that brand names actually mean something to most people. Sixth grade was the second year in a row where I was the new kid at a new school, and my third time at a new school overall. I wasn't worried. I'd done this before. Up 'til then, I'd never thought twice about things like fashion. It had never come up at my other schools. Now, suddenly, it mattered. If I wasn't the only kid in school without Nikes on his feet, it sure felt like I was. The kids at my new school were downright ravenous about it. The taunting was nonstop. I soon became known as the kid who wore Pamida specials (even though the shoes came from Payless). I thought it would die down, but eventually the bullies at school had me begging Mom and Dad to buy me Nikes. No, they told me, we can't afford shoes like that. But the taunting was relentless and I was soon negotiating for Nikes. It's the only thing I w...