Free Republic

A strange paradox is emerging in America: Overall violent-crime rates are down, but active shooter events — in which a person is trying to kill multiple people in a populated area — appear to be on the rise, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Meanwhile, a just-released study finds that although the United States has just about 5 percent of the world's population, the country has 31 percent of the world's mass shooters. The reasons for these numbers are complex, researchers say, but the data suggest that the availability of guns, and perhaps the American obsession with fame, may...

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, caused a firestorm last month when she publicly compared her governor, Republican Scott Walker, to Adolf Hitler in a tweet. She poured fuel on the flames by tweeting at incoming freshmen who were Walker supporters, encouraging them not to attend the school because of Walker’s education funding policies. Then, she apologized. Now she’s promoting a class she’s teaching this fall on “scholar activism.” The graduate seminar will “explore the biographies and narratives of a diverse array of scholar activists, examine the sociopolitical and economic forces shaping their work, and consider...

One of the leading lights of Marxism on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison brings home a sweet salary of $170,000 per year. The well-heeled sociology professor is Erik Olin Wright .. The tenured, capitalism-hating professor’s annual salary of $170,000 is $117,587 greater than the household income of a typical Wisconsin family and is in the top 2 percent of all Americans. Whil an average middle-class family in Wisconsin survives on $4,368 per month, the Marxist professor enjoys a cushy monthly income of $14,166. He will teach exactly two courses in the fall semester for this princely sum. ......

Zandria Robinson, who taught Sociology at the University of Memphis, stated that whiteness is "terror," among other inflammatory statements online. She was dismissed yesterday from the college for her blatantly racist statements. What eventually led to Robinson's firing were the following racist tweets: The University of Memphis eventually learned about these ridiculous tweets, as well as comments that she didn't want her children "in school with snotty privileged whites," and have subsequently dismissed her:

Incoming Boston University sociology professor Saida Grundy was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2008 after she made a fake account for another woman on an adult website. Grundy was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at the time. Grundy first gained widespread attention this month because of tweets in which she called white, college-aged males a “problem population.” She’s most recently been in the news due to comments she posted on a Facebook thread in February, when she argued with a woman who’d been sexually assaulted. ... Grundy was charged with felony counts of identity theft and using...

The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Sociological Association (ASA) submitted friend of the Court briefs in the Windsor case. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. If the Windsor Court majority relied on those briefs, it was reliant on snake oil, not science. The APA and the ASA should be the guardians of good science. Instead, they have joined the ranks of the pink panzers of political correctness. Most studies we have seen that claim that children raised by same-sex parents suffer no disadvantages are so seriously flawed that in...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a wide range of thinkers, both secular and religious, struggled to make sense of the profound evil of war, particularly Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. One such effort, “The Authoritarian Personality” by Theodore Adorno and three co-authors, opened up a whole new field of political psychology—initially a small niche within the broader field of social psychology—which developed fitfully over the years, but became an increasingly robust subject area in 1980s and 90s, fleshing out a number of distinct areas of cognitive processing in which liberals and conservatives differed from one another. Liberal/conservative...

...Carle Zimmerman, Harvard sociologist, studied every major empire and its fall and more specifically, he evaluated and traced the role of the family in each empire. He concluded that families go through three distinct phases. The last occurring just before each major empire fell. In his book, Family and Civilization, he listed these characteristics of families in the final stage. So, you listen and then you tell me, where you think we are and how important this is. One, marriage lost its sacredness and alternative forms of marriage were advocated. Two, feminist movements flourished. Three, parenting became more difficult. Four,...

The Center for American Progress has attempted to tackle a growing bipartisan issue: over-criminalization and over-incarceration. A recent panel discussion at CAP featured University of Texas sociology professor Becky Pettit who argued that “incarceration is deeply concentrated among men, those who are young, and those of color.” She noted out of the 2.2 million inmates in the prison system, “approximately half of them are black.” She claimed that, “Among young black men who drop out of high school, over a third are incarcerated on any given day.” She did not mention that their victims outside the gates are also likely...

Satan falling from heaven, as depicted by Gustave Dore in an illustration for John MIlton's "Paradise Lost". In his first homily, given on March 14th, Pope Francis cautioned the faithful that “he who does not pray to the Lord, prays to the devil.” “When we do not profess Jesus Christ,” he further insisted, “we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.” Since that day, he has spoken often of the one he has called the “prince of this world,” and the “father of lies.” And, in the book, On Heaven and Earth, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio devoted...

Racism may be a quality innate to humanity, with ostensibly smarter people simply hiding their racism better than others. A new study shows that white Americans with greater socioeconomic status — often perceived to be associated with greater intelligence and sophistication — espouse more egalitarian ideals compared to their lower echelon counterparts. But those Americans are just as likely to support the preservation of social and economic privilege, by rejecting fair housing and other policies relating to racial integration. Wodtke, a sociology doctoral candidate, analyzed data on racial attitudes from more than 20,000 white Americans participating in the nationally representative...

For centuries, Christians thought culture would change if we just had a majority of Christians in the culture. That has proven to be a false assumption. Culture is defined by a relatively small number of change agents who operate at the top of cultural spheres or societal mountains. It takes less than 3-5 percent of those operating at the top of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values represented on that mountain.For example, this is exactly what advocates in the gay rights movement has done through the "mountains" of media and arts and entertainment. They have strategically used these...

Faking studies and data has been a long standing tactic of the liberal left. Now a highly acclaimed con-man of the left admits his fraud.

East Carolina University (ECU) has launched a new campaign that attempts to pressure employees to affirm homosexuality despite their religious and moral objections to the lifestyle. Couched in the language of safety and inclusion, the program promises to brand as intolerant those who refuse to accept the university's official position on matters of private sexual morality. This is especially problematic, given that ECU is a public university. The campaign was launched with a profoundly unwise email, sent by university employee Summer Wisdom under the subject line "Gay? Fine by me." She begins: "This spring the LGBT Resource Office (Lesbian, Gay,...

A few months ago I went to an all expenses paid job interview in another city. The interview went well and I was one of the top 2-3 candidates. However I did not get the job, which is fine by me for reasons that I will mention later on in this post. I did however find the ‘rejection’ email interesting because it is one of the better examples of what passes for communication in the corporate environment today. Here is the name-redacted email..

Washington, D.C., residents watch more porn than the rest of America: study • Research from PornHub.com says residents of the nation’s capital watch 14.18 online videos per person in a year. Hawaii is second, with 7.57 per year. Politics has always been dirty, but a new study takes the expression to a level so stimulating that it’s hard to believe. Residents of Washington, D.C., watch nearly twice as much online pornography as people in any of the 50 states, according to a study published by XXX site PornHub.com. Horndogs in the nation’s capital consumed online pornography at a rate of...

This is a belated fifth post in a series on Internet Forums and Social Dynamics. In Part I, I pointed out how the internet self-selects into mutually exclusive groups according to common interests or beliefs. Part II provided an amusing look at the reactions within a group when posters to a forum go against the prevailing groupthink. Then Part III showed how segregation of internet groups occurs not only by interests but by common levels of intellect, sophistication, or expertise in a subject. And most recently, Part IV showed how the sheer size and untamed nature of the Internet, and...

French admit they are 'rude, stroppy, and slothful' The French have admitted they are "rude, stroppy, and slothful" in a new survey about what they think of their own behaviour. The poll revealed 97 per cent of Paris public transport users believed fellow travellers were "ill-mannered" and lacked civility. The biggest gripe was people forcing their way onto trains before other passengers had got off. Other irritations were passengers talking too loudly on mobile phones, and people sprawling over two seats in packed carriages. Also included in the list of annoyances were queue-jumping at ticket counters, leaping over barriers without...

I am a Canadian economist who has worked on family issues in Canada and the U.S. for the past 26 years. Although I’ve mostly studied matters of divorce, custody, child support, and the general institution of marriage, for the past few years I’ve been working on series of empirical projects related to same-sex marriage. I’ve been using a special data set in Canada that is large (over 300,000 individuals) and random (with weights), that directly identifies sexual orientation, and that was designed by Statistics Canada. In the process of working on same-sex marriage I have read almost every study...

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...