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Conservapedia

I do, however, agree with their view of Socrates:

"Socrates was an ancient Greek conservative philosopher, who lived between approximately 470 and 399 BC. He is best known for his method of argument, where you wear your opponent down with quibbling objections until they give up in disgust."

That's how I always felt about [i[The Republic[/i]: my Philistine interpretation is that a bunch of guys who are just out for a fun day at the fair run into this old windbag and spend the rest of the book saying, "Yes, Socrates, how can anyone argue with that", all the while cursing him under their breath because they're missing the races. I guess I wasn't born to be a philosopher.
 
Could be fun to go post some entries there, stuff like:

Darwin ate babies.

Secularism was spawned by the Devil.

Noah's Ark has been found.

Etc....
 
hgc said:
Read the entry on the Pacific-northwest arborial octopus.
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First, I should learn to spell arboreal.

I just went to read that entry again. It seems the editors have a different take:

[Note by Admin: Although liberal blogs are sending people to this entry, none of them seem to realize that this entry appears to be a parody of environmentalists. For example, read the above sentence again: "Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory."--Aschlafly 15:06, 27 February 2007 (EST)]
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Let's start with a quibble: What something appears to be and what people realize are both subjective. It doesn't make sense to say someone fails to realize what something appears to be. How it appears to them is what they realize for themselves.

On the other hand, I do find it plausible that this really is an anti-environmentalist zinger. It just makes me madder than ever about the marriage of convenience between rapacious business interests and religious interests. One wants to, well, rape and pillage. The other has a blessed book that tells them that skydaddy gave them domain over the earth and its beasts - so to Hell with the tree octopus!
 
Some more gems, all found by random searches:

"Homeschooled i[my bold] n his youth, Lincoln became a successful railroad attorney in Illinois..." (I'd say self-educated, due to lack of alternatives, but i'm a lie-bural)

"Robespierre was later executed by the other members of the Club [the Jacobins]" And I thought black-balling was bad! Highly simplistic.

"The Old Deluder Act was passed in 1647 in Massachusetts. It established the first public schools in America to teach children to read, so that Satan would not delude them by keeping the from reading the Bible. Ironically, children are not allowed to even bring a Bible to public school today, even though public schools were established for the express purpose of teaching them to read God's word." Really? Those court-approved after-hours bible-study programs I keep reading about must really be having a hard time.

"St. Augustine: An evangelist who spread Christianity in Britain. He lived from 354 to 430 AD." Uh, you seem to have confused Augustine of Hippo [the 4th century theologian and doctor of the church] and Augustine of Canterbury [6th century missionary to England]. No matter which one you mean - is that it?

"Substitute goods are commodities that are similar enough that an increase in one price of one good (e.g., chewing gum) causes consumers to buy a similar, less expensive good (e.g., a candy bar). Other examples of substitute goods are turkey and chicken, broccoli and spinach, and blueberries and raspberries." I'm still scratching my head over this one. Maybe a better example would help.

"Pilgrims" Pilgrims were people (mostly puritans) in the 1600's that traveled to the American Colonies because of persecution in England. These settlers started the very first settlement in the American colonies, Jamestown." OK, that's it. If the middle-school level of writing wasn't bad enough - nothing against middle-schoolers, we all gotta learn sometimes - is it asking too much to get basic facts right?

Wikipedia does have its own problems, and I wouldn't use it as anything other than a quick-and-basic look-up, but its community does at least enforce some standards.
 
Hmm... perhaps I should write a grant for studying the Conservopedia to do an analysis on it... (what I delightfully "Liberal" idea!)
 
Retrograde said:
"Pilgrims" Pilgrims were people (mostly puritans) in the 1600's that traveled to the American Colonies because of persecution in England. These settlers started the very first settlement in the American colonies, Jamestown."
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Not only that, I wasn't aware that Jamestown was a particularly Sepratist adventure...unlike Plymouth or Boston....am I wrong?
 
Retrograde said:
I do, however, agree with their view of Socrates:

"Socrates was an ancient Greek conservative philosopher, who lived between approximately 470 and 399 BC. He is best known for his method of argument, where you wear your opponent down with quibbling objections until they give up in disgust."

That's how I always felt about [i[The Republic[/i]: my Philistine interpretation is that a bunch of guys who are just out for a fun day at the fair run into this old windbag and spend the rest of the book saying, "Yes, Socrates, how can anyone argue with that", all the while cursing him under their breath because they're missing the races. I guess I wasn't born to be a philosopher.
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Yeah. It's also possible that one party or the other was drunk. Either Socrates was, and is one of those guys who gets really loquacious, or the agreers were, and just kinda stumbled along going Yesh, Shocrates, thatsh 'ZACtly what it is!
 
From their entry on kangaroos:

Origins

Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos 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. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

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.
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CapelDodger said:
Jamestown was funded by adventure-capital.
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Uh, venture capital? So was the Plymouth colony. As a matter of fact, they thought they were headed to Virginia, but the backers conspired with the captain to land them further north instead.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.
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This I have to agree with. Why pretend that 1 CE isn't because of the traditional date of Christ's birth?
 
burnvictim77 said:
This I have to agree with. Why pretend that 1 CE isn't because of the traditional date of Christ's birth?
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Why use the term, "The year 2007 in the Year of Our Lord...", even if you don't consider him "your lord"?

To me, it seems more a preference issue. As far as I know, no one is forced to use CE or BCE.
 
Lonewulf said:
Why use the term, "The year 2007 in the Year of Our Lord...", even if you don't consider him "your lord"?
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Why use a calander based around his birth?

ETA: Why have names of days named for Norse gods, and months named for Roman gods?
 
burnvictim77 said:
Why use a calander based around his birth?
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Tradition and simplicity. It's the way records were kept throughout much of history, and a radical change upsets the books, and makes it even harder to "convert" times from ancient history into modern history.

Plus, really, almost any starting point is going to be subjective. I don't think that there's any real scientific way you can decide a time starting point for the calendars.
 
Lonewulf said:
Tradition and simplicity. It's the way records were kept throughout much of history, and a radical change upsets the books, and makes it even harder to "convert" times from ancient history into modern history.

Plus, really, almost any starting point is going to be subjective. I don't think that there's any real scientific way you can decide a time starting point for the calendars.
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There are other calendars in existence. It would simply be like going from english measure to metric. But what I'm asking you is actually: why bother to rename it? Those books you are upsetting still say BC/AD. No one speaks Latin anymore anyway.
 
burnvictim77 said:
There are other calendars in existence. It would simply be like going from english measure to metric.
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There's a reason to go to metric, though, it's not just "an alternative system"; it's based on the power of 10, and makes thing sooooooo much easier when dealing with science.

And almost all countries that I know of use America's calendar system; on the other hand, metric came about with different measurements in different countries, entirely subjective. You'd have to learn to convert from our English units to whatever the heck else the other country or group of people were using. Metric is an effort to universalize and make things easier and simpler for scientific research; changing the calendar just to be PC would probaby end up being a sole act (as other countries wouldn't go for it), so it has the opposite effect of universalization.

Really, it wouldn't be like switching to Metric at all.

...And, really, good luck getting America to switch to Metric in the first place. Sure, we're changing some minor things, but nothing on a macro scale.

But what I'm asking you is actually: why bother to rename it? Those books you are upsetting still say BC/AD. No one speaks Latin anymore anyway.
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Why not, though? It's a simple letter conversion. And it's not like you're being forced to rename it. It's just personal preference. It's also no harder to read, really. BCE is just BC with an E added, and AD is now CE, keeping the two letters. It's really not that hard overall, so I consider it a minor trivial matter.

On the other hand, with problems between the English and Metric system, NASA has caused a few crashes. I don't think you can do that with BCE/CE.
 
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hgc said:
Uh, venture capital? So was the Plymouth colony. As a matter of fact, they thought they were headed to Virginia, but the backers conspired with the captain to land them further north instead.
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I think that technically, when the Pilgrims set out in 1620, the colony in that part of North America was referred to as "Virginia" as the only colony there was called "Virginia" and the bulk of people didn't, having lived in England and the Netherlands, have a grasp on the scope and scale of this new land they were headed to.

I can't recall where I read that, but it was in an article about the Mayflower compact.

DR
 
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