Conservatives Ape Left -- Again

[Gus Van Horn blog]

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Whether they're taking over the welfare state, censoring a major scientific debate, using government "encouragement" to reduce carbon emissions, or boarding the racial quota express, conservatives are looking more and more like their fellow altruists, the leftists, all the time. Today, we can chalk up another example: Conservapedia.

Recall that there is nothing conservatives like more than to complain about the "Mainstream Media" -- not that I am getting ready to deny the well-known biases of news media dominated by left-wing reporters and commentators.

But if conservatives are going to complain about "liberal bias" with the implication that they are champions of objectivity, projects like the new Conservapedia speak volumes about their motives. An article from the Houston Chronicle lists several excerpts from Wikipedia and Conservapedia head to head, including the following from their respective entries on dinosaurs.

• Wikipedia: Dinosaurs were vertebrate animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for over 160-million years, first appearing approximately 230-million years ago.
  
• Conservapedia: Of those Christians who reject evolution, the Young Earth Creationists believe, based primarily on Biblical sources, but also drawing on archaeological and fossil evidence, that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day of the Creation Week approximately 6,000 years ago; that they lived in the Garden of Eden in harmony with other animals, eating only plants; that pairs of various dinosaur baramins were taken onto Noah's Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning; that fossilized dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood; and that some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today.
  

No missing evidence or ideologically-motivated distortion there! Riiiiight.

-- CAV

Updates

3-28-07: Corrected a typo.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002414.html

[Korthor]

For a wickedly humorous critique of Conservapedia, look here...

http://www.avclub.com/content/hater?page=3

If you like a good skewering of both American pop culture and America's obssession with pop culture, I'd recommend reading more The Hater. Amelie Gilette has a hilariously accurate eye for the ridiculous elevated to the level of the sublime.