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JoshuaZ comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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1) It is plausible that an element of affirmative action could have crept into the awarding of the Fields Medal. It is not unreasonable to suspect that it has. Any number of biases might creep in to the awarding of a prize, however major it is. For example, it could well be that a disproportionate number of Norwegians or Swedes have won the Nobel relative to their accomplishments, because of location.
2) That the mathematics of relativity (either special or general) "allows no exceptions" is trivial but as far as I can see true, because it is true of any mathematical system that exceptions to the system are, pretty much by definition, not included inside the system. Anything inside the system itself is not an exception to it. So, trivial. But not false. What we really need to to do is to see why the point is brought up.
Looking further into the matter of "exceptions", to see why he brought up the true but trivial point with respect to relativity, in the main article I found this:
He appears to be saying that relativity breaks down at the Big Bang. He doesn't appear to provide any ground for making this claim, but it seems likely. Wikipedia says something similar in its article on black holes:
The big bang is a singularity, and in that respect is similar to black holes, so if general relativity breaks down completely in a black hole then I would imagine it would also be likely to break down completely at the Big Bang.
3) That people have often speciously used Einstein's relativity as a metaphor to promote all sorts of relativism is well known. People have similarly speciously used QM to promote all sorts of nonsense. So that particular point is hardly controversial, I think.
I have never relied on Conservapedia and don't intend to start whereas I use Wikipedia several times a day, but these particular attacks on the Conservapedia seem weak.
Did you read the page in question or the entire quote I gave? The first sentence isn't a big problem (although I think you aren't parsing correctly what he's trying to say). The second sentence I quoted was "It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world."
And yes, a small handful of his 33 "counterexamples" fall into genuine issues that we don't understand and a handful (such as #33) are standard physics puzzles. Then you have things like #9 which claims that a problem with relativity is "The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54. " (I suppose you could argue that this is a good thing since he's trying to make his beliefs pay rent.) And some of them are just deeply confusing such as #14 which claims that the changing mass of the standard kilogram is somehow a problem for relativity. I don't know what exactly he's getting at there.
But, the overarching point I was trying to make is somewhat besides the point: The problem I was illustrating was the danger in turning claims that others are being ideological into fully general counterarguments. Given the labeling of relativity as being promoted by "liberals" and the apparent conflation with moral relativism, this seems to be a fine example.
Incidentally, note that Conservapedia's main article on relativity points out actual examples where some on the left have actually tried to make very poor analogies between general relativity and their politics, but they don't seem to appreciate that just because someone claims that "Theory A supports my political belief B" doesn't mean the proper response is to attack Theory A. This article also includes the interesting line "Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities." This is consistent with the project's apparent general approach, as with much in American politics, to make absolutely everything part of the great mindkilling.
I can see that he attacks relativity, devotes a disproportionate amount of space to attacks, and relatively little to an explanation, though comparing it to his article on quantum mechanics it's not that small - his article on QM is the equivalent of a Wikipedia stub. But it's not obvious to me that the liberalism of some of its supporters is the actual reason for the problems he has with it.
It is in general difficult to tell what the "actual" motivations are for an individual's beliefs. Often they are complicated. Regarding math and physics there's a general pattern that Andrew doesn't like things that are counterintuitive. I suspect that the dislike of special and general relativity comes in part from that.