there's a difference between how one talks about conservatives and idiocy like this "encylopedia"--which the more i look at, the more i am convinced has to be a joke. if you are concerned about stereotypes, jorgelito, i would expect that you'd be kinda impatient with stuff like this that plays to them, that reinforces them. the "encyclopedia" claims to speak to and for conservatives---and as if the entries were not adequate proof of the structural idiocy of this project, the entry about wikipedia should do it:
Wikipedia - Conservapedia
personally, i don't care if there are idiots. i don't care if there are politics addressing idiots orchestrated by idiots.
i have a big problem with the way populist conservatism operates in the states, and this nitwit anti-wikipedia is a good expression of why.
i care because shit like this, if it is taken seriously, makes political debate impossible, and by making debate impossible it makes democracy impossible. there has to be some agreed-upon standards of what constitutes information--it is simply not the case that because there is inevitably distortion introduced into any analysis by virtue of analysis being done by a human being with personal and intellectual committments that there is therefore nothing *but* distortions so that it is ok to set about generating infotainment based on nothing *but* distortion, which you then defend as your "opinion" or your "belief"---there is a world and information refers to that world, and as problematic as this sometimes is, that world is not entirely in your head, and it should not matter whether you believe in jesus or think markets are natural formations like rocks and so are therefore rational--there *still* should be--has to be---basic agreement about what constitutes SOMETHING about information so that there can be debate/exchange at all.
the populist segment of the american conservative coalition that is not about that.
it claims to speak for all conservatives--and the way the conservative media apparatus operates, you'd think that this nonsense DOES speak for all conservatives. it is about creating a self-enclosed and self-referential world, a kind of fantasy-substitute for the world that other people know about. that has never seemed to me to square with anything about traditional conservatism--which was, back in the day, ABOUT the concrete world and which opposed "liberalism" and other such movements for being about abstraction---this has much more in common with types of populist reactionary movements, with fascist antecedents. it is a dangerous phenomenon.
traditional conservative writers--you know, edmund burke, in some places tocqueville--maistre (who i like because of his wackiness and because through that a very keen intelligence works)--i find interesting and instructive sometimes---in my 3-d life, i have no problem with most economic conservatives that i know--i don't agree with them--but at least we can talk about that, and other things, and know that we're talking about the same thing--the world outside our heads--even as we disagree.
i think that the republicans--as an aspect of the american right--made a huge mistake when they crawled into bed with the christian coalition, when they started opening themselves up to more whacked out forms of far right politics, when they started shifting their understanding of the center consistently rightward in order to rationalize doing so. the populist right owes more to poujadisme than to burke. it is a dangerous formation.
this "encyclopedia" is a fucking joke.
it has to be.
it's scary to think it isn't.