I’m reblogging a comment I made earlier today to Fred Wilson’s post, Community Organization Is A Conservative Notion, in part because I want to test the disqus.com functionality and whether it works with my blog. (Update: Harvard Weblogs denied disqus.com access, so I’m putting this in by hand.)
Read Fred’s post here — there is now a massively long comments thread, mine is just one tiny particle. I hesitated for a while before posting, because frankly I’m sick of this topic (or rather, it makes me sick). It seems like we’re skidding toward stupid faster and faster, and it’s not a joy ride from where I sit. Everything anyone says (including me) seems to accelerate the skids.
The commenter prior to me wrote, “There have not been conservatives in the GOP in a long time.” That’s what my “Bingo” remark is aimed at.
And then I go off with the rest of it…
Bingo.
With her pitbull-with-lipstick joke Palin revealed that she’s radical and authoritarian.
Radicals don’t “conserve.” Authoritarians don’t need to. Authoritarian radicals are more likely to act like supermen (or superwomen) who can reinvent the world, albeit within a limited definition of what they believe to be human nature (immutable).
What that means for the rest of us is that we get to stand in the prison house of our “nature,” while all around us the world gets an ideological re-fitting.
And there’s nothing conservative about that, imo. If you’re a radical who understands human nature as unchanging and unaltered by history, then human nature (and by extension: *humans*) become “stuff,” sort of like materiel to be used up or suppressed, but not *conserved*.
…After all, women can always make more humans/ have more babies, no choice about that!
Individualism, individual liberty, individual freedoms, individual betterment: all subordinate, under radical agendas, and expendable when necessary.
Barbie Doll wasn’t a mom. Palin is, and I would bet dollars to donuts she raises her family in an authoritarian manner. I don’t raise my kids that way, and in my typically wishy-washy namby-pamby “liberal” way, I actually am stupid enough to believe that I can contribute to making the world a better place by raising good kids.
What an idiot, eh?
According to Palin, it would be so much better to give strict guidelines, lay down the law, “clean house,” and if someone screws up, make them get married …and start doing the same thing in their own (new) family.
Originally posted as a comment by Yule Heibel on A VC using Disqus.
Not sure what I would edit if I wanted to… At some level, I was working out (and coming to a conclusion on) the conundrum that these radical “conservatives” (or Rightwingers) are pro-life/ pro-family and talk a big game around being against “big government,” and yet simultaneously come off as so anti-individual, or even anti-individualistic. I think it’s because for them human life matters firstly as materiel. That’s why you can have a passle of kids and run for high office, that’s why you can be a retard on women’s rights to choose. The individual matters less. And at the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, Palin has five kids; Clinton has one.
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I began by defending her from the disgusting attack (mainly on her teenage daughter) by the Daily Kos. But… well, today I heard her on the radio being asked if she lacked experience in foreign policy. Her answer was that she responded to the VP request as one does in the army to a command. “I didn’t blink”. Which didn’t answer the question.
Anyway I think she has travelled abroad more often than Bush had before he became president, but he’s not female and I’m pretty sure that McCain’s “experience” does not qualify him to run the Empire either, but he’s a man and so nobody is questioning it. It is difficult, under the circumstances, to disentangle the critique of her politics (which is valid) from the critique of her sex (which is pervasive). You have made some of the more sensible comments on the topic.