FRiendly FiRe haPPens. :}
Posted on 10/18/2005 8:18:22 AM PDT by Erik Latranyi
It is time to take some conservatives to the woodshed.
With a heavy heart, I write the above after visiting Free Republic this morning.
Why?
Simply our discourse is degenerating. I am dismayed at the amount of name-calling taking place in these pages. I am even more dismayed that this name-calling is being conducted by conservatives against conservatives.
I understand the anger and disappointment stemming from the Miers nomination, but also inclusive of the budget deficit, education department, immigration, etc. These are matters that bother me as well.
Unfortunately, the tone on Free Republic bothers me even more. When conservatives call each other names and friendly disagreement over issues degenerates into those proclaiming to be "real conservatives" versus "phony conservatives" we only bow to our lowest common denominator.
Rush Limbaugh calls this the "conservative crackdown". In many ways he is right (as Rush is so often). Conservatives do not want stealth candidates. We worked hard to win and will continue to work hard to increase our majorities and enact our agenda.
We are proud conservatives and we want to proclaim this from the mountain tops!
We also want those who represent us to be proud as well. We do not want apologies. We do not want stealth. We do not need to hide behind "compassionate conservative" labels.
We are the majority and we will remain the majority as long as we continue to educate the public about what conservatism is and why we demand responsibility from both the individual and the gov't.
However, lately, we are calling each other names.
This is liberal-speak. We do not want to stoop to the level of our enemies. We should not use their tactics, either.
Conservatives use logic and reason to support our ideas. We can disagree without being disagreeable.
We are not doing that, folks!
Too many of us are so caught up lately that we forget how to be civil. If you want to call names and use the F-bomb, go to DU. You will find that language replaces truth and fact everywhere.
And that is what names do, isn't it? Names replace truth and fact.
But we are conservatives. Truth and fact are what got us this far and it will be truth and fact that continue our rise to roll back 80 years of liberalism.
Some of us back President Bush and trust his judgement. Some of us do not. That is OK. That is healthy for our movement.
What is unhealthy for our movement is this name-calling.
Let it stop. Let us debate Harriet Miers over facts and truth. Stop pronouncing yourself a "true conservative" and anybody who backs President Bush a "Bush-Bot". That is liberal-speak.
Most of it is due to the nature of the medium. It is much easier to be rude and condescending behind the relative anonymity of a keyboard than it would be face-to-face. Also, even with HTML assistance in bold, italics, underline, etc., a text-only medium makes it difficult to use inflection, so cruder forms of expression have to be used.
Thanks for the posting of this thread. I believe we can disagree on issues and have solid, intellectual discussion threads about them. However, many of the threads here lately fall way short of those standards and we need to think before we write and remember that not every opinion we have needs to be uttered (I've certainly screwed up and said things I wish I hadn't)...Most of all, I believe we need to be praying hard for our President, for the difficult times which we are living in and for the big issues that are taking place.
But calling them Bushbots does not get to the root of the problem, does it? It does not educate them, does it? It does not bring anyone to your side of the argument, does it?
No, name-calling is useless.
Why not try to explain why we believe in limited gov't? We do not believe in limited gov't so we can have a small deficit---we believe in limited gov't because gov't is not the answer (New Orleans).
Calling people Bushbots divides us and makes conservatism look like a club run by a few that casts out those who do not think like we do.
You're certainly not.
What a wanker.
Ping for later smackdown, have to go to school and work.
FRiendly FiRe haPPens. :}
Use the first person and don't hide behind the word 'we' or 'some'.
You're only conservative if you're for putting the Nat'l Guard on the border, putting up a wall, and deporting ALL illegals NOW...don't ya know?
> Explosion of government spending and continuation of the nanny state is conservatism?
Anyone who knows my posts knows I agree with you about how far afield the Republican party has gone. But I think what the submitter is saying that when we do disagree about these things, we should leave the insults back in the playground.
My grandmother-- a true turn-of-the-century spitfire-- and I used to have knock-down drag out arguments over just about everything political under the sun. (This was during my brief-but-stupid obligatory teenage liberal period.) You can bet there was no name-calling or insults although it did get mighty passionate. Invariably during these sessions she'd stop, grab my hand, and say with shining eyes, "I **LOVE** a good argument!" Boy, do I miss her.
Argue with passion, but argue with respect. We're family.
Yep. This episode doesn't even seem too bad.
Conservatives are independent thinkers and have varied views on things. Don't you get that?
Most likely, we haven't seen anything yet.
And when our Party loses power there will be name calling ad nauseum.
I agree about the respect issue. It's easy to get so far into an argument that you forget the other person is a human being.
You are correct. This has taken place over other issues as well. It just seems that the Miers nomination has brought a great deal of frustration to a head and I would rather see us debate this rationally than degenerate into childish name-calling.
In my opinion, the name-calling and labels are worse than I ever remember on FR.
Stop demonizing anybody who disagrees with the Anointed One's infallible proclamations, and you might get somewhere.
I used to believe much of the invective came simply from the fact that people, on the Internet, can speak type their minds in virtual complete anonymity. And that is still true to some extent. Folks can take the Keyboard Commando style and "get down" where they might never in face to face public discourse.
But the fact remains that our culture is becoming more and more belligerent, one citizen to the other. And the left certainly has the lion's share of the responsibility for it with their "anything goes" modus operandi, especially since they lost at the ballot box and in the contest of ideas.
Regardless of our positions on various issues, we should be able to disagree, agreeably. Unfortunately, and they are nothing new here, FreeRepublic has had many phases of "Flame Wars" that have done nothing to enhance this great idea of JR's to create a meeting place where conservative citizens of the Republic can gather and enter into public discourse on issues near and dear to the conservative movement.
Nice post and enjoying the "fun" jabbing that has gone on so far. But mark my words, this thread too, has great capacity to degenerate into baseless name-calling.
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