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Thomas Sowell interview

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Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#351

Post by mcguire »

altcognito wrote: post #98
uniqueid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any measure that makes sense to me, and I've lived through a few decades now. I don't even think America represented such a menagerie of viewpoints in the late '60s.

That’s what I’m wondering. The internet has sharpened so many viewpoints (not in a good way) . My question is sincere and curious. There might be lots of pressure to push opinions in one direction or another but that’s not conformism, quite the opposite.

It's probably a reference to http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#353

Post by [deleted] »

BurningFrog wrote: post #125
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think Sowell is a very important thinker in his own right. At the same time, there is nothing conservatives love more than a black intellectual who strongly agrees with them. Perhaps for both good and bad reasons. That adoration does color the perception of people like Sowell.

[deleted]

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#354

Post by jahaja »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #330
jahaja wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority. Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. A top-down vanguard too. > but what would he say about parent-child relationships? The same competence argument applies to child rearing.

> Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.

> But these are voluntary structures?

They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#355

Post by john-shaffer »

BurningFrog wrote: post #261
john-shaffer wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perception of Sowell is colored because he's a black intellectual? That sounds pretty damn racist. How about not judging black people when they don't fit in the box you want to put them in?

Can't tell if this is a joke or not. For the record, I'm not having that perception. But many will judge people by who agrees with them.

Not a joke. I got heated over (what seems to me) whitewashing of liberal racism. It is a very real problem that liberals can spout blatantly racist garbage ("You ain't black") but never actually get classified as racist. Yet merely thinking capitalism is a good system is enough to get one classified as a racist and a fascist.

I apologize for getting triggered on the second part of your post and forgetting the first, but I think it's very important to call racism racism. Calling racism "colored perceptions" is so misleading as to be false.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#356

Post by RoboticWater »

_fq4v wrote: post #338
RoboticWater wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has put forth the argument that Sowell believes systematic racism cannot ever exist. The comment I was responding to literally said "It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those." A very clear implication that systemic racism doesn't exist. Now, this may not be Sowell's views, but fortunately for S…

> Now, call me crazy, but given that he believes it once existed, I find it hard to believe that he also believes that it's just over and done with now. Yes, he does believe racism exists within systems. But this is not what is meant by 'systemic racism'. Today, systemic racism is both a description of a problem, as well as an insinuation of its cause -- namely 'white privilege' and white hegemony -- and an insinuati…

See, this just comes off as reactionary, as if saying "I believe in systemic racism" somehow secretly casts a vote for progressive policies behind your back. Is it really so hard to say "I believe that our institutions are systemically racist, and I believe that egalitarianism is best facilitated by the market"? It just seems strange to get caught up in the "culture war" notions that terms are getting co-opted for agendas and the like, when we can just address the actual issues themselves.

Also, if you believe that institutions discriminate against Black people, is the direct implication not that Whites are privileged over them in these spaces?

And as for school choice, my understanding was that the research showed that school choice worsened racial education outcomes, like this paper claims [1]. I know I've seen other research to this effect, but this is just one of the first results of google scholar. If nothing else, I would assume that any school choice policy must be coupled with a progressive transportation program, lest that choice become determined by geographic disparities, which because of segregation policies both on the books and within people's historical preferences, just bakes in racial disparities.

Regardless, to act like school choice is some kind of underground counter-culture movement to a progressive-dominated education system, when Betsy DeVoss is Secretary of Education, seems misguided at best. I don't know why you feel the need to dance around terms like "systemic racism" as if it will inadvertently empower a progressive movement when that progressive movement isn't even in power.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.20226?ca...

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#357

Post by AnimalMuppet »

peterpeppers wrote: post #332
manfredo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing China and Rome to a modern economy is basically impossible. Those were agrarian societies whose net output per unit of territory was largely static, and determined by the amount of food that can be grown in the land. I don't think it's valid to categorize them as either socialist or capitalist societies. Marx agreed: he wrote of feudalism (and probably, by extension other agrarian civilizations) as a distin…

The fact that they were agrarian societies doesn't negate the fact that both China and Rome often cycled between socialist and capitalist styled policies. Feel free to substitute any modern economy in their place and you'll see a society that is capitalistic but uses socialist policies to constrain the amount of inequality (ie. healthcare, education, etc) driven by that capitalism. You're missing the point that balan…

That seems to miss a point, at least for Rome. Much of the work was done by slaves. Saying that it cycled to "capitalist styled policies" or "socialist styled policies" may apply to the free people, but for the slaves, life didn't change much. Given how much of the economy was driven by slave labor, I'm not sure that the swings changed things all that much.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#358

Post by mcguire »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #22
Eleopteryx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His argument that Donald Trump would be a better choice for President than Hillary Clinton because the former would be easier to remove from office than the latter, arguing specifically that "congressional Republicans would [not] automatically spring to his defense, if he overstepped the line". Doesn't seem like a great example of keen political judgment in hindsight.

That's a pretty uninformed reading of the situation as it happened. If you followed conservative media throughout the process it wasn't at all obvious that establishment Republicans were going to actually mount a defense of the President. There was a lot of wavering back and forth as the narrative evolved and was fought over. It was not automatic at all.

"Five days before the House even approved the articles of impeachment on Dec. 18, McConnell took to television to say he would be in "total coordination with the White House counsel" as the impeachment process moved forward.

"During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, McConnell said that "everything" he does "during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can."" (https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/mitch-mc...)

"But it evidently has great value to the president and to Mr. McConnell, who had spent nearly a year preparing for it. From the instant that Democrats assumed power in the House last January, denying that they had any intention of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell, a six-term Kentuckian and the longest-serving Senate Republican leader, directed his staff to quietly dig into the history of impeachments and consult with outside experts.

"“We thought they would finally work themselves up to doing this on something,” Mr. McConnell said. “It has been threatened endlessly. We needed to come up to speed on what actually happens, and that began in earnest last fall.”

"So when Mr. McConnell fielded a phone call from Mr. Trump days before Christmas, he was ready. Stung by the House vote to impeach him on two charges, the president reached out to the majority leader from his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., throwing out ideas about how to handle his coming Senate trial.

"Mr. McConnell had a reassuring response for the third president ever to face removal by the Senate, urging Mr. Trump to trust him to manage the confrontation." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/us/trump-impeachment.html)

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#359

Post by jahaja »

NateEag wrote: post #298
jahaja wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because his "religious points"-score is unrelated to his universal message and the moral panic of it is thoroughly outdated.

This is not about whether he agrees with me (or anyone else). It's about whether he practices what he preaches. No one is perfect, but it's unwise to trust people who consistently advise one behavior but do another themselves. Also, if he promised to be faithful to his wife, and then engaged in multiple affairs, he broke a big promise multiple times. Again, I'd say that's relevant in deciding how much he should be tr…

> but it's unwise to trust people who consistently advise one behavior but do another themselves.

Well, clergymen haven't been strangers to that kind of inconsistency throughout history. Luckily it's been relegated to gossip tabloids in modern society.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#360

Post by dnh44 »

csallen wrote: post #303
dnh44 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the OP he said Trump would be easier to remove than Clinton. The fact that Trump was not removed from office does not make the statement wrong.

He also said, "congressional Republicans would [not] automatically spring to [Trump's] defense, if he overstepped the line," which was clearly wrong.

I don’t think they automatically sprung to his defense though.

It seems to me that the Republican establishment didn’t support Trump but that he was able to rally his base in order force their support begrudgingly.

I believe the term that Trump’s base used for those Republicans was RINO, Republicans In Name Only. So the fact that this vocabulary existed among Trump’s base to me indicates that their support for Trump was not automatic.

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