For those who haven’t heard, American conservatives have decided to put together their own version of Wikipedia, Conservapedia, to counter its leftwing bias. Here’s a list of the most frequently viewed pages and their number of hits:
1. Homosexuality [2,011,173]
2. Main Page [1,974,521]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis [518,847]
4. Homosexuality and Parasites [479,807]
5. Gay Bowel Syndrome [445,848]
6. Homosexuality and Promiscuity [423,159]
7. Homosexual Couples and Domestic Violence [374,753]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea [332,659]
9. Homosexuality and Anal Cancer [295,222]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health [294,872]
I kid you not, really, go to the site. I make it a policy not to link to such sites, but you will find this list under site “statistics” on the left of the screen. This seems like an appropriate time to quote a passage from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding on association:
IT is evident that there is a principle of connexion between the different thoughts or ideas of the mind, and that, in their appearance to the memory or imagination, they introduce each other with a certain degree of method and regularity. In our more serious thinking or discourse this is so observable that any particular thought, which breaks in upon the regular tract or chain of ideas, is immediately remarked and rejected. And even in our wildest and most wandering reveries, nay in our very dreams, we shall find, if we reflect, that the imagination ran not altogether at adventures, but that there was still a connexion upheld among the different ideas, which succeeded each other. Were the loosest and freest conversation to be transcribed, there would immediately be observed something which connected it in all its transitions. Or where this is wanting, the person who broke the thread of discourse might still inform you, that there had secretly revolved in his mind a succession of thought, which had gradually led him from the subject of conversation.
The key point for Hume (and Freud), of course, is that if one idea occurs to you in relation to another idea, it was your mind that drew that connection. I wonder if there’s any particular reason these conservatives are thinking of homosexuality so much, and in particular of these sex acts? On the one hand, there is the sad obsession with particular sex acts. On the other hand, there is the hair-raising association of these sexual orientations immediately with disease, insects, parasites, etc. Such metaphorics to describe another group turned out real well in Rwanda and Germany.
November 30, 2007 at 7:30 am
let the discursive warfare begin. pack your semiotic rifles down tight!
this whole fiasco reminds me zizek’s basic critique of chomsky and ideology: merely distributing the facts is not enough. (i) they know what they do (/i) but they are doing it. Or in terms of Foucault’s intro to anti-oedipus, asking why people desire their own fascism? This brings up the problem not of facts, but of libidinal investments and the arrangement of fantasmatic coordinates that constitutes, not just the tendency of the christian right to shore up their own discursive weaponry, but the very pliability of discourse, the idiocy of the master signifier and its very efficacy. This also lead me to wonder, in terms of long-term plans of leftist radicals, what of the so-called upsurge of vicious fundamentalism, all muslim, christian, israeli nationalism etc. alike, not to mention the belief of supposed western secular cynicism? Another thought, Benjamin’s monad vs. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of enlightenment…i.e. the irrational, mytholigizing, superstitious underside that accompanies modernity and ‘reason’? In other words, this conflation of the radically ‘modern’ and the savagely archaic. lastly, dr. s, what might be your take on the beef with zizek and laclau and mouffe’s hegemony of empty universals in regards to all of this?
November 30, 2007 at 11:28 am
i didn’t know wikipedia had a liberal slant. if that is true, it seems significant to me. it means that, unless we can prove that liberals edit wikipedia more frequently than conservatives, people have a liberal slant. the thought is very comforting to me on this american morning.
(no need to say that conservatives see liberal bias everywhere. i’d like to keep my comforting thought about me for a little while longer!).
November 30, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Have you checked out GodTube?
November 30, 2007 at 2:21 pm
While I believe the basic point of this post is sound, it should be known that there is some debate about the validity of those statistics. If you google into it further (maybe there’s even a wikipedia page about it??) the statistics for that page going back a few months cast doubt on whether those hits were really generated by human beings. No, what we have here is most likely a cruel internet joke played by some godless liberal hackers.
November 30, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Why do you assume conservatives are the ones driving those numbers up rather than, say, Lacano-Deleuzean philosophers with a point to make about the “mind[s] that drew the connection?”
The idea is certainly in the mind of the authors of the conservopedia, but the page hits belong to the Internet.
November 30, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Wow, those godless liberal hackers must have a lot of time on their hands! Nonetheless, all good points. I’d be interested to know why the site administrators keep the page up if they’re being hacked in this way.
November 30, 2007 at 3:35 pm
ama, i believe your picture of the glass-half-full-half-empty is the worst kind of a liberal slant as it suggests that things could be seen from at least two different perspectives – good god, i feel dizzy all of a sudden…
PS. “anal cancer”?
November 30, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Well this strikes me as a variation of the Rove defense. When the Iraq war begins to sour, blame democrats for rushing the vote. When exceedingly high numbers of hits occur on a particular website in relation to a specific topic, suggest that leftists everywhere have united to drive up the counter so as to smear those poor conservatives. The organizational powers of these godless liberals is just breathtaking. Too bad they devote their energies to driving up webcounters rather than transforming society. Sigh.
November 30, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I’d never heard of this thing. Hopefully you won’t mind that I appropriated the spirit of your observations without giving due credit in a post I wrote on Open Source Theology, which is a forum for the “emerging post-evangelical” wing of Christianity. After citing a bit of Nazi propaganda about the Jewish parasites I wrap up thusly: I get a sense that the conservatives continue to hold the evangelical high ground, not just exegetically but psychologically and politically. The emerging voice is clever but subtle and soft-spoken, looking for small gains and limited freedoms, not wanting to anger the conservative Big Daddy who still dominates the conversation. But if the emerging voice is to be a prophetic one, doesn’t it need to call loud and repeated attention to the incipient fascism that besets the church and that overflows into the broader culture? I’ll give you an update if any interesting discussion ensues.
November 30, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Just to be clear, I’m not in any way defending Conservapedia. It’s clearly a travesty. But if the hits are fraudulent in some way, it’s counter productive to harp on Conservapedians character when their understanding is a more relevant and just as vulnerable target.
On the other hand, I agree it’s mystifying that the page hasn’t been fixed. My best guess is that the people behind the site actually lack the technical competency! Also, I should also say that from what I know of the demographics of people able to pull of such a stunt, the sad truth is they are probably libertarians, not leftists.
November 30, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Well if it is a stunt, that’s a relief. However, having spent some time on popular conservative discussion boards discussing homosexuality, it fits the picture (hence my naive lack of doubt when coming across this). You might look at this discussion thread for an example of what I’m talking about:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1919483/posts
This sort of diary and the comments in this thread are not at all uncommon for this particular blog. I do not believe these are trolls seeking to give a negative spin to Free Republic… Especially given how well policed that blog is (hair-trigger bannings).
If it was liberals or libertarians who somehow managed to coordinate 2,000,000 page hits, I am thoroughly depressed at what such folks choose to coordinate their activity around!
November 30, 2007 at 7:13 pm
And lest it be suggested that this blog is some marginal, fringe blog, it’s worthwhile to lead this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Republic
Not only has it played a significant role in American politics, but no less than former White House Press Secretary was a former commentator there.
May 21, 2008 at 3:26 pm
[...] The key point for Hume (and Freud), of course, is that if one idea occurs to you in relation to another idea, it was your mind that drew that connection. I wonder if there’s any particular reason these conservatives are thinking of homosexuality so much, and in particular of these sex acts? On the one hand, there is the sad obsession with particular sex acts. On the other hand, there is the hair-raising association of these sexual orientations immediately with disease, insects, parasites, etc. Such metaphorics to describe another group turned out real well in Rwanda and Germany. cópia integral de um post publicado no larval subjects [...]