I'm sure they'll edit any dates before 4000BC to be "speculative, because before the flood, you know, things were weird with all that extra pressure from the water over the firmament." And I didn't know listing dates as CE/Current Epoch/Era" was anti-American. You learn somethin' new every day on these interweebie tubular thingies.

Wow, that's almost too easy. With so many fish in one barrel, I almost feel bad for them.

Or I would, had they not volutarily jumped into a barrel clearly labled 'Please Mock.'

Wow. The internet finally gains truthiness.

Irony deficiency is a such a debilitating disease. The first uses of CE and BCE as alternatives to BC and AD that I ever encountered were in those anti-Christian, anti-American publications Watchtower and Awake!.

(Apparently, Faux News is now pushing its own 'satirical news' programme in competition with 'The Daily Show' -- the bit I heard on NPR the other day involved a 'Hillary is a lesbian' joke.)

You mean "crazier people," of course. :-)

Their site seems slow as hell and overwhelmed (something that will surely be entered in Conservapedia as proof that the net was in dire need of their services). The one search I was able to accomplish (searching for "internet,") led me to the entry for "Milton Friedman," which magically avoids making any references to his opposition to the war on drugs.

I can't wait to see the first story of a Young Republican attempting to use a link from here as a citation.

#4 Fragano Ledgister, you mean that all those talking heads are doing Faux News straight? I thought it *was* a comedy act.

I read the Friedman entry and nearly spat up my coffee upon seeing this: "Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was a libertarian economist who emphasized freedom. He was the favorite economist of many conservatives (including Ronald Reagan), in part because nearly all other economists have been liberal."

Has to be a joke. Has to be.

From the Conservapedia index:

World History
Lectures
Ancient History (Creation-500 CE)
The Middle Ages (500 CE-1500 CE)
The Renaissance (1300 CE-1600 CE)
Pre Modern Era (1500 CE-1900 CE)
Modern Era (1900 CE-Current)

They're clearly anti-American and anti-Christian....

"...in part because nearly all other economists have been liberal"

I did choke on my coffee. I managed not to douse the keyboard with it, but only by inhaling, hard. I did, however, dribble some of it down my chin because of the coughing fit.

Steve Buchheit #6: Not only that, Bill O'Reilly is not a comedian.

And our esteemed hosts are from... TranTor?

Joel Polowin #12: That might be the case. I'm certainly resident in Terminus....

It gets even better. Here's an entire entry:

Heliocentric
From Conservapedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The view that the sun is at the center of the universe.

(The solar system is the universe. Wow.)

Fragano @ 14... It's their way of countering Thomas Dolby's song "She blinded me with science!"

(And if you google 'they blinded me with science', a column by Jonah Goldberg comes up. I'm going to be sick.)

Fragano, that stuff is priceless—"Creation to 500 CE"! It has made my afternoon.

This project should be encouraged.

Because every minute a crazy person spends playing in this sandbox is a minute they're not spending on vandalizing the real Wikipedia.

Think of the Wiki wars this will forestall.

A post at Cosmic Variance preserves several entries that are already at least partly changed or gone, including this gem from the "Christ" entry:

Many atheists claim that there is no evidence of Jesus outside the Bible,(Citation Needed) but few scholars take this seriously.(Citation Needed) Historical evidence for Jesus is comparable to that of many historical personalities such as Caesar, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, and Socrates, and many others. Historical context indicates that as a ‘rabbi’ in judea, Jesus would have been married. An explaination for his lack of a wife may be that he was a confirmed bachelor, and had twelve men to fufill his needs.

Alas, when I went to check, that bit had already been edited, though (as of this posting) the entry still tells us that "the name Jesus almost always refers specifically to Jesus of Nazareth, believed by Christian followers to be God's dad" ...

Jon Swift did a nice job on this

Serge #15: Well, that might explain it!

#18 Peter Erwin "(entry on Conservapedia) Jesus of Nazareth, believed by Christian followers to be God's dad"

Obviously a mixup involving a time machine and contreception.

Andrew #16: As Patrick put it, this is an online encyclopædia for crazy people.

Here's another entry:

Fidel Castro
From Conservapedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgenico Batista in 1959 and became dictator of Cuba. Liberals in America promoted Castro as a hero, but the conservatives believed he would become a ruthless and dangerous dictator. Sure enough, Castro soon began to rule the country cruelly, seizing private property and ending free speech. Under Castro's rule, Cuba has changed from being one of the richest nations to being one of the poorest.

(When was Cuba one of the richest nations? Is 'Fulgenico' related to 'fotogénico'?)

If you'd like to have some fun, take a look at the older edits of the relativity entry.

Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept?
Oh dear oh dear.

Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept?

I await with bated breath their call on what Jesus and his mother had.

Huh... to be perfectly honest, I always thought that CE stood for "Christian Era". Which to me, is not anti-Christian, since it at least acknowledges the basis behind our dating system without the implied assumption of the date of Christ's birth being "fact".

Still, this thing is hilarious...

You know what's really sad? When I read some of the entries, I honestly can't tell if they've been vandalised, or if they were serious.

Or is that funny? Damn! I can't decide.

Satire is dead, Satire is risen...

I was taught that CE = Common Era

Everyone here must read the Ayn Rand entry, and the scholarly analysis of her ideas as derived from Norman Spinrad's "The World of Null-A".

Reportedly, the folks behind the Conservapedia are the Schafly family, whose most noted member is of course Phyllis.

So not a joke. Merely batshit insane.

I kind of wish people wouldn't vandalize Conservapedia, actually. Any project whose Examples of Bias in Wikipedia includes such gems as, "The Wikipedia entry for the Piltdown Man omits many key facts, such as how it was taught in schools for an entire generation and how the dating methodology used by evolutionists is fraudulent" seems pretty self-vandalizing already.

Let their native craziness be on display in its full glory!

Wikipedia on CE: "Common era, also known as the Christian era or the Current era"...

Since it's precisely the same calendar/dating system as BC/AD, it's all to easy to slip into thinking "CE = Christian Era." (One could probably construct an argument to the effect that "Common Era" is stealth Eurocentrism, enshrining Christianity as somehow defining the "common era" of human history...)

Maybe we should go back to AUC...

I don't know if I can tell the vandals using irony from the whackjobs using whatever passes for their brains...

Checking out the "Recent Edits" listing is scary.

I don't think I could vandalize Conservapedia effectively, even if I wanted to, for the same reason that I have trouble satirizing a lot of behaviour/beliefs/attitudes that I find silly. No matter how off-the-wall I write my satire, I keep running into people who not only agree with what I've written, they think it doesn't go far enough.

To (approximately) quote song-writer Fred Small, "Tom Paxton said it best: 'Some folks you don't have to satirize, you just quote 'em.'"

When I first say this I thought "Oh the Onion has created a wiki of their own" then I realized they were serious.

Changing AD to CE makes sense to me, but I don't know why we can't just keep BC as an abreviation for Before the Common era. Insisting on BCE seems kinda pointless and almost like you're trying to pick a fight about it.

You know the true way to measure a wikipedia's worth is by it's Articles for Deletion debates.

AFD for the Xbox 360 entry

... I'd note also that there are some gaming systems which have had some historical impact and might be more worth having articles on (such as the early Atari systems). That does not seem to apply to the Xbox.

Jon Meltzer #31: Surely, that's A.E.van Vogt's World of Null-A?

One wonderfully ironic fact is perfectly representative of not only this sucessful realization of self-parody, but of what the conservative movement has become in this century. The software they are using for this is clearly MediaWiki, the open source software created for Wikipedia. (Using may be too strong a word -- they clearly are not technically prepared to handle the traffic load they claim to be seeking. Abuse, misuse, maluse . . . hmmm.) This project's reason for being is to reject the values of a community that the project is completely dependent on for its very existence.

Like the most of the modern conservative movement, this is simply a another bunch of parasites.

By the way, all this attention is spiking their hit rate--bet they'll be trumpeting that.

But how on earth do these people expect to operate? Wikipedia is more-or-less a co-op, operated as a democratic republic; this leads to a reference which is apt to reflect widely-held views. (The validity of these views is another story.) I suppose Conservapedia has some sort of editorial elite, chosen by the management. This is going to make for problems with non-member contributors, who are going to very much resent the editorical control. If they're going to stick largely with paid contributions, they're going to end up with something more like a poorly-edited conventional encyclopedia, and it's going to be bloody expensive.

I agree with Florence Ambrose. (No permanent link to the Friday page yet...)

"And reality has a known liberal bias."

John Meltzer (31):

Everyone here must read the Ayn Rand entry, and the scholarly analysis of her ideas as derived from Norman Spinrad's "The World of Null-A".

I have to agree with the injunction not to vandalize Conservapædia. People who succumb to that temptation will only make it harder for the wingnuts to start concentrating on having their own edit wars, in their very own wiki, free from any annoying interactions with rational thinkers.

I fully expect their edit wars, should they ever be free to have them without any liberal interference, will be truly astounding to watch.

(#46: I don't think they actually employ the ligature in Conservapedia - - part of the reason they started their own Wiki was because they were deeply offended by Wikipedia's use of foreign spellings.)

I'm all for it. Part of the reason the conservatives are so cohesive is that they seldom compare notes on their beliefs. Now they can.

Oh, this is too easy. I agree, these folks are batshit insane, but also they are funny, and we need funny. I say, more power to them.

Note: when I try to get to the site, I can't. My guess is, everyone on the intertubes is checking them out, and probably attempting to edit entries. Better than Paintball.

Alas, the Ayn Rand entry isn't nearly so colorful:

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-born philosopher, screenwriter, and novelist, who used her novels to promote her philosophy, known as Objectivism. Her best-known novels are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Although her philosophy differs in many respects from Libertarianism, it also emphasized invidual freedom, and her novels, particularly Atlas Shrugged, contain lectures that are considered touchstones for libertarian thinking.

Wild. It always bothers me a bit that so many find the ideas they hold so dear to be so fragile as to be unable to survive in their vaunted marketplace of ideas.

I tried to stay away, really I did.

An entry, more-or-less at random, from Conservapedia:

Lamarck:

Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first scientist to come up with the idea of evolution (though a different version than Darwin's). Lamarck suggested that giraffes got long necks by stretching to reach trees, when clearly they got long necks because God wanted them to be long. Lamarck is now an object of derision amongst scientists, much like Darwin will be in a year or two.

I mean, where do you even begin?

Do you start with their confusion of "theorist" and "theory"? Do you correct their claim that Lamarckianism was the "first" theory of evolution? Do you ask for a self-styled "encyclopedia" to, you know, give his dates?

Do you point out that scientists don't actually give any thought at all to M. Lamarck - let alone treat him as "an object of derision"?

Do you start with criticism of a theory of causality that thinks that "God wanted it to be so" is an actual explanation for anything?

Do you start a betting pool on the verifiable prediction they make?

Really, now: how much stupid is it possible to pack into one short paragraph? I think Conservapedia is going to show us.

Bob #52:

And then there's the use of "clearly," because Lamarck wasn't just wrong, but he was screaming in the face of common sense, I guess.

Now... the most hilarious thing of all really... their own "Commandments" for writing an entry...

1) Everything you post must be true and verifiable.

2)Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public domain.

3) Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without gossip or foul language.

4) When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical basis. See CE.

5) As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.

6) Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry. Opinions can be posted on Talk:pages or on debate or discussion pages.

I especially like 1 and 6 ... because, you know... none of the entries I've read violate that at all... /sarcasm_off

The site seems overloaded, but this from the Bill Clinton page:

"Clinton also signed into law the Violence Against Women Act, which opened the federal courts to claims of domestic disputes between men and women, which had always been handled under state rather than federal law. A key provision of this law was later ruled unconstitutional in United States v. Morrison."

reminds me not just that conservatives are nutty (or, really, batshit insane) but that the things they are nutty about are also nutty. Vaccines? Evolution? Violence against women? (They appear to be for it.) British-English spelling of words? Relativity? It's crackpot stuff.

You'd think conservatism was about, you know, traditional values, and not making radical changes in society too fast, and self-reliance. But when you dig, it always seems to be about the outright denial of consensus reality. I thought Terri Schiavo was an excellent case of that, where a whole political party seemed to think that by believing really hard they could make their own medical facts.

"Reality has a liberal bias" never seemed so true. Have they always been like this? My experience of conservatism started with Thatcher & Reagan, who were pretty wingnutty already.

Not for the first time, I'm reminded of John Rogers' Theory of General Crazification,
his explanation of why approximately 27% of the American public are functionally insane:

Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification -- either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

Did someone say truthiness?

When it comes to truthiness, you can't go wrong with Wikiality. :)

They have an entry for Ayn Rand too (in fact, I wrote part of it). and how can anyone forget Michael "Because Michael Moore is Fat" Moore? Bring on the fracts!

#45: Teresa, it's not my joke. It was on the site, according to the Kos thread on this thing. (I haven't checked it myself; the site was slashdotted). Here's what the text is alleged to have been:

"Ayn Rand was a Russian conservative philosopher, considered by her followers to be the greatest philosopher of all time, and by ignorant Marxists to be a fool. Other contenders for the title of greatest conservative philosopher are Kant and Aristotle. Rand believed she had rediscovered Aristotle after centuries of neglect (she was apparently ignorant of the whole of mediaeval scholastic philosophy), and conservative science fiction author Norman Spinrad wrote The World of Null-A, imagining a nightmare scenario in which Rand had not rediscovered Aristotle. Rand's nickname was "Avida Dollars", because (contrary to Christian morality) she believed that making money for yourself was the supreme good. This led her to reject Kant's categorical imperative, opposing it on the grounds that Aristotelian logic made synthetic a priori statements meaningless. Rand called her philosophy "objectivism", because she didn't know the name was already taken for another philosophical concept."

pardon me if I'm barfing stupid up all over the internet here, because I'll admit to not being that widely read when it comes to Kant, but was he really that conservetive?

His essay Toward Perpetual Peace calls for a federation of nations and an abolishion of standing armies. To me, that sounds kinda like the opposite of conservetive.

I realize that the Rand entry is on crack for a veriety of reasons. I'm just wondering if it's on crack for that one, too.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-born philosopher, screenwriter, and novelist, who used her novels to promote her philosophy, known as Objectivism. Her best-known novels are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

And the latter was turned into one hilarious movie.

One of the comments on the Kos thread indicated that some pages still had assignments listed at the bottom to fill out terms. So the initial, um, "content" was probably produced by kids or perhaps college students, which explains the writing quality and minor errors of fact. Like putting Japan off the west coast of Asia. The kind of stuff only nitpickers really care about.

Truth in advertising, at least: the main page says you'll like the "concise" entries. And sure enough, if you value concision highly enough to ignore the rampant inaccuracy, the D-grade book-report writing style, the wingnut lunatic viewpoint, and the complete lack of, well, all detail about everything, you'll be super-happy.

I've stayed away from MakingLight because I've been working to get my own company started. I can spend hours reading ML. But PJ sent me email, quoting stuff, and I couldn't stay away.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The thing is, even batshit has its uses. In this case, making my sides ache from laughter. ohdearohdear.

Aha. They caught the Spinrad-Rand text. It's marked as "silliness removed", but here it was.

"silliness removed"

As opposed to all the silliness that will remain.

TNH@48--LOL, literally

Bob@52--Stephen Jay Gould wrote an extended article on Lamarck; the man was much different from what we usually hear of him.

I wonder what their entries on Tolkien and Lewis will be like.

...what about Catholicism?

TNH@48--LOL, literally

Bob@52--actually, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an extended article on Lamarck; the man was (as usual) much different than the popular accounts.

I wonder what their entries on Tolkien and Lewis will end up like?

...what about Catholicism?

Although her philosophy differs in many respects from Libertarianism

mostly in that none of her heroes have tenure at public universities.

An entry for Lewis, but not for Tolkien. The Lewis entry is...not very good, consisting mostly of an incomplete bibliography with a few comments. C'mon, folks, couldn't you have cited Carpenter and Wilson?

I was truly weirded out by the insistence on "AD" in dates, since year 1 "AD" was probably about four years after the birth of Jesus--surely there is no need to enshrine an ancient calendrical error as revealed truth?

Sample quote: "Plato was a great Greek philosopher from 428 to 347 BC, after which he was not so great."

...and did you know that faith is a uniquely christian concept?

After reading these quotes, all I can do is quote Patrick: "Now I've got stupid all over me."

Currently, searching Conservapedia in Wikipedia gets you to Schlafly's Eagle Forum entry. Good move.

FYI all you Randy spirits:

Norman Spinrad didn't write The World of Null-A, A.E. Van Vogt did.

But why no mention of her long-term affair with her disciple (best-selling author) Nathaniel Brandon?

Paul @ 72:
Written by Van Vogt? Surely you must be thinking of the famous Belgian painter, Vincent Van Vogt.

Worlds of Null-A was of course written (under a pseudonym) by the famous proponent of General Semantics, and California legislator, Samuel I. Korzybski.

(In other words, I see you are unused to the fine art of Internet trolling.)

"Samuel I. Korzybski". Wasn't that a Kuttner-Moore pseudonym?

I fully expect their edit wars, should they ever be free to have them without any liberal interference, will be truly astounding to watch.

There's already been an edit war over atheism, but I think some satirists were involved, so maybe that doesn't count.

Anyway, conservative edit wars will last only until an admin bans one side of the argument. None of your wimpy dispute resolution procedures for *them*, by golly.

Oh, and anyone who hasn't seen it yet needs to see this article. Don't be distracted by the obvious stupidity - see the *subtle* (by conservative standards, anyway) stupidity that has eluded the administrators for over six weeks!

Chris @ #75,

To quote Atrios in other contexts: "The stupid. It burns!"

Good lord.

Well, I suppose they now need a page on Energy Conversation - "Let there be light", "I am the Word and the Light", etc.

Chris@75: The stupid. It tickles! I'm still laughing.

It's a bit stunning to see to see the denial of physical reality expressed in that entry, though. How, I wonder, do these people account for nuclear energy? Must be Satanic.

I've been brooding all day about the "Lamarck" entry I found this afternoon, and about the kind of mind that thinks that this is an explanation:

clearly (giraffes) got long necks because God wanted them to be long..

The obvious snark is that the Conservapedia would be a LOT shorter if they simply used that "explanation" throughout: "Why is the sky blue? Because God wanted it to be blue."

But more seriously, I'm wondering if that's the key to the entire conservative enterprise:

Things are the way they are because that's the way God wants things.

It would explain a lot about how conservatives think about the world. And it would go a ways toward explaining why their positions generally remain incomprehensible to me.

Thanks for pointing me at the funny. Alas, the site no longer seems to be accepting new accounts, so I'm unable to help them improve the accuracy of their little encyclopedia...

You know, this "Conservapedia" gets my little Sillicon Valley brain a-spinning. Everyone is trying cash in on the "social" web, desperately trying to think of new things that you can share on the web and new demographics to exploit. Well, what about the crackpot demographic? I sure don't see any hipster coders in their SF lofts working on *that* market. Hmmm.

The domain is registered to an Andrew Schlafly with an address which has been used by "Andrew Schlafly, Esq., General Counsel, Ass’n of Am. Physicians & Surgeons". That partially explains the odd focus of the Bill Clinton article -- one of the AAPS's claim to fame is forcing the release of the membership list of the health care task force.

Phyllis Schlafly has a son named Andrew. I can't find conclusive evidence that they're the same Andrew Schlafly, but I know which way I'd bet. On at least one occasion, the AAPS and Eagle Forum filed a joint amicus brief.

Conservapedia user Aschlafly is a major contributor and editor, and reading his talk page is interesting; he appears to be able to ban users at will, and it sounds like most of the other early contributors are students of his of some sort. This could be the "Eagle Forum University" mentioned on the Eagle Forum wikipedia page, but it sounds to me like these students are younger than University age, and (anybody surprised?) home-schooled.

me, #82: ... all of which Jon Swift already posted, with more detail and better sourcing... so, um, nevermind.

I've been laughing all day over the title of this post.

Please may I plead for conservatives, here? These people are not conservatives. They're bug-eyed out-of-their-tree radicals. They want to change the world profoundly. What they want is theocracy (not found in the West since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, at least, and arguably never found at all) based on literalist Bible interpretation (Augustine of Hippo put the skates under that one, c500 CE). Above all, they want to destroy a whole tradition of philosophy going back five hundred years, based on the notion that the material universe can be explained by theorising from repeatedly observed fact. They want the death of science, nothing less.

This is not conservatism. These people are for a revolution. And just like every other revolutionary, they will say that the end justifies the means, that the innocent must suffer with the guilty, and that God will know his own.

Yes, they're fools. Yes, it's laughable. Yes, they're losers. No, they don't give a toss about reality. But that's their short-term strength. What they want will never fly, but their underlying despair and fanaticism makes them very useful shock troops. They're impervious to reason, unimpressed with fact, and their certainty can't be dented, in the short term. Never underestimate how dangerous they are.

But conservative, they're not, no matter what they call themselves.

Are the home-schooled required to meet the 'No Child Left Behind' testing standards?

Rob, 86: According to their own holy texts, no child will be Left Behind...in teh RAPCHER! Duh-duh-duh!

#85: But this spirit does seem to pervade the modern Republican party and, for example, the right-wing pundits, right-wing blogs, and so on. Or at least, defending it rather than condemning it as garbage thinking. Defining conservatism as something that most modern self-described conservatives aren't isn't all that useful either.

I've been amusing myself reading random pages (usually quite quick! one sentence!), reported a few blatant copyvios, all good fun stuff. Here's another of my favourite passages from the World War I page:

"World War I consisted mostly of trench warfare. This method of waging war was very slow and messy. Soldiers might wait in their trenches for weeks, only to advance a few feet and wait in a new trench. It is not hard to guess why trench warfare has not been used since World War I."

Not hard to guess at all! I mean, all that mud! And you hardly made any progress at all! Really boring! Everyone agreed it was a big waste of time. That's why the well-known Treaty of Bognor Regis in 1928 banned trench warfare. They also banned bayonets (dangerously sharp!) and cavalry charges (too much horse poo). And then everyone had a nice round of tea and scones. The End.

Dave@85: The problem is, they've stolen the name. It's happenned over and over again in political history.

Bob@79: "Things are the way they are because that's the way God wants things." Well, yes, these are authoritarians--they want an authority. The problem with referring everything to the authority of a diety, philosophically, is that it's always true and of no value--to get something useful out of the explanation one has to begin to think about what God wants and why he wants it and there you are, thinking again.

Rob@86 - not only are homeschooled kids not covered by NCLB, private schools aren't either.

Public schools are given impossible standards, private schools aren't tested this way, and there's pressure to support vouchers to subsidize private schools. It's almost like someone is trying to sabotage the whole concept of public education (well, more than it already has been. Buffy was right, hell is high school).

Of course, the way to meet impossible standards is to cheat, so I suppose the students are learning something about the real world.

How does "truthiness" differ from "versimilitude"? When I learned the word "versimilitude", it had the connotation of seeming but not being.

***

And the About page is LOL funny "rapidly becoming one of the largest and most reliable online educational resources of its kind." Then there's four lines on "Canada", a one-liner on France, another on "Middle Ages", another on "money". It's like "The Encyclopedia of Adrian Mole, aged 13 1/2".

On Sir Isaac Newton: "The majority opinion holds that Newton was a unitarian (one God) and an Arian (Jesus was divine but did not exist eternally and was created by God at some point before coming to Earth). Both are commonly regarded by conservative Christians as the foulest of heresies, and Newton's adoption of them illustrates the folly of adopting personal religious beliefs rather than submitting to lawful authority."

Wow. I guess I'm just not up on my heresies.

"rapidly becoming one of the largest and most reliable online educational resources of its kind."

Well, to be fair, you know that next time the New York Times does a story on Wikipedia, they'll devote an equal amount of column-inches to Conservapedia. You know... for balance.

I wish I was joking, but after the Grand Canyon story, it's not quite so funny.

As an example of the sort of vandalism I simply cannot condone, I offer up the entry for Cthulhu. Really, people— we should not be helping them.

p.s. I think I'm going to insist on spelling it with the ligature just to spite them.

This is via Pandagon, but I checked myself to see if it was true:

1984
1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.
The protagonist is Winston Smith. Thre is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambigous.

Good Heaven, I don't know if this is side-splitting funny (the end is supposed to be ambiguous!) or really, really scary.

Randolph Fritz at #89: there's that. It'll be interesting if the contending wingnuts are forced to think about their various flavors of wingnuttery.

But - if they believe that the status quo is divinely arranged, then they're likely to view change as downright sacrilegious.

clearly (giraffes) got long necks because God wanted them to be long. (There. That settles that.)

So that's given me some insight into the wingnut worldview. Thanks, Conservapedia!

Henry Troup: "Verisimilitude" is what you read from a book, "truthiness" is what you feel in your gut.

So, now we have so many realities to choose from! Isn't freedom great?

94: That really reminds me of the free term paper, free term paper, free term paper.

Bob@96: "But - if they believe that the status quo is divinely arranged, then they're likely to view change as downright sacrilegious."

Well, they do. Why do you think they're so upset?

Currency is a unit of money that facilitates the purchase of goods or services. Each modern nation has one currency, such as the dollar in the United States, the pound in England, and the euro in many countries in the European Union on continental Europe. Many liberals hope for the establishment of a single world currency, which would, of course, undermine the sovereignty of the United States and bring about the Antichrist. Also, Ireland uses the Euro.

Hypothesis: any addition, deletion, or change would destroy the crystalline perfection of this entry.

Analee@60: The Kant reference in the (now-deleted) Rand entry is a subtle joke -- you need to know that Rand hated Kant.

#95, Anna, re _1984_

That entry was written in its entirety by one user, who's been contributing since December 19th. None of his other contributions I've looked at are quite so out-there, so I'm inclined to think this is serious.

#100, Alexey, re Currency

The last two sentences of that entry, on the other hand, are by a new user most of whose edits seem to me to be parody.

Todd, no surprise there. But it's that second beat, the unexpected punchline after the punchline, that had me nearly rolling on the floor.

Rob Rusick, #86:

Are the home-schooled required to meet the 'No Child Left Behind' testing standards?

No, thank God. I was already inclined to homeschooling before No Child Left Alone hit my town, but the Act has definitely decided me in favor of keeping my kids the hell out of public school. It wasn't just my school district having to drop Euclid's proofs because they weren't on the standardized tests; I could cover that subject over the summer. It wasn't entirely that expose on PBS that links the inspiration for the Act to a Texas school administrator who falsified test results so that his methods would appear more successful; after all, useful food crops occasionally grow from muck. The nail in the coffin, for me, was the result of my local high school being forced to cut the Baby Think-It-Over program because they needed more time to prepare kids for the tests.

Teen pregnancy rates rose. But their test scores were great!

#102 Todd: I didn't think for a moment the entry on 1984 was parody, unfortunately. I mean, not deliberate parody. It's not funny enough. It has the ring of truth, and this is what makes it so scary. There are people (admittedly, people who appear to have limited reading comprehension) who genuinely think 1984 is an utopia. Even after the meaning of the word has been explained to them.

#105: After reading all of OrelP.'s contributions, I'm actually having a hard time deciding. See in particular "Turkey" and "Predestination" ("God does not forgive some sinners, like pagans and foreigners.").

I honestly can't decide whether this is some poor free-thinking kid trapped in a situation where the most he can do to keep from going completely insane is push the boundaries just a little bit, or if he really is this...off.

Oh man. Their entry on George W. Bush is just embarrassing. Here's the current one it its entirety.

"George W. Bush
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Is the president of the United States of America. Republican. Was elected in 2000 in a disputed election over Democratic candidate Al Gore. In 2004, George W. Bush won reelection by a popular margin of millions of votes, including a landslide victory in the State of Florida where the outcome had been so close in 2000. Democratic candidate John Kerry quickly conceded defeat the day after the election.

For many months after John Kerry conceded the outcome of the 2004 election to George W. Bush, some liberals continued to claim that the election had somehow been stolen by voter fraud. When Al Gore went on a speaking tour in 2006 to promote government controls over industry in the name of global warming, many liberal fans greeted him with the belief that he had somehow won the election in 2000.

Son of president George H. W. Bush.

The current Bush administration is a Divided Government"

Pathetic. I almost feel sorry for these guys. At the very least they could have listed who his wife is, what she did before she became First Lady. Who their children are, what sort of pet they had, and his previous job as Governor of Texas, or that he went to Harvard Business school. And that's just the non-controversial stuff I could remember off the the top of my head.

I would have that that entry was vandalized, but all of the older versions are as lame, or lamer. Very sad.

Another from the "I can't tell if it's parody or not" category;

http://conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Velociraptor&oldid=16144

The velociraptor is a small, carnivorous dinosaur featured in the fictional movie "Jurassic Park". In the movie, they make a showing due to atheist genetic engineers tinkering with God's creation. Most of these scientists get eaten for their sin.

The velociraptor is currently extinct, due to the Great Flood [1]. It's not clear why they didn't make it onto the Ark, but it's possible that Noah worried that they would eat the zebras.

The United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is a nation formed by the conquest of inferior races by the English, although its first King was the Scottish confirmed bachelor King James. As a constitutional monarchy, it enjoys the benefit of the most perfect system of government known to man.

Dave Luckett said (#85):
... What they want is theocracy (not found in the West since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, at least, and arguably never found at all) ...

Historical nitpickery: There have been small-scale, relatively short-lived theocracies in the West, such as Florence under Savonarola, or Geneva under John Calvin. Since the Papal States were ruled directly by the Vatican, they were arguably a form of theocracy as well. The Holy Roman Empire, on the other hand, was never a theocracy, despite its name.

Ken @ 109

its first King was the Scottish confirmed bachelor King James

This will be news to Charles I!

Dave Luckett@85: And just like every other revolutionary, they will say that the end justifies the means, that the innocent must suffer with the guilty, and that God will know his own.

Wow. You should stick that in the Conservapedia. Maybe under the entry for Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Jesus of Nazareth.

#110 and #85 - they're ahead of you!

Theocracy

Government ruled by a divine means or by leaders considered to be divinely guided. Israel was a theocracy before King Saul.

Modern theocracies include Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan prior to the ousting of the Taliban by the military of the United States of America. With any luck, a new modern theocracy will be established within the United States by the end of the decade.

This has got to be a parody.

Self-follow-up re #113:

Wait a minute - Turkey is a theocracy?

#94: Anna, that scares the hell out of me.

#100 and #108: I'm laughing out loud and my son is looking at me like I'm insane. And I think that based on the chortles that keep popping out while I'm typing up this comment, I'm going to be laughing about that last bit on Ireland all day. And zebras!

Now, I'm cheery, and I'm ready to dry my hair.

Okay, I've been unable to get this out of my head since I first read "Things are the way they are because that's how God wants it": Does that also cover state-recognized gay marriage, legal abortion, separation of church and state, Democrats in control of Congress, and the lousy season record of their favorite sports team, or just the stuff they like?

If I were able to create an account, I'd be tempted (!) to add an entry about the theological implications of the refrangibility of light. Or vice versa. Per M. Apollo, light could not have been refrangible before the Flood, etc. (Not technically true, now that I think about it; the evidence shows only that the amount of refraction could not have been wavelength-dependent.)

Andrew Schlafly seems to be very determined that the Theory of Relativity hasn't produced anything useful. I wonder if he thinks that GPS isn't useful, or that it doesn't really use relativistic corrections?

Conservapedia isn't the first politically motivated spinoff from Wikipedia. I haven't yet seen any mention in this thread of Disinfopedia (now Sourcewatch), a left-leaning Wiki reference that is specifically intended *not* to follow the "neutral point of view" editorial standard that Wikipedia aspires to. (They do aspire to be "fair and accurate", though, just as Conservapedia aspires to be "true and verifiable".)

Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. There are lots of useful sites that have a particular point of view. And SourceWatch at least doesn't seem to try to *prohibit* dissenting POV so far as I've been able to tell; but it does tend in a particular general direction due to the folks who are the editors and the folks the site tends to attract as active participants. That's generally true of most social online communities, including blogs like this one. (And I'm grateful to our gracious hosts for providing and cultivating such an enjoyable forum for discussion.)

Conservapedia's site is slow enough that I've managed to see very little of it so far, and the wingnut factor on the samples I have seen, or seen quoted, seems pretty high at the moment. But it'll be interesting to see how Conservapedia settles over the next few months. The content of any wiki is only partially under control of the editors, as we've seen already; it also depends on the folks who are attracted and stick with the site. Will this Wiki go off in various differnet directions? (An Ayn Rand conservative and a Pat Robertson conservative are rather different.) Will edit wars erupt, as those from the left or various factions of the right try to insert non-party line but "true and verifiable" content? Will the editors try to tighten control to keep the articles "in line"? Will more serious conservatives try to raise the level of the articles, or will it be left to the wingnuts? Will it build or lose an audience over time? It's all potentially catnip for folks who like watching and analyzing group dynamics.

If it's any consolation, the current Conservapedia participants seem to be as unable to distinguish the parodies from the "real" content as we are... and they're getting twitchy about it. Citing "Removed liberal attempt to discredit Conservapedia with parody", one of the more... um... religiously-biased contributors just removed a passage that a well-informed contributor had included in his entry on the Theory of Relativity:

"Like most significant scientific discoveries, relativity has been widely adopted as a social analogy, but the comparison has little factual basis (the common quip about placing a hand on a hot stove has nothing to do with Einstein's theory). For example the idea of moral relativity exists independent of (and substantially predates) the theory of relativity."

They don't like having common errors debunked? They'd prefer to have people spouting party-line nonsense out of ignorance? ... Oh, right, never mind.

Aconite, I was using the word "revolutionary" as derived from "revolution" as defined in the Shorter Oxford as "... a forcible substitution of a new ruler or government". This is, true, its third definition, but nevertheless is quite reasonably respectable, and it was what I meant. By that definition, neither Ghandi nor King nor Jesus were revolutionaries. You would have been better citing George Washington.

But you could have cited Washington, so I am guilty of a loose expression. I'll recant "all revolutionaries" and substitute something like "all extremists who would force revolutionary change on the basis of doctrine, and in so doing deny the right of reasonable dissent". Would that meet your objection? And thank you for your vigilance.

Dave 120: In a phrase, totalitarian extremists. Their justification is different from other, discredited totalitarian extremists, but their goals are indistinguishable (well, the targets of their genocide will be different, but who gives a flying fuck?).

#114--Ken MacLeod: Not unless one considers Kemal Ataturk as a divine--or unless one knows nothing of Turkish history. (Guess which I think more likely.)

I can respect having an ideological point of view--I grew up with virulent anti-Communism. I do not respect bending facts to fit one's ideology. (That was one of the lesser things the Stalinists get heat for.) The right-wing only holds itself up to ridicule, not that they don't deserve ridicule. It's not even proper brain-washing; it's, it's brain-creme-rinsing.

Peter Erwin: Quite so. Definition of terms is vital, I think. A theocracy appears to be a state or nation that is said to be ruled directly by God (or the gods) through a representative or representatives whose rule is therefore divinely ordained and not to be resisted. Strictly, every absolute monarchy in Europe met that definition until the early modern period. On the other hand, all of them, even the Papal States, had practical examples before them that militated against their rulers taking the idea literally, and I really think that very few of them did. Which leaves us with Savaronola and Calvin, and maybe Cromwell after he dissolved the Rump and ruled, essentially, alone. Not lasting, in any case.

But however rare or commonplace theocracies might have been in the West (and I think that we can agree that they were rare) these loons would impose one, if they could. They can't, of course, but they might manage to do something almost worse: destroy democracy.

Xopher: Exactly. I can't think why the word "totalitarian" eluded me. Dementia, perhaps?

Ken MacLeod (#114) and D. (#122):
It occurs to me that perhaps the writer was insinuating "Turkey as theocracy" based on the fact that the current ruling party is quasi-Islamist (in the sort of low-key, "we're religous, but not excessively so" mode of Turkish politics).

Of course, that's like saying West Germany was a theocracy in the 1950s and 1960s because the Bundestag was controlled by the Christian Democratic Union....

D, @122: It's not even proper brain-washing; it's, it's brain-creme-rinsing.

This is possibly the greatest description of anything ever.

Ken@113 "With any luck, a new modern theocracy will be established within the United States by the end of the decade."

This is what Dominionists advocate; it may be seriously intended.

"...Satire has come again."

Unless there's some nasty browser dependencies, and since it claims to be using established Wiki software there shouldn't be, the procedure to open a new account isn't working. Going by some of the names, it may have been spammed to death by the frivolous.

My planned article on Tolkien is appended. It just goes to show how the facts can be presented.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973): South-African-born philologist, academic, and novelist, latterly Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, England.

Remowned for his work on Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English texts, he was later to attain some slight notoriety as a novelist, this work being influenced by his experiences as a soldier in the First Wor;d War, and by his academic work on language and the history of England. In his retirement, he also worked as a part of a team translating the Holy Bible into modern English.

He was a devout Christian, an intensely loyal husband, and a loving parent. He is buried with his wife at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, where a short ceremony of remembrance is held each year, in late September, comemmorating his life and work.

I thought Ayn Rand got all her ideas from Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream...

Antonia, 128: I believe you misspelled "reknowned."

A mere corroborative detail, intended to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Or something like that, anyway.