Posted on 09/29/2007 11:22:01 PM PDT by Jack Black
I like a good opus, you know, insults flying, personal attacks, poster’s disappointments, blood on the screen, but this? You gotta be kidding! Get back on the track, jack!
BUMP!~
BTTT
I disagree. It isn’t just a website. It’s a community. While being a conservative forum, there are innumerable subgroups of every conceivable interest. People group in real life to protest, or to counter protest, or to show up live to important events in order to report.
In many ways, you are witnessing the reincarnation of network news, only this time the news is being brought to you by all kinds of people all over the world.
I’ve seen these Opii, and I think they serve their purpose. They are cathartic, they are healthy, and they are a public declaration by some of the most passionate, intelligent people in the conservative movement, that perhaps all of the work isn’t worth it with the current crop of idiots that have R’s behind their names.
On the other hand, the world is a complex place, and we only know a fraction of what our elected leaders do, and so a certain benefit of the doubt is in order.
I’ve digressed, but the point remains that FR is more than just a website, and that the Opus is more than just goodbye.
Recal this quote from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels
A German intellectual made the following statement after the Nazis fell from power.The judgement of history has been very harsh upon those who've hid their heads in the sand. Upon those who failed to resist. Upon those who surendered their minds, their souls, their spiritual soverignty and their very being to the power-lusters.”In the early days of Hitler’s regime, he recalled, anyone troubled by the Nazi practices and concerned about Germany’s future was shrugged off as an alarmist. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.”
We now face two sets of enemies - Islam and the communist/socialist enemy within. No one seems to have the will or the courage to call them by their proper names. There's your canary in the mineshaft.
The country may throw the rascals out, but it means nothing if the next administration is made of neo-rascals from the other party. To change a nation’s basic course requires more than a mood of popular discontent. It requires the definition of new direction for the country to take. Above all, it requires a theoretical justification for this direction, one which would convince people that the course being urged is practical and moral.
Moral considerations alone might not be sufficient to move men, if they believe the course being urged is impractical; practical considerations alone will not move men, if they believe the course is immoral. The union of the two, however, is irresistible.
By its nature, changing the course of a nation is a task that can be achieved only by men who deal with the field of ideas. In the long run the people of a country have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the intellectuals. The intellectuals cannot escape ideas, either. They may become anti-ideological skeptics, who offer the country for guidance only subjective feelings and short-range pragmatism (describes the current political landscape all too well. Noumenon); but it is the ideas – ultimately, the basic ideas – they still accept, explicitly or otherwise, which determine the content of their feelings and of their pragmatism.
In the long run, intellectuals, too, have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the philosophers. If there is no new philosophy to guide and rally the better men among them, the intellectuals will follow one that is old and bankrupt. If there are no living ideas, they will follow dying ones and take the country with them…
In the absence of any principled opposition, the Kantian ideas by default will continue to rule, and to move us further down the road on which, for so many years, we have been traveling.
From “Convulsion and Paralysis”
Leonard Peikoff – The Ominous Parallels - 1993
Not quite no one my friend.
L
There are a few around here!
Quiet a few........ :o)
Spot on post!
Just so...
Yep.
Why do they always have to announce they are leaving?
I have no idea unless they want a parting gift.
Two good reasons come to mind: One, so concerned FRiends won't incorrectly think that ill health or ill fortune has interrupted their presence here. The principle is that of asking to be excused at the dinner table, dispensed with in less formal circumstances [a sandwich at the kitchen table] but maintained for more formal occasions. I hope you're familiar with such formalities, and appreciate their presence here as elsewhere.
The second reason: that we miught note the missed presence of one of our own, and hope for an eventual return:
And he spake this parable unto them, saying,--Luke 15: 3-7 (King James Version)
"What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?"
And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.
Jim
+1
I won’t say goodbye either, just thanks for everything you’ve done here.
Take a break. Everyone needs one once in a while.
You are needed to fight the good fight, whether we are victorious or not. We just keep on.
Amen, brother.
Mike
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