Commentary

Guerilla skepticism on Wikipedia: how should Christians and conservatives respond?

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The Messianic Drew urges us to watch the first 27 minutes of this lecture featuring skeptic and anti-paranormalist Susan Gerbic. He wants us to see how skeptics are monitoring and policing wikipedia entries to give it a skeptical bias.

Here is Gerbic’s thesis:

We use Wikipedia to shape the public’s view of paranormal topics. We already know that shouting and belittling believers is not the way to go about changing minds. Guerilla skepticism is the act of inserting well-documented well-cited information into Wikipedia. We still follow all of Wikipedia’s guidelines. We are also trying to improve the history of the scientific skeptical movement and document it. It allows editors to edit from home without being confrontational with people.

The Messianic Drew wrote about the lecture on his blog.

Excerpt:

Gerbic is absolutely right. People generally trust Wikipedia, and do not view it with the same degree of scrutiny with which someone would view an atheist website.

If you are a rising Christian apologist, but don’t have the time, money, or experience to publish in professional journals or debate atheists on stage, that’s fine. The Internet is a great place to conduct apologetics. Instead of wasting your time arguing on message boards or social media (like Facebook), why not learn to edit Wikipedia? It costs nothing but time, and it reaches an audience far more open-minded than anyone you will debate online. Remember that people trust Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, something not lost on Gerbic.

Gerbic’s tactics have worked due to organization. Wikipedia has mobs of tens of thousands of editors. Gerbic’s group is a small, but highly focused army of 90 editors, and it has changed the face of Wikipedia’s paranormal pages, as well as its pages on famous skeptics, creationism, and evolution. As far as I know, there is not one single Christian apologetics organization that focuses on Wikipedia. Not one. Zilch. Zip. Zero. This needs to be fixed.

He has a whole bunch of ideas on how Christians can get on this, and he has examples of what the skeptics have been doing (before and after edits) on specific pages.

Now Drew was telling me about this video and his idea last night, and I had two objections. First, I told him that Wikipedia is a cesspool of secularism and leftism that is policed by thuggish fascists. I got this impression by reading about Wikipedia’s suppression about intelligent design on the Evolution News blog. Second, I told him that no one respects Wikipedia as a source. I never use Wikipedia as a source for anything, I prefer to link to the peer-reviewed journal articles or to reputable news sources.

Drew came back with two responses that have swayed me back from opposition to indifference. First, he said that like it or not, people do use Wikipedia to get basic information about things they are interested in. Google search even displays information from Wikipedia entries in the searches. Second, he pointed out specific edits that he had made to specific pages that were not deleted, even after a few days. And these were impressive edits, linking to sources critical of skeptics and skeptical ideas.

We were discussing this on Facebook, and many people started off by objecting to Drew’s plan to have Christians (and conservatives could also do this) systematically monitor and edit Wikipedia pages. A band of Wikipologists, if you will. I know that J. Warner Wallace tweeted his post, and Mike Licona both posted it on their Facebook pages. So I wanted to ask my readers: do you think that Christians should imitate these guerilla tactics on Wikipedia? Why or why not?

If you want to get involved with this, message me on Facebook, by the way.

News

FBI declines to prosecute IRS for targeting Tea Party groups ahead of 2012 election

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Investors Business Daily reports.

Excerpt:

The FBI says it won’t prosecute anyone at the IRS for its admitted targeting of the president’s political foes. This just as the agency claims the law is no longer its main mission. So it’s a political goon squad now.

According to a leak to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation “didn’t find the kind of political bias or ‘enemy hunting’ that would amount to a violation of criminal law.” And so, nobody was likely to be prosecuted for the most blatant politicization of a federal agency within memory.

All the Bureau found was a “mismanaged” agency that enforced rules “it didn’t understand.” In other words, nothing to see here, move along.

That’s strange stuff for an agency whose most implicated regulator, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination in congressional testimony last year. That she came to congressional attention was only because of her calculated announcement that the IRS had in fact targeted Tea Party groups for special scrutiny — that’s right, admitted to breaking the law — in a preemptive attempt to paint her abuse of power as a customer service problem.

Her minions lied that it was only the work of low-level bureaucratic bumblers in Cincinnati. And after that sleazy string of favors that coincidentally benefited her president, she was permitted to retire on a full pension.

The reality is, the acts reeked of political targeting, the most illegal of acts, a corrupt use of government power, and a worthy target of checks and balances provided by the FBI in the name of law and order.

But for some reason, the FBI has neither interviewed the Tea Party activists targeted for intrusive scrutiny, nor has it noticed anything amiss in light of the White House’s rabid attacks on Tea Party activists. It hasn’t noticed the Tea Party’s demonstrable political strength in its large gatherings during the most intense period of its political targeting, nor noted the president’s record of “joking” about investigating political opponents.

And it hasn’t picked up the clue from the Center for Responsive Politics showing that IRS employees donated to Obama’s campaign by more than 2 to 1 over Tea Party-tied Republicans — let alone that the prosecutor chosen by the president to look into this case is a fat-cat donor to Obama.

I was lying in bed at 2:30 AM reading Twitter tweets when I came across this one and I just lay there thinking about this story before getting up to blog about it. And I thought to myself… I used to respect the FBI. I used to believe that they were different from the crooks at the State Department or Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency. I used to believe that they were the good guys. And now I see that they are just as corrupt as any secret police would be in any fascist state.

 

This is not the first time that the FBI has disappointed me, either:

Maybe the big pay increases and benefits that Obama gave all his supporters in the public sector unions were enough to buy off every last bit of honor and decency that used to be in the FBI.

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News

Transcripts show that top U.S. military officials briefed Obama on Benghazi terrorist attack

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Investors Business Daily reports.

Excerpt:

Newly declassified transcripts show top defense officials who briefed Obama on the day of the Benghazi attack described it as a terrorist attack and told the president so, yet he pushed a false narrative about a video.

Just as the new book by former Defense Secretary Bob Gates confirmed what many believed, that President Obama was a politically motivated commander-in-chief who had no faith in an Afghan surge he put 30,000 Americans in harm’s way to execute, transcripts of congressional testimony by military leaders confirm that President Obama knew Benghazi was a terrorist attack before he went to bed to rest for a Las Vegas fundraising trip.

Fox News reporter James Rosen examined 450 pages of declassified testimony given by senior Pentagon officials in closed-door hearings held last year by Congress. In those hearings, Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time headed Africom, the Defense Department combat command with jurisdiction over Libya, testified that he learned about the assault on the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its start, at 9:42 p.m. Libya time, from the Africom Command Center.

Ham said he immediately contacted Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey to say he was coming down the hall at the Pentagon to meet with him.

“I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta,” Ham testified, adding “they had the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House.”

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, an Iraq war veteran and Army reserve officer, asked 29-year Army veteran Ham what he told Panetta and Dempsey. “As a military person, I am concerned that someone in the military would be advising that this was a demonstration. I would hope that our military leadership would be advising that this was a terrorist attack,” Wenstrup said.

Ham responded that “there was some preliminary discussion about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at the command, I personally and I think the command very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack” and that was the “nature of the conversation” Ham had with Panetta and Dempsey moments before their 30-minute meeting with President Obama.

This confirms Panetta’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was he who told the president “there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi.”

“Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?” asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

“There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack,” Panetta replied.

Despite a briefing by Dempsey and Panetta that it was a terrorist attack, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would trumpet the false narrative that four Americans were murdered due to an inflammatory video — something Obama would repeat six times before the U.N. General Assembly and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice would say on five Sunday talk shows five days after the terrorist attack.

It is a disgrace that the only person ever jailed for the Benghazi attack was the maker of that irrelevant video. The terrorists got away with it.

The terrorists got away with it, because the Obama administration didn’t bother to conduct an investigation, or hold anyone accountable. And now we know why – because the person who should have been fired was Barack Obama. He should have been fired in the 2012 election. This whole Benghazi cover-up was just another case of “if you like your doctor, you can keep him” and “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it”. The wonder was that the American people were stupid enough to believe that someone with no experience of any kind at running anything could do a good job as President.

And don’t count on the mainstream media to investigate these stories. They are Democrats. This was their Watergate, and they covered it up.

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