Conservapedia: more interesting than it seems at first glance?

Unfortunately, no. Conservapedia, the Fox News of the internet encyclopedia world, has been making the rounds of the blogosphere as the butt of jokes for a few weeks now. Apparently, it attracts a goodly mix of a) conservatives, b) mean-spirited trolls and vandals, c) well-meaning non-conservatives who nonetheless want to ensure at least a modicum of factuality, and d) mean-spirited “parody vandals”, who do their best to blur the lines between the ridiculous things some American conservatives think and the ridiculous things liberals think conservatives think.

I thought I had found a particularly inspired case of class d) in this version of the “Conservative” article. As an explanation of the conservative trait of ” skepticism about the idea of progress”, the article asserts that it “runs against the grain of Hegel-based worldviews that assume that merely ripping pages off a calendar gets us closer to the eschatological kewpie doll at the End of Days.” What that means, I’m not precisely sure, but it’s evocative and funny, with a great mix of high brow and kitsch. Unfortunately, it turns out this is actually a particularly uninspired case of class a). The whole discussion is plagiarized from this National Review article. Arg!!! Fooled again! Sometimes it can be so hard to tell a liberal parody of American conservatism from a self-parody of American conservatism.