"Conservapedia": The Right's answer to Wikipedia

[I_Love_Me_Vol.I]

I don’t know if this is news or not but Conservapedia is now allowing registration. Which means anyone can now edit the site’s entries.

Be nice.

[Princhester]

@I Love Me

I don’t know if this is news or not but Conservapedia is now allowing registration. Which means anyone can now edit the site’s entries.

Be nice.

Who’s idea of “nice” are we talking about here? I’m going to assume you mean “nice” in the sense of “truthful, even if inconveniently so”. Right?

[Derleth]

From the Main Page:

Minors under 16 years use this site. Posting of obscenity here is punishable by up to 10 years in jail under 18 USC § 1470. Vandalism is punishable up to 10 years in jail per 18 USC § 1030.

Everyone loves a cart00ney! Another fine example.

In case it isn’t obvious to everyone: Issuing empty legal threats means you have lost.

[Princhester]

Well, I “nicely” corrected their “Whale” entry by removing a vague reference to an alleged comment in a PBS TV show and a farcical tale about living in a whale for three days and helpfully added:

“Various fictional tales notwithstanding, remaining alive inside a whale for any length of time would be impossible due to lack of oxygen and the presence of strong acids”

and within minutes I was blocked and told I had “vandalised” the Whale entry :eek: Vandalism? The shame. Here are my wrists: would someone mind slapping them for me?

[Seven]

From Conservapedia (bolding mine):

Censorship

Censorship is the act of withholding information from a larger audience by a group of people or a single person who has the power to do so. Oftentimes it is done for the protection of the people, or to keep the group of people from knowing something bad about the empowered people. A portion of the liberal community is opposed to censorship, with the belief that it is unfair to those who are being withheld from.

Penis
This page has been deleted, and protected to prevent re-creation

Vagina
This page has been deleted, and protected to prevent re-creation

Sex
This page has been deleted, and protected to prevent re-creation

[Dr.Rieux]

Is there a page for irony?

[Princhester]

Yep, there is. There are also now pages for “Family Friendly”, “Sexy” and “Family”. They seem to have been put up by someone called Winchester. Hmmm, seems familiar somehow. Catch 'em before they disappear…

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

Does the page for “Sexy” redirect the user to “Anne Coulter”? :dubious:

[Princhester]

Not while I have any say in the matter. Of course, I expect to have any say in the matter for maybe an hour or two more, when the anti-“vandal” Forces of Righteousness have finished their coffee, wake up and get busy

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@BrainGlutton

Andy Schlafly was interviewed on All Things Considered today. He took the position that “a neutral encyclopedia is impossible.”

And he was as dumb a cunt as you might expect. The host of the show compared the Conservapedia page on the Democratic Party with the Wikipedia page on the same topic. As is consistent with all the other entries cited here, the Conservapedia page sounded as if it was written by an elementary school student, with a rambling and staccato collection of mostly negative and mostly contemporaneous bits about the Democratic Party.

By way of contrast, the host demostrated the much more comprehensive nature of the Wikipedia page by noting that it begins by describing the origins of the party with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

Andrew Schlaffable responded that this was a great example of the problem with Wikipedia - that it would try to “legitimize” the Democratic Party by going all the way back to Jefferson.

The man is a fucking dullard of outrageous proportions. I love that he has become a spokesperson for Conservativism, which apparently stands for intentionally not knowing or allowing others to know factual information.

[Don_t_Call_Me_Shirley]

@Princhester

and within minutes I was blocked and told I had “vandalised” the Whale entry

Well, it’s been nice knowing you Princhester. See you in about 10 years! Don’t bend over for the soap!

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Princhester

Not while I have any say in the matter. Of course, I expect to have any say in the matter for maybe an hour or two more, when the anti-“vandal” Forces of Righteousness have finished their coffee, wake up and get busy

It seems that there are no pages for those topics. If you, um, happened to see them and copy down the text, it would be fun to see what they objected to.

[flight]

Hey Princhester, I couldn’t find sexy, but I had the page on Satanism suggested to me. Not what you would expect on a conservative encyclopedia, I think they would count it as vandalism.

[Talon_Karrde]

Here’s something that might be amusing, Andy Schafly’s series of world history lectures. There’s a lot to go through and I don’t know a lot about history to find anything good there, but maybe others can.

[Cervaise]

@I Love Me

I don’t know if this is news or not but Conservapedia is now allowing registration. Which means anyone can now edit the site’s entries.

So when these yahoos realize the Internet is basically uncontrollable, will they decide it is therefore also undesirable and begin to attack it as a general evil that should be eliminated?

[Frank]

@Talon Karrde

Here’s something that might be amusing, Andy Schafly’s series of world history lectures. There’s a lot to go through and I don’t know a lot about history to find anything good there, but maybe others can.

This is a good start:

When did mankind first begin? There is no reliable evidence of man existing before 3500 B.C.

then, just a bit later:

We can also extrapolate backwards from modern populations to estimate that only about 300 million people existed in the world at the time of Christ, and extrapolating backwards further yields only one family in the year 3300 B.C.

I’m going to bookmark that one for whenever I need some idle amusement.

[Talon_Karrde]

Ah, what the heck, I’ll look through some of that world history stuff and see if I can find anything interesting.

From the section on Greek history in lecture two:

He was charged with impiety and corruption of the youth and executed by being compelled to drink poison hemlock, thereby becoming the greatest pagan martyr in the history of the world.

Greatest pagan martyr? Maybe the wording could be defended along the lines of looking at their definition of Pagan. I suppose Greece’s religion was one of the “various polytheistic religions”, although I don’t know if Socrates himself was a follower of it or not.

His greatest student was Plato (428-347 B.C.). Born as a nobleman, he was fascinated with the power of reason and developed a philosophy based on reason rather than experience.

He says it like Plato was the first to do so. What about the dude you were just talking about, you know, Socrates? From what I remember from the Intro to Philosophy course I took, the credit goes to the guy who said everything is made of water.

And then at the end of the section on Greek knowledge, he goes from talking about the Stoics and Epicureans to this:

Some historians have even speculated that Jesus spoke Greek and that the Apostles may have originally written the Gospels in that language. The traditional view is that Jesus and the Apostles spoke in Aramaic, the colloquial language of that region and time. Many of Jesus’ sayings are quoted directly in Aramaic, including Talitha cum, which means, “Little girl, get up!” (Mark 5:41). Also, Abba (“Father”; Mark 14:36; Gal.4:6; Rom.8:15); Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”; Mark 15:34); Cephas (“Peter”; John 1:42); Mammon (“Wealth”; Matt.6:24, RSV); Raca (“Fool”; Matt.5:22, RSV). Linguists can even pinpoint Jesus’ dialect to be western Aramaic associated with Galilee, rather than the Aramaic dialect spoken in Jerusalem.

But the powerful Greek language would have been useful to Jesus in teaching. Greek was in common use by Jewish people in Palestine, thanks in part to the conquest by Alexander the Great. Greek was even widely used in Jewish ossuaries to bury the dead. Commerce would have often occurred in Greek, and Jesus had been in business as a carpenter. He surely knew the language. Several of the key terms, such as Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees as “hypocrites”, is derived directly from Greek without any comparable term in Aramaic or Hebrew. Several of the Apostles have Greek names (e.g., Andrew and Philip). There has been no discovered book in the New Testament written in Aramaic or Hebrew that predates the Greek versions. For an interesting presentation of this Greek view, see: triumphpro.com

It really comes out of nowhere. But does it have merit? The argument here seems weak to me. Would someone like Diogenes be willing to weigh in on whether this is bullshit?

From the section on Greek Contributions:

The Greek and Hebrew approaches to knowledge were very different. The Greeks emphasized spatial relationships, benefiting from the discovery of geometry by Euclid. The Hebrews rarely discuss spatial aspects of history in the Old Testament, and instead focus on their relationship with Yahweh that has no spatial elements.

Those silly Jews, writing about non-spatial things in their histories.

Many historians credit the Greeks for “humanism”, by which they mean the Greek emphasis on reason, ethics and rational thinking rather than religion. But the Greeks did not choose to reject religion the way that modern humanists do. Instead, the Greeks advanced knowledge without exposure to Christianity.

Count the over-generalizations.

Not everything in Ancient Greece was great. It was polytheistic, worshipping many gods like Zeus and Hercules. The Greek gods were superhuman, but not divine. The Greek gods cared little about ethics or morality, and were the least influential aspect of the Greek culture. At most, this tradition of polytheism inspired some colorful literature and art. At its worst, it inspired silly rituals. For example, ceremonies known as “oracles” in which priests tried to predict the future by looking at the internal body parts of animal sacrifices—a process called “divination”.

I love the quotes around “oracles” and “divination”.

The Greeks are not known for being very practical

They aren’t?

From the Other Ancient Peoples section:

The Celts were the first ethnic group to become widespread in Europe. Using tribes rather than stable civilizations, the Celts began in central Europe and migrated west beginning in about 500 B.C. to the British Isles (especially Ireland) and also northwest France and portions of Spain. Their religion consisted of worshipping gods and goddesses, and their priests were called “druids”. They had no written language but often told myths and folktales. The Boston Celtics basketball team is named after the Celts.

That mention of the Celtics at the end is funny to me.

[Dob]

I love this from the homosexual section…

On the other hand, there is a study purporting to support that homosexuality is partly genetic in cause. Dean Hamer,** a gay researcher**, conducted a study of thirty-two pairs of brothers who were not related and exclusively homosexual.

bolding mine. Now, do you really think it was necessary to point out hes a Gay researcher? I wonder how the rest of the article leaned…

Non-zoologists have sometimes made the incorrect inference that homosexual behavior does not occur in the zoological world and have used it as a talking point when attacking homosexuality. This has created an interest in the side issue whether homosexual behavior is or is not zoologically “natural.” This is largely a sterile debate because behavior is not necessarily moral even if “natural;” because the nature of human beings is not necessarily the same as the nature of other species, and because it is not at all clear when an observed behavior can be counted as “sexual,” or as implying a sexual “orientation.”

I could have fun on this site all day!

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

I enjoyed his hamfisted and undeservedly authoritarian tone in nailing down his terms right off the bat, but most especially “World History is not the same as Western Civilization, which consists of pre- and post-Christian Europe.”

For a guy who has such a hard-on for promoting Christianity, it’s big of him to acknowledge that its time has passed.

Of course, he could be acidically referring to present day Europe as particularly godless, but the folks in Vatican City might take issue with that.

[hotflungwok]

OMFG, how can any of you read that? My brain just gives up after a couple of paragraphs, and I have to take it out and restart it. It’s like it was written by someone using only vague memories and a bible as sources.

I wonder if I would get yelled at if I signed up and went through all of his lectures and put the word History in “”.