For some it’s Columbus Day. But why not also celebrate it as Anti-Flat-Earth Day*. It’s a holiday so I’m going to repost a classic, “Conservapedia: The theory of relativity is a liberal plot.”
I’m reposting it in honor of the Flat-Earth anti-science crowd — starting with Robert Bryce, of the Manhattan Institute, who tried to make a mockery of Science in the Wall Street Journal concerning a recent experiment related to Einstein’s theory.
But of course we have the larger point that Chris Mooney made in his column on how “Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left.” And that brought out the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green who pulled a Charlie Sheen.
Progressives don’t need an alternative to Wikipedia because we are fact-based and science-based. Indeed, science is the foundation of progress. Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are anti-science and why the extremists among them set up the Conservapedia, which claims to be “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” and brags “Over 290 million Views & Over 900,000 Edits.”
And yet after all those edits, they still have the same unadulterated nonsense on the theory of relativity and all of science that I wrote about 2 years ago. And so I would ask you to put on your head vises — or your cranial containment field, if you dropped a dime on the deluxe model — and go back to the future.
First though, it’s worth noting that the Conservapedia entry for Christopher Columbus states, “As conservative historian Wilcomb Washburn explains, if Columbus had not discovered the New World, the process of European discovery might have been very different. Rather than standing as a symbol of inexorable forces, Columbus is better seen as a representative of the spirit of inquiry, Christian religious zeal, and the notable achievements of Western Civilization.”
Yes, Columbus is a representative of the spirit of inquiry in the same way that Conservapedia is representative of an attempt to destroy that same spirit of inquiry, a spirit that created modern science, one of the most notable achievements of civilization.
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.[1] Here is a list of 24 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.
I would have filed this under Signs of the Apocalypse, but we are way past that. This is more like, Signs that the Apocalypse happened a long time ago but we were all too busy watching American Idol to notice.
Yes, there is a Conservapedia and its main benefit to society is that it apparently occupies the time of the great many conservatives who post meticulously-footnoted articles like the one above, titled, “Counterexamples to Relativity.”
It is hard to know what is the most mind-boggling thing about this particular article. Footnote 1 reads:
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.
Really? The Bible outsells The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a hundred-fold? Well then it must be literally true word-for-word. That’s how we know, for instance, that the Sun moves around the Earth*. But still, I am puzzled how this is a counter example:
The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54….
You can click on the second link to read the story in the conservative translation of the Bible – didn’t know there was a conservative translation, did you, ye of little ideological faith?
But I don’t see how that story of Jesus healing somebody proves action at a distance instantaneously. Indeed, in the conservative translation of the relevant verse
So he asked them the exact hour when he began to feel better, and they told him, “His fever broke yesterday, at about one pm.”
Then the father realized that this was the exact hour when Jesus said to him, “your son lives,” so both he and his entire house believed.
Silly conservatives. You would need to demonstrate that the healing took place exactly when Jesus spoke to disapprove the special theory of relativity – rather than say a tiny fraction of a second later. But in your retranslation, the testimony is only “about one pm” – rather than the King James version:
And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.
And for the record, I was taught relativity, understand it to be very well verified, and I continue to read the King James Bible. It contains much one can learn from and is one of the two definitive rhetoric texts in English along with the complete works of Shakespeare. But I digress.
You may be wondering how Barack Obama ”allegedly” used the theory of relativity to mislead people. For that you have to go to the Conservapedia entry on the “Theory of relativity“:
Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion.[45] As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.
Before clicking on the link to the footnote, PLEASE PUT YOUR HEAD IN A SECOND VISE!
I know that you are thinking now that this is some sort of massive spoof by The Onion. But DailyKos actually recalled that the Onion had mocked the anti-science ideologues of the right years ago:
The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.
The truly sad thing about the Conservapedia entry is that it treats the theory of relativity like global warming or evolution — as some insidious liberal plot that needs to be debunked using pseudoscience.
And so we learn that one of the counter examples to relativity is:
The universe shortly after its creation, when quantum effects dominated and contradicted Relativity.
But where in the Bible does it say that the universe, shortly after its creation, was dominated by quantum effects to the exclusion of relativity? Geez. I have no freaking idea where these guys get their information!
Seriously, or rather, semi-seriously, how can you possibly quote astrophysics to refute relativity? Why even bother?
Weirdly, the entry on the theory of relativity includes this:
Creation scientists such as physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett have used relativistic time dilation to explain how the earth can be only 6,000 years old even though cosmological data (background radiation, supernovae, etc.) set a much older age for the universe.
Conservatives need to get their story straight on Einstein! Is he liberal — conservative?
*If you go to the Conservapedia entry on Copernicus to find out what conservatives believe about whether the Earth goes around the Sun and that part of Joshua that suggests the Sun does move around the Earth, you learn this:
The reception to his work was initially positive within the Catholic Church. Years later, the Church reconsidered in connection with claims by Galileo that the Copernican model had been proven correct. Copernicus’ book was suspended until corrected by the Index of the Catholic Church in 1616, because the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun “is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture”. [1] [2] These corrections were indicated in 1620, and nine sentences had to be either omitted or changed.[3] The book stayed on the Index until 1758. In the 20th century, scientists adopted a view closer to the Church scientists. The consensus is now that motion is relative, that Earth-centered and Sun-centered coordinate systems are equally valid for astronomical calculations, that Galileo’s main argument for the Copernican system was fallacious,[4] and that the doctrine of the immobility of the Sun is false.[5]
Yes, the earth-centered system is equally valid to the sun-centered … because of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Darn it, I forgot to put my second vise on!
And how do we know that the doctrine of the immobility of the sun is false? The footnote says:
“The Sun orbits around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”
But were does the idea of black holes come from? Here’s the Conservapedia entry on black holes:
Black holes are theoretical entities popularized by pseudoscience despite their implausibility and lack of ever being directly observed. Suggested by the controversial theory of relativity (see Counterexamples to Relativity), black holes are postulated to be collapsed objects, usually stars, which have become so dense that within a certain radius their escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Thus, they absorb all matter and energy within that radius. Light and matter can enter, but nothing can ever escape.
Black holes are increasingly favored by liberal publications, such as the science page of the New York Times and glossy magazines, as well as science fiction writers.
Damn you, glossy magazine!
So black holes are another relativistic liberal plot. But if so, that how can they be cited as evidence that the doctrine of the immobility of the sun is false? So that means the doctrine of the immobility of the sun must be true — and the literal translation of the Bible is false. And that means all of Conservapedia must be bunk….
Ironically, few things have done more to undermine religion than this bizarre notion that every single word of the Bible is literally true — or, to be more accurate, that every single word of whatever particular translation somebody likes, and whatever particular books one accepts as part of the Bible, are literally true.
But still, this all begs the question, who actually wastes their time coming up with all of this Conservapedia nonsense?
Happy Anti-Flat-Earth Day!
Note: I am aware that Columbus didn’t disprove the “flat earth myth,” but then he “was not the first European explorer to reach the Americas” either. So it’s even more fitting that today is anti-flat-earth Day.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
When I first began to read this piece I believed it was intended as commentary on a spoof. I soon found out that it was far worse than I thought…this stuff is actually happening in the 21st century. I truly fear for the nation and future generations being exposed to such twaddle.
Sigh. I was raised a biblical literalist. These folks do not care if they are inconsistent. Consistency is the Devil’s sweetheart, and they are trained from infancy to *not compare one assertion with another, to never consider the implications of a claim, and to never, ever imagine what it is like to wear another’s shoes.
Some of the consequences of these mental habits:
1. They can claim mutually contradictory things in the same conversation.
2. Believe that references to evidence are merely rhetorical tricks.
3. Some uncommon lack of empathy to folks whoa re different and less fortunate than they (the more different they are, the less will fundamentalists understand them, and the more likely they are to ascribe differences to evil intent).
4. They are uncommonly bad at doing science (although they might do engineering or dentistry, the “what if” required by real science is anathema to them).
5. They are uninterested in science fiction on the whole, especially the better(and more challenging works).
6. They are appalling unaware of how they appear to others.
7. If finally confronted with overwhelming experiences that prove them wrong on an issue, they will probably double down on denial and withdraw from the world at large (especially the general population).
Excellent comment kermit.
I’d add that as the climate becomes more unpredictable and scary in the future (and reality with it) – the literalist world with its black and white view of everything will offer a reassuring place to folks that don’t want to see reality or escape from it (as reality gets tougher, due to climate change, with the march of time).
True, mariners and monarchs in Columbus’s time new the earth is spherical. However, they doubted his project for a very good reason — he believed the earth was about 2/3 its actual size. Everybody knew that a voyage west from Europe to Asia was impossible because you would starve long before you arrived. And that’s exactly what would have happened to Columbus, but he was a lucky fool. If the Americas hadn’t been in the way — entirely unexpectedly — he would have sailed off into oblivion.
Hostility to heliocentrism has been festering for decades and can be traced back to the formation of the modern creationist movement. The late Walter Lang, who founded the national Bible-Science Association and worked closely with other creationist groups personally relayed to me his strict adherence to Biblical geocentrism. The anti-creationist movement has been largely successful in showing the mockery of extremists in the biological sciences. And as a result, we are seeing traditional creationists branching out more and more into areas of science that include chemistry, physics, astronomy, and earth science.
For decades we have ignored these extremist groups at our own peril and are now seeing their ascendancy to the highest offices in the nation.
Pierre Stromberg
I think that this may be one of the reasons the founding fathers thought the seperation of church and state was a really good idea. Though they maybe should have also included a section about the seperation of church and rational thought.
You know, of course, that these same nitwits claim that the separation of church and state is a myth. This is your brain on David Barton – or what’s left (or right) of it.
After reading this polemic my hair hurts. Seriously.
As they checked with the spilt milk on the floor they became assured the Earth was flat. As they knew their place was there to defend and could go no further than the front porch they knew the Earth to be flat. That they allowed for exclusion they knew that others may to rearrange their marble flooring hence their defense that the Earth is flat.
Of course, when they found out that more things could be brought into the flat Earth they encouraged some to do so. Even strange animals could be brought to learn the truth of flat Earth.
Enjoy
“As conservative historian Wilcomb Washburn explains, if Columbus had not discovered the New World, the process of European discovery might have been very different. Rather than standing as a symbol of inexorable forces, Columbus is better seen as a representative of the spirit of inquiry, Christian religious zeal, and the notable achievements of Western Civilization.”
In case anyone has inquired into the true history, this statement is actually quite correct. Columbus and his brother basically created the industry of slavery, which ulitmately led to the creation of the US in 1776 and its ongoings through today. The brothers Columbus have this notable achievement as well as being responsible for the genocide of Haiti, over 8 million people.
Happy Columbus Day
Columbus did not discover (North) America, the natives were there first and I believe the African’s have the real accredited find of the continent long before Chris stepped on the shores. The Vikings were here in the 11th century and the Irish were said to be in Greenland before this! Check.
I had my cranial containment device on, but it didn’t make any difference… I laughed so hard at the nonsense in Conservapedia I ended up splitting a gut. Now where was that stomach vise I had laying around?
I think a temporal rift has opened from a parallel universe inhabited by the ignorant, the clinically psychotic and the terminally daft. Like a bad sci-fi plot, but unfortunately it’s true.
You should leak this, as truth, to the MSM. Maybe it would generate some balanced coverage
Though there has been recently some news on the relativity theory and the media wrote about Einstein beeing wrong. Well, to me this sounds a like M-Theory which combines relativity theory with quantuum physics. Thus implys that our universe is just one of many in a ocean of universes.
Particles break light-speed limit
Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html
This is a good movie on M-Theory discovery “The Elegant Universe”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
Reasonable doubt
If MINOS were to confirm OPERA’s find, the consequences would be enormous. “If you give up the speed of light, then the construction of special relativity falls down,” says Antonino Zichichi, a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. Zichichi speculates that the ‘superluminal’ neutrinos detected by OPERA could be slipping through extra dimensions in space, as predicted by theories such as string theory.
Ellis, however, remains sceptical. Many experiments have looked for particles travelling faster than light speed in the past and have come up empty-handed, he says. Most troubling for OPERA is a separate analysis of a pulse of neutrinos from a nearby supernova known as 1987a. If the speeds seen by OPERA were achievable by all neutrinos, then the pulse from the supernova would have shown up years earlier than the exploding star’s flash of light; instead, they arrived within hours of each other. “It’s difficult to reconcile with what OPERA is seeing,” Ellis says.
Ereditato says that he welcomes scepticism from outsiders, but adds that the researchers have been unable to find any other explanation for their remarkable result. “Whenever you are in these conditions, then you have to go to the community,” he says. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html
Herman Cain says it best, and repeatedly “I don’t have any facts to back this up but I believe….”
Funding for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies, through 2005:
Old Media Transparecy database funders for Manhattan Institute
Through 2005, this shows about 20 million in funding from the usual suspects, including the Scaife (Carthage, Sarah Scaife), Bradley, Koch (Claude R. Lambe, etc) foundations. These grants generally reflect only a percentage of the total operating budgets for these conservative think tanks, with the rest of the funding apparently coming from private and corporate donations, and from fundraising activities.
Articles like the one in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal don’t just spontaneously appear. There is a whole network of conservative foundations which hire people to crank out stuff like that. This network has been around for a long time, and is hugely influential.
The Manhattan Institute was founded by Bill Casey, the ex CIA chief. It’s also accepted at least $385,000 from ExxonMobil:
EXXONSECRETS Manhattan Institute
With funding like that, of course Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute will write commentary pieces like those which appeared in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
It’s his job.
Is there a connection to the “Berlin Manhattan Institut” ?
Climate Denial in Germany funded through:
CFACT (Commitee for a Constructive Tomorrow)
“CFACT wurde für seinen Kampf gegen Klimaschutz in den vergangenen Jahren u.a. von Exxon Mobil mit 587.000 US$, von der Sarah Scaife Foundation mit 175.000 US$, von der Carthage Foundation 1,105 Mio. US$ (beides Stiftungen der Öl-, Uran- und Aluminiumindustrie) „belohnt“ [8]. Und dies sind nur die offiziell bekannten Spenden, die nach amerikanischen Gesetz offengelegt werden müssen.” http://michaelsclimate.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/eike-ein-institut-stellt-sich-vor/
Notice CFACT = EIKE
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Europ%C3%A4isches_Institut_f%C3%BCr_Klima_und_Energie
Well, CFACT is funded by Scaife and ExxonMobil:
Media Matters Conservative Transparency – CFACT
Looks like something close to $1.8 million from Scaife, and $367,000 from ExxonMobil.
I researched this once, and I think that EIKE is actually a post office box.
CFACT is also the new home of Marc Morano, who lost his job as Inhofe’s communications director after it was discovered he was coordinating a network of global warming deniers out of Inhofe’s office.
Certainly, CFACT, CFACT Europe, and EIKE run each others’ articles, quote each other and so on, and use similar tactics. So, are they part of the same network? Yes, very likely they are.
The “Kenneth Green went Charlie Sheen” link is broken (first or second paragraph).
Fixed now, thx.
1st, 2nd and 4th links don’t work. They just reload this page.
Sorry, a bug that we are working on…. Fixed for now.
btw. it would be nice to bring back the module, which displayed recent user comments.
Sadly not possible.
Does Conservapedia include enslavement and murder of Native Americans among the notable achievments of Western Civilization and Christianity as embodied by Colombus? Please remember the forgotten holocaust and have a happy Colombus Day friends.
Peace
I think that conservapedia is a fun read, partially cause i know its all false. I love reading it for my jokes. What’s even better is reading the comments on the talk page. THey provide hilarious attempts at the people who were denied “the glorious nobel peace award” should’ve denied it, without looking at the data and actual scientific report. They even talked about the failed mikey experiment that lead to the theory of relativity and they ask, “why wasn’t that experiment repeated?” cause that was a failed experiment and science learned from the failure of that experiment to produce the theory of relativty, but because it was a failure, it is not repeatable…. how can you repeat a failed experiment? Also half of their counter examples are not backedup by either : real sources or actual data (they did call wikipeidia a liberal website fyi, though its hardly liberal).
Science can advance with one observation, and it’s not necessary to wait until it is repeated before discussing and learning from it. How quickly (if ever) was the Michelson-Morley experiment repeated?–Andy Schlafly 23:08, 27 September 2011 (EDT)
Woops i quoted the wrong example experiment, here’s the one i meant. and here’s the conservapeidia’s take on the experiment (http://conservapedia.com/Michelson-Morley_experiment)
I was hoping you would digress more, regarding rhetoric. Your earlier series on Lincoln’s rhetorical skill expanded the canon beyond the extremely reductive Shakespeare and Bible, maybe to include other classics.
Please indulge my request to consider Plato and Plutarch and Herodotus. Plato’s image of the cave comes to mind when we consider the reaction of the enlightenee to the enlightenor. Not grateful, and mostly annoyed at having to deal with something out of their comfort zone. The shadow play on the cave wall that the shackled souls behold in contentment, until some smart-ass turns their dark-adapted eyes into the full torrent of technical information regarding anthropogenic drivers of climate change. Like they are goodbers or something. Gradually acclimating the cave-dwellers to the light is prudent policy. Strident name-calling, as well as unwelcome information sort of limits the number of people who get your message.
kermit has it nailed.
These people are so insane that it isn’t even worth arguing with them. The most one should do is make sure that any innocent onlookers will realize just how insane they are… and that requires different tactics than an authentic argument…
I read your blog daily and I regard this as one of your weaker posts. And the exploding head man is getting tiresome. I would like to point out that as a matter of messaging-correct messaging being a topic you frequently expound on- it is unhelpful in the extreme when trying to convince others of the rightness of your point of view to separate people into two tribes: the evil conservatives and the good progressives. This sort of cheap generalization only serves to alienate the potentially persuadable.
[JR: I reject your mischaracterization of this post. I clearly stated up front "Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are anti-science and why the extremists among them set up the Conservapedia."
And so I didn't create two tribes.
It is you who made a cheap generalization.
Anyway, sorry you didn't like it. Not everyone likes every post. This proved to be a popular post.
And mockery is rather the least harsh of the messaging techniques one can use, but it is valuable and effective with this persuadable.]
Sure this sort of mockery is easy but I have seen enough arrogance from scientists in my day (and I’m a scientist myself) to be truly sick of it. And it is easy to see that it won’t help you get people to acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change.
Love this post…first time round I too was sure it was an Onion spoof. Rereading it this time, I still think that an Onion writer wrote it on Conservapedia and that at any time now, they’re going to confess.
The Onion was wrong about fundies wanting to repeal the 2nd law of thermodynamics though. They want to keep it because they say evolution violates the 2nd law; therefore since the 2nd law is inviolate, then evolution must be false.
Incidentally, Max comes across as a concern troll, and I suspect he’s a scientist if you use the same inclusive criteria seen in the Oregon petition and their 30,000 “scientists”.