Posted on 04/20/2005 9:22:15 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist
I'll keep this short and simple. After six years of membership on FR I've decided to resign from the forum today. I'll keep checking my freepmail for a few days and wind down my posts here, so if any of you wish to contact me please do so there and I will provide you with a means to do so. I hope to continue future posting activities elsewhere - perhaps a blog - but only time will tell.
It's truly been a blast and left me with many fond memories, but all good things had to come to an end. My favorites comprise a long list, the most noted being the exposition of Rathergate, leading freeps of Algore in the 2000 recounts, protesting Hildebeast's book tour, and giving her impeached husband a freeper's welcome to Texas on several of his visits. Thank you to all who made these events fun and entertaining. Unfortunately the past few months have made it clear to me that FR and I are drifting apart on key issues of conservatism. I'll spare the details, pausing only to state that it isn't just the usuals like illegal immigration, but also things like religion, the culture of political correctness, an overall decline in reasoned civil conversation that used to flourish here, and the purposes and uses of the site in general. More concerning, for the past few months I have been unable to even obtain rational discourse and commentary on many routine threads and issues without being personally maligned and attacked - many times out of the blue and on topics unrelated to the given thread - by a small, petty-minded, and vitriolic group of posters who conduct themselves in a manner unbefitting of what this forum used to be when I joined in 1999, and do so with apparent impunity.
I also find that I simply don't have the time to post as much as I once did, and regrettably so.
I'll leave it at that, as my fond memories outweigh the unpleasant ones. A time arises when parting courses on friendly terms is best before something less desirable arises. Therefore I have volunteered my resignation. To everyone who has made my FR experience enjoyable, I thank you and wish you only the best.
I knew you'd understand J
Are there actually people on Free Republic who feel they MUST pay attention to threads or posts they do not want to read?
And if so ... Why?
Er, um, he's talking about the overall tone and quality of the forum, not just a thread here or there.
And he's right.
Mock if you wish, but he's not the only one who has noticed the deterioration.
GOPcap - Do as you wish, but keep this in mind: Don't be one of these suckers who leaves the GOP to become a Limpertarian. The Limps should stay in the GOP and change it from within to be more along the lines of what they want, rather than joining a party that doesn't win elections, doesn't have a voice in government and gets .0063% of the vote in national elections.
My advice would be to stay with FR, post what you want to post, take on the attackers, don't let them win. If they have silenced your conservative voice in a forum that had a good readership, then they have beaten you. Continue to change FR from within. The moderators don't block your speech. Chip away at your issues by letting the good people of FR know what you think.
My twelve cents...
No worries. It's not that at all. I'll fill you in on what's going on by email or something
I sent you an email to your private account. If nothing else, stick around long enough to defend Tom DeLay to the end of these savage attacks against him, when you and I were up and coming in politics, DeLay was there for us, now we can be there (here) for him.
<< I'll be sorry to see you go. I've enjoyed many of your posts over the years.
I'm sure that since this thread is now over 200 posts, someone else has already said some of the things on my mind.
I hope the moderators & JR will take notice of the suggestions.
So I'll just say this: you will be missed.
Regards,
CD >>
Hear! Hear!
FR was once a bottom-up-empowered, principled, passionately-intelligent, enthusiastically-disciplined, fairly tightly-focused and essentially-single-issue Force whose effectiveness belied its relatively few activist supporters.
The Forum Advisory Board provided an environment within which spirited exchanges among FR's trusted servants were able to take place with a fair degree of confidence and privacy.
Today's top-down and increasingly-bureaucratic FR has lost its singleness of purpose and quite clearly tries to be all things to all comers. A sure-fire recipe for disaster!
Disgruntled and resentful anti-American and/or America-disdaining foreigners of every political persuasion dilute our purpose further -- and actively support one another [Often on their "locality" sites on our boards and in plane sight] in creating dissent among us.
Please God we find another Primary Purpose.
Term Limits for every American politician springs to mind as a worthy uniter and -- in addition to terminating FR's death spiral -- would deal with our Beloved FRaternal Republic's disease -- as a vast improvement upon our present increasingly-emasculated and feminized effectively-impotent flailing about.
As was, it is rumored, recently demonstrated when fifteen or twenty "FReepers" apparently went to Washington to "rally" -- and to prove I know not what to I know not whom.
I shall miss you too.
Blessings -- Brian
[Thanks for the ping, Meeks!]
BUMPping
<< Have I quit? NO! Have I undergone two, count 'em, two, suspensions due to smackdowns with said factionalists? YES!! >>
Only two, eh??
Piker!
Blessings -- B A
More than 20 posts on a thread you say you don't care about. Hmmm...
You're (many) posts indicate that you're part of the problem described in this thread. People who do nothing but bash and engage in childish namecalling, whithout adding substantive debate, have gone a long way to taking the fun out of this forum.
GOP, I really wish you would reconsider, but I understand if you've made your mind up 100%. Good luck in your new endeavors, and be sure to pass all the inside Texas Politics skinny back to Xena or Houston Curmudgeon or me so we can post up all the scandal on Governor Goodhair and the Toll-Road Trolls on the Texas boards. Meanwhile, illegitimi non carborundum.
Adios, amigo, vaya con dios.
Lenin, we know what you think now. Run along, please.
Exactly. Any thread is now fair game for some one to bring in comments from other threads that may have nothing to do with the current topic. Posters make outlandish statements and spew vitriolic slurs and it's allowed to continue. But disagreement with these posters is viewed as being "against" them, rather then debate.
you can be sure the one thing i will not do is take advise from people like you.
LOL!
Tell it to those who keep insisting on calling good posters "liberals" and "subversives" and so on.
I'm halfway out the door myself when that nonsense is tolerated. And I defy anyone to say I don't know how to stick up for myself.
Bye bye, we'll miss you.
Good Luck! You'll be missed.
No, that was not it. People lied about the side people were on no matter how many times they were corrected.
That's easy - Greer should have allowed oral hydration. If Terry couldn't drink or tolerate enough to keep alive, at least the people around her wouldn't have been tortured. If she could - and would - then we'd truly know.
Forbidding oral hydration for comfort care was murder - a deliberate action intended to cause death by that direct action.
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