Sex

Compensate Much?

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Via Reddit, the 50 most popular pages on "Conservapedia," the reference wiki for right-wingers.

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Radley Balko is a journalist at The Washington Post.

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  1. Elemenope

    Besides the amazing fruit obsession, I find it amusing that both Adolf Hitler and Aesthetics (?!) beat out George W. Bush.

  2. PC

    How about a thread on the DC Madam? I hear she was “suicided”.

  3. dbcooper

    Isn’t this (a) old news, and (b) the result of some automated link clicking?

  4. jmr

    “Unicorn” beat Bush, too. But the main thing you see is the quantity of time and brainpower they spend on homosexuality. If it’s not obsession, it’s something…
    JMR

  5. Wow. They may have more pages on homosexuality than the real Wikipedia…

  6. Compensate Much?

    Wouldn’t it be more like “Closeted Much?”

    Makes me think of Derrick Blank from Strangers With Candy:

    “Let’s go watch some gay porn to get our hate back.”

  7. confused

    “Kangaroo”? Why?

  8. Bretannia

    Astrolabe #31?

  9. Fluffy

    With a little effort, we could move Flying Spaghetti Monster into the top 20.

    Maybe we could try to do a few edits to that entry, too.

    Oh, and I used to wonder what kind of dumbasses were interested in Victoria Beckham. I guess now I know.

  10. Other Matt

    Fluffy, on that topic:

    Richard Dawkins uses the flying spaghetti monster in his book The God Delusion attacking belief in God. Some people use a purported belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Pastafarianism as a thinly-veiled attempt to mock Christianity by reducing it to the level of an invented religion like Pastafarianism.

    Seriously, ya think?

  11. Reinmoose

    “15. David Beckham ?(247,211 views)”

    WTF?

  12. Kat

    dbcooper: correct on both, yes.

  13. Hugh Akston

    I was perusing the examples of bias on Wikipedia, and I thought, why do conservatives do this? Why do they insist on creating these ludicrous alternatives to popular institutions, slapping “conservative” in the title somewhere, and then proceed to generate content that shows them to be every bit the myopic, reactive, conspiracy-theorists that the liberals lampoon them to be?

    Do they think this kind of thing will somehow attract people to their movement?

  14. Mo

    Reinmoose,

    See: 2 Homosexuality, 3 Teen Homosexuality, ?6 Homosexual Agenda ?(331,549 views), 9 Homosexuality and choice ?(311,912 views) and, of course, 13 Sexual Abuse Being a Contributing Factor for Homosexuality

  15. Slocum

    Llandudno @ #62? What the hell is that about? Or is Llandudno some kind of Welsh Provincetown?

  16. Mo

    In the examples of liberal bias, it has “Mathematicians on Wikipedia distort and exaggerate Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by (i) concealing how it relied on the controversial Axiom of Choice and by (ii) omitting the widespread initial criticism of it.”

    W.T.F.?

  17. Reinmoose

    Hugh Akston –
    You mean like how the Fox News production Red Eye was supposed to take on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but all it did was prove that conservative media can’t make anything funny… intentionally, anyway?

  18. Ravac

    Right wingers are seriously worried about catching “teh ghey”.

  19. ktc2

    So those who rail the most against homosexuals are actually self hating closeted homosexuals. This isn’t news. Although it does remind me of that comedian’s bit about Falwell wanting to ban breakfast sausages.

  20. Warren

    Could there be a better illustration of the need to have reality conform to world view inherent in the conservative mind?

  21. mantooth

    Well, their article on atheism was effective. Converted me right back.

  22. John-David

    I’ve always believed that Conservapedia is a great practical joke, because to believe anything else is to admit that I share the same air with these mouth-breathers.

  23. J

    I frequent the site often for the unintentional humor. Rationalwiki has a bunch of good stuff tweaking them.

    When it comes down to it, the site is really just the ego-manifestation of the creator. Most of the examples of liberal bias come from arguments with other conservatives (often with similar views to the creator) who disagree with him on some issue.

    It’s so good it just has to be fattening.

  24. Warty

    Wikipedia has a strong bias against the Discovery Institute, a prominent proponent of Intelligent design. Wikipedia articles about the Institute’s campaigns (Physicians and Surgeons who Dissent from Darwinism[31] and A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism[32]) devote most space to the criticism of the campaigns, instead of describing the campaigns themselves.

    *facepalm*

  25. J

    If I remember correctly, the creator is legal counsel for the AAPS (which produces the most BS medical journal I’ve ever seen). The only thing that has really hurt my support for Ron Paul is his (hopefully just political) membership in that association, because they are such a joke.

  26. Elemenope

    Mo —

    The ideological war for the soul of Mathematics is literally thousands of years old. The Axiom of Choice is just one more example of liberal denial of the nature of the universe (as provided by God through convenient-if-invisible Platonic Forms.)

    😉

  27. rst

    “15. David Beckham ?(247,211 views)”

    WTF?

    I think they think he’s cute.

  28. why do conservatives do this? Why do they insist on creating these ludicrous alternatives to popular institutions, slapping “conservative” in the title somewhere, and then proceed to generate content that shows them to be every bit the myopic, reactive, conspiracy-theorists that the liberals lampoon them to be

    I understand that the TownHall people are working on a new project called “ConservaReason” to repond to Hit & Run’s libertarian lies.

    First up will be a detailed article on the Lincoln – Douglas debates.

  29. Mo

    I hope they use this image for the Lincoln-Douglas debate article.

  30. Colbert

    It’s a well known fact that reality has a liberal bias.

  31. R C Dean

    It’s a well known fact that reality has a liberal bias.

    Which would seem to mean that liberals would need to do very little top-down state-driven meddling. Doesn’t seem to work that way, though.

  32. bigbigslacker

    Colbert, I take it you are liberal. A conservative would say the same (exact opposite) thing, and could back it up just as “well”. See conservative Fox News ratings in relation to liberal CNN. (I know, “most people are stupid”)

  33. Ali

    If they are fighting islamofascism, you’d think it rank high up there. I mean, you’ve got to “inform” yourself about that which you are fighting, no?

  34. Adam

    I clicked through to the unicorn article and learned this: “The existence of unicorns is controversial.”

    Uh huh. Tell it to those rat bastards at Wikipedia who define a unicorn as a “mythical creature.”

    I also note that Wikipedia’s modest tagline is “The Free Encyclopedia”, whereas Conservapedia runs with “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia.” The mind reels.

  35. joe

    Homosexuality

    Homosexuality

    Homosexuality

    Homosexuality

    David Beckham.

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

  36. Reinmoose

    joe, you’re late to that party. We’ve already “explored” that characteristic 🙂

  37. Elemenope

    It’s all quite fair and balanced, really.

  38. “16. Unicorn” must be because of “Unicorn Planet”, which keeps with the theme of homosexuality and David Beckham.

  39. Colbert

    “Colbert, I take it you are liberal. A conservative would say the same (exact opposite) thing, and could back it up just as “well”. See conservative Fox News ratings in relation to liberal CNN. (I know, “most people are stupid”)”

    It was just a joke – a quote from Stephen Colbert’s White House correspondents dinner.

  40. Mo

    20. Cactus (221,284 views)

    Why in God’s name do 221,284 people feel that the conservative view on cactus is important?

  41. Alright this is really funny, HOWEVER, in their defense:

    The only reason I would ever use a “conservative” encyclopedia if I had a conservative mind is to look up hot-button issues where a normal “liberally biased” encyclopedia could not do the trick. Homosexuality is a topic of interest where I would not trust say wikipedia to feed me the information I “wanted”, but for other topics a standard news source could do the trick.

    Not to say there isn’t a clear obsession with homosexuality at work here, but perhaps the numbers are not as interesting as they appear.

  42. apparently it’s always raining men over at conservapedia.

    mo – because they’re all closet acid-heads who want to obliquely research how to extract mescaline from san pedro cacti.

  43. mantooth

    ‘I clicked through to the unicorn article and learned this: “The existence of unicorns is controversial.”‘

    Well, yeah. You see the reason why a paragraph before.

    “The word “unicorn” is included in the text of the King James translation of The Bible nine times[2]”

    See also: Leviathan, Behemoth.

  44. rst


    Which would seem to mean that liberals would need to do very little top-down state-driven meddling. Doesn’t seem to work that way, though.

    Which is why they’re progressives, and not liberals. They hijacked the term to sell the New Deal, leaving us liberals scratching our heads.

  45. ktc2

    It’s really sad that they have to reject actual, factual science to support their emotional investment in a myth.

    That’s a serious mental illness.

  46. Kevin P.

    I contribute to Wikipedia and I will say that Wikipedia does have a liberal-left bias. This is ironic, considering that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales is a libertarian.

    The liberal bias on Wikipedia most often shows up in pages that present the liberal-left view of things as the obvious truth, while ignoring or disparaging any contrary viewpoint.

    Certain sections of Wikipedia are also under de facto “group ownership”, like any page related to climate change which is under a headlock by a group of AGW proponents. They control the topic and any edit that does not toe the party line gets reverted.

    So I can understand the need for a Conservapedia, although I feel that a better solution is to join Wikipedia and lend their perspective and weight of numbers to making it more balanced. For instance, after a rocky start, pro-gun people who tend to read a lot about the subject, know their stuff and are passionate about it, have brought back the gun-related pages to a decent balance.

  47. I’m a little sad that their Unicorns page doesn’t mention the FSM’s intellectual forebear, the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

  48. Elemenope

    I would not trust say wikipedia to feed me the information I “wanted”

    If you merely want to be fed “information” you “want”, just take lots of drugs and close your eyes. Why bother reading at all?

  49. Other Matt

    For instance, after a rocky start, pro-gun people who tend to read a lot about the subject, know their stuff and are passionate about it, have brought back the gun-related pages to a decent balance.

    I’ll have to check. Last time I read it, it was whacked out so far in one direction it was laughable.

  50. Other Matt

    Kevin: Checked, still pretty far afield. Presents discredited Brady/Handgun Control crappy propeganda as fact, but notes that these “facts” are sometimes disputed by outlandish lunatics that own guns.

    Ok, I’m paraphrasing a bit, but it’s not doing as well as you present I don’t believe.

  51. Mo,

    The article on FLT says, “In a series of lectures in 1993, mathematician Andrew Wiles announced a proof using techniques in algebraic geometry, relying on the disfavored Axiom of Choice.[5]” Now the Axiom of Choice is disfavored, which is news to me. Most of mathematics, especially analysis, relies on the axiom of choice, so I think calling it disfavored is, uh, not a mainstream point of view.

    I guess this is an example of liberal bias because using the axiom of choice makes you “pro-choice” or something. Either the author is a really, really, hard-core intuitionist, or has absolutely no idea what AC is all about. It’s telling that the author refers to ET Bell as writing “the standard biography of all the great mathematicians,” something historians of math would get a chuckle out of.

  52. joe

    “In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

    “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

    Conservapedia isn’t an effort to describe the world as it objecitvely exists, but to use description to remake the world as conservatives would like it to be.

    We’ve seen how the modern conservative mind works lo these last eight years. They believe they can make the world become what they want through the sheer force of disseminating their vision of what it should be.

    Having lived through the period from September 2001 through the spring of 2005, I can understand how they could come to believe things really work that way.

  53. J

    Oh!

    I like the focuses on mathematics, but I like this too:

    The theories of relativity (general and special) are disparaged. The logic and underlying reason seems to be something to with sharing the name with moral relativism.

    Not kidding. At all.

  54. non-sucker (the other kind)

    The “popular pages” results at Conservapedia have long been skewed toward teh buttsex by a bot designed specifically to yield posts like Gillespie’s and comments like yours.

    Way to get trolled.

  55. mantooth

    Is this just a theory or is there somewhere I can I get information on this bot that is skewing the stats? All that aside, the entries are laughable by themselves.

  56. dbcooper writes: Isn’t this (a) old news, and (b) the result of some automated link clicking?

    Shhh. Radley doesn’t know that. Nor does he have the chops to look through this popular page and offer a counterargument. They don’t do things like that around here, this is just like a playground for “libertarians”.

  57. joshua corning

    Unicorn” beat Bush, too.

    So is unicorn some sort of euphemism for RINO…maybe with the covet that a Unicorn is a big tent republican?

  58. Redeye defender

    You mean like how the Fox News production Red Eye was supposed to take on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but all it did was prove that conservative media can’t make anything funny… intentionally, anyway?

    Redeye is not realy a counterpoint to Colbert/Stewart; that was that another (totally horrendous – and now cancelled) show ‘1/2 news hours’ – which of course is a blatant ripoff of of ‘this hour has 22 minutes.’

    Redeye fills the same niche as something like ‘best week ever’ and ‘the soup/talk soup’ but from a ‘south park republicanism’ angle. (I am not saying that red-eye is anywhere close to being a good as southpark, just that they have the same political sensibilities.)

    But it’s not a ‘cip show’ per se. It follows the same talking head format as every other daytime cable news and financial network show, but tries to do it deliberately ironically, rather than the vapid stupidity that too frequently emerges during the day.

  59. Elemenope

    Nor does he have the chops to look through this popular page and offer a counterargument.

    Does anyone have the fortitude to make it through the list? I spewed my coke after entry 30, thus breaking my keyboard and monitor.

  60. pinko

    “Does anyone have the fortitude to make it through the list?”

    No…I did skip to matriarchy and patriarchy. Thought it was pretty accurate as a description of how the terms are used and what they generally convey.

    Heck. Leave it alone. OLS thinks he (she?) actually contributed something.

  61. the innominate one

    Mo | May 2, 2008, 10:20am | #
    20. Cactus (221,284 views)

    Why in God’s name do 221,284 people feel that the conservative view on cactus is important?

    Because they like pricks?

  62. joshua corning

    Why do socialists hate closeted gay men so much?

  63. Mo

    joshua,
    They don’t. It’s self-hating, closeted gay men that wish to reduce the rights of gay men that people hate.

  64. Andy

    The few homosexuality-related articles i’ve checked out are just individual studies done by one person.

    Why is it that conservatives can latch onto any one study/argument (of ID, or global warming not happening) as supporting their own view of things, but if say one study arguing that AIDS was created in a lab or 9/11 was an inside job was quoted they would flip the hell out? There is very rarely a total consensus on anything, but usually there is a vast majority who objectively see things one way. To ignore this consensus whenever you feel like it seems dishonest. Are they really that hypocritical?

  65. ktc2

    As long as we’re making fun of religious whackos, these guys do it well:

    http://www.landoverbaptist.org/

  66. Cameron

    I agree with the proposition that the main reason the “homosexuality” page has so many hits is because that is one of the main subjects that conservatives want an “alternative” view of. Also, it is probably one of the most likely pages for non-conservatives to visit in order to laugh at the conservatives’ “alternative” views.

  67. Kevin P.

    Other Matt, what page are you looking at?

  68. Jim Walsh

    Like I once said about the losers who spend all day at home in their underwear, listening to (and calling into) conservaclone talk radio: anything that keeps ’em off the streets…

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