Posted on 04/01/2005 4:26:00 PM PST by Poohbah
First, this is NOT an April Fool's joke.
I am leaving Free Republic.
Over the past two years, civility and thoughtful discourse has vanished from this site, replaced with demands for ideological conformity that are straight out of Stalinist Russia or China's Great Cultural Revolution, and unrelenting uncivility if said conformance is not forthcoming. This trend began with the California recall election, where certain posters were allowed to flame the living beejezus out of those who didn't wholeheartedly support Tom McClintock, or thought that he wasn't running a campaign capable of winning. It extended into the Keyes campaign last year, where any critique of Keyes' campaign strategy was shrilly flamed, despite the obviously flawed execution of his campaign.
(Aside: one person who flamed me during the Keyes mess later said that he hadn't intended to start a fight with his remarks that accused me of homosexuality, pedophilia, and other evils; I was instantly reminded of the time I had to bail one of my Marines out of the local lockup. "Honest, Sarge," this Marine told me, "I didn't mean to start a fight when I called that Army Ranger a faggot." My response was not [and still isn't] suitable for public consumption.)
Since then, the Terri Schiavo case has pushed FR over the edge. We had posts calling for people to ensure that "accidents" to befall Schiavo and Judge Greer. We had posts praying that Iran would soon develop nuclear weapons, so that they could destroy the United States. And until the FBI started making arrests, those posts were allowed to stay up, completely abnegating Free Republic's standards.
We had people on both sides of the issue point out that the Schindlers were associating with some people of extremely low character, and that our uncritical embrace of these parties would not rebound to our favor. Rather reasonable attitudes to take, actually; but the loudest of the loud were in no mood to think.
My personal favorite was the following exchange:
The issue is not legality, but public opinion. Which will not be helped in this case if the pro-Terry side becomes associated in the media with Christian Identity, white supremicists, neo-nazis, racists and/or anti-semites.
Diva Betsy Ross made a valiant attempt to...ahem...whitewash Christian Identity, but it didn't work.
To top things off, we had people embracing as some sort of conservative icon, to the extent of posting a fundraising link.
I always thought that conservatism valued thinking over feeling, careful contemplation of facts over wild-eyed repetition of every damn rumor to come down the pipe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. For a while, Free Republic met those criteria in spades.
Those days are long gone, and I have serious doubt as to whether or not they're coming back.
I know that many of the usual suspects will cheer this on, as their longtime nemesis is leaving them the field.
Be careful what you wish for; you are in the process of getting it. You may succeed in driving the folks who disagree with you from the site; but you will end up being just another collection of shrill voices in Bedlam. When everything is an over-the-top scream, no one will be heard.
Farewell.
I'm really going to miss your humor Poohbah.
And neither were most Americans,who favored eugenics, pro-Nazi.
Just because Hitler picked up on eugenics, doesn't mean that everyone else with such an interest, was in any way,shape,manner, or form pro-Nazi.
And Stalin sent far more people to their deaths, than Hitler had murdered.
It's long past time for people on this forum to stop using NAZI as a pejorative, when they can't refute someone else's argument, or attempting to prove that the LIBERALS here are Nazis, when that us not the case, no matter what kind of perverted revisionist history one uses.
The reason we put animals down is because animals -- unlike human beings -- cannot make sense of or transcend suffering ... like we used to do, during the Christian Age.
Eric von Keunnelt-Ledhinn has a remarkable little passage about suffering in his book LEFTISM.
Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that "progress" has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable.
All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the anti-technological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives' critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to "progressive" industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this:
Indeed, if we read Marcuse carefully, we shall discover just these accusations, just this lament.
You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your "system", your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates.
You are wrong! You will actually lay the foundations of a society in which servitude will assume a more subtle, more ubiquitous, a more oppressive character than ever before.
Life will cease to have color, to be spiced with adventure, and people will revolt against the inhuman boredom and drabness you offer them. In the long run, man will not be satisfied with a social system giving him nothing but security and a near anonymous government of laws and regulations—rotating, impersonal, lacking all glamour. Emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, bishops, and noblemen will be replaced by general dictators, bureaucrats, manufacturers, bankers, trade union bosses, party bosses and dictators: This will make rule not less burdensome, only duller and, in many ways, more oppressive.
Young people especially will rebel against an order based on the counting of noses, an order giving them nothing to live or to die for. Once all great dreams are gone, this society of identical and equal people in their purposeless solitude will start to scream!
The New Left ... <<<<<---- More on Marcuse, Nunya.
The first part of the chapter is here ...
The Present is Largely Leftist Inspired ^
Posted by Askel5
On News/Activism ^ 05/17/2004 7:46:04 PM PDT · 4 replies · 67+ views
LEFTISM: From DeSade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse | Erik Von Keunnelt-Leddihn
Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left Movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand bourgeoise Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communists, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed ...
We appear to have even more in common,than we thought. LOL
Many are no longer here; some missed, many not.
I don't get it. I used to want to leave. Now I just don't get into discussions with people I know are waiting for a fight.
Please try to to take this in the spirit it's intended .... but, watching you try and teach thoughtomator a thing or two about the who, what, when, where of eugencics is like having my dog try and show me how to play the flute when he's got no opposible thumbs or lips to speak of.
The present order, no doubt, is iniquitous in many ways. However, life according to Christian precepts, is a vale of tears and the "pursuit of happiness" on this earth is more or less bound to fail. Christianity does not eliminate suffering, but gives sense to it. It does not make people "happy"; it offers joy and, by giving a sense to suffering, prevents despair.We have to admit that the present state of our Western civilization (and of the rest of the world as well) is worse than it has been in almost any period of history. In spite of good dentists, anesthestics, better health conditions, moon flights, television, birth control and a greatly decreased mortality, it would be easy to prove that human unhappiness has reached a very high level.
I know I would never want to live "like that".
And so to bed.
We all make choices...stay or leave, post or don't, fight or ignore. :-)
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust
Goodnight all.
And in the same spirit as your post, watching you post one CCPed bit of this from one author and that from another,pretending to be the great intellectual/superior being ,whilst eating up far too much bandwidth, with lengthy, mostly boring to most, philosophical prose, because you are incapable of any intelligent thought and discourse of your own,is about as worthwhile and fascinating as watching paint dry in the midst of a deluge.
I remember you best, for all such posts of yours. Which is precisely why, my dear, your opinion of me causes nothing more than sneering merriment at your banal and ineptitude to type what you assume to be a wickedly clever insult/put down. If,OTOH, you gave me compliment, I'd begin to worry.
Thank you for adding those paragraphs. Now #1523 makes more sense.. :-]
I recognize some unhappy people despair and turn to suicide as an answer. It's even more distressing to recognize some unhappy people are finding an answer in helping *others* commit suicide.
If suicide is immoral, and I believe that it is, then helping it happen, regardless of motivation, is also immoral.
Time for a new tagline, because it's what should be the focus, even though the last one was true too.
Last time I checked, Barney Frank, Christopher Shays, and the ACLU were on Michael Schiavo's side. I wouldn't exactly brag about their support.
One thing with Poohbah(and Catspaw) they are the biggest LEO bootlicking, Drug Warrior, pro-firearm regulators on this board. At least out of the 'respectable' contingent.
On a Crevo thread, the partisans may often sound alike on one side, but I always noticed that Catspaw, Poohbah, Chemist_Geek and CJ said the SAME thing over and over.
IMO, they were always soft Prescott Bush Republicans who never stood for anything resembling the Burkean conservatism for which this forum should be known.
No big loss, IMO, as I've had my own run-ins with that cohort on many a NON-Schiavo thread.
That's not to say I am in favor of much of what has transpired on the forum, but I'll be honest--I generally stayed away from those threads.
I'm an agnostic who was for intervention in that case. But the religious haranguing may have gotten to people.
But my feelings towards the aforementioned have NOTHING to do with Schiavo.
ROFL
Lol, funny stuff.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.