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Fox
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Conservapedia: New morons online?
« on: 2007-03-06 15:54:51 »
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A conservative encyclopedia you can trust.
Conservapedia has over 3,800 educational, clean and concise entries on historical, scientific, legal, and economic topics, as well as more than 350 lectures and term lists. There have been over 545,000 page views and over 15,500 page edits. Already Conservapedia has become one of the largest user-controlled free encyclopedias on the internet. This site is growing rapidly.

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of "political correctness".


Source can be found here.

It appears that the main criticism of Wikipedia is that it's 'liberal'.

Quote:
Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users.


Quote:
Conservapedia - United States of America
The USA is rightly considered by its patriotic citizens to be the best country in the world.
 

The idea that there needs to be this 'conservative bias' to counteract the devils of the media is just another way righties try to get you to 'believe' there is a liberal bias in the first place. I mean, look what they're posting - "America is the best country in the world." WTF does that even mean? It's nonsensical, and just helps diluted righties to continue their self-delusion.

Quote:
Conservapedia - Wikipedia
The administrators who monitor and control the content on Wikipedia do not represent the views of the majority of Americans, and many are in fact not American.


Think these are funny? Look up unicorns, Dinosaurs, Global Warming, faith (which apparently is a 'christian' concept), Fascism, evolution, abortion (which apparently causes cancer).. hell even Gravity! There may be some truth in abortion causing breat cancer, but I have never heard of it before. They say that abortion and breast cancer are both rising, however contraception isn't always reliable, and since modern-day civilisation has a lot of casual sex, its understandable for abortion to be common. Cancer, not just in the breast, but all over the body are rising, but the main contributor is radiation. Raditaion waves enter the body from many sources, and there is always background radiation. The common use of computers, televisions, radios and other such technology gives an increased risk of these waves entering the body, and the possibility of a cell to mutate and replicate into what we call a cancer. Since breast tissue undertakes some of the most rapid mitosis in the body, it is more prone to mutate that some other tissues.

To me this just seems to be yet another group of extremists on the internet seeking to find a voice of influence. This is pretty bad that they are attacking Wikipedia. If I understand the way Wikipedia works, they get their content from users. So it is not as though the people that maintain the site or making the content or pushing their agenda.

However, it is cannot be said for the other, Conversapedia, which seems more like it is written by those that have a grudge against Wikipedia rather than open minded individuals. Plus they are bringing in the church and religion to explain away things from the initial glance that I took. They went so far as to call the scientists doing research on Global Warming, athetists. Just because of them not caring about the planet.

There is just too much religion there. But they also said that is what they are about. It is probably some group of extremist Christians. Religion is the byproduct of too many extremists.

North American Conservatives seem to have always been petty like this when it comes to the media (with the exception of the strictly fiscal conservatives). Personally, I think Edmnund Burke would throw up. Every form of media is apparently liberally biased (Fox News too? Yeeeeaaaah). Education to (My Western Civ teacher was a huge conservative, but we'll ignore that, like greenhouse gasses). And who knows what else is 'liberally biased'. Really though, based on this information that conservatives have given us, it certainly seems that liberals are more successful in the world, what with everyone of scholarship and influence being biased towards it.

Remember when conservatism used to be about evolution rather than revolution and pragmatics? My condolenses, Mr. Burke.

At first I thought it was a joke, but then I realised that there are people who are actually that stupid.

Meh.

Fox
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Cassidy McGurk
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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-03-10 18:30:05 »
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"like your grandma trying to join in a conversation about the Clash", heh

my mate jon had a good review of it

http://secback.blog.co.uk/2007/03/08/conservapedia~1866602
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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #2 on: 2007-03-10 19:33:23 »
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I was going to post this link (image) under "free for all" but after reading this thread, I thought it timely to post it here.



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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #3 on: 2007-03-11 04:02:56 »
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[Blunderov] "11 March 2007, 12:30:05 AM - seankenny@gmail.com (irvken)
"like your grandma trying to join in a conversation about the Clash", heh

my mate jon had a good review of it"

http://secback.blog.co.uk/2007/03/08/conservapedia~1866602"


Let the ridicule begin.

I'm looking forward to the contortions that I feel fairly certain await me when I enquire as to how the shy and doe-like Tyrannosaurus Rex managed to avoid the rude gaze of humans for long enough to become extinct without anyone noticing.

Doubtless many other riches of the mind await our amazed, not to mention reverant, inspection. I'm all a'quiver I can tell you.


Conservapedia
by secback @ 08/03/07 - 01:23:27

Here's a fascinating new contribution to scholarship. It's called Conservapedia. Trips off the tongue, doesn't it?

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American, it says. It reproduces a reasonable facsimile of the Wikipedia front page, but doesn't have the logo with the globe. Perhaps the roundness of it upsets them. Today in history (renamed from Wikipedia's On this day) covers March 2 to March 7. Five of the six entries refer to events in American history. Presumably any less than five sixths of world history would reflect an anti-American bias.

Here are some rather wonderful little snippets from their piece on kangaroos.

Kangaroos are the largest Marsupials alive today. They currently are native to the continent of Australia.

Currently? Oh, please read on.

Their legs are strong and powerful, designed by God for leaping.

Which is certainly more than I am. It's perhaps a rather striking claim for an encyclopaedia though.

According to the origins model used by creation scientists, modern kangaroos, like all modern animals, originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood.

Um, OK. What's a baramin, exactly?

A baramin is a lineage of earthly life which is believed by creationists to be created by God during the Creation Week, and corresponds in some functional aspects to the secular concept of species.

Ah. Wait, there's more.

Also according to creation science, after the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

It's certainly a relief to know that such a journey is still subject to debate. The weird thing is the way they accept continental drift, but still cling to a six thousand year timespan. How fast do they think continents move? At that rate Scotland will get to Preston in our lifetime.

It's just embarrassing, obviously, like your grandma trying to join in a conversation about the Clash. Still, it may offer us an opportunity for some fun. I've registered with them, and I'm going to try and insert some thoughtful edits. Watch this space.

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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #4 on: 2007-03-12 12:44:09 »
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[Blunderov] Not to be missed.
Walking with Jesus and the dinosaurs at the Daily Kos
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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #5 on: 2007-03-12 20:28:06 »
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2007-03-12 12:44:09   

[Blunderov] Not to be missed.
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save me, Jesus!

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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #6 on: 2007-03-13 06:39:29 »
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Quote from: David Lucifer on 2007-03-12 20:28:06   
save me, Jesus!

[Blunderov] Mm yes. Perhaps this rather different take on what really happened at the "last supper" is not the most wonderful example of the compositors art. The scale doesn't seem quite right and the subjects appear curiously indifferent to their impending doom.

"On the third day he was regurgitated..."?
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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #7 on: 2007-03-30 02:16:58 »
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[Blunderov]Witness the Wizards of Woo at work.

Action Skeptics

Christian Answers: Christozoology
24 March 2007, 08:37:48 AM - Akusai

I feel, gentle readers, that lately I've had too big a focus on religion and not enough of a focus on some really high-quality woo. I wanted to find some woo to fisk today, but today is Christian Answers day. Luckily, I was able to find a Christian Question that fit both criteria. Thus it is that I present to you another in my series of take-downs of articles from the Kid Explorer's section of Christian Answers:

Are any dinosaurs alive today?

This fantastic Christian Answer mixes shitty apologetics with that bastard child of animal science and Indiana Jones fantasies, cryptozoology. They begin with

There is some evidence that a few dinosaurs and great marine reptiles could still be alive, teetering on the edge of extinction.
Right off the bat they're being dishonest. I don't want to call it lying, because there is, strictly speaking, evidence of these things. It's just really bad and/or fabricated evidence. The first paragraph ends with:

Scientists are still discovering unknown animals each year.
which is footnoted with the following:

As late as 1965, the National Geographic Society stated that the number of new animal species discovered each year averages approximately 50 mammals, 100 fish, 15 birds, and 5,000 insects.
At first blush, these seem like innocent facts, dropped for the edification of the dinophile children reading the website, but they're meant to teach the children an important religious lesson: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The footnote serves to reinforce their fallacious appeal to "science doesn't know everything." If that applies to dinosaurs, why then, golly gee, it must apply to god, too! At least that's what they're getting at.

They start off with sauropods:

Natives in a very remote jungle in Africa repeatedly told of seeing large animals a lot like the sauropod dinosaurs. The sauropods included the Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and others like them.
And then, to support claims of living pterosaurs, they also say

Natives living in northern Zimbabwe described a strange flying animal which they called the "kongamato." It was not a bird but more like a reddish-colored lizard with bare, bat-like wings. The distance between its wing tips was four to seven feet.

Penn Jilette dismisses claims like these on the cryptozoology episode of Bullshit! with a cry of "The locals are fucking with you! The locals always fuck with you!" I think that his sentiment, while funny, dismisses the problem without really looking at it. I believe there's more going on.

The cultures that claim to see giant "sauropods" (usually referred to as "mokele-mbembe") and "pterosaurs" are jungle-dwelling, pre-literate tribes. They are ignorant of the fruits of modern science, and, more importantly, they are highly superstitious. These are cultures that run on oral traditions, and when the oral tradition includes a sauropod-type creature, a superstitious tribesman (or -woman) is likely to "see" the creature thanks to an overactive imagination and the confirmation bias. Religious people reguarly see something where there is nothing, like a cheese sandwich or a stump, and these are often city-dwelling folk who are at least passingly familiar with modern culture and science. They hold a belief that god and his emmisaries show themselves regularly, and so when something bears even a slight resemblance to Mary or Jesus or St. George, they believe it to truly be that person.

I believe that such religion-driven pareidolia is a likely explanation for mokele-mbembe sightings by the pygmy tribes of the Congo basin. Infused with their local spirituality and superstition, they use that as the framework to understand things they see but cannot explain. That is one of the major purposes of religion in general. Their tradition includes age-old stories of the creature known as mokele-mbembe and what it looks like. It is only natural that, seeing something large and strange in the jungle that looks like it has a long neck they would assign that particular part of their culture as the explanation. This is a far more likely hypothesis than that mokele-mbembe actually exists.

After all, repeated expeditions into the Congo Basin have turned up not a single shred of evidence for the creature. Not only that, such a large creature as mokele-mbembe would require a lot of food, and any creature would require a large enough breeding population to survive. I highly doubt that an ancient sauropod population lies hidden in the jungle and leaves no evidence whatsoever. This is what Infophile likes to call the "modus tollens exception" to the "absence of evidence" claim. It breaks down like this, using the modus tollens form of argument: If a creature/event/thing would perforce leave behind evidence that it exists, and after duly searching no evidence is found, then it can be said that the creature/event/thing does not exist. More formally:

1. If Thing X existed, it would necessarily leave behind detectable evidence.
2. No evidence exists for Thing X.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Thing X does not exist.

As an example, look at a nuclear bomb. Say that you say to me "I saw a nuke explode across the street from McDonald's the other day!" Naturally, I'm skeptical, and I ask for evidence. You say "I don't have any, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, so you can't tell me I'm lying." Well, I say, that's sometimes true, but a nuke would necessarily leave behind traces of its existence in the form of radiation. I take out the geiger counter that I keep under my bed for just such occasions, we drive down to McDonalds, and I set about performing my measurements. No radioactivity is found. Thus can it be concluded that, lacking the evidence that a nuke must necessarily leave behind, there was no nuke. In this case, absence of evidence most certainly was evidence of absence.

This works with mokele-mbembe and "pterosaurs" (and Bigfoot, and Loch Ness, and Champ, etc). If these creatures existed in large enough numbers to support a population that goes back the centuries since the sightings began, even if they remained unseen by human eyes they would still necessarily leave behind mountains of evidence that they were there: dung, prints (and real prints, not ones made with wooden feet), fur or skin, carcasses, blood, eggs, nests or colonies, and so much more. None of these things has ever, ever been found, and people have been searching exhaustively for these creatures for a long time, often using very high-tech equipment. To claim "Well, but absence of evidence and all that..." is ridiculous. In these cases, the absence of evidence doesn't merely preclude active belief, it reinforces the claim that the creatures don't exist at all. Add that to a much more plausible explanation (pareidolia) for which evidence is readily available, and I have no problem whatsoever saying that mokele-mbembe doesn't exist, "pterosaurs" are not still around, and the people who claim to see them are mistaken.

The quality of the evidence that Christian Answers offer for these assertions is pathetic. It adds up mostly to hearsay, but this interesting tidbit is implied to be something more robust:

The scientist showed the natives pictures of various animals, both living and extinct. Each person interviewed said the Pterodactyl (TEH-ro-DAK-till) was most like the Kongamoto [the native name for the "pterosaur].
This is not proof that the natives saw a pterodactyl. This is proof only that the natives thought they saw something that bore a resemblance to a pterodactyl. Until and unless actual physical evidence of the creature surfaces, we have no reason to believe it is there, and every reason not to.

Then they decided to piss off this humble myth buff with lies and misrepresentations:

The folklore of the Sioux Indian tribe also tells the story of a flying reptile, named the "Thunderbird", that was seen falling from the sky after being struck by lightning. It has appeared in Indian tales ever since.
The thunderbird is not a reptile. It is a bird. It is a large bird, or many large birds, depending on whose myth you're reading. They have feathers. They are magical creatures, to be sure, who ride the lightning like James Hetfield in the electric chair, but the myths and stories describe them as birds rather uniformly. The lies, they burn!

All of this strikes me as implying something similar to what Eastern "medicine" woos often say outright: the traditions and superstitions of old, bronze-age cultures are equal or superior to the power of science. Because these natives say they see these creatures, we must concede that the creatures exist. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Old belief is inferior to new evidence.

They take a different tack when dealing with the dreaded sea monster:

An ancient Hebrew legend says that the only animals to survive the Flood, besides those on the Ark, were "the giant og, the monster reem and the fishes." The word "og" means gigantic and long necked--a good description of the big plesiosaurs (PLEE-see-o-SORS).
First off, "og" means only "gigantic." "Long-necked" does not enter into it. Second, "the giant og" does appear in legend, but he also appears, conveniently, in the Old Testament:

Then they turned and went up along the road toward Bashan, and Og king of Bashan and his whole army marched out to meet them in battle at Edreil. (Numbers 21:33)

Og, you see, was a large person, not a sea monster. Legend says that he survived the flood by walking through the water behind the Ark. So what we have is a flat-out lie about a character from the Bible and an ommission of the patently ridiculous circumstances under which he survived the Noachian Deluge, perhaps because saying "Well, see, he was so tall that he could walk through the ocean with his head above water" sounds dumb even to the densest of faithheads. Nice thou-shalt-not-lying, Christians, nice. More:

There is more sworn evidence for "sea monsters" than would be needed to prove any ordinary case in the court of law.
What? Fucking what? It takes far more than eyewitness testimony (excuse me, "sworn evidence") to win a case in the American court system. People get confused. People make mistakes. People out-and-out lie. It is widely acknowledged that eyewitness testimony is far from sufficient when trying a case. What is needed is, of course, that old standby of actual physical evidence.

Saying things like this to children not only increases their credulity while decreasing their scientific literacy and grasp of reason, it teaches them falsehoods about the burden of proof and what constitutes good evidence. It is all around dishonest and intellectually abusive. Kids deserve better education than this tripe.

There's more to the article, but after a few more bits of poor evidence and hearsay that would make Charles Fort proud it switches gears into something else entirely. I have dealt with the main points of the article, and, lest I start getting too repetitious, I will leave it at that.

Once again we see that the people who write apologetics are at best incompetent and at worst flat-out liars. Join me here next week, same Action time, same Action channel, for more of these bastards and their neverending deceit
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Re:Conservapedia: New morons online?
« Reply #8 on: 2007-05-06 09:45:05 »
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[Blunderov] The latter day Canutes, unhinged but undeterred, present qubular balls to a largely disinterested world*. It must be scary living in a world so full of liberal bias. This bias appears to be so widespread as to calls the meaning of the word 'bias' into question, really but troglodytes have very thick skins.

workingassetsblog.com

Culture Wars Redux: Conservatives start QubeTV.tv in response to YouTube.com "liberal bias"

In the, "I'm really not making this up" section of the news today, folks are creating something called QubeTV.tv in response to the "liberal bias" of YouTube. It's the culture wars of the user-generated media.

It's laughable of course. Someone even started a conservative version of Wikipedia, which just utterly defies the reason for Wikipedia in the first place.

Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' Internet encyclopedia, also has some conservative competition on the Web. Conservapedia.com was founded in November 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
The reason why these user-generated sites may seem to have a liberal bias is because conservatives seem to be afraid of culture. Period. They're the old parents telling their kids to turn that infernal racket down because it's not Mozart.

So, conservatives have to start their own site, with an explicit bias, because they don't have enough relevancy in popular culture to actually control, well, popular culture. Videos on QubeTV.tv so far? A video of Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-CO., explaining why President Bush's tax cuts should be made permanent. Wow! Do I want to watch that or the new Linkin Park video dealing with global warming on YouTube? Conservative taxes, liberal minding the environment? Let's see what users think : Tom's video has been viewed 243 times. Linkin Park's has been viewed 3,415,583 times

Culture is strong. And it's not liberal; it's just accepting. And because it's accepting, it has mass appeal. Culture in itself eventually defines politics. This is something that Conservatives may never understand. One of my favorite quotes is from an MFA artist named BARR. In one of his songs, he sings: [mp3 link]

"Politics is not necessarily just guerrilla fighters, prime ministers and who cheated in the primaries, it’s also who am I in relation to you, who are we in the way we can see ourselves in relation to the other kids."

That's it. That's politics. Simple. Oh, and incidentally, Qube.TV is a design firm. QubeTV.tv is the conservative response to YouTube. Maybe they should have thought of buying their domain name before branding themselves as QubeTV. Qube.TV would have been much better for them, and it's laughable that they don't own it. And pretty indicative of how well they understand culture, anyway.

Posted by Dan Droller at 1:30 PM

* In spite of the seemingly epic achievment of have squared a circle in all three dimensions.
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