Posted on 07/16/2012 9:47:45 AM PDT by Sark
A couple of days ago, I posted a blog criticizing President Obama over remarks that I perceived to be insulting toward entrepreneurs. In particular, I quoted the following excerpt from his speech: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Since that time, I’ve witnessed a backlash against my post and those of other conservatives who have made similar arguments. While I don’t intend to respond to every backlash like this, I believe that the arguments being made are credible enough to merit a response in this instance.
The people castigating myself and other conservatives have made two general points, and I’ll address both in turn. First, they argue that conservatives cherry-picked a very short excerpt from the President’s speech, and that we did so with the intention of removing any and all context, thereby making his point “beyond comprehension.” In other words, they argue that conservatives maliciously made a misleading sound bite that misrepresents his point.
(Excerpt) Read more at principlesandpolicy.wordpress.com ...
Why not post everything here? Copyright issues between FR and your blog?
Another thing is that the success of business men started long before any government created a road.
Obama must be referring to the fact that in order for you to be successful, some federal regulator HAD TO GET OUT OF THE WAY.
Which he is parsing to mean, “made that happen”.
So!
Anytime you have any measure of success, you should be thankful for the regulator, who didn’t stop you....
To LIBERALS, we “cherry pick” every time we happen to notice the COMMUNISTS revealing their true intentions!
Rush was just saying...what made the roads necessary? It was commerce...and that had nothing to do with the government.
Actually I owe my success to the broad in front of me yesterday buying twin lobsters with a food stamp card. While I purchased hamburgers.
Actually he said paved roads are because of cars...which was really stupid. paved roads have been around since the romans.
Don’t believe what you see or hear. Believe what the media and administration tells
you.
I honestly don’t think it’s a big deal whether I post the entire thing on here or just a good-sized excerpt. I posted enough to explain what the full post will cover, which lets everyone decide whether or not they’re interested enough to keep reading. The link to the rest is clearly available, and it’s not like my blog has ads or anything like that, so I don’t get anything out of it. I just think that if people like it enough to read the whole thing, they might want to read other things I’ve written, too. Also, I’m not really sure how to use HTML on FR, so I can’t carry over the formatting or hyperlinks on here.
The gubmint simply needs to supply a cop to protect my goods, a fireman to douse the fire if they ignite and a transportation system (preferably not high speed rail) to transport them and all the rest is superfluous. But then again all Americans and not just entrepreneurs benefit from the above services.
What follows is intended to be helpful for you, not an attack. I'm speaking purely as an individual; I have no official or even unofficial role whatsoever at Free Republic. But I've been around long enough to have seen the “blogpimping” accusation leveled against too many people who, like you, may honestly not understand the background.
I'm copying this to Jim Robinson and Onyx in case I'm misrepresenting something from Free Republic history.
Many years ago, Free Republic was involved in what became a key precedent-setting case on developing copyright law as it applies to the internet. The case was complex so I'm not going to try repeating the details here and maybe getting some of them wrong, but the bottom line is that Free Republic claimed that the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law allowed its users to copy and paste the full text of articles from newspapers onto this website and then comment on them. A related factor is that at the time, Free Republic was essentially unmoderated or only lightly moderated, so users were acting on their own, not under the control of FR management, but that's not relevant to the excerpting issue.
The eventual solution was that Free Republic agreed to allow newspapers to require that their content be used only in an excerpt form, with a link to the original content. Some newspapers bar Free Republic from using their content entirely, others allow headline and link only, still others require excerpts only. Free Republic maintains a list of newspapers that impose copyright restrictions on posting of their content and the software enforces those restrictions.
Newspapers which impose excerpt-only or stricter rules do so with an implied or explicit threat that if the content is not excerpted, a lawsuit or at least a legal nastygram will follow.
That history is a major part of why people on Free Republic, unlike lots of other websites, have a strong preference toward full-text articles rather than an excerpt. An excerpt implies that the owner doesn't like Free Republic. Today, with the rise of blogs, it also is often a way for people to drive traffic to their blog and use Free Republic to get hits for their blog without participating in the discussions on Free Republic.
Knowing history often helps make sense of current critics.
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