I had no idea that the Theory of Relativity was a liberal scheme, but thank goodness conservapedia is on it:
There is so much there to love I just don’t know where to start, whether it be the conflation of relativism and the theory of relativity, or the action-at-a-distance by Jesus (WTF?). The footnotes are just as awesome:
See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.
This has to be a spoof, right?
BTW- longtime readers will understand the title of this post.
pharniel
people still have trouble believing me when I say there are elected officals in the US who dispute heliocentrism.
Gen. Jrod and his Howling Army
RIP B4B
4tehlulz
needs more Jewish Physics
Bubblegum Tate
That heliocentrism post is seriously one of my favorite things ever put on the interwebs. This Conservapedia post is pretty damn good, too.
QDC
For some reason I checked out the page on General Relativity when Conservopedia was first in the news, and not only is this not a spoof, but it appears to be a personal hobby horse of Andrew Schlafly.
The talk page on the original article (the server appears to be down now) had tens of thousands of words on the subject. A few physicists and engineers begged him to be reasonable, but he–in all seriousness–argued that the liberal bias of physics professors distorted the teaching of relativity and caused them to overlook credible critiques. I have no idea where he was getting it from, but he had an extensive knowledge of non-standard sources on the subject, such that every single dissenter eventually gave up. It was actually a pretty good example of how all wiki’s favor motivated nutjobs over knowledgeable people with something better to do.
Special relativity, he was okay with, as I recall. It was all very, very strange.
Edit: Number 9 is a gem. Action at a distance by Jesus, indeed. And the edifice of modern physics comes crashing down.
Matthew B.
There’s all sorts of bizarre stuff on Conservapedia that has nothing to do with religion. They don’t accept Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, ’cause it uses complex numbers.
FormerSwingVoter
Conservapedia is great – it’s fun to guess which bits were put in by actual wingnuts and which ones were by spoofs. I literally can’t tell the difference anymore.
Comrade Javamanphil
I can see the marketing campaign now –
Conservapedia: Ignorance is Bliss! (Now with footnotes.)
p.a.
No spoof, although maybe some trolling in the footnotes/commentaries. Conservapedia has invented whole new schools of ‘science’ in biology astronomy etc. to conform to Biblical
delusionsreality. And there is a Christianist website promoting the Terracentric universe. It claims modern physics is a ‘Pharisitic Jewish’ plot to destroy Christianity. Poe’s Law in the flesh.pragmatism
both sides are wrong. the theory of relativity is that everything is relative to the flying spaghetti monster. FSM is at the center of the universe also, too (which central to my point proves relativity).
JGabriel
I know it’s silly to argue about accuracy when dealing with people who want to use Jesus as a counter-example to relativity, but … quantum entanglement was first predicted by Einstein in the EPR paper. You can’t use it to say Einstein was wrong when, in fact, Einstein predicted it.
.
FormerSwingVoter
Conservapedia crashed when I did a search for “mental illness”.
:(
debit
Does anyone remember the “school” in Nicholas Nickelby? I’m pretty sure they’d like to see us go back to this:
“This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,” said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ” We’ll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy ?”
” Please, Sir,” he’s cleaning the back parlour window,” said the temporary head of the philosophical class.
” So he is, to be sure,” rejoined Squeers. ” We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It’s just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where’s the second boy?”
“Please, Sir, he’s weeding the garden,” replied a small voice.
” To be sure,” said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. ” So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘era. That’s our system, Nickleby; what do you think of it?”
” It’s a very useful one, at any rate,” answered Nicholas significantly.
” I believe you,” rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his usher. ” Third boy, what’s a horse ?”
” A beast, Sir,” replied the boy.
” So it is,” said Squeers. ” Ain’t it, Nickleby ?”
” I believe there is no doubt of that, Sir,” answered Nicholas.
” Of course there isn’t,” said Squeers. ” A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast, as every body that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?”
” Where, indeed ! ” said Nicholas abstractedly.
” As you’re perfect in that,” resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, ” go and look after my horse, and rub him down well, or I’ll rub you down. The rest of the class go and draw water up till somebody tells you to leave off, for it’s washing-day to-morrow, and they want the coppers filled.”
So saying he dismissed the first class to their experiments in practical philosophy, and eyed Nicholas with a look half cunning and half doubtful, as if he were not altogether certain what he might think of him by this time.
“That’s the way we do it, Nickleby,” he said, after a long pause.
Nicholas shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was scarcely perceptible, and said he saw it was.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: Yes, you can. You just can’t do it and be taken seriously.
Crashman
For some baffling yet fascinating reason, the fact that the Bible outsells the New York Times Bestsellers is relevant information to this article. Does it ever, ever not come back to taking random rhetorical shots at liberals?
Amanda in the South Bay
I’m surprised conservatives are still quoting Paul “spanking fetish” Johnson.
Mind you, I have nothing against spanking fetishes, unless they are held by hypocritical conservatives.
catclub
Was that General or Special relativity that the article was objecting to?
Special relates to items 4,5 and 8,
while General relates to the others.
Someone has forgotten that many theories have a limited ‘domain of validity’, and when you are not in that domain, it does not matter if the theory no longer works.
It is well known that GR does not match up with a quantum explanation – hence the need for a ToE – Theory of Everything.
I look at that list and think: Neat, more anomalies to figure out!
The conservative (After conflating a theory with fact: ‘mathematical system that allows no exceptions’) thinks:
“It is ALL wrong, losers!”, followed by a Nelson Muntz Ha, ha.
Allan
One day we can look forward to Andy passing the Conservapedia baton to its future editor, Trig Palin.
MattF
Time to go on off to a bar near here and self-medicate. See ya.
Lev
Any chance this is just a list of things that disprove that “Six Degrees of Separation” theory, as in “Everything’s Relative”?
Triassic Sands
I consult Conservapedia for all my scientific questions. Knowing that the Baby Jeebus backs all of their meticulously researched information is a great comfort. Needless to say, most reputable scientists publish in Conservapedia instead of such discredited journals as Science and Nature.
Pangloss
@p.a.: The Laffer Curve was a major catalyst for conservative science.
Zuzu's Petals
@QDC:
Re Edit #9: Well, have you ever seen a theory of physics that explains the turning of water into wine, Mr. Smartypants? Have you, huh?
Brachiator
Sweet Quantum Jesus!
Wingnuts are not only crazier than I imagined, they are crazier than anyone could imagine.
Comrade Dread
So a theory to explain how the laws of physics work in the universe in relation to time and space equals the moral decline of America?
Man, those physicists must have some wild benders in the lab when we’re not looking.
Svensker
@debit:
Great book. Squeers is a typically gorgeous Dickens villain. And I love that he is pasty and white and fat like a boiled pudding.
JGabriel
@Matthew B.:
Which pretty much sums up Conservapedia’s approach to complex anything.
.
Poopyman
I am so happy to inform you all that our corporate IT Dept has deemed Conservapedia to be “Improper Internet Content”.
I think this is the first time I agree with their assessment.
Monica
Conservapedia: Ignorance is Bliss!
Davis X. Machina
Well, seventy years ago it equaled the moral decline of Germany, so why not here, why not now?
wilfred
B4B forever! I miss posting there.
But (moral/cultural) relativism does have origins in physics – that’s one of the cultural legacies of quantum mechanics.
matt
@Comrade Dread: Would that that were true.
freelancer
Fukkin Margins. How do they work?!
bey
@Matthew B.: Speaking of which, check out the book Fermat’s Last Theorum by Simon Singh.
Who knew mathematics was such a hotbed of intrigue?
LanceThruster
First rule of atheist plots. Don’t talk about atheist plots.
“Hey,” asks Homer suspiciously, “how come you guys got such great parking places?”
Lenny answers quietly, “It’s a secret.”
Carl tells him “Shh! Shut up!”
matoko_chan
This is one of the countable infinity of reasons why 94% of scientists are NOTrepublican.
Jamie
well it was only a matter of time.
licensed to kill time
I wouldn’t want to fly in an airplane built by any of these “make up your own science” people, since no doubt Jesus would be the engine and faith would be the fuel. And if we didn’t get off the ground it would be our fault for our lack of faith.
catclub
@Svensker:
“Great book. Squeers is a typically gorgeous Dickens villain. And I love that he is pasty and white and fat like a boiled pudding.”
Also his first name is Wackford if I remember correctly.
Wackford Squeers.
Almost as euphonious as ‘Smock’ used in Calvin and Hobbes.
daveNYC
Three of the points don’t even have footnotes and one of them is from the bible.
Lets go update whatever articles they have on vaccines and antibiotics. Maybe we can get these guys to weed themselves out of the gene pool.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Lev:
Given some of the people these right wingers tend to target, it might be closer to everyone’s relative.
Might be why a “theory of relativity” sounds so scary, who knows.
elmo
I’ve re-loaded this page three times, trying to get rid of the far-right margin fail (FYWP). Each time, when I first see the screenshot, my brain tells me it says, “Counterexamples to Reality.”
Even though I’ve already seen it three times. Does the same thing every time. I think it’s Jesus doing some action-at-a-distance on my eyeballs.
Bill E Pilgrim
@bey: Wonderful writer. The Code Book is actually my favorite.
Corner Stone
Given that this thread is about holding crazy beliefs, are we going to just ignore what Tres Sec Rubin and O’Neill said yesterday?
No second bite at the apple
Poopyman
@Comrade Dread:
Well, that was graduate school. And you weren’t supposed to be looking, anyway.
soonergrunt
@Crashman:
No. SATSQ.
SpotWeld
No, it’s not a spoof. From that entry’s “talk” page:
And in case you don’t know Andy Schlafly is, he’s the pastor of this parish of pandemonium.
Joey Maloney
@licensed to kill time: I wouldn’t mind if we failed to get off the ground. I’d vastly prefer that to failing to stay off the ground.
Silver
@wilfred:
What?
Plato kind of brought that dilemma up (and dispensed with it, imho) more than 2000 years before quantum mechanics.
p.a.
@Pangloss:
True story: I was taking an undergrad econ course at an Ivy League school in 1979-80. The econ dept was overwhelmingly Reaganaughts unlike (unsurprisingly) the rest of the campus. When we confronted the profs with the obvious falseness of the Laffer Curve/supply side
voodooeconomics, they happily admitted to the fraud. Their general response (I’ll never forget) was basically ‘of course it’s bullshit. If we told the rubes we actually intend to instigate a major recession and weaken middle class entitlements ‘we’ would never win the election.’JGabriel
@Comrade Dread:
Actually, you’d be surprised. Instead of thinking physicists think grad students.
.
YellowJournalism
@Allan: Trig Palin is light years ahead of these people, something we’d all do well to remember.
matt
@Matthew B.: Not true anymore that they criticize the proof for using complex numbers. Their only quibble is with the use of Axiom of Choice (presumably because it’s pro-abortion).
matoko_chan
how dare you guyz question my hypoth of conservative biomemetic selection for stupid after reading that conservapedia entry?
LanceThruster
@pharniel: I feel helioconservatives should be given equal time with heliomoderates, let alone helioliberals (who btw reject dinosaur fossils with saddles – seriously)
Poopyman
@JGabriel:
Heh. Got there first.
‘Course, that was back in the 70’s. Who knows what sticks-in-the-mud grad schools are churning out these days.
Annie
Andy Schlafly’s relativity – his brother is gay and his mom is Phyllis.
debit
@Svensker: Agreed. Dickens always had great villains and great names. And great characters; Nicholas may have been the main character, but Smike stole and then broke my heart.
NonyNony
And why not? Conservatives have gotten mileage for decades with the evangelical right with the conflation of libertine and liberal. Why not try for another one? Because it’s fucking stupid? Pffft – like that has ever stopped them…
licensed to kill time
@Joey Maloney:
O ye of little faith. ♪♫ Jesus is my aeroplane ♪♫
Lurked
@SpotWeld:
Uh, the GPS would not work without corrections for both special and general relativity. General relativity is required because the satellites are higher in the gravitational field of the Earth than are the receivers, which causes a time dilation effect when the photons fall in the gravitational field. Clocks deeper in a gravitational well run slower than clocks higher in the well, and GPS is entirely based on triangulation due to differences in the time signals from different satellites, so accurate times are essential. The corrections are fairly low order but without them, the accuracy would be so poor that the locations derived would be pretty much useless. So I would think that is valuable. It is to Garmin and such, at least.
cleek
in total sales since the beginning of book publishing, yes. which is not surprising given that it’s been for sale since before Jesus was (allegedly) born.
in actual present-day sales (which is what the present-tense verb “outsells” should be concerned with), no – it’s not even on any of the charts i searched (Amazon, USA Today, NYT, CS Monitor, etc.). it doesn’t even register.
did Jesus have anything to say about lying in his name ?
J.W. Hamner
Really, there is no shame in not understanding physics once we leave Newtonian land… I decided pretty early in the college lecture that merely brushed on Relativity that a career in physics was probably not for me. For some reason there appears to be a class of person that just rejects such a possibility… like that Jesus wouldn’t be so mean as to make the world so confusing.
Michael
You guys crashed conservapedia again.
Sarcastro
OMFG, I just read the beginning of one of their articles concerning my specialty.
They called the Barracks Emperors during the Crisis of the 3rd Century the “Thirty Tyrants”. Uh, about 700 years too late, and in the wrong Mediterranean peninsula.
http://conservapedia.com/Roman
Good gods, the one on the Republic is even worse.
Omnes Omnibus
@SpotWeld: That passage you quoted makes no sense to me. I am a lawyer, which means that I am trained to be able to read and parse the meaning out of complicated and dense prose, yet I am defeated. As near as I can tell, the scientific sophisication shown by these people is below this level.
MeDrewNotYou
It bears pointing out that Einstein was not only European, but a Jew as well. I think we can safely dismiss his theories as liberal BS meant to corrupt our youth into gay marrying terrorists.
jl
The moral rot started with Galilean relativity. I am surprised that the socalled ‘Conservapedia’ does not get this. Maybe Conservapedians are liberal moles sent to mislead the gullible and we need a truer, more conservative, Conservapedia? A Reactionarypedia? Hnnng? Maybe?
The Moar You Know
Thanks, John. I love watching these people slowly work themselves out of the food chain.
And out of jobs. I’ve watched several fundies work themselves right out of careers for failing to respect basic science.
Scott
@cleek:
did Jesus have anything to say about lying in his name ?
Once Andy finishes the Conservative Bible, I’m sure that pesky “Thou shalt not lie” commandment will be properly edited to reflect that Jesus loves a Republican liar…
jl
@MeDrewNotYou: Eisntein was a Jew, and Galileo was a Cosmopolitican unbeliever who defied religious authority. Same difference. And pi equals three. Got to get back to basics.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
As I read somewhere, if there is a God – someone who can violate the laws of nature – then it still doesn’t change the theories. At worst, they all come with an asterisk that says “Except when Jesus wants to break it.”
Corner Stone
@Lurked:
You mean we might bomb Azir’s compound instead of Mamed?
Meh, bygones.
Smurfhole
@LanceThruster:
I believe the proper term is “Helioleftists,” if you consult Blogs 4 Brownback.
GambitRF
Future Conservapedia science article:
Newton’s First Law of Motion:
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. This is because the liberal welfare state has made the object too lazy to go out and get a job.
Jay in Oregon
@licensed to kill time:
Better that than falling out of the sky halfway there…
Poopyman
@cleek:
No sign of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but that Stieg Larsson is kickin’ ass.
Seriously though, there are so many versions of the Holy Bible out there that assertions for or against best-seller status are probably pointless.
demimondian
@matt: Um….
If there’s a proof of the Fermat Conjecture which depends on AC or GCH, then there’s a proof which doesn’t. Wiles Theorem is a delta-1 proposition about the integers, and is, therefore, not independent. (That is, it’s either provable or refutable.)
ksmiami
If these people are so against scientific discovery does this mean we can take away their advil???
But for a fair and balanced society, we have to put up with their crap.
BeccaM
Those cretins, without permission, stole and linked to one of my Grand Canyon photos for a conserva-wiki article in support of the Noah’s Ark deluge and young-Earth theories.
I promptly re-edited my copyright protected picture with an overlay/watermark stating:
To their credit, they did remove the link and stopped using the photo.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Omnes Omnibus: It basically says that any scientific “theories” must be voted on by the public before they are considered “facts.”
Air quotes are so that everyone understands my proper misuse of the words.
JGabriel
@Poopyman: Well, the physicists parties I went to were in the early 90’s, so the trend continued till then at least. Given the continuing occasional appearance of critically acclaimed rock bands with physicist/mathematicians amongst their line-up (Air, Apples In Stereo, just to start with the As) , I suspect the trend continues.
Also, I did try to acknowledge you getting there first after seeing your post, but, alas, my editing period had passed.
.
Michael D.
@licensed to kill time: Air Jesus
Bill Murray
@Omnes Omnibus: well any passage saying accountability is a conservative insight (or maybe that liberals downplaying accountability is a conservative insight) is going to be hard to parse without laughing so hard one can not proceed
Brachiator
@Sarcastro:
And yet, the wingnuts probably think that the stuff posted there should be included in all school text books.
Bill Murray
Is Conservaepedia an Infinite Improbability Generator?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@demimondian: I think he was playing on the word “choice.”
licensed to kill time
@Jay in Oregon:
You are the second person to exhibit such lack of faith! I just enjoy the mental image of a planeload of fundies clutching their bibles and straining, redfaced and sweaty, praying and hosannah-ing, scooching in their seats and saying “I think I felt it move a little bit that time, didn’t you? Pray harder! Here we go!”
Heh.
Scott de B.
My specialty also.
The succession of short-reigned 3rd century Emperors are called the Triginta Tyranni by the Historia Augusta, probably deliberately to associate them with the Athenian tyrants. To get the nice round number of 30 the author of the Historia Augusta had to stretch a lot, including some spurious individuals and counting a few sons who never reigned in their own names.
The reference to them in Conservapedia is only evidence of the sin of never reading anyone later than Gibbon on the subject.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill Murray: I will admit that one of my problems while reading it was my need to smash my head against my desk resulting in my being slightly stunned and having a case of the “dizzies.”
QDC
@Lurked:
Yep, that argument got covered on the talk page. Andy Schlafly has a (stupid) response to that argument. I believe he says that the satellites’ clocks are adjusted based on terrestrially-generated radio signals rather than the actually equations of general relativity. If you point out that this is irrelevant so long as the adjustments are consistent with the predictions of the theory, he will argue that it is nonetheless proof that the theory has not done anything useful, since it’s not strictly “used” to adjusted the satellites. If you continue on, he eventually demands you read a bunch of manuscripts, some of which are in French.
I’m telling you, he’s spend a lot of time thinking about this. (And apparently I’ve spend too long reading that talk page. But, it is one fascinating sociological experiment.)
Query: If you declare arbitrarily chosen and generally accepted scientific theory X to be the product of liberal bias, and create a conservopedia page around that notion, how long until people start being banned as liberals for defending X?
Omnes Omnibus
@QDC: 42.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Smurfhole:
And they’re coming in black heliocopters to put you in reeducation camps. Or actually, just education, in this case.
JGabriel
@cleek:
Err, umm, there really are a lot of bibles still sold. The reason it doesn’t register on the bestseller lists is because there are so many different versions sold by different publishers that no single edition makes the chart.
I’m not saying it would make the top ten on a weekly basis, but it would probably be somewhere in the lower end of a top 500 list, like perennial entries The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby.
.
soonergrunt
@GambitRF: Yeah, and the corollary to that is that Objects in motion tend to remain in motion because of the effect of the profit motive. We all know that the word ‘motive’ and the word ‘motion’ have the same derivation and therefore one cannot have motion without motive, and the only legitimate motive found in nature is profit.
Rick Taylor
Wow, that’s impressive.
They used to have some crazy stuff on the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem as well, but I think that was mostly removed.
Smurfhole
Teach the controversy! Heliocentrism was disputed by lots of prominent thinkers- and still is. (I’m a prominent thinker, to me anyway.) We can posit that the Earth holds still and the entire Universe moves around it- I just did. It’s really easy. Ergo, the solar system has the Earth at its center, not the Sun- as Tycho Brahe argued.
As far as relativity goes, Einstein talked about the position of the observer relative to the phenomenon a lot. Problem is, he didn’t understand that God observes everything and so relative motion is impossible. The Earth’s the center of the Universe not so much because I imagined it that way in the last paragraph, but because God, according to the Bible, “…hath fixed it firm, immobile.” Relativity’s junk because God’s the only observer that counts and God observes everything. Space and time don’t increase or decrease as an object approaches the speed of light- they’re all the same to God.
Read your Bible, it’s all in there. Or don’t read it, it’s really long. Read a sermon some other guy wrote that mentions it in passing.
AnotherBruce
The Theory of Wingnut Relativity:
All wingnut theories from a distance appear to be spoofs, but the closer the observer gets to the actual wingnut horizon, the more the observer realizes that Wingnuttia spoofiness is not spoofed.
Stillwater
@p.a.: Their general response (I’ll never forget) was basically ‘of course it’s bullshit. If we told the rubes we actually intend to instigate a major recession and weaken middle class entitlements ‘we’ would never win the election.’
Along those lines, Einstein, who was prone to fits of honesty, originally wanted to name his theory ‘sociaIist doctrine to separate conservatives from their money, guns and God’ but was talked out of this by unnamed leaders of the liberal intellectual cabal.
licensed to kill time
@Michael D.:
You made me click on that and now I am starting the 40 day Miracle Diet. Since Jesus wandered in the desert for 40 days I think it starts that way plus nothing but fruit (?) so I will be back in 40, a newer svelter me, just like Jesus :)
AB
k. compromise. Taylor expansion in even powers of (v/c).
roshan
I don’t know why Einstein overlooked these guys. I mean they have had the grand unified theory of everything for about 20 centuries now.
Smurfhole
@Bill E Pilgrim:
You mean to say that you can’t trust a prominent conservative blog that advocated for a guy who was easily in the top 10 most prominent Republican Presidential candidates of the 2008 election? If you can’t trust a source like that when it comes to scientific articles, who can you trust?
BoredNow
A tale of Andy Schlafly butting heads with real life academics
http://tinyurl.com/3yosjkr
Sly
Interestingly enough, it used to be the (religious) left that utterly despised scientific advancement. The first among the anti-evolution crowd were prominent liberals like Samuel Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan, who conflated evolution by natural selection with the advancement of a new moral order that was rising among the more economically conservative establishment in Europe and America, through people like Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer. What would eventually become codified as Social Darwinism, but was generally termed as “eugenics” prior to the 1930s. Bryan’s own anti-evolution activism was sparked by his visits to Germany as Wilson’s Secretary of State, where eugenics had fervently taken hold among the political and military elite.
Nowadays, there is less a direct rejection of scientific advancement among the left, except for the few Luddite groups who have political grievances against biotech companies. But there has been more of a complete misapprehension of modern scientific knowledge to justify political grievances against biotech companies, as well as the New Agers who look for anything within modern cosmology that can validate their fetish for Eastern mysticism. Enter the “quantum quacks” like Deepak Chopra, as well as 90% of the health-related entries at Huffington Post.
Just saying that scientific quackery isn’t the sole province of the right (and really never was). I apologize in advance for any perception of High Broderism.
Perry Como
@licensed to kill time: I prefer the 3 day Zombie Jesus diet.
dmsilev
Wow. So much fail in so little space. Looking a bit further on that list, there is:
“The failure to discover gravitons, despite wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer money in searching.” (never mind the fact that GR is a non-quantum theory; gravitons are predicted by various grand unified theories),.
“The uniformity in temperature throughout the universe.” (measuring variations in the background temperature are an important tool for understanding the structure of the early universe)
“The theory predicts wormholes just as it predicts black holes, but wormholes violate causality and permit absurd time travel” (“I don’t like it” is not a valid scientific critique)
“Relativity requires that anything traveling at the speed of light must have mass zero, so it must have momentum zero. But the laws of electrodynamics require that light have nonzero momentum.” FAIL. Utter and complete FAIL. Zero mass does not require zero momentum. The counterexample being …light. A self-refuting point. Beautiful.
“Unlike most well-tested fundamental physical theories, the theory of relativity violates conditions of a conservative field. Path independence, for example, is lacking under the theory of relativity, as in the “twin paradox” whereby the age of each twin under the theory is dependent on the path he traveled.” Using big complicated physics terms like ‘conservative field’ only demonstrates your total lack of understanding of the concepts contained therein.
dms
PurpleGirl
Are quantum entanglements like imperial entanglements?
(It was too tempting to not post.)
Lynnehs
Who needs reality when you can create your own little echo chamber and make up whatever you want reality to be?
licensed to kill time
@Perry Como:mmmm…..brains!
p.a.
Does anyone actuallyearn a living off that site? I may take a swing by next. Are there ads? Is it wingnut welfare a la Regnery? Is it Renaissance Man Schlafly’s hobby?
Are red state school kids citing Conservapedia in papers? YeeeeeeHaaaw!
The Bearded Blogger
Hey John! Fix the fucking right margins!!! We’re hurtin here!
Omnes Omnibus
@PurpleGirl:
I believe they are much smaller.
Sarcastro
Thanks Scott de B, I’m much stronger on the Republic (and Magna Graecia) than the Empire, especially post-principate (even if barely), and I’d always read Pollio’s work as “The Lives of the Thirty Pretenders” and never in the Latin.
Stillwater
Relativity’s junk because God’s the only observer that counts….
Whew, glad that’s cleared up.
Sly
@Comrade Dread:
I’ve actually seen less credible (and more objectionable) theories on the moral decline of America.
wilfred
@Silver:
Ideologues depend on absolutes; relativism is anathema to them. Even though I think the Conservopedia is spoof they are actually on to something – they just got the physics wrong.
Roger Penrose once said that if you weren’t shocked by quantum mechanics, you didn’t understand it. Once the basic ‘certainties’ of physical reality are reduced to mere probabilities how can one adhere to absolute(s) certainties in any sphere? This is one reason why Einstein never accepted quantum theory and why the rest of us wrap ourselves in periodic relativist epiphanies.
I have someone working on this now, actually. Not the physics part, but the combined effects of psychoanlytic theory and quantum mechanics, amongst other things, on changes in moral absolutes in cultural production. Or something like that.
Objective Scrutator
Doctrine, not plot. The Helioleftists already succeeded with their plot to overthrow sound Christian science after Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and Bruno brainwashed the public. Perhaps their plot began even earlier, with the Spherofascist Aristotle.
Blogs 4 Brownback is one of the greatest ideas ever, although the authors really should have set their sights higher. Certain other candidates could easily be sabotaged in such a manner as their early work (before Brownback quit; afterwards, it started to go downhill) _ Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney, beware!
Also, while Andrew Schlafly is certainly real, a substantial portion of the contributors are parodies. Probably the best one was Bugler, who fooled Andrew for over a year.
You should also check out their article on Augusto Pinochet. It’s pretty hilarious, as it makes excuses for the murder of his political opponents.
Smurfhole
@Stillwater:
I will pray for your atom-splitting soul, heathen.
The Bearded Blogger
@wilfred: I think it’s more of a sollipsistic fallacy thing… if I can’t wrap my head around it, it’s false and evil.
Btw… in response to my comment above, margins work well in Firefox
sgrAstar
@dmsilev: bravo, dms.
PeakVT
@AnotherBruce: I thought when we approached the wingnut horizon that the density of idiotic ideas would radiate stupidity that could be seen throughout the universe. Which explains why we haven’t been visited by aliens species yet.
Objective Scrutator
@Smurfhole
Atom splitting is a necessity, heretic. Your lackluster education has encouraged you to believe that angels and demons ought to coexist.
Be sure to read the section on the “political aspects of relativity”, too. A curvature of space concept is an argument for expanded abortion rights! Who knew?
Menzies
What I was about to say, other people have covered, but to put it in more explicit terms: Andy Schlafly sees the theory of relativity as necessarily implying that moral relativity also exists, and since the scientific community is so entirely dominated by liberal intellectuals, they must be implying one from the other.
Christ, what an idiot.
Smurfhole
@Objective Scrutator:
I used to be Sisyphus, so I think I can address this. There was some discussion at the beginning about picking a different candidate, but in the end we decided on Brownback because he was the wingnuttiest of the bunch from our perspective. Right around the time he withdrew from the race, one of my collaborators decided it was a good idea to start “blogs4conservatives,” which is probably what we should’ve called ourselves from the beginning. That would’ve involved less quasi-deification of Brownback, though, which was one of the parts of the blog I enjoyed the most. (I then did a “Blogs4Huckabee” for a bit, which just ended up being a reprint of a lot of the sillier later posts on Blogs 4 Brownback and is barely worth mentioning.)
The Heliocentrism post wasn’t my personal favorite. My personal favorite was a post simply titled “Good!”, in which I argued that we should all thank Rwandan poachers for killing off mountain gorillas and thereby eliminating the favorite sexual playmates of Darwinist scientists and Frenchified UN peacekeepers. If memory serves I also argued that Darwinists were having half-breed human-monkey hybrid children and then passing them off as legitimate humans- probably because the Darwinists themselves were descendents of previous abominations in this line of sexual experimentation. It was racist as Hell, but it also had the smug condescension of being able to argue that it wasn’t racist (“Look! I praised Rwandans! Therefore, I’m not racist!”)
I stopped writing for the blog for a couple reasons, some personal. But it had gone downhill by that point anyway, and I felt like it jumped the shark when I found myself arguing for the existence of phlogiston and an actual flat Earth.
Jumping the shark is always a problem with a spoof. The new problem is coming up with a spoof that doesn’t jump the shark while simultaneously not sounding like a credible mainstream conservative (AND while being funny). At this point, I could write a blog arguing for the return to slavery, and it would violate two of those tenets (it would sound like a mainstream conservative opinion AND it wouldn’t be funny; it would be impossible to detect it as spoof). We didn’t anticipate that wingnut event horizon would approach when we wrote the blog.
There were many other problems and difficulties inherent in writing that blog, like my pretense of Catholicism when I’d never even been baptized. (I got around that one by pretending to be an extraordinarily ignorant Catholic, and that seemed to do the trick.) Another problem was when someone used my email address to log into the blog and write some crap about how it was all a spoof. We had to do a lot of damage control after that one. But anyway, it’s probably not too interesting to hear about. Old, dead blog, fun while it lasted.
Spherofascist is really clever, though. If I still did the blog, I’d steal that one off you.
Smurfhole
@Objective Scrutator:
Only God should split the atom. Anyone who thinks an atomic weapon should work by means other than prayer is deluding themselves.
The reason the bomb at Hiroshima worked isn’t because of some scientist loon like Einstein. It’s because someone on the Enola Gay said a prayer before it went off. God heard that prayer, and split those atoms. Someone’s always praying at nuclear tests, even if it’s that Commie pagan Oppenheimer reading the Bhagavad-Gita out loud at the Trinity site.
wilfred
@Smurfhole:
Well done; it was brilliant.
MeDrewNotYou
@jl: Speaking of pi being 3, here’s a Straight Dope column about the incident. I’m proud to be a resident of the fine state of Indiana, where we have the balls to legislate fundamental mathematical concepts.
Smurfhole
@wilfred:
Thanks. I try not to talk about it much, since the blog’s technically still “live” and I could always restart it if my life takes that kind of a trajectory. (If that happens, BTW, all these posts were written by a fraud and an imposter. Some moonbat treefrog Helioleftist liar. You’ve been warned.)
Poopyman
@licensed to kill time:
Ugh. After Day 10 or so don’t you have to eat scorpions or something?
licensed to kill time
@Poopyman:
I will let you know on Day 11 what I find to eat. I hope it’s not worms. Maybe the Manna will start to fall from Heaven at that point. One can only hope.
roshan
@Smurfhole:
Now, I can’t decide which stories are better, the conservapedia spoofs or chronicles of narnia.
Objective Scrutator
@Smurfhole
I used to be “Bob Corker” on the blog, as well. I don’t think I was ever good at being anything other than silly, and I sometimes took spoofing to the point of being a major-league asshole. (I think my theories on the Ice Wall were the most memorable.) I remember trying to pass myself off as a Christian Reconstructionist, modeled after Rushdoony.
I also liked playing the part of being the “racist as hell, but not really racist” guy. My very username was from my Senator’s racist-as-hell campaign from 2006, and I remember originally being incredibly racist on the blog before suddenly starting to call everyone else racist.
Your posts were the best, but I felt that most of Psycheout’s posts were highly unappreciated. He was absolutely brilliant at playing the clueless Brownback supporter, and looking back at some of the earlier posts, he was excellent at trying to pretend like a legitimate contributor, even going so far as to becoming part of the Brownback community.
Still, the blog was incredibly fun. The style of spoof it had was far more sophisticated than just about every other spoof I could think of; the prose was excellent, the fairly large variety of subjects covered kept it interesting, and the campaign posts on Brownback kept a veneer of seriousness.
I enjoyed contributing to the blog. If I happened to be a factor in its decline, I apologize. I enjoyed reading the posts much more than contributing.
wilfred
@Objective Scrutator:
Second all that. Incredibly, some people who posted here back then did not believe it was spoof.
For me it was the prissy, arch delivery.
Scott Mercer
There are so many copies of The Bible in print because:
A) it is the main text of one of the three most followed religions on the planet Earth, and
B) The Bible is in the Public Domain, which means that anybody can print, distribute and/or sell a copy of it to anyone, at any time, for any reason (counter to something like Scientology, which rigorously enforces its copyrights and makes a lot of its money by actually selling “sacred texts” to its members).
The Bible is free. SHOCKING! That means the Bible is SOCIALIST! Why is The Bible against The Bible?? I have just proven that The Bible calls for banning The Bible!
Smurfhole
@roshan:
Chronicles of Narnia for writing talent, conservapedia for sheer humor.
I remember I tried to sabotage their microscope entry one time, and they banned me for life. I can’t believe they actually caught me, all I did was copy and paste the wikipedia entry while adding the word “allegedly” to almost every sentence.
Kib
I clicked through on “Pioneer anomaly.”
After screen after screen of mumbo-jumbo we arrive at the answer:
Well duh, we don’t know where every celestial body is.
Remember November
Mock Einstein? Seriously? What a bunch of Intelligent Design flat earthers. Next they’ll be counting Thetans.
tavella
My favorite is still Andy Schlafly’s dogged belief that no humor existed before Christianity. It’s just the pure lunacy of it: why the hell would that even have anything to *do* with Christianity? At least with Darwin and modern science, you can see the fact that it’s invalidating the Bible as fact, thus the furious denial of reality.
But over _jokes_?
Smurfhole
@Objective Scrutator:
I was wondering who you were. I knew who some people were- I was a couple of the commenters myself, generally the more asinine ones that were easy to write. (I can’t even remember their damn names, it’s been so long. I know I was whichever one invented the term “Helioleftism,” in that Heliocentrism thread.) My Dad was Maura Ghee (“Ghee” is Gaelic slang for “pussy,” apparently.)
You were always pretty funny. You weren’t a factor in the blog’s decline, the number one factor in the decline of my posts was that I went from unemployed to working 95 hours a week in mid-June of 2007. I went from writing several blog entries a day to being lucky to get to write a couple posts a week. That was the cause of my personal decline, anyway. I gave up when life got even more crazy later on.
Psycheout kept that blog going for a really long time. I haven’t talked to him in a while, no idea why he stopped running it.
LanceThruster
@MeDrewNotYou:
Whew! Just as long as they’re not marrying gay terrorists.
LanceThruster
@Smurfhole:
You owe me a new keyboard for the spit-take I just did!
Mike Schilling
The Conservapedia article on Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, is calm and more-or-less accurate. Why the difference?
aimai
@tavella:
That thread on humor that tavella links to is infinitely amazing, amazing to the quantum level. After reading it I think its pretty clear that Schlafly is not only an asshole, in the classical sense, but also probably clinically nuts. There’s something about his style of argumentation and his inability to reason that reminds me of the word “perseverate” and the tic-like behavior indulged in by people who are on very strong drugs to control their behavior and mood swings. I’m not pretending to diagnose this guy at long distance–I’m no Republican Senator–but I’d bet all lombard street to a china orange that guy is, basically, nuts. He reads like those graduate students who had a psychotic break in late adolescence/early adulthood and never recovered.
aimai
MeDrewNotYou
@aimai: I’m in the process of reading it now and its just so ridiculous that I can’t even laugh at Schlafly. Besides his style of argument that you mention, even suggesting the there was no pre-Christian humor is crazy asshole territory. Hell, even Pat Robertson would admit that the Greeks and Romans had humor, even if it was vulgar, crude, and anti-Christian in nature.
SRW1
@roshan:
Right. And the excuse that they published it in an obscure little journal isn’t that plausible either.
SRW1
@aimai:
Who would have thought that when Umberto Eco wrote ‘The Name of the Rose’ and developed the plot about Aristotle’s lost ‘Book on Comedy’, he had Andrew Schlafly in mind with the figure of Jorge of Burgos, the blind monk who devours the poisoned pages of the book rather than have it fall into the wrong hands.
MeDrewNotYou
@MeDrewNotYou: Reading a little farther, I got to the question of Athenian literacy vs US literacy. The man (and his minions) seriously argue (and shoot down the poor Irish guy bringing actual stats) that a society where only rich male citizens were literate had comparable or greater literacy than modern America. Wow.
Mark S.
The Counterexamples to Evolution article is incredibly stupid as well. I’m not sure whoever wrote it even understands how sex works:
I mean, they do understand that men inherit stuff from their mothers and women from their fathers, don’t they? There are also a lot of these kinds of arguments:
which show they have no idea what the theory actually says.
MeDrewNotYou
@Mark S.: Darwin wept.
Martin
@Mike Schilling: Well, technically you can’t measure the current position of conservative thinking on science and it’s momentum. Since you’ve read that article, they may have completely shifted position – discrediting anything that cannot be directly observed. After all, if God had intended you to look at such tiny things, he would have gifted you with scanning tunneling microscopes instead of eyes.
AnotherBruce
@Mark S.:
Oh help me Lord, the weight of the dense stupidity is overbearing. These people are too stupid to understand the meaning of the word species?
Maybe they’re just put off by the idea that to have species, there has to be fucking involved in the process.
Lee
That’s some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever read. GG conservatives.
cleek
@JGabriel:
maybe.
but as best i can tell, nobody keeps track of “sales” (even though many/most are simply given away by churches), so there is pretty much no basis for the claim. at best, it’s a guess.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Oh yeah, heliocentrism brings back some fond memories.
Troll lists. Scrutators. And this wonderful delicious article right here, the greatest triumph in spoofrat history.
Good times. Good times.
Nylund
No doubt the author carries a device in his pocket every day that proves him wrong.
Many devices we use have GPS capabilities. The GPS system is little more than clocks on satellites flying around the Earth. But, as relativity states, the passage of time is relative to one’s velocity. The clocks that are flying around the earth move at a much higher speed and thus time passes differently for them. As such, we constantly have to adjust the time on these clocks in order for them to match “Earth time” so that we can get an accurate measure of our current location on a GPS device.
Every iPhone, every car navigation system, uses the theory of relativity to get us from point A to point B. This happens thousands, if not millions, or billions of time every single day. Understanding relativity makes possible many of the advantages of modern technology possible.
momus
Overall, a brilliant use of the “if the glove doesn’t fit you must acquit strategy” by Schlafly.
Origuy
@Scott Mercer:
Not necessarily. The original texts are in PD, of course, but modern translations hold the same copyright as an original work produced at the same time. The King James Version is out of copyright except in the UK, where the Crown still holds rights.
So don’t do your copying in England, or the Queen will get medieval (or at least Tudor) on your ass!
RSA
So Talking Points Memo is running a story on this, in an article that I think was written four hours after this one. Unfortunate that there was no hat tip to BJ.
Bill E Pilgrim
Testing something. Thank you.
Smurfhole
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
Not quite. Psycheout even made it onto Keith Olbermann’s show.
Matthew B.
Went and had a look there for the first time in years. They seem to have toned down the craziness at the Fermat’s Last Theorem article, though they still go on and on about the proof being non-elementary, as if anybody cared about that. I got a kick out of this, from the “Elementary proof” article:
Ho ho ho. Go and compare the elementary Erdős or Selberg proof of the Prime Number Theory to one of the much less complicated tauberian proofs, and get back to me on that one.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“OMFG, I just read the beginning of one of their articles concerning my specialty.
They called the Barracks Emperors during the Crisis of the 3rd Century the “Thirty Tyrants”. Uh, about 700 years too late, and in the wrong Mediterranean peninsula.
http://conservapedia.com/Roman
Good gods, the one on the Republic is even worse. ”
I’m just surprised they didn’t blame the fall of the Romans on teh ghey. I thought that was Standard Conservative Canon. (Nevermind Catullus was writing about what was going on in Roman bathhouses five centuries before the end of the Western Roman Empire.)
Objective Scrutator
@wilfred
Who were you on B4B?
Yeah, I remember a lot of the commenters being incredibly dense. At one moment, they would be demanding that we admit ourselves to be parodies. At the next, they’d be calling us troglodytes or something to that effect. Their reactions were the one thing which I could never understand there, especially because these commenters I speak of often consisted of the same five people or so that hung around for six months.
Oh, well. It was fun making them look stuff up on the Internet for us.
@Smurfhole
Heh, thanks for the compliment. I kinda wish that I had sockpuppeted myself; for example, making a David Broder character demanding that everyone on there be bipartisan. For example, this could range into a compromise between the Spherofascists and the flat earthers, i.e. the world used to be flat. (Incidentally, I have seen at least a couple of websites claim that, so you didn’t jump the shark very much. I still think that its sandpaper skin grazed you.)
By the way, did you do Scrutator? I remember that blog being one of the first parodies I read.
DavidTC
Oh good grief. The theory doesn’t ‘predict’ wormholes, it allows for the possibility they might exist.
To ‘violate causality’ using a wormhole, here is what you must do:
1) Find something called ‘exotic matter’, which has negative mass. (Not antimatter, antimatter has positive mass.) Note: Exotic matter might not actually exist.
2) Managed to bring enough of this exotic matter together in one place. Note: Exotic matter, if it does exist, might be so foreign to normal matter that keeping them anywhere near each other is a bad idea, like antimatter on steroids.
3) Somehow open up a wormhole. Note: We have no idea of how you would possible do this, at all.
4) Insert enough exotic matter into the ends of the wormhole to hold it open. Assuming we can actually collect and manipulate exotic matter as in step 2, this is probably the sole possible step.
5) Put one end of the time/space distortion you made on a space ship. Note: How on earth we could possibly move what is essentially a feature of space/time is unknown. It’s even harder than moving black holes, which we could at least get to ‘follow’ us. But wormholes don’t try to ‘eat’ everything, so we can’t do that.
6) Fly the ship, with the wormhole, at or near the speed of light for some amount of time, long enough to relativistically alter the amount of time that the end of the wormhole on the ship experiences. Note: Special consideration that we need to bring the exotic matter along with us, and, oh yeah, not end up with the entire ship tore apart with tidal stress because we’re moving planet-sized amount of mass and anti-mass around. Not to mention the previous problem of moving a feature of space/time.
7) Fly the ship back, bringing the ends back near each other, continuing to hold them open with exotic matter, and we have a wormhole that if you go through one way, you end up in the past. (And the other way you end up in the future.)
Of course, that won’t work anyway, as current theory holds if you manage all that, once you got the ends exactly close enough that the ‘past’ end is exactly the ‘light speed distance’ from the future end, aka, if the ends were five light minutes apart, and five minutes apart in time, in that millisecond a near infinite amount of energy would go through in a loop.
It would actually be a very small amount of energy, just in an infinite loop as it coincidentally managed to leave the past end in exactly the right way to reenter the future end. An near infinite loop taking place in a single moment of time, with a single photon looping septillion times, with all that mass showing up and you having to pump in exotic matter to counter. As you probably don’t have that, the wormhole will collapse.
…which, if you’re really lucky, won’t result in the wormhole collapse into two black holes on you. And then instantly evaporating, aka, exploding, as that looping mass vanishes.
Heh, even if you had the exotic matter to hold it open, you sure as hell couldn’t travel through it or send a signal through it. The past end, the future end, and all space in between (Both though the wormhole and through normal space) would be a white-hot radioactive wasteland of looping energy and normal-matter destroying exotic matter you couldn’t even get Morse code through. It would be like trying to hold a press conference standing on a supernova, with the added bonus that gravity, and hence the metric of space-time, is totally fucked also thanks to all that anti-mass you’re using to hold the thing open.
T-shirt idea: I traveled into the past, and all I got was ripped into atoms by tidal forces and then melted into quarks by EM, which were then destroyed by interaction with exotic matter.