Entertaining stupidity

Have you heard of a project called "Conservapedia?" If not, you definitely want to check it out. The idea for the site is based on Wikipedia: it's a free encyclopedia which anyone is allowed to edit but that also has a few moderators with the power to override any edits. Its stated purpose is to provide balance to Wikipedia which, according to Conservapedia's founders, exhibits a liberal bias.

(Note: in what follows, I don't provide any additional links to Conservapedia. Those clowns don't need any more traffic than they have already. However, what I write about them is researched and you can easily verify it for yourself if you feel like it.)

Conservapedia's entries on politics and economics are entirely predictable given the project's mission. However, when you move to science and math, things get really unexpected. And really funny. What's unexpected is exactly which mathematical and scientific ideas the website's writers think conservatives should find suspect. In math, for example, they postulate abandoning imaginary numbers (according to Conservapedia's founder, no one has proved the existence of i) and the axiom of choice. You may or may not find it funny. But this you definitely will: for some reason, the site's authors believe that thinking general relativity is true is inconsistent with being conservative. Where this belief comes from I have no idea; perhaps they think general relativity leads to moral relativism or something (and they're no strangers to the fallacy of arguing from consequences: for example, they argue that the fact that some people who "believed in evolution" were social Darwinists is evidence that the theory of evolution is false). Now prepare for some good laughs; in their entry on general relativity they provide a list of counterexamples to the theory. One of them is:

The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, as described in John 4:46-54.

Take that, physicists!

If you're still not laughing, I have another gem for you. Here's an entry titled "Conservapedia's Law:"

Conservapedia's Law is the observation that conservative insights increase over time at a geometric rate, as in 1-2-4-8-16 etc. For example, there is a doubling in effective new conservative terms per century. Conservapedia's Law is analogous to Moore's Law, which holds that the rate of increase in the number of transistors on a chip of a given size roughly doubles every two years.

You have to hand one thing to those guys: while most stupidity is incredibly dull, theirs is so outrageous it's actually highly entertaining. In that respect they resemble Young Earth creationists or postmodernist "scholars" in the humanities. In fact, some of Conservapedia's entries are so out of this world I can't help but think that the site is being hoaxed. Just as it was the case with postmodernists that were so masterfully duped by Alan Sokal, Conservapedia author's views are so outrageous that they themselves must have trouble realizing exactly when they're being made fun of.