Love, thy name is Schlafly.
15Apr. 09
Yes, really. I have found a new favourite website in Conservapedia, the conservative ‘rival’ to Wikipedia.
You may be wondering what it is about this page that makes me want to do a little dance and drink mead like a Viking. Is it the high calibre educational articles? The unbiased goodwill and generousity of the administrators? Perhaps it is the even handed way they deal with religions other than Christianity, not to mention the scholarly understanding of atheism?
F*** no.
It’s the unrestrained stupidity pouring out of every virtual orifice, the sheer mind-numbing cascade of dumb that flows freer than goon through a Jaffy. They are morons of the highest order, and it makes me chuckle.
Now, I know that Conservapedia is ‘old news’. I remember way back when it had just started — I regarded it as I would a cane toad, and went on my way thinking that no one could take it seriously. As has been known to happen, I was wrong — it’s still around, and there are people taking it seriously. So why am I bringing this up again, other than my fondness for equine necroflogging?
Andy Schlafly is giving online ‘world history lectures’…and grading students on the website. Now, while it may be a little bit frightening to think some people are using Conservapedia as an actual educational resource, I find that my horror is balanced by my amusement at Andy Schlafly pretending he actually has any freaking idea what he is talking about.
Let’s pick a lecture at random, shall we…lecture five. He begins:
“Last week we finished the “ancient world.” It was followed immediately by a period of hundreds of years when there was no significant civilization in Western Europe.”
…aside from the Visigoths (and then later the Moors), the Franks, and so on. While ‘significant’ may be a malleable term, I think even Schlafly would be hard pressed to argue that the civilisations that spanned from around the fall of Rome through the early Middle Ages were insignificant. Lucky for him, he doesn’t have to even try — he rather glosses over a large bit of that period. I especially like his eventual commentary on Islam in medieval Europe…
“Islam came very close to conquering Western Europe and forcibly converting Christians to Islam in the A.D. 700s. By then Spain was already under Muslim control by the Moors…”
…who had obviously just materialised there, what with there not being any significant civilisation in Europe at the time. Actually, I think Schlafly would rather gloss over a lot of Islamic history given the way he superficially flits about the topic. Over four paragraphs we jump from Jihad, to Muslim conquests in Europe, to Muhummad Ali, and finally to the first Muslim Congressman in the USA. Somebody better give Andy some Ritalin soon, before all that intellectual jumping makes him pull a brain muscle!
Now, call me overly sensitive, but I can’t help but feel that,
“There were five noteworthy ancient American civilizations,”
is a wee bit of an oversimplification, and an insulting one at that. By the five civilisations he lists (actually six, given that he lumps the Moche and Incan civilisations together despite their being separated in time by a good seven centuries), it appears that to get on his list you have to have been a civilisation somewhere between modern day Mexico and Peru. Because nobody else is noteworthy.
Of course it gets better, because after ineptly delivering a lecture, there’s nothing like ineptly setting questions you can later mark. Ineptly. Of course, the questions are all perfectly clear and not at all leading or loaded with bias. The model answers are good for a yuk too — go and have a read if you’re a bit of a masochist. I won’t post any here, because…well because quite frankly it might make your brain explode.
Tags: andy schlafly, conservapedia, history, Richard Hughes
April 15th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
He’s a grade A moron, that Andrew. RationalWiki has done an extensive job of refuting his ‘arguments’ (ones, I might add, that a year 8 could poke holes in).