Free Republic

"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...

2005-12-01 The radical loser Hans Magnus Enzensberger looks at the kind of ideological trigger required to ignite the radical loser - whether amok killer, murderer or terrorist - and make him explode I. The isolated individual It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to. Stupid because there can be no definitive winner and because each of us, from the megalomaniac Bonaparte to the last beggar on the streets of Calcutta, will meet the same fate. Difficult because to content oneself with this metaphysical banality is to take an easy way out, as it ignores...

Full-Time Motherhood? How Selfish November 5, 2005 BY JULIE SHILLER Across the nation, privileged young women are seeking to be competitive candidates to gain admittance to prestigious universities. Impressive SAT scores, awards, grades and extracurricular activities are of the utmost importance for college-bound high school students and their families. The priorities of many of today's elite young women, however, are surprisingly conventional, according to one survey. The most fortunate and educated women say they will conform to traditional gender roles after completing their Ivy League degrees. They are choosing careers as full-time mothers and expect to be supported financially by...

By now the images and stories of looting and mayhem in New Orleans--the residents "shopping" for nonessentials in an abandoned Wal-Mart, alleged rapes in the Superdome, a shot fired at a rescue helicopter -- have been burned into the brain of every television watcher and newspaper reader in America. But do they give us an accurate picture of the aftermath of the flood? In fact, if criminal violence were indeed rampant in New Orleans after Katrina hit (setting aside the taking of food, water, bandages, and other necessities of survival), that would contradict much of what sociologists have learned in...

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO., June 13, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A forty-eight page study to be published two weeks from now in the peer-reviewed journal, Psychological Reports, compares extensive and newly released Center for Disease Control (CDC) data, concluding that homosexuals are far more likely to engage in illegal and socially dangerous behaviour than heterosexuals. In fact, according to the study, homosexuals are over 12% more likely to have been booked for illegal activity than heterosexuals.Dr. James Cameron of the Family Research Institute led and penned the report, which is based upon data gathered in 1996 by the CDC. The National Household...

A radical left-wing professor will now exert even more influence upon students at Brooklyn College in New York. According to the Christian news outfit, Agape Press, Dr. Timothy Shortell was recently elected by his colleagues to chair Brooklyn College’s Sociology Department. Why should his promotion concern you? Professor Shortell, a raging social-Marxist, refers to religious people as “an ugly, violent lot,” “moral retards,” and compares faith to “a child-like rationality.” These statements were written by the professor and appeared on a website called Anti-Naturals.org. On Dr. Shortell’s own website he says, “I am proud to be among a group of...

A Brooklyn College professor who described religious people as "moral retards" said he is dropping his bid to become chairman of the department of sociology after the college's president expressed outrage over his views. Timothy Shortell, an associate professor in the sociology department at the CUNY senior college, sent a bitter e-mail on Monday to several departmental heads saying he had decided to step down as chairman-elect and claiming he was a victim of a political attack.Yesterday, the college's administration, led by the president, Christoph Kimmich, announced that Mr. Shortell declined the appointment but would be consulting on the future...

A team of archaeologists is hoping to unearth evidence of medieval Coventry's haves and have-nots. The 12-strong team from North-amptonshire Archaeology is heading a four-month dig looking at the city's past ahead of the multimillion-pound Belgrade Plaza regeneration scheme. The development is set to include new apartments, retail and leisure space, as well as hotels and a casino. Work on the improvement and expansion of Leigh Mills car park has already been started by developer Oakmoor Deeley but the archaeological survey needs to be carried out before work begins on the new plaza. Iain Soden, senior project officer for Northamptonshire...

June 13, 2004 'What's the Matter With Kansas?': Heartland SecurityBy JOSH CHAFETZ WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By Thomas Frank. 306 pp. Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24. IKE the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits (Ann Coulter springs unbidden to mind), Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are ''the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what...

My mother is a teacher and has started working on her Masters Degree. One of her courses is on Family Therapy and she has to plot out her extended family as part of the course work. "Family Themes" was one of things she needed to write down so she asked me for ideas about some of our family themes. I started to look through her textbook to get a better idea of exactly what they wanted. Here is just some of what I found: The Expanded Family Life Cycle Individual, Family, and Social Perspectives Third Edition Edited by Betty Carter...

'Hell is other people,”- Sartre A new generation of sociologists has begun to apply Goffman’s insights to our use of cell phones in public. Kenneth J. Gergen, for example, has argued that one reason cell phones allow a peculiar form of diversion in public spaces is that they encourage “absent presence,” a state where “one is physically present but is absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere.” You can witness examples of absent presence everywhere: people in line at the bank or a retail store, phones to ear and deep into their own conversations—so unavailable they do not offer...

THE ISREALIS: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land by Donna Rosenthal. Israel: CNN has its perspective, Al Jazeera theirs. The BBC has its versions; the New York Times theirs... But how does Israel look to Israelis? Who are these people who order Big Macs in the language of the Ten Commandments? Are they the Sabras (native born Israelis) who believe only sissies wait in line and obey "No Parking" signs? The Ethiopian immigrant children who sing reggae in Hebrew? Or the entrepreneurs who invent everything from the world's most popular computer chips to the latest cancer and heart breakthroughs? The...

BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS Teacher to class: 'F--- God' College says professor owes Christian student apology -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: August 26, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Does academic freedom allow college professors to offend their students with profanity? The question is coming up in Illinois, as an instructor is under fire for displaying the message "F--- God" to his class. Bruce LeBlanc, shown here in 2002, allegedly used his blackboards for profane message (photo: Moline Dispatch) According to the Moline Dispatch, Bob Stotler, a 30-year-old student at Black Hawk College, filed a complaint after his sociology teacher, Bruce LeBlanc, displayed...

Four days in California US sociologists are finally challenging the intellectual stranglehold of economists Jonathan Steele in San Francisco Tuesday August 24, 2004 The Guardian In the ocean-fed air and mild August sunshine of America's most beautiful city, optimism flows easy. But the real mood-lift these past few days was in the windowless conference rooms of two downtown mega-hotels. More than 5,000 American sociologists, plus a few foreign scholars, held their largest and, many said, most vibrant annual convention for years. Bush and Kerry were campaigning through nearby states. Their soundbites were rarely mentioned, but the lack of serious debate...

Myles Kelleher, a professor who teaches sociology at Bucks County Community College, has published a controversial new book on the free market solution to social problems. Kelleher's new book, "Social Problems in a Free Society: Myths, Absurdities, and Realities," offers an alternative to what he sees as a one-sided debate on social problems and how to deal with them. In his book, Kelleher says the field of sociology today is run by decidedly left-wing socialists, both in academic publications and on teaching staffs. Kelleher, who has been teaching sociology at BCCC for 35 years, said there is not a single...

Foxx calls for runoff in 5th District. Runoff election is August 17.

LONG before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran. Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in underground cellars of an old Assassin castle at Alamut, near the Caspian Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights. The discovery of these...

Will too many boys make China and India aggressive militarily? Our country is preoccupied with terrorism. But looking ahead, terrorism may be only one of our problems. China and India between them have 2.3 billion people. Although both nations have embraced some aspects of a market economy, one of them, China, is ruled by autocrats who manage a large military establishment. The People's Republic wants to control Hong Kong more than Hong Kong wants to be controlled and harbors aggressive tendencies toward Taiwan. Both India and Pakistan, though engaged in diplomatic talks, wish to control Kashmir, and each country has...

In promoting its political agenda, one of the world’s largest philanthropic agencies has made itself the biggest single financial contributor to a self-described Roman Catholic group dedicated to vigorously fighting the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and birth control. For more than 20 years, the Ford Foundation and Catholics For A Free Choice (CFFC) have forged a strong political and financial alliance that sacrifices the lives of the unborn to a discredited view of international economic development.[1] Founded in 1973, CFFC has been led since 1982 by Frances Kissling, a feminist who has actively promoted abortion for more than...

The German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) was a major contributor to theory and field studies in sociology. [1] He is best remembered for his distinction between two basic types of social groups. [2] Tonnies argued that there are two basic forms of human will: the essential will, which is the underlying, organic, or instinctive driving force; and arbitrary will, which is deliberative, purposive, and future (goal) oriented. Groups that form around essential will, in which membership is self-fulfilling, Tonnies called Gemeinschaft (often translated as community). Groups in which membership was sustained by some instrumental goal or definite end he termed...

The Myth of Socialization by John Loeffler, Steel on Steel Radio Program September 13, 2002 Every time I run into a public school teen it happens. "Hi, Ryan." Unintelligible grunt response. "Whatcha doing?" "Nuthin'." "Anything happenin'?" "Naw." Whereafter Ryan hurries off to pursue his active life of nothing happening with his friends and I check to see if I have acquired dengue fever without knowing it. So tell me, where is this socialization the government school crowd always promotes as a reason for not home schooling? When home schooling took on serious momentum two decades ago, educrats chanted the...

(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers.) Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us...

Wednesday, December 24, 2003 A Tale of Two Catholic Sociologists: One Incisive, the Other Delusory Bright Promise, Failed Community is a small book, but it has the effect of dynamite. The title refers to the bright promise of an American Catholic Church poised in the nineteen fifties to influence American culture through the natural law philosophy of Catholicism. But the title also refers to the failure of translating that promise when, with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the apparent political success of American Catholics ironically became a death sentence for Catholic influence in American culture. Here is how...

Please help a fellow FReeper. For a school project, I need to interview someone who has immigrated to the United States. Just simple questions - what was life like back home, why did you come, cultural differences experienced, etc. This is for a college level sociology class.

Vast changes since attack mostly negative FALL RIVER -- Nancy Lee Wood, chairwoman of the Bristol Community College Sociology and Psychology Department, believes much has changed culturally since Sept. 11, 2001. But she says the changes almost entirely have been negative. "There have been vast changes in the political culture of America, and they are not for the better," the doctor of Sociology said. "The Patriot Act alone has unraveled 200 years of constitutional legitimacy and we the public are not recognizing this. "An enormous transformation has taken place." She said the political elite and the corporate media are not...

 Here On The Island - by Lewis NapperA Scholarly Critique of the Style, Symbolism and Sociopolitical Relevance of Gilligan's Island  Great works of literature often attempt to confront us with the obvious in such a way as to call the inevitable into question. Some strive to explain through metaphor that which is too complex or too abstract to state literally. Other forms seek only to capture some moment in time so that future generations may experience and learn from what has gone before them.  All of these qualities are ambitiously gathered in Sherwood Schwartz's masterwork, "Gilligan's Island." Through a...