No, not the movie, although giant ants will show up later.
I was enjoying my morning open-eye with some nutritionally incorrect belly-filler when I ran across
Driftglass's post, "
Today in Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson," which contains a quotation from the said Mr. Gerson:
Conservatives latched on to the GOP as an instrument to express their ideals. Now loyalty to party is causing many to abandon their ideals. Conservatism is not misogyny. Conservatism is not nativism and protectionism. Conservatism is not religious bigotry and conspiracy theories. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual and anti-science.
(Original
here.)
As it was for some of Drifty's commenters, so for me: Oh,
really?
Really? Oh, Mr. Gerson,
you need to get out more. (Ideally, that sentence would have a link to conservatives being misogynist, nativist, protectionist, bigoted, conspiracy-mongering, and pig-ignorant, but Breitbart.com and nationalreview.com get enough traffic.) Seriously, that's what conservatives are
known for. The people on the left espousing that sort of thing are few, and I can't think of any examples outside of Josef Stalin, who has been dead and discredited even by hard-core Marxists for the last 60+ years.
Technically, I should be a conservative. I'd prefer not being socked with change first thing in the morning, I like the people in charge to have ethics/morals, I remember a Golden Age (your Golden Age may vary). There are times when I get the sense that humans have a propensity, nay, a
bent, for
stupid behavior only curbable by laws (and punishment), other humans, and operant conditioning.
Difference is that I don't think people are incurable. I suspect they'd
prefer to be; change is hard and many people don't have even the desire.
Most of us do not throw our feces at strangers now
except on the Internet because we were trained not to do that. Many of us have not figured that women are people (and that includes a not inconsiderable number of women). We
have developed more sophisticated methods of murder
and more sophisticated ways of saving life. We are nowhere near the Kingdom of God.
So. My actual beef with the conservative tendency is personal, too, but mostly I am not interested in returning to the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century. I don't need the hypocrisy, the misogyny, the bigotry, or the twisted anti-Communism (the usual disclaimer: I
grew up with virulent anti-Communism. It was an American Thing in the '50s and '60s. I still don't want to live under a Communist regime. And I'm still down with the idea that, say, the gap between rich and poor does not need to be the size of the Grand Canyon. Deal.), and conservatives don't really seem to have anything to add to the modern discourse except the word "No." (But they'll still use modern communication devices. Go figure.)
I'm willing to let them go off to palisaded enclaves where they can mumble among themselves, but they seem to want to run
my life.
No.
Susan of Texas (
The Hunting of the Snark) calls out Ross Douthat, who wrote an apologia column in the
New York Times (link for documentation purposes only) which both
she and
Yastreblyansky have well and truly horsewhipped in the last several days. She's had enough, though, and is now
expressing her opinion of the scribblings of Mr. Douthat pungently. One might say
Rudely. Warning: Adult language is used:
In the end, the only thing conservatives have to sell is racism.
Conservatives tried to pretend they were selling firm morals, but since they were lying the truth was eventually revealed.
[...]
Actually, no. Douthat is trying to switch the dialogue away from conservative racism by trolling liberals. Liberals owe bigots nothing and should offer bigots nothing. That is painfully obvious but that would be the end of Douthat's career, which is based on religious, racial, and class bigotry. But mostly racism. So Douthat must find a way to convince liberals to give racists respect and a place at the table of public opinion, instead of telling them to fuck off as they should.
Seriously. I joke about reactionaries wanting to restore the Bourbons in France, but you have to remember that their idea of Eutopia (spelling deliberate) is a monarchy in which they are nobles and all others are peasantry. And we have enough high fantasy novels as it is.
(There was other stuff, but this got
long. There should be footnotes [squeaky voice: "No, not footnotes!"] but most of the assertions are easily checked with Google or older posts here and too many other blogs to mention. There's iced tea [unsweetened] in the fridge.)
