Exhuming McCarthy

For all of the faults of Wikipedia, it's a marvelous demonstration of the power of the hive-mind of the Internet. It really is an impressive achievement. One way to step back and appreciate that is to compare it to its latest imitator, the Schlafly-spawn's "Conservapedia."

Conservapedia is old news in the blogosphere, but it's back in the headlines thanks to this week's Los Angeles Times article.

It's kind of fun to alternate between the two sites, comparing entries. For example, here's a link to Wikipedia's exhaustive entry on The X-Files. And here, reprinted in its entirety, is the Conservapedia entry:

The X-Files was a television program on Fox about two FBI detectives who investigated the occult. One of them was named Fox Mulder, the other was named Dana Scully. The former was played by David Duchovny, the latter by Gillian Anderson.

That entry is listed under Conservapedia's category "Broadcasting," which contains 24 other articles on TV shows and TV networks and one on Katie Couric. (This arbitrary list has to be seen to be believed, but it does perhaps provide a window into the peculiar tastes of the right-wing homeschoolers who sketch out much of the site's content.)

If the X-Files comparison seems too low-brow, try something else:

• Shakespeare: Conservapedia; Wikipedia

• String theory: Con; Wiki

• Frederick Douglass: Con; Wiki

• Henri Matisse: Con; Wiki

Let's be charitable and try a few that ought to be easier territory for the Conservapediaphiles:

• Ronald Reagan: Con; Wiki

• Phyllis Schlafly: Con; Wiki

• Homeschooling: Con; Wiki

Even on their home turf, the Conservapedia entries are short and shoddy imitations of the Wikipedia entries.

Meanwhile, the monkey wrench gangs have been hard at work, and an entertaining "watch" site -- RationalWiki -- has arisen, with a delightful "Best of ... collection.

The stupid on display here is a source of endless amusement. But while smarter monkeys might have made for a less laughably embarrassing site, I've come to believe that the whole enterprise was conceptually doomed. C-pedia's "About page suggests it is intended as a conservative alternative to Google and Wikipedia. That's just not possible.

The cooperative, democratic, open-source ethos of Google and Wiki is antithetical to the supposedly conservative values espoused by the C-pedia's contributors. The original is based on the idea that all of us, together, know more than any of us individually does. The "alternative" is based on the idea that some ideas are forbidden and must be censored. The model for the Conservapedia's form of collaboration isn't so much Wikipedia as it is one of those totalitarian youth clubs in which children are commissioned to report subversive comments by parents or teachers.

Thomas Cahill's pop-history How the Irish Saved Civilization recounts the role that medieval monks and scribes played in preserving the West's knowledge of history, science, art and literature throughout the Dark Ages until, one day, the time was ripe to bring it forth again to help usher in the Renaissance. The sense one gets from C-pedia is that of a group of scribes working to do the opposite -- to reduce and eliminate much of what we've learned so that, one day, the Dark Ages can be reborn.

Comments

[the opoponax]

There's something distinctly Newspeakish about a lot of those linked articles.

Which is, of course, exactly what Conservapedia is -- Newspeak for paranoid conservatives who worry that if they don't have their own parochial online wikified encyclopedia, they might accidentally stumble upon a piece of information that shatters their delicate little worldview.

Interesting that Conservopedia attempts to paint Shakespeare as a "rags to riches" "pulled up by his bootstraps" type. His father was a prosperous burgher and prominent local official, and his mother was of the gentry. hardly an illiterate peasant. not to mention that theatre at that time had nowhere near the high-art respectability it enjoys today -- Ben Jonson was the adopted son of a bricklayer, Kit Marlowe was a shoemaker's son, and one of my favorite little bits of Shakespeare in Love involves the young John Webster, who is portrayed as an idler and ratcatcher in the film (no idea whether that resembles truth or not, though his parents were a coachmaker and the daughter of a blacksmith). So it would seem not uncommon for playwrights of the time to have come from the middle/working class. even a lot of the university educated playwrights of the time attended as the equivalent of scholarship students.

[the opoponax]

oh, this is rich, from Tsar:

"The people of Russia discontinued the institution of tsars in 1918 with the death of Nikolai II and his family."

Yeah. Totally. Nicholas II voluntarily dissolved the monarchy upon the death of his last living heir.

I'm going to start using "discontinued" in that sort of contstruction as a euphemism for "totally wasted the shit out of", from now on. For instance if my neighbor doesn't stop being so obnoxious with the super-loud construction noise at all hours, I think I might have to discontinue the institution of having a next door neighbor. Definitely.

[the opoponax]

hat trick post!

the especially annoying this is that I really expected Conservopedia to really be like Wikipedia from a blatantly conservative perspective. really it just seems like the main M.O. is to simply not give any but the absolute most basic and vague information out, on any subject, with the occasional insertion of a slight tweak of the facts which is irrelevant at best. Tsars ruled Russia, and then they didn't. This is all you need to know about the tsars. I was at least hoping for a defense of the Russian monarchy, or something (which tends to be latent in American culture anyway what with the Anastasia mystique and our obsession with Faberge eggs).

[Jos]

Looked up my country on Conservipedia to see what they had to say about my beloved pit of moral decay.

Man, that was depressing. It was pretty much all about the money.

A brief list of our biggest economic industries, the whole tulip thing, a section on drug laws and one on Queen's Day. They did mention the flood of '53, but only so they could link it to Katrina.

Nothing about our history, how and why the country accidentally came into being as a nation. Nothing about how we went from Republic to Monarchy. Nothing about our artists or culture.

But, looking around, it could be worse. At least we have an entry. It's like the world outside the US doesn't really matter, unless money is involved somehow.

I'd like to be surprised, but I'm not.

[treeandleafster]

At least the X-Files page is vaguely accurate. Consider the entry for "Life on Mars":

"Life on Mars is a British sitcom based in Manchester, England. It follows the exploitations of a man, Sam Tyler, who thinks he is from the past. There is some controversy surrounding the naming of the secondary lead character, Gene Hunt. He is not in fact a genealogist researcher. He is in fact a Police Officer."

Fail, fail, fail: five seconds googling could enable anyone with basic reading comprehension to write a better and more accurate summary of the show than that, neve mind actually watching the show, which they clearly haven't.

[grendelkhan]

Conservapedia does provide a valuable service, in that it's an object lesson in all the various ways in which Wikipedia could have gone wrong, but didn't. Wikipedia is clearly not perfect (off the top of my head, there's the occasional unaccountable godly action from Jimbo, a pain in the ass system for clearing copyrights (though it's better than what used to be there) and a userbase frequently unwilling to understand that we do have to take copyright law more seriously than pretty much anyone else on the Internet does, and a constant tide of vandalism which requires an ever-growing system of automation and eyeballs to keep somewhat controlled)... but it does do some things well.

I think this ties in with the hermetically-sealed smaller duplicate of American culture that certain churchly folk have constructed. A certain brand of closed-mindedness dictates that opposing ideas must not simply be ignored; they can't even be seen in the first place. Because of this, there's a Christian literary world, a Christian film industry, and, now emerging, a Christian internet. They may make Wikipedia look good, but it doesn't make up for the sad feeling I get when I imagine Christian youngsters looking up information about evolution on their Christian wiki-encyclopedia, reading their Christian paleontologists over at Answers in Genesis (which is where the footnotes draw most of their information from), and writing reports to be read by their Christian homeschooling parents, working from books acquired from the Christian publishing industry.

David Brin writes about how bright conservatives, exiled from academia, created a weak imitation of it in their think tanks and other pseudoacademic institutions. This reminds me of that, a little.

[Tonio]

I don't see Conservipedia as necessarily about censoring certain ideas, although that's certainly the effect. Instead, I see the enterprise as driven by a sense of victimhood. I suspect that Schafly and many other conservatives see Google and Wiki like they see the mainstream media, as biased against conservatism. (I find that funny, because plenty of leftists see the mainstream media as biased in favor of corporations.) Without debating whether they're right, the existence of Conservipedia and Fox News seem to suggest that many conservatives really want information biased in their favor.

[Jason]

David Brin writes about how bright conservatives, exiled from academia, created a weak imitation of it in their think tanks and other pseudoacademic institutions.

Grendelkhan, any more references on this? With all the talk from some circles (Horrowitz, et al.) about the academy "censoring" conservative viewpoints, I've always thought that it's shocking that nobody seems to have looked at the effect of conservative think tanks on conserative scholars. More to the point, if I'm an enterprising young conservative ideologue, why would I want to waste my time at a university, with its tenure tracks and peer review, when I could go to some think tank where I'll make more money, be unaccountable, get to be a talking head on Fox News, and spin it off into a book deal?

[grendelkhan]

Huh. Well, this is interesting. In Conservapedialand, Plessy v. Ferguson was bad, "a loss for the rights of Americans everywhere". However, Brown v. Board of Education was also bad; it was based "on social science research that claimed to show that black children have trouble learning unless white children are in the classroom" and led to "forced racial busing"; besides, it's "debatable how much actual desegregation was a result of this ruling".

See, you can't be for Plessy, because, well, it's nakedly racist and apparently those damn liberals have made that unfashionable. But the folks over there can't bring themselves to be for Brown either, because, well, "forced racial busing" and all. How'd that song go again? "Be nice to people who are / Inferior to you / As long as you don't let 'em in your school." It's easy to be against segregation in the nineteenth century; it's apparently harder to be against it when it was in living memory.

[Robb]

It's like the world outside the US doesn't really matter

Sadly, to most "Conservative" (I use the word as label for an ideological group rather than an adjective) Right-wing, American "Christians" (same), that's exactly the case. I find it shameful to be an American & a Christian and to see such attitudes in my brothers & sisters.

The model for the Conservapedia's form of collaboration isn't so much Wikipedia as it is one of those totalitarian youth clubs

No shit! The quote at the end of the LA times article sounds like it could be a rallying cry for the Hitler Youth (or possibly a deleted line from Swing Kids):

'But the biggest lesson she's taken away as a young conservative is: "There are people who want to destroy us."'

Not quite sweetheart, just destroy your isolational ignorance.

[Robb]

I find it shameful to be an American & a Christian and to see such attitudes in my brothers & sisters

Sorry, I left out a very important word: alleged brothers & sisters. I know for a fact that there are many folks out there who are far more committed to the idea of a "Christian America" than they are to serving/honoring/following/imitating Christ.

[grendelkhan]

Grendelkhan, any more references on this?

Certainly! Brin wrote a five-part series on the topic on his blog. One, Two, Three, Four, Five. He has a habit of going off on strange tangents, and his writing style brings to mind being cornered by an excitable fellow in a bar, but I think that adds to the flavor. He has an interesting point of view on a number of things, not the least of which is the obsolescence of the left-right divide in political discourse (there are some more polished essays on the topic linked to from the first part of the essay series).

[Womble]

It's like the world outside the US doesn't really matter

Looking around Conservapedia, I don't think it's a case of the world outside the US not mattering. It's just that the rest of the world is so very, very naughty.

For example, after clicking on the Con Matisse link (“There is no page titled Matisse”), I decided to search Picasso. Perhaps it’s a compliment to Picasso that, despite being single-handedly responsible for the decline and fall of Western Art, he still gets a link to their “Painting Masterpieces” page. Not for Guernica, though, because that’s about Communism. Really.

[ali]

Have you checked out the main Conservapedia page? They have an announcement about the article in The LA Times, Conservapedia says The LA Times praised our entries on the tuba, Claude Monet, the nation of Latvia, Robin Hood, polygons, and The Renaissance.

The actual article says Many, perhaps most, of Conservapedia's articles are free of ideology. There are brisk, straightforward entries about hundreds of topics: the tuba, Claude Monet, the nation of Latvia, Robin Hood, polygons, the Renaissance.

An interesting interptation of praise.

I checked out their TV entries and was gobsmacked by this sentence on Doctor Who:
It centres around a character named The Doctor, who travels around the universe in a time machine called the Tardis, which resembles a 1940s British Police Phone Booth, but is much bigger inside than outside, usually with a female companion that he picks up along the way.

It seems that grammar and puncuation arent beig taught to homeschooled kids. Must be too liberal.

[Tonio]

"it was based 'on social science research that claimed to show that black children have trouble learning unless white children are in the classroom...' "

That sound you hear is me pounding my head against my monitor. Wasn't the decision based on the principle that "separate" was inherently unequal?

Besides, if the ruling didn't result in much "actual desegregation," that's the fault not of the ruling but of white flight. I've seen racial steering by real state agents and developers in my community, but done in code by touting their homes as being in certain school districts.

[straight]

Out of a perverse impulse toward fairness, I point out that Wikipedia is 6 years old and Conservapedia is 6 months old. What did Wikipedia look like when it was 6 months old? Or maybe even more to the point, are there any other 6-month-old Wikipedia alternatives with very small user bases (surely there were some rival open-source encyclopedias early on that were comparable in size)? In other words, how much of the craptacularness is attributable to conservatives being dumb and uneducated (which seems to be the assumption most people are making) and how much because you have a very small user base that's only been working on it for a few months?

[Steve]

From the LA Times article, this is a brilliant quote:

But consider the entry on Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (b. 1947). She "may suffer from a psychological condition that would raise questions about her fitness for office" — namely, "clinical narcissism," Conservapedia asserts. Evidence of her instability includes her "ever-changing opinion of the Iraq war." Though Schlafly demands that entries be rigorously footnoted, these sentences are not.

Schlafly calls the armchair psychology "borderline in acceptability" for his site, but he defends the Clinton article on balance as "an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective."

That last line is beautiful. Its bias free, depending on your perspective. Mr. Schlafly, do you understand the definitions of "objective" and "bias"?

[Steve]

Fred: You misspell RationalWiki, btw.

Now, I have to say, I think the RationalWiki people have it all wrong. The best way for Conservapedia to die is for it to be ignored. Attacking it as they are, while humorous and, in some ways, noble, is going to reinforce the victimhood mentality of its designers. They created this site because they believe Google and Wikipedia and he general public are against them, and RationalWiki is reinforcing this notion. Therefore, their approach may lead to increased resources being poured into Conservapedia.

[pecunium]

But, based on the assumptions being made, arguendo, for the reasons behind Conservapedia (the need for an encyclopedia, online, which isn't biased; and especially isn't biased againt "Conservatives") being free of ideology is praise.

Sad, and pathetic, but praise.

[McJulie]

All of this seems pretty inevitable when you consider that facts have a liberal bias.

[Steve]

This is beautiful:
Conservapedia's Sermon on the Mount page

As Fred has often said, conservative Christian's like to ignore the Sermon On The Mount.

(And I didn't just search for this page, this was linked from the Jesus Christ page.)

[Fraser]

Straight, a pro-creationist slant can't be blamed on Conservapedia being a new site.

[Manalive]

My favorite quote from the article is:
"We have certain principles that we adhere to, and we are up-front about them," Schlafly writes in his mission statement. "Beyond that we welcome the facts." HA!

I also like how the definition of polygon given in their "praiseworthy" article defines a polygon as the "union of disjoint line segments which is path-connected". In the article on "line-segment" they specifically state that a line segment includes its endpoints. Hence, by their definition every polygon consists of a single line segment. The list of polygons states that there is no such thing as a one-sided polygon in the plane and cites the Klein bottle as a higher dimensional example (of what?) but then goes on to state that a triangle is three-sided. They are using "side" in two different ways! In the equations that they give for the perimeter and area of a regular polygon, they don't say what the "radius" of a polygon is, or rather the "length of the radius" :) Noone who didn't already know what a polygon was would learn anything from the article! Or even find it understandable!

And this was cited as "brisk and straightforward"?

[Manalive]

Now that I think about it, their definition of polygon would include a solid square (and other solid shapes) as it is foliated by line segments.

[Steve]

This is also humorous...from Conservapedia's home page:

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ARTICLE ABOUT CONSERVAPEDIA IS HERE.

The LA Times praised our entries on the tuba...

I come from this upbringing, and the mindset here is so telling. The LA Times is a newspaper, therefore it is liberal and the bad guys...but if they say something nice...ooohhh....look at us, we got some validation from the real world!*

This whole notion of victimhood is bathed in low self-esteem...and these kids (and adults) are so hoping for validation and positive reinforcement. Since their ideas are always a bit crazy**, for example, or their art lame, they have to create their own subculture within which they can self-congratulate. And because there is no effective criticism, the bad art and/or ideas continue rather than being challenged and improved upon.

I think conservatives have done a masterful job of branding any and all media as liberal. Its been good for their cause, but bad for our society. Because now, any reporting that is negative on anything managed by conservatives (the White House, the Justice Dept., Iraq, etc.) is obviously biased. And if its positive on anything managed by conservatives, its obviously true because the liberal media would never print a lie that hurt their cause, right? The opposites are true for anything managed by liberals (anything negative must be true, anything positive suspect) therefore liberals have an uphill swim in all matters of public opinion. So getting large sections of the general population to realistically see the truth is incredibly difficult anymore.

-------

* Okay, but the tuba? This is funny. The LA Times says their four sentence entry is "brisk and straightforward" and Conservapedia calls that "praise"? That sounds like a statement of fact...only if you are starved for validation would you see that as praise.

** Who of us didn't have some crazy ideas in our youth, and even now? But what helps is discussing and debating those ideas. For example, discussions like this are why I, as a Christian, can believe God created the world, and have no problem with evolution. If God created the world over millions of years and evolution was involved, so be it. But this notion that all scientific theory and proof must be debated because it rejects the creation story, is both silly and unnecessary for thinking Christians.

[grendelkhan]

Okay, one more, from Earl Warren:

"Liberals consider Warren's final opinion a political masterwork, not just for his political gamesmanship, but for his general writing, making use of dubious social science research to draw legal conclusions, and laying the groundwork for forced racial busing."

Damn that Forced Racial Busing!

[straight]

Straight, a pro-creationist slant can't be blamed on Conservapedia being a new site.

Oh sure. There's stuff here that's clearly bonkers. But Fred's critique seemed to center on the paucity of articles and how little information they have in general compared to Wikipedia. And that, it seems to me, would be true for any encyclopedia project that was this small and this young.

[histrogeek]

Steve,
I have to disagree that the best way to destroy Conservapedia is to ignore it. Conservatives have shown a talent for keeping ridiculous things like this alive despite their being pointless. Ignore it and it will fester in the swampy environment of homeschooled kids, ideologues, and unchartered colleges. Then in a few years they'll start quoting it in their think tanks and slowly the articles will be used by lazy journalists hoping to avoid angry reactionaries.
Better to point out how awful the whole thing is and make anyone who quotes it an object of ridicule.

[Redem]

How bout the one on unicorn

http://www.conservapedia.com/Unicorn

[Geds]

straight:

You do bring up valid points.

The funny thing is, though, that Conservapedia is just a symptom of an overall cultural problem and can be used to illustrate exactly that.

Conservatism and Christianity (which I will attempt to separate for the sake of argument) are both moving more towards making their own society that mirrors but is not connected to the rest of the world. Both groups are making their own worlds myopic and anemic (and, I would argue, are detracting from the rest of the world. I believe that everyone has something to bring to the table that can enrich the world and the world, in turn, has something to offer everyone. By withdrawing from the collective you impoverish yourself and the collective).

Christianity has been doing this longer than Conservatives, so I'll start with them. I also have a great deal more knowledge in the field. Contemporary Christian Music is a category unto itself that has managed to produce some good music, but which for the most part is schlock (and most of the good stuff these days is coming from indie Christian artists). The best stuff can hold its own with the really good "secular" music (since I'm on kind of a folk kick, I'll run that comparison). Andrew Peterson or Eric Peters can come up with stuff that's just as good as Kate Rusby or Roddy Woomble. The problem is that the Christian music talent pool starts out at half the size of the secular music talent pool. Add to that the fact that many Christians who are musicians won't go in to the Christian music scene and you end up with a talent pool that is, at best, 1/4 to 1/3 the size. Then to that add the restrictions from that Real True Christian distinction and you, in effect, censor expression to turn it in to what you say over how you say it. Christian books are much the same. Phil Yancey and Rob Bell are great writers, but they're the shining lights in a much smaller field compared to the secular market where there are probably five times as many great writers and even more good writers in every genre.

It's sad, too, considering the fact that it wasn't (and isn't) always the case, as Fred likes to point out with The Brothers Karamazov or Traveling Mercies. But now that the RTC market has withdrawn, those books aren't accepted and the quality of Christian writing will further atrophy, since the writers who stay in that world will have worse and worse examples to follow while writers who want to be better will probably end up being rejected by those who need them most.

Conservatives don't like the "liberal bias" they see everywhere in media and the internets, so they create Fox News and the Conservapedia. It's a limited resource because there are fewer people to do it to start with and they're going to be restricted by whatever goodfacts the party line prefers at the moment.

So, yes, there is something to the fact that Wikipedia is 6 years older than Conservapedia. History tells me that six years from now, assuming it still exists, Conservapedia won't be any better. It will probably have more content, but there will be less than Wiki has now and that content will be just as bad as it is today.

[hf]

What did Wikipedia look like when it was 6 months old?

I believe it had long essays from Larry Sanger and probably more short articles than Conservapedia.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Quoth Manalive: My favorite quote from the article is:
"We have certain principles that we adhere to, and we are up-front about them," Schlafly writes in his mission statement. "Beyond that we welcome the facts." HA!

Yes. Reminds me of the famous axiom, "Other than, that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

[Jeff Weskamp]

"I think this ties in with the hermetically-sealed smaller duplicate of American culture that certain churchly folk have constructed. A certain brand of closed-mindedness dictates that opposing ideas must not simply be ignored; they can't even be seen in the first place. Because of this, there's a Christian literary world, a Christian film industry, and, now emerging, a Christian internet. "

I agree totally with grendelkhan. Here in Colorado, a Longmont church is trying to create a 340-acre Christian subdivision with million-dollar homes, old age homes, nurseries, etc. Here is the article: http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_6190043

This is just a foretaste of things to come, folks. These so-called Christians are trying to create what sociologists call a "total institution." (Here is a reference at the secular Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_institution)

Frightening, isn't it? They want Christians book publishers, Christian music, Christian schools and homeschooling, Christian "science" that doesn't contradict the literal words of the Bible, Christian psychiatrists, and so on and so forth. And believers are not supposed to look outside this hermetically-sealed alternate reality.

[Geds]

The funny thing is, I wouldn't have too many problems with the entire "total institution" thing, were it not for two problems. First, they want to impose the total institution on everyone, and once it's imposed on the group itself it will be much harder to destroy the groupthink. Second, I know a lot of people who would fall for it. That saddens me immensely.

Variety and new experiences are the things that make getting up in the morning worthwhile. I honestly cannot imagine wanting to wake up in a world where my every stimulus and thought is controlled.

[Steve]

Geds: You make a good point about the talent pool for CCM music being smaller. I think the critical infrastructure (that challenges artists toward quality) is also smaller, plus, hindered by the "the world is against us mentality" in that: "if the world rejects our music, we need a safe place for our musicians"* and therefore it is often not acceptable to criticize the quality of the music or lyrics or theology behind the lyrics. (This lack of criticism plays into the success of Left Behind too.)

Think about American Idol. Some people don't like that the judges are so harsh on poor singers. Admittedly, sometimes they are cruel, but mostly they are honest. And some of the singers have never heard that honesty before. No one has told them that maybe they should get singing lessons, or gee, even "I love you son or daughter, but I'm not sure a career in music is for you." So they come on American Idol, face the criticism, and are shattered. And sometimes you see the cases of the person walking out saying the judges are idiots and don't know talent when they see it....they are still in denial. This denial is NOT good for them. They need to hear the truth.

That insular world is what leads to a lot of bad CCM, and contributes to a lesser extent to a site filled with poor information like Conservapedia being acceptable.

-----

* Truth be told, some of the reason CCM exists is because the world did reject it. Mainstream radio stations often wouldn't play preachy Christian music. That being said, even as an evangelical Christian, I really don't like preachy Christian music myself...I don't listen to music to be sermonized. And I don't enjoy preachy Jewish or Mormon music either, except for the laughs.

[Geds]

By the way, the Conservapedia entry on Joe McCarthy: http://www.conservapedia.com/Joseph_McCarthy

From the "Condemnation and the Watkins Committee" section.

"While, over the past few years, Senator McCarthy withstood countless biased and unsubstantiated attacks by Liberals, Communists, etc., the organized effort to remove McCarthy from his Chairmanship and officially condemn him began in the Spring of 1954. It was started by fellow Republican Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont at the behest of a coalition of Communists, Liberals, and Eisenhower Administration officials."

Not only is it poorly written, it is the exact opposite of unbiased. That "While, over the past few years..." line not only starts a paragraph, it starts an entire section.

As far as I can tell, Mr. McCarthy receives the biggest write-up of anyone or anything in the Conservapedia.

[patter]

...one student had just turned in an assignment that dated events as "BCE," before the common era — rather than "BC," before Christ. "Where did that come from?" he demanded. Her answer: "Wikipedia." At that, Schlafly knew he had to act.

Article doesn't specify, but if he took the conservative -- i.e. James Dobson -- approach to the immediate problem, he beat the living crap out of her, then flunked her.

Sigh. This is why I avoid the term "Christian" like the plague.

[Fred]

Good cach, Seve. I reinsered he missing leer and correced he irraional spelling.

[Steve]

patter: Here is my beef with right-wing Christians in a nutshell (and why I think they are ultimately without moral or ethical character): Of all the things in the world to get pissed off about and work toward rectifying....racism, drug abuse, crime, poverty, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, disease, etc. etc....your life passion is to get BCE changed back to BC?

[Steve]

histrogeek: I have to disagree that the best way to destroy Conservapedia is to ignore it.

As Billy Joel once said: You may be right, I may be crazy. In fact, when I see the defense of McCarthy and critigue of major civil rights decisions, maybe the best thing is for Conservapedia to grow and grow to become a helpful source for documenting the revisionism and moral bankrupty of the movement.

[Tonio]

"your life passion is to get BCE changed back to BC?"

Of course. How dare Wikipedia take the reasonable position of using a religion-neutral dating system. They should treat Christianity as the normal religion. It's just like that "Happy Holidays" nonsense - why should Christians have to share American culture with other religions? Who cares what the heathens and pagans think? BCE is just another tool in the Secular Humanist conspiracy to destroy Christianity, I tell you! What's next? Will people be thrown in prison for saying "God bless you" in public?

-click- It's safe to come out now, I've turned off my satire generator.

[julia]

Why right-wing homeschoolers?

[Geds]

Good cach, Seve. I reinsered he missing leer and correced he irraional spelling.

I have no idea why, but I find this to be frikken hilarious. Probably because I'm a dumb language joke junkie.

Steve:

Good points on CCM. There's also a very random corrollary issue that I tried to parse about a year ago when I first came up with the smaller talent pool theory. There is no Christian music "scene." Most Christian musicians come up through churches. They play in praise bands and whatnot. Contemporary praise music is designed to be simple. It's strum/chord acoustic guitar music designed to be accompanied either by another acoustic or some guy with a djembe (sp? It's one of those drums that looks like a really big half-bongo). The music is uncomplicated and the audience is uncritical, since it's all about praising God so most people are too busy listening to themselves to actually even hear the music.

Then they form bands and the good and bad alike are coddled by their friends, churches, and the CCM industry. As far as I know there is no Christian equivalent of the band that gets a gig in a biker bar and struggles because half the people there just want them to shut the hell up so they can drink in peace. The bad bands are often excused because "their heart is in the right place" or some other cliche, so you end up with the sonic equivalent of a dumpster full of Thomas Kinkaide paintings. The rest of the industry supports it with a combination of "if you like [secular group], you'll love [Christian group]" posters and media that outright attacks the secular music. When I was in junior high I had a subscription to Breakaway, a Focus on the Family magazine for teenage boys. Every week there was a music column where guys wrote in and asked about music. Secular music was always praised for their energy or skill, but then ripped apart because of one song or a misunderstood lyric. I still remember their review of the first Matchbox 20 album. It ripped apart a lyric that went, "You've got to think with a girl like that any luck at all is better than nothing," because it did not offer a proper Biblical perspective on how guys should treat girls. 'Cuz, y'know, Matchbox 20 is the Devil and that lyric right there is going to convince me to go out and deflower as many pastors' daughters as I can..

Oh, and your BC - BCE comment reminds me of something. I had a high school pastor who was (and is) a very good man. He managed to get worked up about things and draw the wrong conclusions on four occasions that I can remember. One of them was the BCE debate. The reason for it is that switching from the initials that mean "Before Christ" to "Before the Common Era" is yet another indication that the world is rejecting God and going to Hell in a handbasket. Being a good little fundamentalist, I took his side. Since then I've gone on and gotten a degree in history and reflexively use BCE/CE terminology and can't actually get myself to go back to the BC/AD nomenclature unless I really think about it.

The thing is, the pervading theory in fundigelical circles seems to be that if our society is re-formed in Christ's image, all problems will be solved. Thereby you have to fight to keep the forces of evil secularism from advancing on any and all fronts. If BC becomes BCE, even more people will go hungry because there will be even more evil in the world. And, as we all know, the Christians are perfect and only they can keep the world from falling apart...

[Doctor Science]

And the thing about "BCE" is that it's at least as useful for Christians as anyone else, because it gets around the whole "Jesus was born in 6 BC" thing, which just sounds *stupid*. But maybe sounding stupid is a conservative value?

[Bugmaster]

One interesting thing that struck me about Wikipedia, besides the obvious bias elevated to nearly satirical levels, was how few entries there were, and how poor the writeups were for the entries that did exist. Bias aside, I could click any Conservapedia entry, tab over to the same Wikipedia entry, and find that Wikipedia was be more informative, more clearly written, better documented, and had cooler pictures.

Even if I was completely unbiased, I would still conclude that conservatives suck at research, writing, and Web design skills.

[the opoponax]

@ straight --

while to an extent i think you're somewhat right, i don't think that's the whole story. especially when you look at the "stubs" and notice that it's not just that they're incomplete, it's that they say things in a way that indicates that there's a half-truth being told. for instance that sentence from Tsar i quoted above: "The people of Russia discontinued the institution of tsars in 1918 with the death of Nikolai II and his family."

Why say it that way, when you could easily write "Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate by the Russian Revolution in March of 1917, dissolving both the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Imperial system as a whole"? Which would both be more clear, and also the correct answer (Nicholas was no longer the tsar when he died in 1918). It would convey pretty much the same information, and it would be a hell of a lot more clear.

The sentence as it stands implies that Nicholas II died a very old man and voluntarily dissolved the monarchy at the people's request. It gives Nicholas an agency that he just didn't have, and glosses over probably the main fact that most Americans know about the tsars, and the Romanovs specifically, that they were eliminated by the revolution.

the reason, of course, the more ambiguous statement is preferred is that it works around the idea that the Russian people decided that they didn't want a tsar anymore, banded together, and got rid of the system. which then circumvents the need to talk about why the Russians didn't want a tsar, the 1905 Revolution, etc. etc. it's the intellectual equivalent of Newspeak -- remove the framework that might lead people to 'dangerous' ideas, even if that means also blocking ideas that are relatively harmless but might lead someone down a 'dangerous' path (including a reference to any aspect of the revolution might lead to eventually having to explain what communism actually is, outside a McCarthyist framework).

[the opoponax]

see also the relatively well fleshed out entry on Phyllis Schlafly, linked in Fred's post above, which attempts through unclear language to cast her as a feminist, in that she wrote books "about feminism". It doesn't bother to mention what any of Schlafly's ideas actually are/were, or that those books were "about [how] feminism [is wrong]."

The entry goes so far to state that feminists hate(d) her in a way that makes it sound like they hated her as an ideological peer within their own movement, not that they hated her as an enemy outside the movement.

you can say that this is in there for brevity's sake, or because her ideology, the contents of her books, and the exact nature of her relationship to the feminist movement of the 1970's has not yet been fleshed out in the article. except that it's clearly been deliberately omitted in bad faith. Conservapedia has to limit the scope of their articles because their entire ideology falls apart on close scrutiny of almost any subject you can think of (except maybe for tubas?).

[Jeff]

Under Jesus [Christ]:

Many of Jesus' most well-known teachings were given during the Sermon on the Mount, such as the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. Jesus often used parables in his rhetorical technique, such as the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

No links to any of the bolded entries. Are they scared of the message of Jesus? (Probably)

I noticed this (already noted):

the actual date of Jesus' birth between 7 and 4 B.C.

Jesus was born before Christ! Yay!!!!

[Geds]

And polygons.

Kind of.

[Consumer Unit 5012]

"Out of a perverse impulse toward fairness, I point out that Wikipedia is 6 years old and Conservapedia is 6 months old. What did Wikipedia look like when it was 6 months old?"

If you'll pardon a bad analogy, at 6 months, Wikipedia had ten little fingers and ten little toes. Conservapedia has four flippers and a cleft palate.

Conservapedia can't work, because the peopleperson running it won't LET it work. I've tried editing there, and posting any facts that violate Conservatively Correct thought is considered "vandalism", punishable by permablocking and having _all_ the edits you've made deleted. And then the mods complain all the new users they get are vandals.

I give the place another six months before it's permanently stagnated or collapsed into a black hole of its own paranoia.