Conservapedia Now Slightly Less Fun
Readers of talk.origins may remember Ray Martinez, a particularly dense and combative young-earth creationist. I’d been having fun this past week or so reading his antics at Conservapedia.
Like the time when Ray wrote about theistic evolution that:
Logically, real Christians accept the Biblical version of origins and not the version which all atheists rabidly support.
Another user changed “rabidly” to “strongly”. Ray took offense at this and changed it back to “rabidly” with the comment:
restored admitted atheist corruption of original text; only conservatives are allowed to make edits of this nature
Alas, it was not to last. Conservapedia apparently didn’t recognize Ray’s genius and make him properly welcome, so he decided to take leave. From his resignation letter:
Apparently, I have lost my bid to have non-conservatives to be declared ineligible to edit controversial pages. This means that Conservapedia is not faithful to its own vision of relaying facts which justify the conservative viewpoint. It makes no sense to let non-conservatives edit the type of pages at issue since there is no chance the conservative point of view will get communicated. Administration has no objective criteria in place to fulfill the reason for being of its stated goals as long as non-conservatives are allowed to edit said pages. […] I do not respect Administration or their “intellect” and do not want my name associated with this type of convoluted reasoning
[…]I am going to start a Wiki where BOTH sides write for each controversial topic.
So I guess Ray will no longer be a source of fun on Conservapedia. In the meantime, maybe he’ll continue contributing to Creationwiki. He should blend right in.
I’ve learned never to doubt Ray’s ability to go over the top, but I’m still a bit stunned that there was a serious contributer to Conservapedia whose writing looked too much like straight propaganda. If you don’t meet Conservapedia’s minimum standards for neutrality, that’s pretty far out there.
I guess it was a year or two ago when I turned on the radio and heard a few minutes of a Fresh Air interview with some conservative political pundit and said to myself, “You know, that man sounds fairly reasonable. If only he were running the show on the conservative side, things would be a lot less crazy.” A few minutes passed and I finally figured out who it was: Pat Buchanan. When conservative politics has gone so far that Pat Buchanan can talk for 10 minutes without sounding like a complete head case by comparison, you know that something is terribly wrong. I guess in the end, it’s all about where you put your definition of normal.