Sorry to be pedantic, but I think it’s important that a distinction be made here for clarity. Most social and religious conservatives consider abortion pro-choice, liberals don’t. Abortion is abortion. The decision to either keep or abort a pregnancy is a choice. Someone desirous of the right to make that decision is pro-choice. Being pro-choice doesn’t mean you’re pro-abortion, regardless how many times conservatives say it.
I think the word “bias” is a big topic. There is factual bias, something that can be discredited or supported with evidence. And there is the kind of bias you mentioned: that if a group of people share a certain characteristic, then they will write about subjects in a certain manner with like minds. This kind of bias, I recall, has been discussed on the New York Times, describing the liberal bias in academic circles simply because there are more liberals offering liberal explanations than conservatives offering conservative explanations on a social phenomenon.
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Conservatives (or at least those that the vast majority of people, including the subjects themselves, would call conservatives) could and do often call for change. Lower taxes (as you quoted yourself), fewer/no abortions, more “morality”, fewer black people… the list goes on.
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So, conservatism is more than just about resisting or impeding change. It may be about resisting or impeding change but also about acting on certain values. Lowering taxes for the richest would be considered conservative, because it allows the richest to keep more money and possibly give higher wages to employees. I think the fundamental value in conservatism here is capitalism, and capitalism has a hierarchal structure. Coincidentally, absolute morality implemented in heaven and hell also has a hierarchal structure. I wonder if there is a relationship between religion and conservatism or a relationship between one’s black-and-white, up-or-down mindset and conservatism. I have never heard of fewer black people or fewer gay people as being conservative. I don’t think conservatives advocate for fewer black people or fewer gay people; I think they advocate for laws to restrict rights to black people and gay people to keep the former hierarchal structure, but that’s my opinion. For certain liberals, I think the hierachy implies inequality; however, it may imply a perceived order by conservatives. See King Lear for more discussion about the old way of thinking and new way of thinking.
Well, there is spontaneous abortion known as miscarriage and there is the more controversial induced abortion known as ‘abortion’. Pro-choice may mean that one has the right to choose an abortion, but if that option means “abortion” rather than not abortion, then I can see why conservatives cannot seem to draw a line! If abortion were legalized but not socially approved, then abortion would be de facto not an option when de jure it would be.
Being nerdy is a personal attribute, but if most Wikipedia editors are nerdy, the articles will be far more detailed for the nerdy topics than for others.
For example, as the Wikipedia systemic bias article itself admits, there is a bias against articles that are of interest mainly to women, because most Wikipedia editors are men.
It is the only “trusworthy” encyclopedia, after all!
Because so many of their falsehoods are blatantly obvious, so much so that it takes willful blindness or massive ignorance to buy into them. American conservatism has long since passed the point of “reasonable difference of opinion” and passed into the area of “fanatic denial of reality”.
No; that they live in the same universe.
They are much the same thing in America. And conservatism is full to the brim with hypocrisy and outright irrationality. Conservatives do not believe that logic and facts have value; only dogma, self interest and the sheer will to believe matter.
Asking whether or not Wikipedia as a whole has a bias has the same problem with asking questions like “Do Americans think _____?” You can try to make broad generalizations, but there are 300 million Americans, and probably about that many wikipedia editors.
I haven’t really noticed a widespread bias, but I certainly have noticed individual pages that had what seemed to me to be a slant, which is in itself can be a problem.
In my experience, the bias is not at all helped by the large number of deletionist editors and the increasingly restrictive notability criteria they introduce.
In my experience, any page concerning something that’s been in the US news recently tends to become very biased one way or the other in short order. Then it gets locked, sanitized and becomes one of the least biased pages on the site until the heat dies back down.
That being said, I have often noticed that pages about private enterprises or corporations tend to read a lot like press releases. Presumably because they’re written or edited by the company’s shills without attracting the same kind of attention from the senior editors.
You know, evidence is more weighty than claims. I am more interested in where and how you draw your conclusions than on your negative claims on conservatism. You seem to have a very negative opinion of conservatism, by calling it a “fanatic denial of reality” and “full to the brim with hypocrisy and outright irrationality” and that conservatives do not believe that “logic and facts have value; only dogma, self-interest, and the sheer will to believe matter,” implying that you draw a connection between conservatism and faith-based political stances in American politics. You also seem to be so focused on the part mentioned about Conservapedia, an American Evangelical Protestant online encyclopedia, and Conservatism more than about the possible biases on Wikipedia, which is what this thread is supposed to be about.
Conservapedia, founded by Andrew Schlafly, does claim that it is supposed to be trustworthy and free from the liberal bias that it perceives on Wikipedia. However, the so-called “liberal bias” may not be what one has in mind! One would think that “liberal bias” means no speaking in a politically neutral manner, and would intentionally persuade people to join the liberal side in a political arena. Rather, the “liberal bias” is more about criticizing the mass media to favor or appeal to subjects that conservatives would disagree upon, because the subjects are perceived to contradict with the Fundamentalist Christian / Biblical literalist values, traditions, and interpretations of the Bible. I would not say that Conservapedia, a product of the Religious Right, should be attacked with such vicious language of yours, but I would say that Conservapedia does have uncited information, misintepreted information, unsupported information, and information that is hard for a reader to discern between opinion and fact, all of which are likely to decrease or undermine its own credibility. One can only hope that someone comes along and gives a more accurate interpretation on certain sources. For example, PBS never attacked pro-life groups as terrorists, as one article on Conservapedia cites. I followed the link, and PBS really said that “should violence against medical doctors who perform abortions be viewed and prosecuted as domestic terrorism?” and targeted right-wing extremist groups, not pro-life groups or Christian groups.
Why is abortion a left-wing thing, anyway? If anything, the belief that the state has no business interfering in personal matters is libertarian. If the pro-life crowd wasn’t motivated by religion, their demand for state intervention might be cast as left-wing.
Legalizing abortions means that public abortion providers will be provided to pregnant mothers. Public abortion providers and clinics and doctors are supported by tax dollars for government intervention for aborting a pregnancy. Big government, appeal to the downtrodden, the value of choice, and the weight of feminism make pro-choice position very attractive. Opponents of abortion are said to be “right-wing”, because they want to limit the government in that they do not want to fund in taxes for abortion clinics, presumably do not see the abortion debate as a feminism issue, and/or have an alternative plan to the perceived cruelty of abortion, commonly referred to as “murder”. I am not sure how many pro-life people are or are not religious, but I have been to a public speech by President Barack Obama, and some people there bring up signs that are pro-life. One man voices his opinion over the speaker about “Thou shalt not kill,” a phrase used in the Ten Commandments. The man on the speaker essentially makes a religious objection to abortion.
The “alternative plan” being “let the bitch suffer”. The anti-abortion movement is about tormenting and oppressing women and has zero concern for the welfare of the fetus they intend to force her to bring to term. It can already be dead, they still don’t want it removed because the point is to hurt the woman as much as possible. And it certainly has nothing to do with limiting government; they want to expand the government to control women’s bodies.
Conservatives are not anti-government; they just object to government being used to help or protect people. They love using the government for oppressing, spying on and killing people; they just hate it when it helps or protects people.
Religiously motivated hatred of women is a central part of the anti-abortion movement.
Yeah, I’m not exactly convinced any of the public-finance arguments are significant by comparison, nor do I get the alleged Big Government aspect you ascribe to the pro-choice. A case could be made for the right/left divide over public health care (or the government subsidizing of private health care), but would abortion specifically still be a right/left issue if, hypothetically, the government neither funded it directly nor regulated it, i.e. leaving it solely to market forces and private charities?
For that matter, is it still a right/left issue in Canada, where public funding of health care and the lack of regulation on abortion are the norm? On these issues, is Canada left of the U.S. because of the health care, the abortions, or some synergistic combination of both?
I don’t know about the rest of Canada, Bryan, but here on Prince Edward Island – as far as I can tell – the “pro-life” movement is religion-driven. I assume they are primarily conservatives, as well, but at their demonstrations it is religion not politics that they babble on about.
So is there a significant school of right-wing politics, in Canada or the U.S., that is not religious at all?
I suspect not.
I’d look for an answer to that on Conservopedia, but my WOT add-on has a fit when I try to go there.
I would suggest the Calgary School does not have a noticeable religious element. It has been influential in several ways, including on a young Stephen Harper when he was attending the U. of C. His “hands-off” approach to same-sex marriage and abortion upon taking office seems consistent with the themes of the Calgary School members, which focus more on economics and federalism issues.
Yes. Try arguing that animals aren’t “gay” for an explanation for a correction, even when the same article says one can’t anthropomorphize animals and science can only say, at best, that certain behaviors are same-sex.
Other, less politically touchy subjects have a higher degree of honesty. If you discover an error or want to add information it’s usually not a big problem; I’ve done a couple hundred wikipedia edits. The high profile political articles are the hard ones to change.
And I’ve never ever cited to an article I edited.
Because of the nature of the open-editing model, Wikipedia is irredeemably biased towards people who will fight to their death for their causes on Wikipedia. It thus far over-weights conspiracy theories, far-left and far-right viewpoints, anti-science quackery of all kinds, and other causes espoused by the chronically unemployable, who will sit at home reverting their article until the end of time while people who have actual credibility in science or history are busy doing work in those fields.