Conservapedia, billing itself as “the Trustworthy Encyclopedia”, is supposedly a user fed alternative to the presumably biased Wikipedia, existing for the benefit primarily of conservatives, who count among themselves a large portion, if not most, of the fundamentalist Christians in America. A good indication of this is that it includes a daily Bible verse on its main page. It does not “allow liberal censorship of conservative facts.” (and here I thought facts were just facts, having no political allegiance – who knew?) It claims to be better that Wikipedia for many reasons, one of which is:
Conservapedia is first and foremost a family-friendly encyclopedia.
We all know that “family friendly” is Christian code for “anti-homosexual”, and the proof is in the pudding. Recently it posted the Top Ten most viewed pages on the site, which I’ll list here:
- Main Page [1,938,825]
- Homosexuality [1,626,288]
- Homosexuality and Hepatitis [518,224]
- Homosexuality and Parasites [434,638]
- Homosexuality and Promiscuity [422,327]
- Gay Bowel Syndrome [402,787]
- Homosexual Couples [374,232]
- Homosexuality and Gonorrhea [332,163]
- Homosexuality and Anal Cancer [294,586]
- Homosexuality and Mental Health [293,991]
It’s quite clear where the interest of the readership seems to lie, eh? (Gay Bowel Syndrome?) I guess some facts are just more interesting than others.
SPANISH INQUISITOR 
This is par for the course. It’s unfortunate that the conservatives have been hijacked by far-right extremists to the point that useful conservative values appear to be almost liberal. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with many liberal values. It’s just odd that liberals are, in some cases, more faithful to traditional values than are the so-called conservatives. Does what I just wrote make any sense to you? It makes sense to me, but it’s also giving me a headache.
Makes sense to me. Liberalism has become a dirty word, when liberalism has been the impetus behind some of the best things to come out of the 20th century, from social security, to water and air cleanliness, etc. Classical conservatism is not the same as that espoused by the conservative fundamentalists who have hijacked the Republican party, the party of Lincoln.
A good book on the subject is “What’s The Matter With Kansas” by Thomas Frank.
Can we assume from the statistics that either most evangelicals are closet gays, or that one of them is really fanatic about gayness?
Liberal is only a dirty word in the mouths of conservatives and Republicans. And brainwashed Democrats.
Ric, incidentally, linked a great article on his blog about “conservatives”. I suggest everyone read it. Ric’s post is called “If Conservatism Is The Ideology Of Freedom, He’s The Queen Of England”.
I am trying to remember who said that facts have a liberal bias. I know I heard it somewhere (and that’s definately out of my league for wordsmithing).
Anyway, that would certainly explain why new conservatives need an encyclopedia containing only their facts. In conversations with our knee-jerk right wing homophobic christianist fundamentalist dominionist Catholic Bush-loving freak, I am often struck by the cavalier way he deals with facts. In my line of work, facts are important. Yet historical facts about the resource we interpret are, well, often inconveniant to him.
He has also come up with some doozies: Trees cause polution (i think that one dates from Reagan); 90% of Spanish speaking people in America are illegal; the world is colder now (or at least today) than 10, 20, 40 (or whatever years he wants); Gore was caught in a factual error, therefore anything he says is a lie; Hillary Clinton is a murderer (murderess?).
I suspect that most of these would be on Conservapedophile.
He is extremely fascinated with homosexuality (he is a 38 year old single male who brags about being a virgin (and he will only marry a virgin (which might explain why he spends so much time around a middle school (that last part is an exageration, but not by much))) and still lives with his parents). It is a rare day that he does not comment on homosexuality (oddly, the one gay gentleman in our office, other than occasionally mentioning his boyfriend) never comments on gays. Its almost as if he doth protest too much.
The stats on most frequented pages almost had me on the floor.
Sorry for the long post. Again, occupational hazard.
I’m speechless for a change. 😦
I’m having flashbacks from Howard Stern’s Private Parts. Didn’t they make a point of saying that the people who supposedly hated him listened 2-4 times longer than the average listener? Whether the conservatives are closet gays or not is unknown, but one things is pretty common for them and that is that whatever it is that they’re supposed to hate they devote A LOT of time and energy on. I find it amusing that the wonderfully moral result of a religion of peace and love is not so much helping those in need but being consumed with the destruction of others, be they gay, muslim, atheist or anything but proper god-fearing, repressed bastards like themselves.
Cpedia appears to redefine the words ‘pathetic’ and ‘delusional’ by infusing them with ‘arrogance’ and ‘ignorance’. There must be a term that covers that… oh, how about Bushianism. Or Bushism. Or, wait, wait, it’s coming to me, I can almost get it, right on the tip of my brain… ah – Conservatism.
Thanks for the link SI, let the hilarity begin! This link should provide us all with much fodder for furture posts.
You know what I find strangely odd about this list? That they actually published it, as if they were extremely proud of it. Maybe they don’t look at their own statistical page very often. I see that the numbers have gone up since I posted them, so it must be an automatic page calculation. But you would think that if it was so overwhelmingly enlightening, they would get rid of the page and the statistics. But they don’t.
Well, as you know polls only show what people are thinking in reality, and reality is known to have a liberal bias… -Stephen Colbert
Bad news, the stats are off.
I signed up to conservipedia to edit their atheism page. The bastards have locked it down! The shit they wrote there makes my blood boil. I don’t eat babies okay? I also like how it is all about how bad atheism is and then finally at the end declares that the bible says atheism “doesn’t exist” (I am not making this up)!
Thanks, Samuel.
OK, Everyone, go here and see what he’s talking about. I couldn’t get past the first sentence without having to turn off my bullshit detector.
I love how they define morality based upon their politically active ‘moral voters’ checklist.