Todd's Mischief Blog

  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...

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...

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...

USA Today confirms something I've been saying on Twitter and this blog for awhile now: "whiteness" (and by extension, it's counterpart "blackness") has nothing to do with skin color.  In the past, I have hedged that observation by saying "almost nothing to do" but that seems unnecessary going forward.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/29/fact-check-warnock-sermon-whiteness-condemns-racism/4008303001/  https://web.archive.org/web/20201229212656if_/https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/29/fact-check-warnock-sermon-whiteness-condemns-racism/4008303001/ https://archive.is/OIzqx

Found on Twitter. Wish I'd thought of it. 

Just today, I stumbled upon this two-year old thread that is such an incredible insight into many of the same topics I explore, I have to commandeer it for my collection and future reference.  All credit to Jeff Stoner @Stoner_68  [ original ] I now realize why liberals believe that everyone to right of Stalin is an actual Nazi: They think the right is intersectional. /1 The left is intersectional. If you support a liberal cause, you must support every adjacent cause. Those who don't are driven out. Liberal activists jostle to get their pet causes adjacent to the most popular/protected/well funded causes. /2 To wit, in order to be a good feminist, one must also be a trans ally, an environmentalist, a BLM ally, etc. This is how we got pro-abortion evangelicals. They have to toe the feminist line, or lose thier cred with the minorities. Intersectionalism deranges institutions. 3/ But here's the thing. Leftists assume that right-wingers do this too. They imagine that the KKK ...

It's an old debate over whether red states or blue states pay in more than their fair share of taxes verses what they get back. I've had the same discussion enough times that I want to preserve my usual arguments here for quick reference. SALT (state and local tax) deductions are a de facto subsidy paid by low-tax red states to high-tax blue states to make the high state rates feel about one-third lower. Essentially, money that would have gone to the feds from a blue state gets shifted directly to that state rather than make the round-trip. But that doesn't get counted in the transfer. One counterargument to this is that a state that taxes its people more to pay for its own programs is taking care of its own and doesn't need to ask for money from the government. But that sidesteps the fact that, to do it that way, someone else needs to pick up the slack. In effect, Texans pay more in federal taxes so Californians can pay less of what ultimately ends up in West Virgi...

Thanks to @Gitabushi  for  inspiring  this post. [ alt link ]  The only way to understand the Left is to get into their headspace, which is a completely foreign place to the average conservative or even centrist thinker. I'm not so good at leading people down the path, so I drop little nuggets and hope it attracts people who "get" it. "The Left can't discern" "There are problems on both sides: problems on the right and problems in America" "BLM has almost nothing to do with dark skinned people." I know there are others, but those come top of mind. In simplest lay terms, this all means that there is a double-standard, which folks on the right have known, but I don't think really understood. (I certainly didn't until sometime mid-Obama.) The Rightist way of thinking is very formal. Righties get caught up on logical fallacies and whatnot. Pipsqueaks like Ben Shapiro (luv ya, Ben) get airtime. To the Right, a double-standard is ...

 by @Gitabushi Two ways to look at recent Democrat criticisms of violence: 1) hypocrisy: They saw it was hurting them in the polls, so they started criticizing it and trying to hang it on the GOP. 2) Delusional honesty: the riots are not violence, but people defending property or Trump is. They can both be true, I guess. But let's look at the evidence for the latter. Biden denounced violence, said Trump never has. Biden also didn't mention BLM or Anti-FA*.  *Anti-FirstAmendment Well, Trump has never denounced Kyle defending himself or the paintball conservatives going into Portland. Biden has. Cuz that's the only thing he sees as violent. The Left sees what they call as Justified Violence as Expression. They see anyone criticizing their Justified Violence as Expression as violence. Remember "Silence is Violence"? Their violence is expression. Normie expression is violence. They *believe* this. Based on their formulation and view, the only violence that needs to be...

In this first conception, the alt-center is illustrated as a "third-wing" as opposed to an actual center. This next series of diagrams represents each position as sliders. If these were animated (and maybe I'll do that eventually) the left, right, and center sliders would fluctuate somewhat over time, while the alt-center sliders would swing wildly from end to end.