Comments on: Conservapedia: Quote Mining or Super-Weaners?

By: Dave Zirkle

Dave Zirkle — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 01:18:57 +0000

Nice writing there Lepht. I see your use of capital letters is limited. (hint: it’s the shift key) I also note that yes is not something you use very often. I’m thinking it must be some of that high quality home school education.

By: C. L. Hanson

C. L. Hanson — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:54:41 +0000

That’s funny that they would defend the practice of quote mining instead of claiming they don’t do it — it almost shows a perverse kind of honesty. Except for the fact that they willfully ignore the distinction between using someone’s own quote against the person quoted vs. taking a sentence out of context in order to change its meaning.

Yes, when a politician says “I never claimed the invasion of Iraq was about finding weapons of mass destruction” to go look at old articles to find the quote that shows he’s lying. Quote-mining is a bit of a different animal though. It’s more like quoting the first sentence only from an article that begins “Most reputable scientists today believe that X is true. Yet in this paper we present new evidence that X is in fact false.”

By: Timothy

Timothy — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:54:29 +0000

Interesting… A fundie troll (you know, the ones who want essentially a theocracy) taking a libertarian (aka mildly anarchist) political stance. Wow, how does one resolve the differences between those two ends of the spectrum? That makes my brain hurt!

By: Lepht

Lepht — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:48:23 +0000

The entire legal and political fields use quotes by others against them.

yeah, that’s right, lump yourselves in with lawyers and politicians, those bastions of trustworthiness and honesty.

i think atheist criticism just became superfluous.