Just How Stupid Is Americia's Right Wing?

Being to busy to see straight, I will just link to Vanity Press, where you can be introduced to Stupidpedia, the rights attempt at fact gathering.

Via CC, here's the Conservapedia, which is supposed to be Wikipedia for the ideologically fragile. Not surprisingly, it's actually just for the dumb. PZ Myers has already noted its mistakes on Darwin (big surprise there), but I thought I'd list a few more:


They think that in The Divine Comedy, Dante's guide through Hell was Aristotle. Actually, it was Virgil.

They think that the Christian undertones in Tolkien are "altogether unintentional." Actually, we know from many of Tolkien's letters that they were deliberate.

They think that Chaucer's Middle English is "so different from modern English that [his writings] are usually read in modern English translation." Actually, every college student who's studied even a little Chaucer reads him in Middle English.

They think that Chaucer's poem The Parliament of Fowles is called "The Assembly of Fowles."

They think that Beowulf is an epic (it isn't), and that it is "the oldest surviving literature in the English Language." It almost certainly isn't.

And that's not even mentioning the spelling, grammatical, and stylistic mistakes. This project is a really bad idea. It's just another example of epistemological relativism, of the kind that's too common on the modern right to begin with.

Both Ed Brayton and PZ Myers have been having fun with the rights latest public display of gross stupidity.