User talk:JZambrano

I'm back after a multi-year recess. I saw the pages here had been deleted in May - I have no idea why - and made the Jzy account because I thought this account was banned, to ask what was going on with that and the numerous account deletions in recent months. Ironically I came back expecting to start posting only to find Conservapedia had deleted my page, re-igniting my previous suspicion of the site and its administrators. I've been editing variously at CreationWiki, Citizendium, and SourceWatch over the last several years. A lot of my recent editing has been at CreationWiki.

I'd like to have a more favorable view of Conservapedia since I'm a pro-life, Creationist, very socially-conservative Christian, but thus far have seen a disturbing level of administrative heavy-handedness from 3 separate admins. I also dislike the unwillingness to mention valid criticisms of Obama like the Born Alive controversy, and suspect a number of the admins here are secretly liberals who support Obama. At any rate, I'm just here to use the debate pages and provide some opinions defending Christianity and Creationism since CreationWiki is unfortunately down right now (hopefully the site's back up soon). --Jzyehoshua 19:38, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

When did CreationWiki go down?

When did CreationWiki go down? And why? Conservative 20:09, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

Just today. I'm not sure why it's down. I'd been talking to Ashcraft lately about a possible fix to the code so footnotes don't change the line height (I asked about it on MediaWiki here). I'm hoping it's nothing more serious than a coding fix or maybe some temporary site outage. --Jzyehoshua 20:20, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

CreationWiki liveesss!!! :) --Jzyehoshua 21:46, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

Line height

I notice Conservapedia has the same issue Creationwiki does, line-height alteration for lines with footnotes. I found a fix for this using a line height template, but to make it work here it needs to have other templates installed also, and apparently putting a lot of the }} brackets after each other isn't allowed on Conservapedia. So I can't install templates like Xpd, Xpd2, Purge, and lf, some or all of which are required to keep the template from messing up. I'll just remove the line-height template I was using at Creationwiki for right now I guess. --Jzyehoshua 01:33, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

The template only worked on a case-by-case basis anyway, so it was a pain to have to put it in for pages to make one page at a time look nice. To fix it site-wide I think would require adding a line to the MediaWiki:common.css file per the following discussion: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Support_desk&limit=20#Footnote_Line_Height_17453 --Jzyehoshua 01:51, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

Re: Conservacelt

He looks suspicious to me, and much of his edits rely on liberal sources. With that being said, I suppose that we could give him another chance. I myself tried to change his block setting to two days after seeing that you changed his block setting to ten minutes, but I accidently blocked you instead... Sorry about that. - Markman 20:12, 23 July 2012 (EDT)

I agree with a 2-3 day block, just not permanent. And you forgot to unblock my IP address, lol. I figured it out eventually. He made a serious mistake, reverting Mr. Schlafly's revert of his material, but this is something to be explained to him. It was a big mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. I hope he'd just be given a warning this time. I'll personally explain it to him on his page. --Jzyehoshua 20:25, 23 July 2012 (EDT)

In retrospect I'm guessing that you're right, although I still retain my suspicion... Let's hope that after the next three days are over our he'll learn to behave himself. - Markman 20:39, 23 July 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, I think he will. I've seen a lot of vandals and what they would have done is blanked a whole page and added pure opinionated material. That he even bothered to use ref tags was a strong indication he wasn't a vandal, but someone making what he thought were good edits, and who just re-added it, not realizing who'd reverted it. I think it was just a new user not aware of site policy. On Wikipedia, you actually need to revert material 3 times, so policy here is quite a bit different from what he'd encounter there on other wikis. I think he'll learn from it. --Jzyehoshua 20:42, 23 July 2012 (EDT)

Unblocking

If you make a motion to unblock anyone, do a check of the block first. If the original block was unwarranted and/or minor, unblocking is fine. If the block was done by a senior admin, do not unblock unless you check with that person first. Karajou 04:56, 27 July 2012 (EDT)

The individual you just unblocked was reblocked by me; the individual was involved in heavy spam attacks on the site. Karajou 04:59, 27 July 2012 (EDT)

Alright, I didn't realize that. Were they a sockpuppet you mean? Or did they engage in spam some other way? Sorry about the mistake. I guess there's some info I'm not able to see from the logs, which is what I was going by. --Joshua Zambrano 05:21, 27 July 2012 (EDT)

I'd even checked deleted page logs for the user just to make sure they hadn't created a bad page that got deleted, and didn't see anything there. Just off the information I knew existed, I couldn't see any reason for the block, and apologize for the unblock. I will make sure to check with senior admins from now on too, I hadn't realized Ed Poor was one. I'll check with any users on this list[1] first from now on, sorry about that. --Joshua Zambrano 05:28, 27 July 2012 (EDT)

Our main page conversation

Thought it might be more productive and discreet to continue our chat off the main page talk page. Here's my response:

To deal with your first and second points: yes, the BBC is a special case; I cited it (a) because I'm British and (b) because the unique status of the BBC (publicly funded through a levy on TV owners, but kept as scrupulously away from political control as possible by means of its charter) means that it's the only media organization in my home country that is actually meant to be unbiased (I suppose the US equivalents would be PBS and NPR, though as I understand it their audiences are so vanishingly small as not to matter very much).

All other media, in a free market, are free to present the news as they wish. So you have liberal media (NY Times, MSNBC) and conservative media (Fox, WSJ). I've spent some time professionally in media analysis (though not to do with political bias), and it's a very tricky, nuanced thing to do. But ultimately it doesn't matter: news media are free to present the news with whatever slant they want. Audiences decide which they like best. The free market works: the only problem, in a democracy, is when uneducated people believe uncritically whatever they are told, because their lack of education means they don't know better. Democracy founders on the ignorance and indifference of the electorate; that is its Achilles' heel, which is why I value education so highly. And this wiki purports to be an educational tool, which is why I devote so much time to it, (It's marketed as a home-schooling resource, which is laughable and terrifying in equal measure -- see the entry on E=mc2, for instance).

I'm not convinced by your fourth point; let me tell you why. Yes, journalists tend to be better educated than the general public. But then you shift the blame to the colleges, which you claim exhibit liberal bias. Now, why should educational institutions be liberally biased? Perhaps because they tend to be located in urban centers, where people are more aware of the diversity of the society around them? (Cities are almost always more liberal than rural areas.) Perhaps because the very process of becoming educated exposes students to diversity, and causes them to be more aware of different people, and of how society as a whole works? One of the things any educational institution worthy of the name must do is encourage critical thinking, so that students question what they are told rather than swallowing it without tasting. It's possible to go through all of this and yet emerge with a conservative viewpoint; I have many highly educated friends who have.

In sum, I don't believe the assertion that colleges have a liberal bias. The bias they have is against ignorance and prejudice. Much of this wiki, in contrast, is biased in favor of ignorance and prejudice. --Esseph 16:34, 29 July 2012 (EDT)

As far as the OpenSecrets.org data is concerned, no surprises there. Business owners expect the GOP to give them breaks; all the other groups you mention will tend to fare better under the Democrats. Note how the Texas GOP recently came out against educating children to think critically. -- Esseph 16:48, 29 July 2012 (EDT)

Alright, that's fine. However, the fact of the matter is that here in the U.S., we have seen something of a takeover by liberals of whole industries in our country. I don't know if anything similar has happened in Europe, but this is a very real problem here in the United States. We let our court system become so liberalized that the liberals here were able to sue to force government to do pretty much whatever they want, and now require the teaching of Macroevolution, Abortion, and Homosexual role models in public classrooms. All of this has occurred just over the past 4 decades or so, and is contrary to what our nation used to be like. As a result, the majority of our nation is much more socially conservative and is opposed to this takeover of our government to support a single partisan side.

The reason educational centers to be biased is that (A) we have a Department of Education here which controls them all. I don't know if England has one, but here it tends to be very liberal and governed by court decisions as well. Again, it forces the teachings of liberals here to indoctrinate students. Those who disagree, the socially conservative 2/3 of Americans (which includes by the way many Democrats and Independents), must homeschool and pursue alternative education (e.g. private schools). Colleges here actually get subsidized in large part by the government, especially by very liberal states. If you look at the budgets of many liberal states (Illinois, Wisconsin, California, etc.), you'll see Democrat lawmakers voted to subsidize the state's colleges, and that these have become such major drains on state budgets as to be a major reason states are going bankrupt here. Democrats can essentially control the institutions through government subsidies and the courts. It's just a bad system that's cropped up.

Finally, as far as tax breaks, actually, 1/3 of Obama's Stimulus consisted of tax cuts. Tax cuts are the least effective form of military spending, even moreso than spending on defense, which was one reason I criticized Obama's Stimulus so strongly.[2] (See pg. 6)

--Joshua Zambrano 22:41, 29 July 2012 (EDT)