Free Republic

Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism. One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this...

It's that time of year again! We want to know who you think made the biggest impact during 2009! We've been doing this every year since 1996 and the fine folks of Free Republic have been instrumental in helping us make our selection. Last year's winner was none other than Sarah Palin, then Governor of Alaska and ex-running mate of John McCain...Who will it be this year? All you have to do is tell us their name and a few good reasons why you think your nominee should be named the ESR Person of the Year for 2009. Nominations will...

Howdy all! Just wanted to wish everyone at Free Republic a Happy New Year and tell you that we've just seven hours until voting is closed for our 12th Annual Person of the Year Award. We've had a tremendous response from FReepers -- as always -- and if you haven't had a chance to vote yet, all you have to do is go here.

FReepers! Lend me your ears! It's the last call for nominations for ESR's 12th Annual Person of the Year Award! You've only got a few more days before nominations close. FReepers have been instrumental in the past in helping choose someone and I want that to remain true this year. If you'd like to help us out just visit this page.

After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable. The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed....

ESR's Tenth Annual Person of the Year By Steven Martinovich web posted January 3, 2005 My memory is probably failing me but for the past four years I've started out each Person of the Year by writing "It wasn't even close." Well, this year, it wasn't even close. What changed were the results. U.S. President George W. Bush didn't win this year. Although the American president finished strongly in second spot, ahead of other worthy nominations which included the people of Iraq, the U.S. military, Pope John Paul II, Joe Leiberman, ESR scribe/presidential candidate/actor Michael Moriarty, Angela Merkel and Tom...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- As both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature voted to override the governor's "partial veto" of a bill promoting embryonic stem-cell research over the strong objections of the state's Catholic bishops, Catholic leaders in Delaware and Michigan geared up for similar battles. "For the first time in our nation's history, we will be giving government approval for the systematic destruction of innocent human beings so that their body parts can be harvested for scientific research," said Bishop Michael A. Saltarelli of Wilmington, Del., in a May 26 pastoral statement about the Delaware Regenerative Medicine Act, expected to be...

I have to admit that when I opened the call for votes and nominations for our Ninth Annual Person of the Year, I expected George W. Bush to win in a romp. When he won the 2003 Person of the Year Award he received 58 per cent of the vote -- but considering his win this past November, I thought it was a forgone conclusion that he would smash that mark and win an unprecedented fourth straight award quite easily. He won...but it wasn't a romp. In fact, he squeezed out a victory almost as narrow as his re-election win....

WASHINGTON, D.C., Dec. 10 (OneWorld US) -- U.S. civil-liberties and social justice groups marked International Human Rights Day Wednesday by launching a new ''U.S. Human Rights Network'' dedicated to raising awareness about international human rights standards and focusing attention on the U.S. failure to enforce them. More than 50 groups, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) to New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), said they had agreed to join forces to address what they said was ''the alarming rate of human rights violations in the U.S.,'', particularly as it pursues its ''war on terrorism''. The groups...