WHEELER Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 This is response to NJCubScouter and to Proud Eagle. NJCubScouter doesnt understand the seemingly dual purpose that I am exhibiting. He thinks I am hypocritical. On the outside, this seems right. But if one is trained to see essences and understands reality, then. (This is truly what philosophy is all about; the discovery of divine and human things and their causes.) How Does Death come? Pause and Think. Answer this to yourself before you move on. Find the answer yourself first. What is one reason we have hands? One reason is that we have the possibility for defending ourselves. Why do we NEED to defend? Because that is one direction that death cometh. From animals or from other humans. One direction implies that there is another direction; Is there? Is there another direction? Yes. The abiltity to abstract and to quantify and to seek essences; this is philosophy. What are white blood cells and their function? To defeat death from within. White Blood cells and T-cells are to defeat harmful bacteria and viruses. There are two directions that the human body faces defeat (death). One from the outside and one from the inside. Lets take again, the Socratic principle of macrocosm/microcosm. What goes in the little so goes the whole. The paradigm does not change. The pattern is the same. (In the post, What is a Republic is another example of this Socratic Principle of philosophy.) Lets look at the higher macrocosm-the body politic. What is the military? For defending against outside forces that seek the death of a particular body politic. What is the Police? For defending against inside forces that seek destruction. In the oath given to military soldiers in America, there is a phrase, to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. Death for anything comes from two directions. This is the same for any organization. Take Christianity. At its very inception faced death from without and within. As in evidenced in the Book of Acts, St. Paul in behest of Jewish authorities sought the death of the Christian movement. Roman authorities sought the death of the Christian movement. Not only did the Christians face death from the outside but also from within, the circumcision party, the Gnostics, the Nicolations, and others. St. Paul struggled against all these forces. Heresies are like viruses to the Christian Faith. The body politic and any human organization is just like the human body. They are living organisms. This modality is the same for the right and the left. Communist and Fascist governments had armies to defend themselves against outside forces AND secret police to root out dissidence from within. Good and Evil face death from within and without. Death comes from two directions and must be faced. There is no escaping reality. The Boy Scouts is no different. It is a living organism and cannot escape this paradigm. The Boy Scouts are facing Romans on the outside and Romans from the inside. Death from within and Death from without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest OldGreyEagle Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 "There is no escaping reality." Finally something you post that I can agree with, of course we can descend into "whose reality" in a few minutes but lets first bask in the glow of common ground Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WHEELER Posted March 9, 2004 Author Share Posted March 9, 2004 Cicero in the Fifth Philippic: "Every evil is easily suppressed at its birth. It is when it has had time to remain in existence that it gathers strength." On Government, Penguin Classic, pg 359. Cicero lost his life to the Evil. He tried his hardest to suppress it but it didn't work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoutingagain Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 OGE I beg to differ, some of us seem to have escaped reality. "Oh reality, it's not for me And it makes me laugh Oh, fantasy world and Disney girls I'm coming back" Brian Wilson, "Disney Girls", from Surf's Up, 1971. A man clearly ahead of his time. SA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
evmori Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 Death cometh when life endeth! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AK-Eagle Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 "Don't take life too seriously.... You'll never make it out alive" -Bugs Bunny Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NJCubScouter Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 Well, Wheeler, thanks for answering my question, finally. And leaving aside your implication that I don't "understand reality" -- I think I understand it pretty well -- when you cut through all the irrelevant analogies, what you are saying actually does make sense up to a point. What I think you are really saying is that you deal with issues one at a time, so you might be defending the BSA on one issue and criticizing it on another. That's ok, but as I said in your case, only "up to a point." I think the thing that makes your posts inconsistent is a matter of degree, and perhaps one of timing. As I pointed out in the thread to which this thread is a response, you rode into this forum on a big white horse as a "defender" of the BSA against its "attackers," and then suddenly you started criticizing the BSA with much greater intensity than anyone else. And when I say greater intensity, I mean in terms of the "language" that you use, the percentage of your posts that are critical of the BSA, and the number and length of your posts. There is one other person, Merlyn, who surpasses you in the percentage of his posts that are critical of the BSA (at or near 100 percent), but consider that Merlyn has been in this forum for slightly more than 3 years and has posted 448 times, while you reach your one-month mark tomorrow and have exactly 200 posts (maybe a couple more before I post this.) (For statistics buffs out there, Merlyn averages 12.4 posts a month while Wheeler will exceed 200 in his first month. I did a little more looking at some numbers, which I will put in another post, I am not sure what thread it should go in.) And then there is the length of most of your posts, which requires no further comment for anyone who has been reading them. And then there is the point on which you are attacking the BSA, namely the involvement of females, and the associated "language" issue. There are a few people in this forum who basically agree with you on the involvement of females, though not in the near-hysterical terms that you use. But most do not agree, and these include men who have extensive experience in dealing both with female Scouters and young female Venturers (OGE first and foremost in the second category.) Plus, there have been women in Cub Scouting almost since its inception (I believe the Den Mother role became official in the 1940's), and women in increasing numbers in all positions in Boy Scouting since the 80's, and guess what? The programs are still here. I suppose that most boys who graduate Scouting are not necessarily ready to grab a gun and fight the Boers (a little B-P reference there), but I think this was also true in the all-male-leader version of Boy Scouting in which I grew up. In fact, my father has told me that when he turned 18 (in June 1944) after being a Scout from age 12, he wasn't ready to fight a war either, but like many men of his generation, he didn't exactly get a choice. As he says (with some poetic license), "When I graduated high school they were waiting for me with a rifle and a bus ticket." They shipped him and hundreds of thousands of others off for a few weeks of training, and they were "ready." (Fortunately for him, he got sent for some additional training, and then different parts of the war kept ending right before he was going to be sent into combat.) But the point is, they didn't great "ready" in the Boy Scouts. Regardless of how you might interpret some of what B-P said, that is NOT what the program is all about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laurie Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 NJ--I agree with your summary of how Wheeler joined in the Scouter.com discussions. The biggest difference I personally have noted between him and others who come here who do not support the BSA (either in part or in its entirety) is the open hostility to any who disagree with him and his contempt for women, not just in the BSA, but in general. Combine that with a refusal to learn about the BSA today, and it makes it hard to think of him as someone with a credible argument either for or against the BSA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NJCubScouter Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 OK, I said I was going to post some statistics, and I did not want to start a new thread for them, so I am just putting them here. What I did was, look at a few members of the forum to see how many times they have posted and how long they have been members of the forum, and calculated the average number of posts per month. (Yeah, I know, I'm not sure why I did this either, I just started comparing Wheeler's and Merlyn's numbers and I got curious, and it sort of got out of hand.) The posters chosen are more-or-less a random sampling of people who seem to post "a lot," plus I threw Merlyn in there for reasons suggested in the previous post. There are a number of others who I could have chosen and who would fit in between others in the "standings." And by the way, the numbers of posts are as of some time this morning, and I rounded down the "time in forum" to the nearest whole month (except in Wheeler's case) but that wouldn't change the averages much. FOG, 1862 posts in 8 months, 232.8/mo. Wheeler, 200 posts in (almost) 1 month, 200+/mo. BobWhite, 4099 posts in 25 months, 164/mo. evmori, 2455 posts in 27 months, 90.9/mo. OGE, 2487 posts in 41 months, 60.7/mo. NJCubScouter, 1322 posts in 24 months, 55/mo. Rooster7, 1406 posts in 34 months, 41.4/mo. eisely, 1526 posts in 40 months, 38.15/mo. Merlyn, 448 posts in 36 months, 12.4/mo. Any errors are the fault of the Windows calculator program. Since the original point of my statistical voyage was related to who was being "critical" of the BSA in their posts, I suppose that in fairness I should add the following, and it all is of course my own opinion: Virtually all of Merlyn's posts have been "critical," and a very high percentage of Wheeler's (that discuss the BSA at all) have as well. FOG criticizes some aspects of the current BSA on a fairly regular basis, and obviously I criticize the BSA's current position on one particular issue, though I'd put the overall percentage of my posts that have been about this issue as probably less than 25 percent. Bob and eiseley are at somewhere around zero percent "critical," and in Bob's case that is only because I am not allowing for negative percentages. As for the others, the percentages would be low, and the criticism when it has appeared has been mild. But I think this confirms what I was saying in my previous post... probably in too much detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fat Old Guy Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 Wow! I think that means that I'm spending too much time on-line. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
evmori Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 NJ, Nice job on the stats! And in the great words of the TV sage "Life's tough. Get a helmet." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WHEELER Posted March 9, 2004 Author Share Posted March 9, 2004 You are right NJCubScouter. My Thesis is that the Boy Scouts have compromised...compromised with something they don't fully understand the complications it has. Never does Man fully realize the consequences he causes. All the what if's... I am not finished posting by far. When one throws a rock into a pond the ripples expand exponentially. Allowing the females in is that proverbial "rock". It is dangerous. I will be proving my point in the future and continuously. Rome wasn't built in a day. The change of words, the change of philosophy, the change of conceptions, the change in methodology are all signs of the creeping influence of what George Orwell, Ayn Rand and others have seen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty_Doyle Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 I suspected that you were drafting a thesis on-line in these forums. Do we get to grade the final version? Continuously? Oh, joy. Laurie's a rock, OGE is a traitor, and so much more ...... to look forward to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty_Doyle Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 I suspected that you were drafting a thesis on-line in these forums. Do we get to grade the final version? Continuously? Oh, joy. Laurie's a rock, OGE is a traitor, and so much more ...... to look forward to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Twocubdad Posted March 9, 2004 Share Posted March 9, 2004 Congratulations, Wheeler, on what must be your most conscise and reasonable post to date! (This most recent one, most definitely not the first one in the thread.) But here is the essential flaw in your thesis: You begin with a false premise that the purpose of Scouting was to "rigorize boys into men," therefore your conclusion that Scouting has been compromised is also false. Time and again you have demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of Scouting. Until you are willing to eduacate yourself as to the purpose and goals of Scouting, you're not going to be taken seriously here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts