The Conservapedia site looks like being a great source of entertainment, even despite the scary thought that those behind it are totally serious. For some reason, Wikipedia does not have an entry on it, but it is mentioned in the entry about the Eagle Forum.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the whole business is that it is all wrapped up with home study. Apparently home study is a big deal in the USA amongst conservative circles: it means they can bring up their children to think exactly like them, with no danger of independent thought or new ideas being introduced to them at school. As Danivon said at a meeting tonight, the Conservapedia is not a very good advertisement for home study!
Which brings me to today’s example of madness and badness. I hit the random article link just now and got a tiny entry on geocentric theory which said it was proposed by Ptolemy. That was about all it said, and that is wrong – the idea of the Earth being at the centre of everything was around for centuries before Ptolemy’s time. But there was a link to an entry on Ptolemy, so I followed that and found something glorious.
The article on Ptolemy was a veritable essay by Conservapedia standards. With 3 paragraphs containing 785 characters in 135 words (I pasted it into OpenOffice and did a word count – I didn’t sit here counting them by hand) it is bigger than their entry on Adolf Hitler!
Having pasted the text into OpenOffice I didn’t dare run a spelling or grammar checker on it in case the computer started acting like one of those computers in Star Trek which has been asked to explain a paradox. Here is the third paragraph:
But, although throughout the many years this idea was embraced several scientists tried proving this theory wrong, people refusehighly respected, no one doubted him. Also, people liked the fact that Ptolemy d to listen. Because Ptolemy was placed the Earth in the center of the universe, making it the most important.
It reads like one of those instructions for tourists in an oriental hotel, which was translated from one language to another by someone who is fluent in neither.
Having protected their children from the pernicious liberal attitudes of society, these cranks are giving them an education where such absolute garbage is being used to explain stuff to them. I hope the Eagle Forum have their own exams too because anyone educated via such rubbish isn’t going to stand a chance in a proper exam where any sort of linguistic coherence is needed.
Lol .. if they speak like that at least the crackpots who educate their kids through conservapedia will be easily identified..
From the edits history, it look like a slip of the copy/paste on 18 December, mangling the original sentence that said:
people refused to listen. Because Ptolemy was highly respected, no one doubted him. Also, people liked the fact that Ptolemy was placed the Earth in the center of the universe, making it the most important.
So I can forgive a copy/paste error which no-one has seen fit to correct in the last 3 months. But I do like the irony of the last sentence, on a site which devotes such a lot of time to telling Christian Right parents exactly what they want to hear.
Actually, the antries I’ve read look like they’ve been written by 10-year old homeschooled brats anyway.
For my own interest, there is no article on the planet Mars, a short one on Venus which spends most of it’s time describing it as the evening star and referring to Walt Disney and C.S.Lewis.
But the Moon article – well, the Moon article has me coughing up my own skull. It actually says nothing at all about the Moon – how big it is, how far away, what it’s made of, the history of it’s exploration. It’s just a set of fundie creationist claims that relate to the Moon.
I’m going to have some fun conservasurfing this afternoon!
I just looked at the moon article.
It says that the moon has an artistic design, and ‘proves’ that it can be no more than one billion years old.
I like the fact that even the original sentence was gibberish!