Free Republic

Item: An article at The Humanist calls for “expanding humanism to clearly and robustly include sentientism.” The new word there needs explaining. It begins with granting “moral consideration” to sentient beings other than humans. I quote now from the article:The most obvious candidates for moral inclusion are animals other than humans. While scientific debate continues on the margins (sea sponges, for example, are animals with no brain or nervous system), it’s clear that most animals, particularly those we farm in the trillions, are sentient. If we care about suffering and flourishing then it’s sentience, not species membership, that matters.

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at the sheer idiocy of academics, but it would be a mistake to dismiss their cultural power. The academia to established practice pipeline isn’t 50 or 100 years now, but a decade or less. Niche academic theories such as critical race theory have become standard fare in elementary schools, and every corporation has a DEI department. The society we live in was first designed in obscure academic departments and became reality once it filtered through the MSM, Hollywood, corporate America, public schools. The insanity we see everywhere today has been born out of academic...

The first people to deconstruct their faith were not young people in America — they weren’t people dissatisfied with American Christianity. The first people to deconstruct their faith were people in the Garden of Eden — they were people dissatisfied with God. Adam and Eve are the first people to deconstruct their faith. People deconstruct their faith when they’re dissatisfied with their faith — when they’re dissatisfied with God: and it always ends in disaster. People who deconstruct their faith destroy their faith, and they destroy their souls. Deconstruction is essentially just a fancy word for doubt. People who deconstruct...

Several religious denominations have seen memberships fall in recent years, including among young adults and teens. A new survey suggests that many young people perceive a disconnect between themselves and the houses of worship that need believers to sustain their congregations. Half of young people ages 13 to 25 surveyed said they don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter deeply to them, according to a report released Monday by the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Those issues include racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality and gun control. Springtide tracks...

UPDATE: Aug. 14 at 12:35 p.m. EDT: Josh Harris announced that after receiving feedback about his course, Reframe Your Story, he's decided to “pull the course.” In a statement on his website, he explained that he’d “hoped I could use my platform to spotlight other people with more experience and expertise, point people to good resources, and offer questions to help people unpack and make sense of their own journey. But I recognize this approach is flawed. I want to explore different ways to lift up other voices.” Read Harris' full statement here.Original: Josh Harris, the author of the bestselling...

Columbia University is holding a five week long series of lectures for white students on “deconstructing whiteness.” The workshop series is titled “From Ally to Accomplice at Columbia: Working Group for Examining and Deconstructing Whiteness to Mitigate Racial Trauma.” According to the Facebook page for the series, the aim is “for white-identified students to engage in exploration of their white identities and build community and accountability around deconstructing whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an anti-racist lens.”The description adds that it “will not be a support group for white students. Nor will it be comfortable or...

(Skip) Cries of "social justice," "affirmative action," "racial prejudice," etc., ad nauseam, enfranchise the Left to wallow in a fictitious self-regard of moralizing sentimentality. Anyone who opposes leftists is automatically demonized as inhumane. Cowardly Republicans, large corporations like Procter & Gamble, and bureaucrats are shaken down and extorted to comply, for fear of appearing insensitive toward "oppression." Any evidence of political incorrectness can damage employment prospects or even get one fired. We are being thought-controlled and speech-tyrannized. How can we push back against such imperious "bleeding heart" compassion? The ideology has a stranglehold on academia and is being rolled out...

To assume an English major took a class in Shakespeare is a pretty safe assumption, or at least it used to be. Now, not even the Bard of Avon is safe from censorship, as university administrators and faculty use the education system to drive their own agendas. At the University of California, Los Angeles, English majors are no longer required to study one of the greatest writers of all time. Instead, they have to take classes in “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies” and “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies,” in addition to critical theory and creative writing. Dost thou...

The present manifestations of feminism are mere phases of a process that seeks the annihilation of women. It seems a contradiction. Feminism claims to glorify women and their accomplishments. Women’s Studies departments worldwide are supposedly dedicated to the study of women’s achievements and the denouncing of the “oppression” they have suffered over the ages. However, avant-garde feminists reveal the true nature of their nihilistic creed. They desire the destruction of all that was once considered to be female. They claim the feminine ideal is a social construct that inhibits and restrains women from being whatever they want to be. Central...

As a neo-pagan evolutionary materialist (pagan animist), Dennett enthusiastically embraces Darwin's evolutionary theory because evolution – an unseen creative energy that acts upon matter – supposedly provides a 'scientific' explanation for the emergence of life from non-life bearing chemicals, thereby supposedly negating the necessity of the living, supernatural Tri-Personal God. Hence Dennett's delusional insistence that there is no soul/spirit (mind, will) associated with the human brain or any supernatural God or life after death. Thus the central concern of Dennett's career has been to explain how, ".... meaning, function and purpose can come to exist in a world that is...

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind. Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University If you enjoy this speech, keep up with political correctness and how it continues to emerge on college campuses by following our Faculty Lounge blog. Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans...

In 1903, during America’s darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas,” Du Bois wrote in “The Souls of Black Folk.” “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.” Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the 18th-century British orators whom, at age 12, he had discovered in a collection of political speeches. “Every opportunity...

An uneasiness has overtaken the body politic. There is a sense that a terrible clash is about to occur. The establishment’s contempt for Donald Trump, and their machinations to remove him, are validated by the president’s intemperate counterattacks and the glee that his supporters take in his barbs. These two groups do not simply disagree; they consider each other to be illegitimate and unconstitutional outlaws. It is true that Trump’s behavior is not befitting his office and that a certain decorum and dignity in the White House is not only desirable but essential. Democracy is no different from any other...

It’s taken me a while to craft a concise wrap-up to this little series. I’ve realised via the responses to my previous articles that the typical XYZ reader is well-versed in the machinations of the loony left, so I’ve been asking myself “who am I writing these for?”. Bringing it back to my original question, I suppose it has always been a slightly selfish conceit – someone once said writing is therapeutic, and forcing myself to read, research and write these has been its own therapy. Truth be told, I never intended to write 10,000 words on anything in particular,...

Back in the early 1980s, some conservatives began raising the alarm about the rising tide of anti-Americanism in primary and secondary public schools. "History" textbooks became "social studies" textbooks. Teaching the incredible story of America's founding was given short shrift, inspiring stories of individual Americans were omitted in favor of highlighting our many faults and teaching a form of "social history" that concentrated on those who were oppressed in the past. There is nothing wrong with teaching the complex and problematic history of America's past. But not at the expense of the truth. In fact, the amazing story of our...

The radicalization of the Democratic Party is transforming everything that happens in America into another battle in our unending culture war. Is there anything left in American public life that isn’t an occasion for political rancor and division? NFL games are now nothing more than crude pieces of political theater. On Sunday even Vice President Mike Pence got in on the act, showing up to a Colts-49ers game then leaving after a few players knelt during the national anthem. Next day was Columbus Day, which the cities of Los Angeles and Austin decided this year to replace with “Indigenous Peoples’...

Before analyzing Kid Rock as a cultural phenomenon, we first have to spend some time with the Frankfurt School, a group of European academics who rose to prominence in the mid 20th century. No, seriously. The word "dialectic" gets thrown around enough to warrant some clarification. Now used primarily as a pseudo-intellectual shibboleth to refer to social changes, the philosophical roots of the modern concept of dialectic are surprisingly important. Dialectic describes Hegel's idea that as society moves toward its perfected state, it must resolve internal contradictions – issues that cause social unrest and then lead to social change. According...

The greatest threat to the liberal international order comes not from Russia, China, or jihadist terror but from the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture. To say that the world has been getting progressively less stable and more dangerous is to state the obvious. But amidst the volumes written on the causes of this ongoing systemic change, one key driver barely gets mentioned: the fracturing of the collective West. And yet the unraveling of the idea of the West has degraded our ability to respond with a clear strategy to protect our regional and global interests. It has weakened the NATO...

A comatose nation has been revived and is undergoing physical therapy in preparation for return to a normal life. It’s going to be quite a ride, America, so fasten your seatbelt and prepare for takeoff! For the last eight years the nation underwent what was sometimes called fundamental transformation. I call it the deconstruction of America, a process that actually began over a hundred years ago, but was rapidly accelerated by the mass influx of leftist socialists into all levels of government during the Obama administration. It had even progressed - digressed, actually - to the point where the Republican...

Superman should be invincible. Since his car-smashing debut in 1938, he’s starred in at least one regular monthly comic, three blockbuster films, and four television shows. His crest is recognized across the globe, his supporting cast is legendary, and anybody even vaguely familiar with comics can recount the broad strokes of his origin. [...] And yet, for a character who gains his power from the light of the sun, Superman is curiously eclipsed by other heroes. According to numbers provided by Diamond Distributors, the long-running Superman comic sold only 55,000 copies a month in 2015, down from around 70,000 in 2010—a mediocre...