The “conservative” spokesperson here demonstrates perfectly Chris’ thesis that the Foxis of Evil provides an “alternative facts” echo chamber, even quoting Rick Santorum as an authority. Amazing, revealing, pathetic, and sad.
We all know that many American conservatives have issues with Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution. But Albert Einstein, and the theory of relativity?
If you’re surprised, allow me to introduceConservapedia, the right-wing answer toWikipedia and ground zero for all that is scientifically and factually inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet.
Claiming over 285 million page views since its 2006 inception, Conservapedia is the creation of Andrew Schlafly, a lawyer, engineer, homeschooler, and one of six children of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist and anti-abortion rights activist who successfully battled the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. In his mother’s heyday, conservative activists were establishing vast mailing lists and newsletters, and rallying the troops. Her son learned that they also had to marshal “truth” to their side, now achieved not through the mail but the Web.
So when Schafly realized that Wikipedia was using BCE (“Before Common Era”) rather than BC (“Before Christ”) to date historical events, he’d had enough. He decided to create his own contrary fact repository, declaring, “It’s impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral.” Conservapedia definitely isn’t neutral about science. Its 37,000 plus pages of content include items attacking evolution and global warming, wrongly claiming (contrary to psychological consensus) that homosexuality is a choice and tied to mental disorders, and incorrectly asserting (contrary to medical consensus) that abortion causes breast cancer.
The whopper, though, has to be Conservapedia‘s nearly 6,000 word, equation-filled entry on the theory of relativity. It’s accompanied by a long webpage of “counterexamples” to Einstein’s great scientific edifice, which merges insights like E=mc2 (part of the special theory of relativity) with his later account of gravitation (the general theory of relativity).
“Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world,” declaresConservapedia. “To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for Relativity.” The site goes on to catalogue the “political aspects of relativity,” charging that some liberals have “extrapolated the theory” to favor their agendas. That includes President Barack Obama, who (it is claimed) helped published an article applying relativity in the legal sphere while attending Harvard Law School in the late 1980s.
“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,” Conservapedia continues. But even that’s not the site’s most staggering claim. In its list of “counterexamples” to relativity, Conservapedia provides 36 alleged cases, including: “The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46–54, Matthew 15:28, and Matthew 27:51.”
More at that link.
Yeah, that explains a lot.
So since Conservapedia is rubbish, Mooney has tried to out-rubbish it.
What a load of…
Read instead the NYT’s review of The Righteous Mind. Much more interesting stuff.
You might sound less the repetitive, vacuous jackass if you could actually substantiate how anything Mooney has offered herein is “rubbish”.
Won’t hold my breath.
That conservative rep was incoherent, and yet she was able to slip the East Anglia canard in. Good grief, couldn’t Chris have corrected the record on Climategate? It’s all good to talk about psychology and liberals, but the random listener would have remembered that East Anglia factoid…..
I admire Chris Mooney immensely, but we can’t let these misstatements go unchallenged.
You have to love that her example of fraudulent science is “East Anglia University!”. Nevermind the 9 investigations that found those scientists guilty of no scientific wrongdoing – fraud I tell you! I don’t think S.E. could have proven Mooney’s point any more perfectly.
The lady in the interview, Ms. Cupp offers the same litany of misinformation, lies, nonsense and subterfuge the GOP has been selling us for years, not only on climate change, but on gay people, the economy- energy—
Truth is Mr. Mooney is right. The Republican party of 2012 has long slid past the line of authoritarianism into a dangerous 21st century kind of neo- fascism.
Having read a bit of her writing and seen her in quite a few interviews, it’s long been clear to me that Sarah Elizabeth Cupp shares the somewhat tenuous connection many evangelicals have to truth and reality.
And, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, S.E Cupp is an atheist in the same manner that your average teenager is invincible and immortal – life just hasn’t dealt her hard lessons yet.
The 1st major crisis that drops her on her ass will find her on her knees to Jesus, begging for forgiveness and praying for salvation.
Deeply, deeply disturbing…
Hope the book includes a free microscope.
I’d take issue with one thing Mooney said in the interview that I don’t think he says in the book. It isn’t necessarily true that science and liberals have more in common, and it certainly wasn’t true 40 or 50 years ago.
My recollection of universities in the 60s was that the hard science areas were either split politically in much the same way as the population at large or more likely, they were fairly strongly conservative. Physicists, chemists and engineers as well as geologists and others who were looking to research and employment related to nuclear – both weapons and power generation – and to resource exploration or to “modern” approaches to food, pesticides and other chemicals were much more likely to express conservative notions. I very much doubt that Gilbert Plass doing his research into heat seeking missiles, and thereby confirming CO2’s radiative properties, was any kind of wild-eyed leftie liberal. Nor were any of the other physicists and engineers engaged in such military projects in the 50s and 60s.
The big issue, which I think comes out more in Mooney’s other work, is the huge shift in the Republican Party in the USA and to a more limited extent conservative parties in other English speaking countries.
It’s not that scientists are more ‘attracted’ to the liberal view of the world, it’s that the radical right has made conservative political parties less and less welcoming to scientists. Funnily enough, that’s made scientists less likely to view them favourably.
The republicans have rejected scientists, not the other way around.
I think that’s really what Mooney is saying. Scientists have found that they are not comfortable with the snake handlers now running the GOP.
The interview was a great illustration of the conversation going on in the media today between science and much of the conservative world.
The conversation going on right now seems to be analogous to the conversation about whether 2+2 is four in the book 1984, no matter who says it is. Later he’s told it’s 2 +2 = 5
The short clip of Michelle “Stepford” Bachmann reminds me why she’s so frightening – she always looks and sounds exactly the same and I can never tell if she’s lying.
If I didn’t know that (most of) what she says or believes is hogwash, I would be convinced she’s telling the truth about everything.