"Conserva"--Hawai`ian for "correct"

Having had parody on my mind earlier in the evening, I thought I should finally check out the new parody of Wikipedia, the Conservapedia. Created in order to combat the liberal bias of the web-based encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the Conservapedia provides a web-based encyclopedia that anyone can edit with a conservative bias, although to be fair, The Conservapedia Commandments do not require an editor to write from a conservative bias.

In case you do not believe them when they say there is a liberal bias in the Wikipedia, the Conservapedia provides a handy growing list of Examples of bias in Wikipedia. Such things as how "Wikipedia features an entry on 'anti-racist mathematics.'" The Conservapedia's decision that neither this term nor ethnomathematics should have definitions is indeed correct.

Two glaring examples of the liberal bias concern John Seigenthaler's wiki bio, and how it slandered the conservative journalist by saying that he briefly worked as an administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (They go so far as to accuse him of riding with the Freedom Riders and being knocked unconsious by a mob with the police refusing to help.) and then later worked on his presidential campaign and was a pallbearer at his funeral. The Wikipedia also alleges that Seigenthaler worked to defeat corruption in the Teamsters union. All these problems will be corrected when the Conservapedia gets around to writing its article about John Seigenthaler.

In an effort to show the big tent of conservatism, many different definitions of the word conservative can be applied to their articles. For example, in Wikipedia, the gratuitous article on energy conservation scrolls on screen after screen with pictures and links to more information. Conservapedia definitely lives up to the "avoiding excess" definition here by not having an article on energy conservation at all, saving the amount of electricity required to store and display Wikipedia's planet-destroying article.

While I am in favor of the "uniquely American doctrine" of free speech as much as the next man, I do feel that if we do not find the liberal activitists who created this parody encyclopedia to spread the notion that conservatives are closed-minded and shut them down, the terrorists win.

(Sp)amicus curiae

Carol Burnett and her production company Whacko, Inc., filed suit in the Central District of California against Fox over an episode of Family Guy for copyright infringement. In last April's Family Guy episode "Peterotica," it was alleged that the reason that Pornoslavia, "the best dirty bookstore in town," was so because Carol Burnett was the part-time janitor, and then Burnett's copyrighted character the Charwoman was shown mopping the floor. I suppose one could simply say that parody of a copyrighted item is protected under the "fair use" provision of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 and conclude that this suit will be dismissed in short order. However, this suit draws attention to a glaring flaw in Family Guy--they don't really parody anything. They take a copyrighted cartoon janitor from four decades ago, and they depict her doing janitorial work. Truly cutting edge satire. This technique of copying something directly from another work and juxtiposing it next to Peter Griffin and his family has been used for several years, and from the few episodes that I have seen, it fails to be funny virtually every time. Family Guy routinely dives headlong into the Uncanny Valley, animating scenes that are too close to their antecedents to generate any humor. If you want to make a joke about a scene from Star Wars you have to actually modify it so that it will in fact be different from the scene in Star Wars. The time has finally come for Family Guy to be punished for failing to be funny.

In a manner similar that of the Parents Television Council and their FCC complaints, I encourage you to please email a copy this post the United States District Court, Central District of California.

UPDATE: Wiki-accords

It seems that since my previous post, the Wikipedia article on the Dayton Accords has overtaken the article on the Khitomer Accords in length.