“Amen to your thoughtful post, darrell. I understand what Charles is saying, and know that he speaks for a lot of good, solid conservative freepers who don't do much posting. Thoughtful discourse is a very difficult thing to manage on this board, and sometimes is best avoided if you're not a group thinker.”
Thanks for your thanks, ohioWfan, but more importantly, thank you for the service of your Bronze Star recipient. None of us would be able to talk the way we do on Free Republic if it were not for the freedoms for which our soldiers fight.
As for the internet and groupthink — Yes, I realize the problem, and I definitely do **NOT** blame this forum. It's a problem all over the internet and Free Republic is much better than most places.
As the son of a Republican politician who has spent virtually all of my entire adult life working in the news media, I think it's not impossible to use “mass media” forums to educate people and try to bring up the standard of discourse beyond sound bites.
Some people will tune that out. Lots of people tuned out the Founding Fathers, too. But they managed to create a country based on the work of those who **WERE** listening.
Today's internet is much like the “penny press” from a century and a half ago — virtually anyone can say virtually anything and get an audience, subject only to the truth that the owners of the press decide what gets printed. Furthermore, the people who yell the loudest often get the most readers, as men like Hearst and Pulitzer found out. That's not a bad thing if we believe the Founders were right about the First Amendment and about the right to private property.
Let's look on the good side of that. We conservatives aren't confined to sitting back and writing stuffy articles in conservative political journals that get read by almost nobody outside academia and the upper levels of the political parties and news media. We can reach hundreds of thousands of people who actually vote, and who actually know neighbors who vote and go door-to-door to get them to vote.
That's a Republic in action, and it's a really good thing.
Nothing’s perfect, and I'd rather deal with the problems of internet discourse than deal with the problems of the liberal control of a largely monopolized news media that we had not very many years ago.
Thanks for your posts, Darrell. I’ll come back to them later. Gotta run now.
Absolutely! The internet, with all its shortcomings - in particular the nastiness that comes with anonymity, and something we all need to check in ourselves - allows the conservative message to be discussed, sometimes rationally, sometimes not, but at least put forth.
We are in a far better place now than we were when leftists controlled nearly everything broadcast or in print, and that, in the end, is very good for America, and at this point in history, I think, imperative for its survival.