Thursday, June 21, 2007

Facts All Come With Points Of View

Facts won't do what I want them to!

PZ Myers makes better sport of the subject of the LA Times article on Conservapedia than I can, but I do want to quote just one section. An article on Hillary Clinton unsurprisingly asserts (without supporting evidence) that she may suffer from a mental disorder:

Schlafly calls the armchair psychology "borderline in acceptability" for his site, but he defends the Clinton article on balance as "an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective."

The whole point of his encyclopedia, he said, is to provide a different angle on the facts — ones that a student researcher wouldn't necessarily find on Wikipedia, or in the school library.

[Emphasis Mine]

I didn't quote this bit for the Clintion-bashing. You'd be surprised if they didn't just call it the "I Hate Clintion"-wiki.

No, the hilarious part to me is that he clearly doesn't understand what "bias-free" means. A "conservative perspective" is by definition a "bias" (a "fixed attitude" so to speak). Secondly, isn't the intention to "provide a different angle on the facts" the sort of relativism that conservatives despise. The whole thing exemplifies the fundamentalist panic response of postmodernity. Or, to quote Conservapedia:
Truth is a "social construct" rather than empirically provable