Free Republic

We ought to consider the metaphysical shift that has taken place since the hysteria began: the loss of critical thinking. Death has been at the forefront of our collective minds over the past 18 months. When the WHO declared the advent of COVID-19 a world-wide pandemic, whole swaths of civilization descended into a pit of panic about the unknown virus that had sprung forth from Wuhan. Uncertainty abounded. Was this God’s wrath? Was this a chemical weapon unleashed by a Communist state? Was this nothing but a seasonal respiratory illness that was co-opted for political reasons? In reality, we will...

If it seems that young people these days believe absurd things, that they utterly lack both the ability and the inclination to reason logically—well, it’s not your imagination. Today’s college graduates can’t think, or at least don’t think, because they’re not being taught to. This sad reality, though long suspected, became clear in 2011, with the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. After a four-year study of more than 2300 undergraduates at selective universities across the country, they concluded that a sizeable percentage of them improved little if at all...

As Americans seek to be accurately informed, how does one protect themselves from believing and spreading false information? And how can one consistently spot the truth amidst an abundance of error?With citizens struggling to find trusted media sources, the need for truth has never been greater. A recent Gallup Poll showed that only 9% of Americans trust the media “a great deal,” while 60% “have little to no trust” in the media to report in an unbiased manner.As our team of researchers at iVoterGuide provide analysis for thousands of candidates in thousands of races across the country, this is something...

Questions about the legitimacy of the election results didn’t start on Election Day. They didn’t start in the days that followed when evidence was spewing out like bullets from a minigun. Questions about election integrity started months before when President Trump and many of his supporters started blowing the whistle about unsolicited mail in ballots, predictable lack of oversight by poll watchers and ballot-count observers, and voter rolls being loaded with deceased or unqualified voters. There were even a handful (including NOQ Report) who were ringing the alarm bells about technological voter fraud before the election was underway. What followed...

Critical Theory’s War on Critical Thinking A Virginia school district has decided that critical questions about Critical Theory “will not be tolerated.” Free speech is great and all, they say, but it is “outweighed” by the importance of dealing with social injustice and systemic racism. In other words, if taxpayers don’t like spending thousands of their dollars on foolish and destructive indoctrination for their kids, that is just too bad. They are, by default, in the wrong. What is “Critical Theory” Anyway? Its roots actually go back to some of those dastardly dead, white European intellectuals. Specifically it originated among neo-Marxists,...

Having just written about two separate examples of the woke in Seattle getting rough with people they dislike, I wanted to highlight something about the underlying mindset driving some of this behavior. Yesterday, James Lindsay, one of the people involved in the grievance studies academic hoax, published an essay titled “No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why.” He attempts to explain some of the philosophical reasons why this might be true. In Lindsay’s view the answer isn’t as simple as hoping to avoid being embarrassed. It’s much deeper than that. So far as he is aware, there’s no single explanation published anywhere...

This guy unloads a lot of common sence in 5 minutes. Think about what he is saying, and please share this before Youtube bans it.https://youtu.be/orLeIjRWsCA 

YoungRippa59 Published on Jul 16, 2019 Be sure to visit https:www.EricDJuly.com for updates, news and much more. You can also visit www.ForCanonSake.com to listen to all of the episodes of my podcast. For all things related to my band, BackWordz, visit www.BackWordzMusic.com

I don't have a komando.com account but I listen to her show every week on AM radio. If someone does have a komando.com account, please post a transcript of her show [it played in my locale on 9/2/2018] where she starts off saying that her show has never been political and then starts on an anti-Trump rant.She pretends that she believes that Trump's recent tweets are anti-First Amendment and that Google is not suppressing free-speech. (and if Google is doing so, it's not a problem because Google is a private company and not "the government" thus not a problem)

RUSH: Back in April, an ISIS supporter attack in Paris, Champs-Elysees, a couple weeks before the French elections — by the way, have you heard what they have done in Paris? I don’t know if this is the mayor or if it’s this new president. Do you know what they did? This is a sign, folks. This is a comforting sign to show you how tough the French are in this fight against terrorism. You know what they’ve done? They’ve turned off the lights in the Eiffel Tower at midnight. You know how that is bound to frighten the terrorists?...

"The church is always more than a school. . . . But the church cannot be less than a school." - Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale historical theologian1 Being an idea-oriented, bookish, and cerebral-type of Christian can have its challenges. Often times, intellectually inclined believers find it hard to fit into their local evangelical church.2 This difficulty usually arises because the life of the mind is not often identified as a high church priority. So, unfortunately too many churches within the broad sweep of evangelicalism are, to use Pelikan’s words, "less than a school." Parts of the evangelical theological tradition have struggled...

Never has there been a time in history requiring that an individual be equipped with critical thinking skills more than now. The biggest problem that America is facing today is the inability of the vast majority of the citizenry to think critically. Matt Drudge went so far as to say that Americans are sick. Lack of the ability to think critically is a mental symptom that affects all people regardless of their level of education, economic status, age, race, ethnicity, sex, or political party (although it appears that liberals are more likely to lack such skills). If we are to...

We must get back to common sense, logic and critical thinking and it must begin at home and within our educational institutions We have all heard it before. Students at colleges and universities around the country are demanding that anyone who has a differing opinion than their own should be tarred, feathered, banned and removed from their sight. Student groups claim that inviting anyone with a differing opinion onto their campus threatens their very safety or well-being. Sound ridiculous? Leaders at these educational institutions are listening to these demands resulting in the creation of a generation that is single-minded, self-absorbed,...

A panel discussion at Center for American Progress called for brain research in the classroom and shared their remarks on mandating scientific research in the classroom. Giving a final exam-type test on the first day of class, Benedict Carey, science reporter for The New York Times and author of How We Learn, said, “[It] prepares the brain to receive the information subsequently” because “you see the topics that are coming” later in the semester. He admitted, “Pre-testing is very counterintuitive,” but claimed these pre-tests, which a majority of students fail, “help” students get higher grades on final exams. Glenn Whitman,...

It's not just that there's a lack of a Christian way of thinking -- a "Christian mind" -- but there is hardly a mind at all. Some years ago I read an article in Newsweek about a husband and wife team of scientists who studied ducks. In order to observe their habits, they built a blind by a pond, then settled in to watch. During their investigations, they observed among the ducks incidences of what they called gang rape. While it was not written in so many words, the bottom line of the article was this: If gang rape takes...

[Summary: The Education Establishment likes to pretend that new digital options mean kids don’t need traditional skills. That is a non-sequitur and probably dishonest. ] A new development in education is deciding what “literacy” should be in the 21st century.  With a swirl of technological breakthroughs all around us, elite educators are gaga at the plethora of excuses for pooh-poohing subjects routinely taught in the dark age known as the 20th century.  The National Council of Teachers of English recently announced: “Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change,...

One of the axioms utilized by H.L. Mencken in analyzing politics in the United States stated that Americans were unable to grasp arguments on their face and instead needed them recast in pure Manichean terms, with the most repellent of devils on one side and the purest of angels on the other. Mencken was on to something there, something that still holds true today, as is shown by the debate concerning the NSA scandal. This scandal is being fought out -- particularly among conservatives -- on purely Manichean grounds. Certain commentators insist that since the NSA operates to protect national...

As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one. The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it.

...The one thing modern education does not do very well is teach critical thinking and this needs to change. In my own life, it was the hall way bull sessions of high school and college that probably did more along this line than any class. In Space Cadet, this took the form of the hall way bull session, but in Starship Troopers it was an actual class called History and Moral Philosophy...

Younger voters are usually liberal anyway - until they get a real job and see how much the government takes out of their paycheck. By the time they get married and have kids, the natural equilibrium in politics is re-established and a majority become Republicans. But how could they have been fooled by such a charlatan? A new study shows that college students fail to develop critical thinking skills.McClatchy: An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are...