{"id":1063,"date":"2008-09-11T13:40:06","date_gmt":"2008-09-11T20:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1063"},"modified":"2008-09-11T13:45:18","modified_gmt":"2008-09-11T20:45:18","slug":"comment-on-a-vcs-post-community-organization-is-a-conservative-notion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/09\/11\/comment-on-a-vcs-post-community-organization-is-a-conservative-notion\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment on A VC&#8217;s post, &#8220;Community Organization Is A Conservative Notion&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reblogging a comment I made earlier today to Fred Wilson&#8217;s post, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.avc.com\/a_vc\/2008\/09\/community-organ.html\">Community Organization Is A Conservative Notion<\/a>, in part because I want to test the disqus.com functionality and whether it works with my blog.\u00a0 (Update: Harvard Weblogs denied disqus.com access, so I&#8217;m putting this in by hand.)<\/p>\n<p>Read Fred&#8217;s post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.avc.com\/a_vc\/2008\/09\/community-organ.html\">here<\/a> &#8212; there is now a massively long comments thread, mine is just one tiny particle.  I hesitated for a while before posting, because frankly I&#8217;m sick of this topic (or rather, it makes me sick).  It seems like we&#8217;re skidding toward stupid faster and faster, and it&#8217;s not a joy ride from where I sit.\u00a0 Everything anyone says (including me) seems to accelerate the skids.<\/p>\n<p>The commenter prior to me wrote, &#8220;There have not been conservatives in the GOP in a long time.&#8221;  That&#8217;s what my &#8220;Bingo&#8221; remark is aimed at.<\/p>\n<p>And then I go off with the rest of it&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Bingo.<\/p>\n<p>With her pitbull-with-lipstick joke Palin revealed that she&#8217;s radical and authoritarian.<\/p>\n<p>Radicals don&#8217;t &#8220;conserve.&#8221;  Authoritarians don&#8217;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).<\/p>\n<p>What that means for the rest of us is that we get to stand in the prison house of our &#8220;nature,&#8221; while all around us the world gets an ideological re-fitting.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s nothing conservative about that, imo.  If you&#8217;re a radical who understands human nature as unchanging and unaltered by history, then human nature (and by extension: *humans*) become &#8220;stuff,&#8221; sort of like materiel to be used up or suppressed, but not *conserved*.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;After all, women can always make more humans\/ have more babies, no choice about that!<\/p>\n<p>Individualism, individual liberty, individual freedoms, individual betterment: all subordinate, under radical agendas, and expendable when necessary.<\/p>\n<p>Barbie Doll wasn&#8217;t a mom. Palin is, and I would bet dollars to donuts she raises her family in an authoritarian manner.  I don&#8217;t raise my kids that way, and in my typically wishy-washy namby-pamby &#8220;liberal&#8221; way, I actually am stupid enough to believe that I can contribute to making the world a better place by raising good kids.<\/p>\n<p>What an idiot, eh?<\/p>\n<p>According to Palin, it would be so much better to give strict guidelines, lay down the law, &#8220;clean house,&#8221; and if someone screws up, make them get married &#8230;and start doing the same thing in their own (new) family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><cite>Originally posted as a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.avc.com\/a_vc\/2008\/09\/community-organ.html#comment-2288232\">comment<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/disqus.com\/people\/Yule\/\">Yule Heibel<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/avc.com\">A VC<\/a> using <a href=\"http:\/\/disqus.com\">Disqus<\/a>.<\/cite><\/p>\n<p>Not sure what I would edit if I wanted to&#8230;\u00a0 At some level, I was working out (and coming to a conclusion on) the conundrum that these radical &#8220;conservatives&#8221; (or Rightwingers) are pro-life\/ pro-family and talk a big game around being against &#8220;big government,&#8221; and yet simultaneously come off as so anti-individual, or even anti-individualistic.\u00a0 I think it&#8217;s because for them human life matters firstly as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Materiel\">materiel<\/a>.\u00a0 That&#8217;s why you can have a passle of kids <strong>and<\/strong> run for high office, that&#8217;s why you can be a retard on women&#8217;s rights to choose.\u00a0 The individual matters less.\u00a0 And at the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, Palin has five kids; Clinton has one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reblogging a comment I made earlier today to Fred Wilson&#8217;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.\u00a0 (Update: Harvard Weblogs denied disqus.com access, so I&#8217;m putting this in by hand.) Read Fred&#8217;s post here &#8212; there is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,3021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-us_elections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}