Posted on 05/26/2007 1:49:34 PM PDT by Eurotwit
A few weeks ago – in between Hillary Clinton’s official entry into the presidential race and the first Republican primary debate of the cycle – the fiery online conservative forum Free Republic marked a decade in operation as one of the premier online forums for right-wing political discussion.
It also experienced one of the biggest internal battles to rock the site since the 2000 election of George W. Bush -- a tumultuous campaign year that nearly tore the site apart, as its founder and chief administrator first cleansed commenting ranks of Bush supporters, then, later, rallied to his support.
At the heart of the latest controversy: the fight over the conservative bona fides of Rudy Giuliani.
Over the past few weeks, chaos has reigned in the “Freeper” community as members sympathetic to the former mayor's candidacy claim to have suffered banishment from the site. They were victimized, they say, by a wave of purges designed to weed out any remaining support for the Giuliani campaign on the popular conservative web forum. Another significant chunk of commenters have migrated away from the controversial site over the action, according to a number of former site members and conservative bloggers who have been tracking the situation.
In a plaintive post on the blog “Sweetness & Light,” exiled commenter Steve Gilbert, who says he does not support the former mayor’s campaign, blasted the site’s new “anti-Giuliani, anti-abortion jihad.” Since George W. Bush was elected president, he wrote, “there haven’t been any large scale [Free Republic] purges to speak of – until now.”
The fight began one month ago, when site founder Jim Robinson posted an anti-Giuliani manifesto titled: “Giuliani as the GOP presidential nominee would be a dagger in the heart of the conservative movement.” Then the virtual ax started to swing. Longtime posters to the freewheeling discussion threads, used to serious no-holds-barred web etiquette, were still stunned by the intensity of the anti-Rudy activity; conservative blogs buzzed with the development.
“Jim Robinson has been going on a tear demonizing Rudy Giuliani, because Rudy (agreeing with the vast majority of Americans), is personally opposed to abortions on a moral level…” complained a user on the GOPUSA Web site. “Anyone who posts any support for Giuliani at the site, if it's at all forceful, will be banned.”
(“Normally, we don't allow complaints about other conservative forums,” chided the moderator, but “…because it is being discussed all over the Internet, I'll make an exception.”)
Just a few months ago, Rudy Giuliani placed second in an early Free Republic straw poll; now, his support on the site has been virtually eliminated. “After the ‘April Purge,’ I don't think there are any Rudybots left around here,” noted Free Republic commenter “upchuck” in one recent post. “And if there are, they're not posting pro-Rudy stuff :).”
The forums weren’t the only venue for the Free Republic’s new antagonism toward Mr. Giuliani, which coincided with a wave of comments expressing similar sentiments from other corners of the conservative movement. A few days after Mr. Giuliani’s equivocal Roe v. Wade comments at the Republican presidential debate on May 3, a new “STOP RUDY NOW News & Information Thread” was featured on the site, and a newly-created stand-alone category debuted via a link from the homepage: “The Giuliani Truth File.” (So far this campaign season, Mr. Giuliani is the only candidate – Republican or Democratic – to be singled out for that level of scrutiny from the Free Republic.)
Why Rudy? Why now? Some conservative bloggers and former commenters contacted for their view of the continuing controversy say they believe that site founder Jim Robinson holds ideologically middling Republicans like Mr. Giuliani responsible for the GOP’s congressional loss and current woes. (They asked that their names be kept out of this story for fear of antagonizing the famously frisky site regulars.)
Others claim that the former mayor’s top-tier status is spurring frantic site administrators into action. Finally, one popular theory holds that the Free Republic is secretly hoping for another Clinton presidency that would send its Alexa ratings soaring back to levels it hasn’t experienced since its halcyon days of the Clinton impeachment, when a since-soured relationship with blog pioneer Matt Drudge and overwhelming anti-Clinton sentiment in Republican ranks helped make Free Republic one of the hottest Web sites in the nation. It hasn't recovered that luster since the Bush administration took over.
“It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s an observation,” said one blogger, who describes himself as a half-hearted Mitt Romney supporter. “They’ve still got a brand name that means something, but they’re not what they were in terms of real-world impact. A Hillary presidency would get them there.”
Robinson himself could not be reached for comment, but his original post laid out his case against Mr. Giuliani – a graphics-heavy presentation of some of the former mayor’s most damning moderate quotes in mainstream media venues, along with a color-coded report card tracking his less-than-doctrinaire positions on abortion, immigration, gays and guns.
Robinson, it should be noted, famously blasted George W. Bush’s presidential candidacy back in 2000, before a dramatic late-campaign about-face that saw him emerge as one of the GOP ticket’s biggest supporters. But whether or not Free Republic experiences a similar election-year shift this cycle, the site’s current campaign is spreading a dangerous primary-season meme of Rudy Giuliani as big-city liberal – and turning one of the most influential web forums in conservatism into an exclusive gathering place for those who share that view.
Not so fast, buddy. I was wondering how you had happened to read The Screwtape Letters. Same thing either way!
This is interesting, now that I notice it. Tolkien and Lewis were friends, I wonder if the commonality came from that?
I should eat dinner already. Apparently I'm so hungry I'm thinking of soup and losing my ability to spell.
You have it completely backwards. The coven or cabal or whatever you want to call them who were acting in the role of Grima Wormtongue and whispering into Jim Robinson's ear were recently mostly banished. The old Jim Robinson is back and conservatism reigns on Free Republic.
Ah. Grima Wormtongue. Yes.
*************
I can imagine that would be difficult to overlook.
Which I noted in reply #1059
I doubt that it is enough to get anyone banned unless it is done repeatedly
If I remember correctly, SETI is not looking for an ordered signal but a signal using the same frequencies we use. They are taking their lead from something we have an example of and is most reasonable given the distances involved. They are assuming that, because we have yet to see it happen naturally, those frequencies are more likely to be used by intelligence than by nature. Even if they receive a signal in the range expected, from what I have read they will first assume that it is a naturally occurring signal and look to natural explanations first.
"Yet at the same time, these evolution beliving SETI scientists, turn around and suggest that the simplest life form we have found, which contains many times more programming source code and data arrays than a 10 minute Youtube video, came about purely through Darwinian evolution.
Scientists are not considering a complex life form such as what we find now but a much simpler self replicating molecule. Nor are they attempting to find the molecule that is our ancestor, just a molecule which self replicates and develops the attributes of life. Current evolutionary thought has surpassed Darwinian theory. Darwin's theory is the basis for what we now believe but that theory has been expanded considerably.
I really don't need one. I was drawn into this because of a link someone posted and I was curious as to what was said.What I read in that link is the only post I ever remember reading by R.A.
I don't have an opinion on R.A. and his posts and really don't care. I know a lot of people have been banned lately and I was quite happy to see some of them go, others that are gone, I will miss.
So you call it “mercy killing”?
So how many millions of years ago do you estimate your relatives "derived" from apes and became rational thinking beings with a conscience (knowing right from wrong, etc.)? Secondly, what force started it all?
Just wondering here...
Are you referring to me?
We need to poll this on a future thread so we can get a break-down on where the creo-Freepers fall.
We have not found evidence of design.
Yet all I see is design, i.e. program source code, function and procedure code, data arrays, replication code, etc. But I write software for a living, so that is a strong bias in how I see the world.
Science is concerned with the observable.
Like macro evolution.
You have evidence that the earth's magnetic field strength increased during the polarity fluctuations?
..that predisposes some people to both go into engineering and believe in a suopernatural designer.
Perhaps. This is not something I'd chose to try to find out. It would be interesting to see the percentages of graduates that belief in evolution break down among physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers and mathematicians. I'd wager the mathematicians are the least accepting of evolution as fact.
You seriously cannot make the analogy between SETI and evolution? Do you believe the very first life form on earth had complexity? Did this life form possess the ability to reproduce/replicate itself? Now, if it could, would this not imply some complexity existed in life at it's very earliest form, at it's inception? If a quirk of luck, a convergence of natural phenomenon, or whatever it was that created this first life form on earth occurred, the fact therefore remains that this entity of life was at least complex enough to reproduce and/or replicate itself.
Whatever the unknown event(s) in earth's pre-history that allowed life to come into being or to create life itself were, I'm sure you'll agree that the cause was natural. Therefore, if the first life has a natural causation, and this life form has the ability to reproduce and replicate itself, or at a very minimum the ability to consume energy with which to sustain itself long enough for it to develop the ability to reproduce itself. One must conclude that purely natural events created life. Since this life arose on earth somewhere as the result of natural causes, it's fair to say that purely natural systems in the universe can give rise to initial complexity. Similarly as you suggest, this life-form evoles and acquires more complexity as it evoles.
Therefore, one cannot assume that an ordered signal from outspace automatically has an intelligent cause when at the same time, more complex minimal life on earth came from purely natural causes. It could well be that an organized signal from a point in space came about from some unique (or not) set of events that are purely natural. Therefore, if evolution is true, no scientist can turn around and tell me that organized signals from outer space are necessarily an indication of intelligent life, since for life forms, we believe otherwise.
Let me ask you this, at a minimum, what complexity existed in the first life-form that Darwin says we all came from? Did this first life form possess any DNA? What capabilities/functions did this first life form possess? Please spare me the abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution. It has everything to do with evolution, because non-creation based evolution depends entirely upon this event first occurring.
I did not name myself "twit."
>> ...should even count as an offense.
So when Jim Robinson says "no profanity," he really doesn't mean it? Or, it's OK when it's directed against me?
Yeah, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the signers of the Declaration, were a bunch of real ignoramuses...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
I wish you nothing but bad luck and utter failure in your pursuit of the destruction of the cornerstone of American liberty, which is found in the above paragraph.
bump for later read
Yet they have no problem assuming life arose from natural causes. Look at me, I've got cake and I'm eating it too.
Scientists are not considering a complex life form such as what we find now but a much simpler self replicating molecule.
Can you think of a single invention by man that is a "self replicating" anything? I cannot conceive of anything in the physical world that man has designed that is self-replicating. Can you?
Software code can be written such that it is self replicating. However, this software is entirely dependent upon the existence of the hardware for which it run. Software cannot be coded to replicate itself without the existence of the hardware. Furthermore, the initial replication code will have to write itself! This is why I think mathematicians, programmers and engineers are less likely to be evolutionists than pure scientists. I would love to see this polled, but given the evolution is god mentality of academia, I hold out no hope an accurate poll of this could be taken.
Therefore, the "much simpler self-replicating molecule" is still dependent upon the hardware and software sides of the entire molecule if it is to work. If this is not the case, please provide a real world or realistic theoretical example which replicates itself? You'd think with the rich diversity of life forms on this planet, these real world examples would be everywhere.
I'd tried telling my boss that my next code assignment will write itself through evolution. He told me "good, at least the work will get done on schedule".
I kind of failed the nerd test.
Ghandi knew all about how the evo threads work: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
Got it. The old JR, the one who thinks national defense would be run just as well by the democrats. I remember him.
Not.
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