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Comment by dingdingdang | Hacker News Reader

This is such demagogue reasoning that it is hard to know where to begin.

A good indication of something being off is when it is trivial to rewrite the points to support the exact opposite point. I.e.

"Are You A Conservative? The Answer May Surprise You!"

"If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?"

"If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like a conservative! A most basic conservative principle is that there exists an enduring moral order. Thus voluntary community is an important aspect of human life leading to reasonable understandings with each other and to treat each other with dignity and respect."

Etc. etc.

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You assumption that being (the traditional kind of) conservative is the opposite of being an anarchist would be strange to many anarchists. Noam Chomsky has said that he considers himself a conservative in the traditional sense. Also see the essay by the '60s anarchist Paul Goodman called "Notes of a Neolithic Conservative".

I believe the parent comment's point wasn't about conservatives specifically, but rather that you can just change a word or two and insert any ideology you'd like by saying that since $ideology has [insert some words here] and therefore would also form a queue at the bus station.

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. I think this is more an indictment of artificially striated political beliefs than this article. I also believe that most of where conservatives and liberals disagree are in how to deal with exactly the sort of mechanisms that anarchy seems to say are the problems in the first place, i e. Bureaucrats, the military, police, law etc.

You could say the same about ethical theories too. They all have a way of explaining what they would do when confronted with a runaway trolley or some silly thing like that. The fact that all political ideologies have a way of explaining why they would get in a bus queue just shows that asking someone about why they line up for a bus is a good way to find out about how they think about the world politically. It's just using a simple example to illustrate how anarchists make sense of the world. There are many people who (understandably) think that they don't live their life in an "anarchist" way, and this article is just showing people that there is probably a lot about their life which is consistent with anarchism. There is probably also much which is consistent with the principles of other ideologies, but anarchism is one of the least understood, so a simple exercise like this can be informative.

[That being said, as something of an anarchist, I don't share the Graeber's conception of anarchism but that's another issue.]

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