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Encountering Thomas Sowell

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111–120 of 272 posts

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#111
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of somebody being a "trained Marxist" is very funny. Personally, I'm a 4th degree Historical Materialist and I'm training for the 2nd level Communist obstacle course

I’ve had colleagues in Silicon Valley who were members of their home countries’ Communist Party student organizations.

Commies killed a lot more than Nazis, yet I would be extremely surprised if Nazi party student organization would be allowed.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the language from the BLM site regarding disrupting the nuclear family. I'm very pro nuclear family. This didn't seem bad to me. -------------------------- We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justic…

Those paragraphs go through great contortions to avoid using the word "father".

Yeah, especially odd that they don't make it into this sentence.

> mothers, parents, and children are comfortable

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and c…

The idea of somebody being a "trained Marxist" is very funny. Personally, I'm a 4th degree Historical Materialist and I'm training for the 2nd level Communist obstacle course

Why is this funny to you? There are many Marxist organizations in the world, surely some of them focus on organizing considering that one of the core ideas of many Marxist and “post”-Marxist intellectual currents (like critical theory) is proletarian or some other sort of revolution.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the notion of BLM, of which only sociopaths would disagree, then there's BLM the organization which is exactly how you described it. The naming of this organization was actually a stroke of genius. Only the crazy edge cases would refute it's name but served as a Trojan horse for an ideology that is inherently un-American. If you disagree with them the immediate reaction has been "you don't think black lives m…

Just an inheritance from the term progressive . "I disagree with you." "What, you're against progress ?"

Also "anti-fascist" and "anti-racist".

The left has gotten clever with their naming, similar to the conservative movement in the 90s under the advisement of George Lakoff ("death tax", etc).

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#115
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the language from the BLM site regarding disrupting the nuclear family. I'm very pro nuclear family. This didn't seem bad to me. -------------------------- We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justic…

A dig at fathers in the first paragraph, and a diplomatically stated rejection of the nuclear family in the second. You need to be very generous to interpret this as anything other than an attack on the traditional family.

Right, and that's straight from Engels' playbook on advancing Marxist agendas. Nuclear families lead to private property, therefore, inveigh against nuclear families. [1]

This is exactly backward for how to elevate poor and minority interests. Strong ("nuclear") families, education (not indoctrination), and _more_ private property from which those families can build security is what's needed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Priv...

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#116
post #84
post #2

> Many people wondered last summer why, for example, on the Black Lives Matter website the organization declared (and has since deleted) a “disruptive” stance on the nuclear family. What did that have to do with mobilizing against police violence? For a long time I was very sympathetic to BLM, I would even have considered protesting with them. It was the above that caused me to rethink my position and eventually deci…

It is amazing that people are always projecting these ideas of organization so aggressively. Here BLM is portrayed an organization with founding documents that are have important guiding philosophy from which the rest emerges. Actually looking at the people and what happened shows that there was very little organization involved and what little there was got conjured up late in the game by the most extreme involved p…

Yes, it matters what the group espouses: a group using the death of George Floyd to attack the nuclear family using trickery is a second problem.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#117
post #83

Thomas Sowell is a titan. As was his recently deceased best friend and intellectual colleague Walter E. Williams. The leading public intellectual regarding race in America today is undoubtedly Ibram X. Kendi. His central thesis, that any differing outcomes between racial populations is evidence of racism, is the single topic that Thomas Sowell addressed more than any other. The breadth of his research on this particu…

That is an interesting reading, but it is worth pointing out that Thomas Sowell consistently differentiates between race and culture. In particular in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals he asserts that many black people living in the American South picked up a redneck culture that does not well serve either them or the white people they picked it up from. Culture trumps race. Anyone could embrace redneck values if they feel they should.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#118
post #70
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my question is: to whom did all that money go? (The link you provide outlines where the money went.)

The point is that this "decentralized" movement has a central organization that has a lot of money donated to it, and that the central/important tenets of that central organization probably has some measurable influence in deciding which "decentralized" parts of the organization get funding/donations/focus/marketing. So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished, then one…

> With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized and that what the RNC and DNC do/say hasn't a huge bearing on the way that the individual local leaders/sub-organizations of the parties do or how their rallies behave.

That's not a terrible argument, and actually aligns quite well with my own experiences.

My local GOP isn't well aligned at all with the national party.

The NRA is an even better example. I refuse to directly donate to the NRA due to their mismanagement of member funds in the recent past and their lack of support for important court cases going back much further. My local NRA, on the other hand, uses the large majority of funds raised for local support and outreach: education, maintenance of public ranges, instructor training, etc.

I don't think it's uncommon to support a local chapter of an organization while being at odds with the organization itself.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#119

Every discussion of Sowell online seems to attract fans of his declaring how brilliant he is. It's a bit strange the sort of hero worship he attracts. Personally, I've never seen it; while he seems like a reasonably smart person, his ideas are simply a mix of standard conservatism and condemnation of the intellectual establishment as he sees it. His views on immigration are uninspiring, the reasons he believes the U.…

A column or collection of random quotes will never adequately summarize a thinker - however his books "Knowledge and Decisions" and "A Conflict of Visions" both rank as masterpieces.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#120
post #84
post #2

> Many people wondered last summer why, for example, on the Black Lives Matter website the organization declared (and has since deleted) a “disruptive” stance on the nuclear family. What did that have to do with mobilizing against police violence? For a long time I was very sympathetic to BLM, I would even have considered protesting with them. It was the above that caused me to rethink my position and eventually deci…

It is amazing that people are always projecting these ideas of organization so aggressively. Here BLM is portrayed an organization with founding documents that are have important guiding philosophy from which the rest emerges. Actually looking at the people and what happened shows that there was very little organization involved and what little there was got conjured up late in the game by the most extreme involved p…

The cop restrained a black man using a standard technique, while the balck man had overdose levels of fentanyl in his system. The cop has not been found guilty of strangling Floyd so far, and I believe the system in the US means innocent until proven guilty.
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