Posted on 06/25/2002 3:42:21 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
The following email is being circulated to our members by various disgruntled former FReepers:
Subject: The Future of Our Free RepublicDear Fellow Free Republic Member,
Many of us at Free Republic are distressed by the extraordinary level of censorship that has been so obviously going on. It is very obvious that individual posts, entire threads, and the entire work of members who have been highly regarded are disappearing into a Memory Hole.
Scores of us have organized an e-mail network that is independent of the communication controls presently, and sadly, being used at our Free Republic. We have carefully documented the unmistakeable evidence that most of the posts, threads, and posters that are vaporized completely are overwhelmingly targeted for their political stance on the Right. These are not Leftwingers. These are not even Middle-of-the-Roaders. These are not disruptors. These are not foul-mouthed delinquents. These are fellow patriots on the Right who disagree with the controllers of FR on specific issues that are now hotly debated by the Right. We have documented that FR will parade before you, as if to hide all of the great posters whose work has been destroyed, a straw-man delinquent that has been banned. This is deceptive.
Treating these fellow patriots on the Right so shabbily is not right. As shabbily as those banned into the Memory Hole are being treated, the most shabbily treated of all are all of the good folks on Free Republic themselves. We came here for honest debate. Free Republic advertised itself as a Forum for honest debate. Without that honest debate...everything at Free Republic becomes shabby.
We can do much better. As a measure of how intense the simmering feelings have gotten among members on this unjustifiable use of deleting, censoring, and banning please link to the following thread. You will notice that one simple and sincere plea from one of our finest members has spontaneously touched off a prairie fire of approximately 500 posts in a mere 18 hours. If it isn't Memory Holed this thread may shoot into the thousands.
If you would like to receive anonymous updates of information concerning the hundreds of Freepers who have networked via e-mail to restore the wonderful honest debate to Free Republic, just drop an e-mail of just one or two words if you like for extreme brevity to:
StopCensoringUs@hotmail.com
And, here's that link back to the snowballing thread at FR:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/704701/posts
Thank you so much for giving your thought to this vital matter for our Internet home.
Sincerely, StopCensoringUs@hotmail.com
One small thing, though. The concept of "rights" only applies within a society of human beings, not when you are alone on a desert island.
Say you have the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (which you do). Those rights can only be violated by other people using force against you. So if there are no other people around to violate your rights, then the concept of rights is moot.
Does that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense. The desert island is just a useful metaphor for me. If another person showed up on my island, for example, would I have a right to that person's things? If I had a right to that person's things, I also had a right to them when alone on my island.
For me, rights are an intrinsic part of the human. You can't seperate the human from his rights. To do so makes the person less than human. A person's rights cannot be alienated from the person- ie he cannot exist in a different sphere than his rights. So your rights are something you would have with you whether you are alone or in the middle of a mega-city.
If I am alone it doesn't matter much and like you said it only comes into play as a concept to be acknowledged and respected when other people enter the mix. But the desert island is useful in seeing what is intrinsic to the human and what is not.
Let's say my visitor on my desert island is a doctor. Do I have a right to his skills? Well no. I have a right to go up and ask him to help me but whether he does or not is up to him. So if the doctor is there or not I have no intrinsic right to medical care.
It's like I said, it is merely a useful tool for me. It has its flaws. It is best used only as a general rule of thumb, a sort of jumping off point to deeper considerations.
America is unique in history in that it was the first nation to be founded on the principle that individuals have rights, and that the only legitimate function of government was to protect those rights.
Too darn bad we've strayed so far from those ideals. In modern America, most people think you do have a right to the skills of doctors. I think that FDR was the first one to overtly change the definition of "rights" with his "Four Freedoms" state of the union message.
In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the wold. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
FDR slyly mixed in the false "right" to the labor of others in with valid rights like freedom of speech and worship. He also snuck in the false concept that governments have rights, and people do not.
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