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
C'mon, C_C. That's like trying to prove Communism didn't cause widespread starvation by pointing to a fat Russian.
Prediction: this thread will hang around for a while and be all gooey and cathartic and all, then quietly vanish in a day or two.
I am not a libertarian and not an anti-Semite so what's in it for me over there? NOT MUCH except the same curiosity factor of seeing a car wreck.
Yeah, Slashdot's the absolute worst. Extremely active, all posts on one page until a thread reaches an insane number of responses (300? 500? I forget), a "karma"/thread-viewing-options system so confusing you practically have to have a Ph.D. in computer science to even comprehend it, on and on. It doesn't help that the "karma" system allows thousands of morons to turn the system into their personal playground, on the argument that "Hey, you can always set your karma cutoff level higher if you don't want to read our crap!"; it causes threads that would have 150 intelligent responses to have 600 posts instead.
I've largely given up on even reading Slashdot for these reasons. Luckily, some guy has created AlterSlash, a site that's basically a "Best-of" digest. It lists the new threads and only the hand-picked best posts from those threads. It's a million times better.
Do you really think so, or are you playing to the crowd again?
I am so darn impressed. LOL!
Wow! That's really cool! All I got was bumped off for a while.
I gather the software was being tinkered with and barfed.
Darn Jim, sorry I made the mistake of disagreeing. It won't happen again.
Yeah but there's this universal fascination with the repulsive... Hence obsessive nosepicking...
Thanks, AM
Equally impressive was your desire to count them. ;^]
You know, some links, some supporting evidence?
Something?
Anything?
It wasn't wrong so much as devoid of any meaning.
2. Darn Jim, sorry I made the mistake of disagreeing.
Disagreeing?
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