I am still trying to comprehend why the 2000 or so active
remaining Freepers continue to send their hard-earned money
to Jim Robinson, the site owner of Free Republic. Judging from
the abysmal performance of his web site lately, he certainly
isn't spending it on things like expanded server capacity or
increasing the robustness of his network.
Rim Job (as we like to call him) claims to receive $320,000.00
a year from the Social Security and pension checks of his
deluded followers as love gifts to operate his web site. But
its become almost a rarity these days for Free Republic to
actually be up and fully functioning at any particular time.
Rim Job publicly and routinely asks his users not to use the
search function or other database-intensive features on the
web site because they so negatively impact system performance,
and blames conveniently unidentified hackers for Free Republic's
ongoing connectivity problems. But what Rim Job doesn't tell
them is that the pros simply don't bother with an irrelevant
chat site with a core of 2000 or so active users. There may
indeed be a million or so user names in the databases that
Rim Job touts, but all but a small fraction of those users have
been banned or have left in disgust in response to the various
ideological user purges that Rim Job proudly and unabashedly
conducts from time to time. (Does the term "Bug Zapper
Thread" ring a bell, Freepers?). The real uber-hackers want
to penetrate and deface the Googles and Yahoos of the Internet,
not some backwater bolthole for racists, contrarians, and the
terminally paranoid that Free Republic has become.
So I guess a better question to ask is, "Why do stupid people
persist in being so stupid?" Free clue: It simply doesn't take
$320,000.00 a year to operate an early 1990s-era text-only chat
site like Free Republic, even if every server were plated with
24K gold and Rim Job was using Google-quality redundant pipe
for every connection. Why else would the Freepathons (the
fundraisers that Rim Job conducts on a quarterly basis) have
been getting longer and longer in the past couple of years,
and why hasn't Rim Job opened his company's books to actually
confirm the financial numbers that he's been feeding us? Can
you name any other major political web site that actually
suffered significant service outage on the one day out of
every 4 years that they would actually be relevant, which is
Election Day 2008?
So the bottom line is this: if Freepers want to knowingly donate
their hard-earned money to a man who publicly refers to George
W. Bush as a coked-up fool and war hero John McCain as a
"treasonous bastard", then they have my blessing to do so. It
is perfectly legal to be stupid and to give money to charlatans
and grifters like Jim Robinson. But they really should ask him
to use extra KY the next time he tries to guilt them into
giving him extra money for a "secure server". Because judging
from Free Republic's performance to date, those monies are going
to go straight into Rim Job's pockets, not to realize any
significant improvements to Free Republic.
Olive Garten | 11.11.08 - 11:15 am | #
Freepers are dittoheads or lemmings. If 'high command' asks them to jump off a cliff, they would.
Olive Garten brings up a valid point: If FR is making 320K a year, why is it so ugly and crash so much? DU probably doesn't generate that much revenue but is far more dynamic and user-friendly and codes more effectively than FR. Alan Colmes' blog
Liberaland looks better than all of FR.
Guess it's true that their audience is mainly anti-intellectuals who don't like or can't handle bells and whistles. They're the "AOL Crowd" so they only focus on sites within their prism.