Free Republic

In Internet Forums and Social Dynamics: Part I: Everybody is someone else’s weirdo, I dealt with the issue of self-selection on internet discussion groups, using Free Republic as an example. I explained that people who share values tend to evaluate newcomers to see if they are truly “members” of the group or not, by analogy to well-known statistical methods, before deciding whether to accept them or not. In Internet Forums and Social Dynamics: Part II: Snapbacks, I discussed the often humorous process by which people sound one another out, and the fireworks which oftentimes result when a person is suddenly...

In part I of this series, Internet Forums and Social Dynamics: Part I: Everybody is someone elseÂ’s weirdo, I observed that like-minded people cluster into groups on the internet. Using Free Republic as an example (as it is the only site I feel I have any right to talk about), I showed how peopleÂ’s reactions to other posters are based on observation of the other posterÂ’s opinion, and that the process used to evaluate other posters bears an analogy to statistical techniques used in industry. In this part, I consider some of the social tensions which occur during conversations /...

One of the things that is fun about forums such as Free Republic is the sheer volume and scale of topics discussed. Everything from discussions of GOP primary races (come BACK, Sarah!) to speculations on the Middle East, from Kim Jong-un to fitness resolutions for the New Year, from Naughty Teacher threads to black helicopter speculations. If the Internet is a microcosm of the real world, then Free Republic is a microcosm of the internet. And all helpfully sorted by keyword, date, and author in order to make drinking from the fire hose easier. But of course, not is all...

In 2010, the Hong Kong organization Noah’s Ark Ministries International or NAMI announced they had discovered the legendary vessel on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey and were subsequently accused of perpetrating a hoax. Now, a professional archaeologist states there is significant merit to their discovery. Harvard University educated archaeologist and director of the Paleontological Research Corporation, Dr. Joel Klenck, surveyed the site, analyzed the archaeological remains and completed a comparative study. “The site is remarkable”, states Klenck, “and comprises a large all-wood structure with an archaeological assemblage that appears to be mostly from the Late Epipaleolithic Period.” These assemblages at...

A difficult, delicate conversation here in our latest distillation of another critically important conservative/libertarian book. These ideas are like discovering continents; you cannot undiscover them. If you're able to figure out which book we're discussing before we mention the name of the book, you are at the top of your class.

If you want to avoid seeing your 18-year-old turn into a freak within the first year of college, it’s best to make sure he, she, or it avoids taking a course in sociology. That is especially the case if your kid plans to attend Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Professor Laurie Essig teaches a course at Middlebury called “The Sociology of Freakishness.” She justifies the course by saying that “American popular culture began with the freak show” and that “P.T. Barnum taught us that freaks are always made- not born.” Better not tell that to GLEAM (Gay & Lesbian Employees...

Illinois' own Dr. Eric Wallace reprimands fellow black Americans in a recent controversial Freedom Journal's Magazine column for the community's misguided devotion to Democrats. He compares voting for Democrats to Pavlov's conditioning experiments:

Frank Schaeffer, the son of the late Christian worldview apologist Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984), writes the following in a post-election article that was published on the ultra-liberal Huffington Post website: “One reason the Republicans won on Tuesday is because many of their supporters have already given up on this world and are waiting for the next. I know, I used to be one of them.” One of the major faults of his father’s worldview was its lack of a viable eschatology. I’m not the only one to make this observation. William Edgar, a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, recounts...

When academics venture off campus, they may take a little longer to notice things than the rest of us. Colgate sociologist Meika Loe seems to have had several such epiphanies. “For her senior thesis, she decided to get a job at Bazoom’s, a restaurant in San Diego whose concept was based on women’s sex appeal,” Jenn Howard wrote in The Observer at Boston College on October 19, 2010. “The restaurant’s motto was ‘Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.’” “She took the job to immerse herself in this culture, conducting interviews and doing research along the way.” Most casual observers would have been...

Columbia, SC -- She’s conquered music, makes a fashion statement, has influenced politics… now she’s a course subject at the University of South Carolina. I’m talking about Lady Gaga. Starting this spring the University will offer a course titled “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”. Longtime sociology professor – Mathiew Deflem – will be teaching the course. Normally his focus is on criminology, policing, and the sociology of law. But the professor admits that he is a huge fan of Lady Gaga. To his knowledge this is the only course of it’s kind in the country.

The church is shrinking; Christians get divorced more than anyone else; non-Christians have a very low opinion of Christians. That’s the bad news many people hear when it comes to Christianity in the United States. And a lot of it is lies, says sociologist Bradley R. E. Wright, of Storrs, Conn. Wright presents an analysis of previous research in his new book, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites … and Other Lies You’ve Been Told, to offer readers a more accurate view of American Christianity. He acknowledges that it’ll be difficult to change popular beliefs about Christianity and Christians even with more...

Enlarge Image Fair is fair. Norwegian school children in this study worked hard to earn their money before deciding on a fair way to share it. Credit: Image courtesy of Knut Egil Wang Children start off like Karl Marx, but they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that children's views on fairness change from egalitarian to merit-based as they grow older. The results help explain why society rewards high achievers with high pay, and they could help educators better motivate children. The find comes thanks...

Sociology For Adults Only Malcolm A. Kline, January 20, 2010 Like Brittney Spears and Madonna or Tiger Woods and a groupie, Sociology and Pornography had to meet, and on the stomping grounds of the former field of study. Wesleyan just approved a forum—Sociology 420—entitled Pornocopia: Society and Pornography. The best passage is: “We hope to meet once a week for 2 hours in the evening. Anytime movies will be shown, there will be a second meeting for 2 hours. This would allow plenty of time for discussion as well as sufficient time to watch any documentaries as a class.” Right…...

First-century believers could have offered tangible evidence that there was little chance for the gospel to have an impact on the status quo of religious and civil oppression in their day. How could a small band of men—led by a fisherman (Peter) and a tentmaker (Paul)—living under Roman occupation ever conceive that their circumstances would change enough so that the gospel message would lead to the transformation of the world? To add to the improbability of a world-wide impact, soon after the victorious ascension of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on His disciples, one of their own...

If you believe in evolution, there is nothing wrong with rape. In fact, you can’t really call it rape. Whoopi Goldberg dismissed Roman Polanski’s rape conviction by declaring that it “wasn’t rape-rape” (see her comments on The View.) As a firm believer in evolution, she should have said, “There’s nothing wrong with rape or sexual aggression. That’s how we all got here!” Here’s the premise: Whatever animals do in nature is natural. What’s natural is normal. What’s normal is moral. So if penguins engage in homosexual behavior, then that behavior must be natural, normal, and moral. How can we mere...

Finding could offer insight into autism and other disorders Related Links: Dr. Ralph Adolphs Pasadena, Calif.—In a finding that sheds new light on the neural mechanisms involved in social behavior, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed the brain structure responsible for our sense of personal space.The discovery, described in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, could offer insight into autism and other disorders where social distance is an issue.The structure, the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped regions located in the medial temporal lobes—was previously known to process strong negative emotions, such as anger and...

If Sally is over six feet tall and Bill is over six feet tall, too, are Sally and Bill over six feet tall? What if you had a room full of Sallys, each at least six feet, and in that room are also a gaggle of Bills, all over six feet. Would it be true that each person in that room is at least six feet tall? Men, on average, are taller than women. It is certainly true that some women are taller than some men, but in any collection of “the tallest” most of those collected will be men...

People who get divorced are more likely to suffer health problems including heart disease and cancer, even if they go on to remarry, a study has shown. Divorce and widowhood have a long-term negative effect on physical wellbeing that is only marginally ameliorated if the person finds a new partner. The stress and financial uncertainty of separation can continue to take their toll on our bodies decades after the Decree Absolute comes through, the research indicates. Divorced people have 20 per cent more chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer than married people, according to the study...

From Gloucester to Afghanistan: the making of a shoe bomber Saajid Badat this week pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up a plane. What drove this quiet football fan to thoughts of terror? Mark Honigsbaum and Vikram Dodd Saturday March 5, 2005 The Guardian He seemed the model British Muslim citizen - a poster boy for integration whose knowledge of the Qu'ran and achievement at grammar school made Gloucester's close-knit Islamic community proud. When in November 2003 anti-terrorist police turned up at the terraced house in the Barton and Tredworth district of the city that Saajid Badat shared with his...

When I was in college I took the introductory course to sociology. At the time, I thought it was a poorly developed subject, taught by quirky idealists. I sort of hoped that their fraud would be uncovered and that they would fade away. It seemed as though they relied heavily on opinion and played fast and loose with flimsy data. Since then, I have come to see modern-day sociology, as it is taught in the USA, as the greatest threat to Western Civilization. continue

Published online 4 March 2009 We cannot live by scepticism alone Harry Collins1 Harry Collins is director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science at Cardiff University, UK. He is currently working on a book about tacit and explicit knowledge. Email: collinshm@cf.ac.uk Top of pageAbstract Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific truth and sociologists have fostered too much scepticism — social scientists must now elect to put science back at the core of society, says Harry Collins. J. TAYLOR The term 'science studies' was invented in the 1970s by 'outsiders', such as those from the social sciences...

A Double Take on Early Christianity MIKE AQUILINA Tracking the growth of Christianity 2,000 years ago is an ambitious undertaking for a sociologist. But Rodney Stark found it irresistible. Reading recent histories of early Christianity, he began to do some number-crunching. Soon, he says, it was a consuming "hobby." And, before long, he had written a best-selling book, The Rise of Christianity. What he found in his study of the first Christian centuries was an astonishing growth rate in the number of Christians of 40 percent per decade. From a small band of twelve, the Church had grown to 6...

Nobody likes to pay fines for speeding or littering, but does the punishment really promote good behavior? The answer appears to be yes, according to research published today in Science. Even just the long-term prospect of a penalty seems to motivate people to cooperate for the common good. Cooperation for the public welfare is one of the characteristics of human societies, yet it's hard to see how altruistic behavior evolves from individuals looking out for their own interests. Altruistic behavior can have a high individual price, after all--the chance of death in war or costly carbon taxes, for example--and that...

As I sat through another interminable middle school award ceremony that lasted longer than the contest itself, I pondered how the self-esteem movement has wrecked this country. I had plenty of time since well-meaning adults were handing out participation medals to every eager participant. This current financial calamity is the logical result of the self-esteem movement. Don't get me wrong, I think self-esteem is wonderful when sprung from a healthy self-image and buoyed by real accomplishments. But like diversity, it is worthless when pursued for its own sake. Presidents Clinton and Bush were full of self-esteem as terrorists plotted the...

This sense of entitlement on the part of Chinese men is a big problem in China. In a country where 'manhood' is still highly prized, however, such behavior is not entirely surprising. One child families - where parents and grandparents spoil their children 'silly' - produce millions of men who grow up believing that they are the kings of the world. After all, even well into their late teenage years, everything is done for them. Their mothers wash their clothes, cook meals for them, and their fathers pay for four years of university - the young men never have to...

"The dad vs. stepdad debate is no mere academic question, but instead an issue which has serious ramifications in family law. Advocates of sole or primary custody for mothers often insist that children do fine with 'father-figures' instead of their fathers." My new co-authored column, Media Misreports Study: Stepdads Better than Dads? Not so Fast (Tacoma News-Tribune, 8/13/08), details the way the media has distorted a recent study about fathers. Media Misreports Study: Stepdads Better than Dads? Not so Fast By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks “Stepdads beat biological fathers in parenting, study says.” “Stepdads do better than real dads...

My father always said that anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination remembers what they were doing at the precise moment the president was shot. This may well be true, but we also lucidly recall the circumstances of far lesser events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The furor its conclusions caused is forever ingrained in my memory. At the time I was a psychology graduate student and found that most of my associates were familiar with the work but...

Books | Review of: The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" (1944), published in the same year as Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," is as sacred a text to the opponents of free-market capitalism as Hayek's is to the Chicago School. To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in "The Great Transformation." It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals...

The idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority has come to a dead end Question one: what happens when you leave rubbish outside people's homes for two weeks? The planet stops overheating and life on earth is saved? Nope. But you do get lots of well-fed rats and flies happily paddling around the households of suburban Britain. Apparently, the Government has been sitting on research which made the startling discovery that failing to empty rubbish bins every week produces a rise in disease-carrying rodents and insects. Who, one wonders, actually commissioned this project?...

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family. That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can't explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears. The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic "Family and Civilization," which has just been republished in an edited version by...

The famous 6 degrees of separation theory fades under scrutiny. It’s rare for a sociological study to wind up a part of pop culture, but that’s what has happened to Stanley Milgram’s “small world” study, which posits that all of the people on the planet are connected to one another through an average of six acquaintances—or through six degrees of separation. The first popular use of Milgram’s study was the John Guare play Six Degrees of Separation, which was later made into a movie. Then came the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, created by college students, in which players...

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The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences. After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw’s Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman—clearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff (Yoga? Pilates?...

A reorganization of workers at the Swedish Tax Authority is partly shaped on studies of apes, according to a leaked internal report. Employees are not flattered by the comparison. The tax authority is currently undergoing its largest reorganization for many years. One of the foundations of the restructuring plan is a report which says that studies of apes show that people work best in groups of 150. The reorganization was announced earlier in the summer. Work is being moved from small towns to larger towns and cities. Around 1,350 people are affected by the move. Economies of scale are a...

Not in my backyard, either Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 MONTREAL -If you live in Montreal, and an acquaintance tells you she lives in Outremont, you may ask her with a wink -- the question is not perceived as anti-Semitic--if she lives in Outremont ma chere or Outremont kaschere. In Outremont, Montreal's most beautiful neighbourhood, one enclave, the aforementioned Outremont kaschere, is home to thousands of Hasidic Jews, who live peacefully but separately, very separately, from their neighbours. As in any Hasidic quarter, you can walk about there in assured physical security, although you may...

One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members. Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.” However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The...

April 24, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- A disturbing video of a young boy beheading a Pakistani hostage has shocked and angered the Afghan public and international observers since it began circulating several days ago. Rights activists condemned the use of a child in the execution as "new low" -- even for an extremist group like the Taliban. In Afghanistan, it is unclear what effect the grisly video might have on militants' efforts to recruit sympathizers. more

This short essay begins with noting the recent death of Seymour Lipset as well as the previous deaths of Phillip Reif and David Reisman. The author then wonders why there are no new leaders. "...Of course, sociologists are still being trained, books are being published, and university departments of sociology show no sign of going out of business. But the sense of free-wheeling inquiry that drew some of the best minds of the 1950s and 1960s into sociology -- in what appears now to be its golden age -- is no longer in evidence. Seymour Martin Lipset explored the social...

Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path... at three miles an hour. On his tricycle. Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And... wait a minute... those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves. Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their...

“Today is ‘Juneteenth,’” Dr. Carey Stronach states in the small, crowded blue room of the Rayburn House Office building on Monday, June 19 at the “Survivors of the Academy Luncheon.” “The day that slavery ended, 151 years ago.” “I bring this up,” Stronach, 65, continues, “because, recently, certain freedoms have been violated at Virginia State University (VSU).” The caucasian Dr. Stronach, who has been a physics professor at VSU for forty years, recently retired two years early from the historically black college because he was sick of the “mistreatment of the faculty and staff by a highly politicized administration.” Along...

Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast. I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes...

A young, single mother informed a Tribune reporter that "marriage is for white people." The statistics back up her words. More than three-quarters of black babies are born out of wedlock, according to the St. Joseph County Health Department. South Bend sociologist Johnnie Griffin says blacks were more likely to be raised by both parents during slavery days than they are today. Nearly 1.5 million babies, a record, were born to unmarried women in the United States last year, the government reported. And it isn't just teenagers anymore.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.[snip] Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime. And why do so many young...

Michelle has kindly posted the infamous "whiny kids grow up to be conservative" paper in PDF format. Would you believe that the paper claims that conservative boys were "visibly deviant?" Yes, it does. Click here to download and read the entire document from Michelle's site. Much of it is pretty boring, mundane stuff, but there is a noticeable pattern of ascribing negative behaviors to conservatives and positive behaviors to liberals.Read this part of the report. The participants’ LIB/CON index scores at age 23 were correlated—for the genders separately— (1) with their CCQ item values gathered 20 years earlier, (2) with...

Some women still party as if invulnerable It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths. A group chants, ''Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she met hours earlier. Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear. ''It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. ''It happens...

An academic controversy recently erupted over the decision of Science Magazine editors to refuse publication of an article about gender difference by British biologist Peter Lawrence. Though the prestigious journal had given Dr. Lawrence a publication date and article proofs, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy abruptly notified the author that the piece could not be published because it did not offer "a strategy on how to deal with the gender issue." The article, in edited form, is reproduced below. Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those...

Darwinism has had it all its own way for too long, Warwick's controversial sociologist tells Zoë Corbyn Guardian In 1981, in a courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, Michael Ruse testified that "creation science", the faith-based explanation of life's beginnings, was not science at all. "In my opinion," Ruse told the court, "creation science is religion." It was the first time in America's fraught struggle over evolution that a philosopher of science had taken the stand and his words made a big impression on Steve Fuller, then a 22-year-old PhD student. "It set a precedent because, up to that point, the...

Sociology is an academic discipline that has had an unhappy history since its founding in France in the nineteenth century. It has never had a consistent methodology and has been racked by competing theories. The grandiosity of much sociological theory has been matched only by its incoherence. Although the subject has been taught at Australian universities for more than fifty years, its practitioners have shown little concern about de­scribing the country to itself and far more interest in denounc­ing it for its failings. This is especially true in race rela­tions. For the past twenty years most sociologists of race have...

Understanding how liberals and conservatives differ, from conception on At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, and even genetics are attempting to assay this mysterious chemistry. These are particularly important questions right now. “When Goldwater ran in 1964, he said there wasn’t ‘a dime’s worth of difference between the two big parties,’” says Radcliffe Institute fellow and associate professor of government J. Russell Muirhead, who is working on a forthcoming book, Left and Right: A Defense of Party Spirit. “It used to be that most major legislation was passed by whopping bipartisan majorities, and lawmaking was characterized,...

< Return to Adherents.com homepage Composite U.S. Demographics Introduction This table lists some major demographic groupings in the United States. Race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other factors are factors in personal and group identity. This table is unusual in that it presents a merged list of these factors. This more accurately reflects actual American society, in which most people belong to more than one group. All individuals can be classified into multiple groupings below. This list is not comprehensive. Please write to suggest additional groups. Group Number Percent ofU.S. population Total 1 284,800,000 100.0 % English-at-home speakers 6 245,497,600 86.2...