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DISCLAIMER: This is a long post, as are many of mine, which some people here can attest to. I fully admit-I don’t have, and have never had Twitter because I believe it is silly to force people to comment on something substantive while imposing a character limitation. If someone can do it, I am sure to express my respect for them, because I wish I could, but usually cannot.

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I come back to FR year after year because I view it as an “Intelligence Aggregator”, a phrase I heard another Freeper use.

Freeper spok is only the most recent person saying this (read it today on a thread, spok) so I pinged that person out of respect, but what he or she said goes right to the core of the problem: The Internet is untrustworthy, and all information obtained from it should be assumed to be false unless analyzed throughly...and even then.

We cannot trust our media, and it is looking increasingly true that we never should have ever trusted them, and when we did, it was out of ignorance or laziness. I stand guilty of this in my life.

We cannot trust our government, as it has shown that it not only approves of censorship and is trying to institute a three letter agency of some kind that can only be likened to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth”, but it is fully involved in leveraging the organs of government to persecute its political enemies since it has seen nobody is going to step up and stop them.

Therefore, like Soviet citizens who got accurate information by either listening to foreign media (The way we now sometimes do with sources like The Daily Mail) who include information our own woke media purposefully omits, or we have to read between the lines to discern information by it’s absence or bias, in much the same way Soviet citizens read Pravda.

The fly in the ointment is, not only is the Internet extremely unreliable by its very nature, there are active propagandistic methods in play to deliberately counter true (or possibly true) information with false information, specifically crafted to create confusion, sow dissent, and steer people towards, in most cases, the government line. There are active, intrusive, and carefully constructed propaganda campaigns, now done with the help of AI, that are in play, being directed by entities both in and out of America, and entities both in and out of governments.

Therefore, as Freeper spok has accurately pointed out, every piece of information anywhere on the Internet must be assumed, as a starting point, to be false. We have more information available to us, in real time, but any conclusions we draw from that information are only as worthwhile as the time we put in to vet the information.

And that is a lot of work. Not only that, you have to really leverage any intelligence and rationality you might possess to perform a crucial examination of the information at hand. I have personally spent considerable time and effort (as many Freepers have) in this process of examining information and sources, and I can barely do it. I am simply not smart enough, don’t have enough talent, and most critically, not enough spare time to consistently so it well.

And this is where Jim Robinson’s Free Republic has come into play for me, and I suspect, many others

On Free Republic, we can “crowdsource” information and analysis.

Multiple people looking at a problem, picking it apart, contributing some piece of personal acumen, helping some see the problem, while giving everyone the opportunity to see an issue from a different angle.

Not that we all grasp that opportunity to see things differently, but it is available.

On Free Republic, discourse can be stupid, inappropriate, impolite, uncivil, and downright offensive. I have unfortunately participated in all those negative aspects at one point or another, but thankfully with one exception, I have been able to patch up those disagreeable interactions and remain on speaking terms with most other Freepers (and I hope that includes YOU, lapsus calami!).

When I enter the Internet each day, Free Republic is my first stop.

I use it to see what issues exist in the world each day. I used it as my jumping off point for everything non-sports and non-retail related in the world.

If I need accurate information on military matters, I can get it on FR.

If I need to see all aspects of a political issue, I can hear them on FR.

If I need an opinion on energy related issues, we have people on FR who know the industry.

If I need humor, I can get in on FR, everything from sweetly cute humor to grossly off-color humor. Both quality humor and bad humor.

And here is the thing: Crowdsourcing information and analysis with honest people is a form of Intellectual Capitalism.

With Economic Capitalism, you don’t need the ten smartest people sitting in a room in Washington, DC to decide how much to charge for a pair of shoes, how many of them to make, and where to send them. You “crowdsource” that problem via Economic Capitalism to people holding hard-earned dollar bills in their hands who will make those decisions by spending what they think it is worth to set the price, and by supply and demand to determine how many to make and where to send them. It inherently includes a self-regulating mechanism that gives the correct answers to those questions. Instead of relying on the intellectual capacity of ten “smart” people to make the right choices, we rely on millions of people, voting with their hard-earned dollars to make those decisions, and in that way, harness the intellectual capacity of millions to make those choices correctly. And it is made correctly because those ten bureaucrats in Washington, DC have no conception of what it takes to run a gas station in North Dakota. Heck, they don’t have anything but the foggiest idea of how to run a gas station. And the running of a gas station is only one of millions of bits of information they will never have. But millions of people, spending their dollars on gasoline, can contribute slices of information about these things, and, as George Washington famously said, “Many Mickles make a Muckle” which means, many small things become a big thing.

And Free Republic offers a mechanism of Intellectual Capitalism that helps in the same way.

And what I love most about it is that this fabulous mechanism of Intellectual Capitalism is completely in line with one of the most fundamental key concepts of our nation in general, and Conservatism in particular: Freedom of Speech.

With this Intellectual Capitalism, I don’t have to bear the sole burden of information analysis. I don’t have to be one of those “smartest people in the room” who decides. I can leverage the broad spectrum of knowlege. I don’t know anything substantial about mining, but if I come to Free Republic and read about a mining crisis where we have outsourced much of it to countries like Communist China, I am sure to meet a person in a thread who knows about mining. Maybe even mined minerals, or managed a mine. They know what I don’t. So I give more weight to what they say. And if they are a poser, know nothing about mining, and are simply spouting off or disseminating bad or misleading information, civil discourse will often illustrate to an open or critical mind who knows of what they speak, and who doesn’t.

And it doesn’t involve blindly accepting what some Freeper says about a subject (although, with some trusted Freepers with track records, this can happen)

Furthermore, if a topic arises regarding flight deck operations aboard an aircraft carrier, how dangerous radioactive isotopes are, or how medical imagery is acquired, stored, and processed, I can contribute on those subjects and help others in their quest to make sense out of this world we live in.

It isn’t perfect. I make mistakes, because in the end, I still have to collect and process the information. But it isn’t all on me. With Free Republic, I get the expertise (and and widely varying opinions) of thousands of other people, and it is those expert explanations and varied opinions that help me deal with this firehose of real-time information being sprayed into my eyes and ears on a constant, non-stop basis.

I have personally met dozens of quality people due to FR (HT to the DC Chapter of FR) and been able to be a personal participant face to face with the Left in some of the most divisive issues of the last two decades.

I have become personal friends with many Freepers, and to me, that has value. They may mislead me with information due to their ignorance. They may mislead me due to emotion. They may mislead me because they hold a different opinion and try to defend it. But I have found very few cases that lead me to believe, those Freepers will mislead me because they are hostile to what I see as the core values of our nation.

So I come to Free Republic, pay for the privilege, and will continue to do so because I come here to have civil discourse, and to learn from that discourse. I can be a more informed person, and a better person by frequenting Free Republic. If I can only leave my mind open enough to take advantage of it, that is.

That is a personal goal I will pursue. When I fail, I will apologize to anyone who was on the receiving end of my keyboard when my mind was closed, pick myself up, and promise to do better.

To me, if Free Republic is down, the Internet is far less interesting, usable, and informative.