The First Amendment Needs Your Prayers

The Wall Street Journal ^ | December 4, 2015 | Peggy Noonan

[TBP]

You can see a coarsening in how we respond and react on social media. No one feels ashamed to exploit the tragedy for political purposes even while it is happening.

But as soon as the story broke Wednesday afternoon, and while it was still going on, there were accusations and bitter words flung all over the Internet. The weirdest argument came almost immediately. A person named Chris Murphy, who is a U.S. senator representing Connecticut, sent out what struck me as the most manipulative message of recent political history.

The background is that Republican presidential contestants responded online to the shootings with the only helpful thing you can say—or do, frankly, from faraway—when a story like this occurs. “Praying for the victims, their families & the San Bernardino first responders,” said Jeb Bush. Mike Huckabee said he was “praying.” John Kasich: “My thoughts & prayers go out to those impacted.”

This managed to enrage the progressive left. You can take your prayers and stuff ’em. The answer and the only answer to this tragedy is gun control, and if you’re not for it you’re not allowed to be part of the conversation. “Please shut up and slink away,” tweeted a reporter. Another: “Your thoughts and prayers don’t mean a damn thing.” A reporter at the Huffington Post damned public officials’ “useless thoughts and prayers.” Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos: “How many dead people did those thoughts and prayers bring back to the life?”

[Gene Eric]

Wrong thread?

[imardmd1]

For inatance, you entered text into the "Your Reply" box editor that had a right-hand slanted apostrophe like this:

>> I’m using Opera on Win 10. <<

However, when I just copy/pasted the result back into the "Your Reply" box tp show you what happened it came up in the Preview box as:

>> I’m <<

It changed again!

But going back to the beginning, when I corrected your entry as it was printed out in your Post #8 to replace the slanted apostrophe by editing it in this "Your Reply" box, such that the apostrophe is not left- or right-handed, but straight (as rendered by the effect of my keyboard calling out the single apostrophe supplied by the FR text editor), it is entered as:

>> I'm using Opera on Win 10. <<

and it comes up in the Preview box as:

>> I'm using Opera on Win 10. <<

Does this make sense to you?

[Gene Eric]

>> when I corrected your entry

You normalized my entry to account for the parsing bug that has recently showed up on FR.

Don’t go nuts explaining the details. But I’m glad you confirmed what I’m seeing!

Regrettably, I’m all too familiar with character encoding issues. This particular problem looks to be UTF-8 being interpreted as ANSI.

[imardmd1]

Wrong thread?

Huh????

Well, to continue, this entering of slanted quotes, slanted apostrophes, em-dashes, semicolons, colons -- any fancy punctuation that is not sourced from the ASCII table, into the "Your Reply" box or in the "Body of Thread" or "Body of Comment" boxes in the Post Articles application, will cause nonsensical characters to appear in the Preview Box of any of these FR posting routines. The person doing the posting can see it, and it is up to him/her -- not the web-master or moderator -- to make the corrections by editing out the non-ASCII charaters of his submitted text prior to clicking on the "Post" button. After that it is too late.

Each poster has to stop habitually hurrying through and finalizing the post of article or reply before checking how it is going to look when posted. You just have to read through the text as it is displayed in the Preview Box, and make the indicated corrections.

This involves respect of the limitations of the participant-activated FR text-entry system, and exercising personal discipline in finding out and educating oneself in the rules of the system.

I hope that also makes sense by illuminating without raising the reader's emotional temperature.

The FR system has to shuck off fanciness in text cosmetics to achieve quick response by adhering to plaintext ASCII text submission simplicity. Otherwise, if you try to get magazine-style (or even lengthy) submissions, you will still be laboring at HTML-writing while the show has moved on, and your reply is too long and too late to count. Like I'm doing right here,

But that is also why one's posting of articles finally has to be a brief summary that links the perceptive reader to the original article on another site.

Ta-da!

[imardmd1]

Succinctly, that is correct, and I explained that on another thread a day or so ago. But eventuyally this, like candy or poison, will wind up saturating most of the contributing constituents of FR. Thanks for your patience!

[Gene Eric]

>> >> Wrong thread?

>> Huh????

Apologies... lost track of the thread topic with respect to our encoding discussion.

[TBP]

Prayer is ALWAYS appropriate.

[imardmd1]

Prayer is ALWAYS appropriate.

Not necessarily.

God does not do what He has appointed for you to do for yourself and others.

It is a sin to refuse to execute the duties my Heavenly Father has set before me. In this case it is certain that not only will He not hear my prayers (Ps. 66:18), but He may well allow the heaping of even more negative consequences arising from my refusal to accept the responsibility to act; resorting only to requests for a Providential solution when my action is the practical answer that solves the problem.

It is precisely that shirking of the task at hand which causes adversaries to identify ineffective appeals to God as a cop-out, as a substitute for applying obvious remedies.

[TBP]

While you do whatever is needed, you pray. Pray always. Prayer is always appropriate. Especially when people are hurting.