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Encountering Thomas Sowell

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Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#131

Post by nucleogenesis »

zpeti wrote: post #86
genghisjahn wrote: post #77

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.

> 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 justice work

That’s not a stab at fathers. It’s a stab at the societal norms that force single mothers to work double shifts just to support their family. They are purporting that this is due to the fact that our society is patriarchal (run by men - which it is). Whether they’re right or wrong it’s not a dig at traditional dads.

They’re attacking the societal norms that a straight cis mom and straight cis dad are the only foundational units for a legitimate family.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#132

Post by zucker42 »

Stronico wrote: post #119
zucker42 wrote: post #79

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.

I've not read any of his books, but I have watched quite a few long form interviews with him, to give you a sense how I've developed this impression of him.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#133

Post by jimbokun »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #125
jimbokun wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to include the policy setting part of Biden's base.

Which policies and who?

The American Rescue Plan Act is being called the most significant progressive legislation, maybe since the New Deal.

Not saying that makes it bad, but it's certainly boldly progressive.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#134

Post by ceilingcorner »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #127
ceilingcorner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College students too, unfortunately.

So a small minority with almost no experience raising children?

The question isn't whether they are correct (clearly they aren't) but if they are influential in culture and government.

Many/most social movements start on college campuses, so I would consider it pretty relevant.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#135

Post by greenonions »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #59
JasonFruit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the conservative side, mostly, and I'm deeply disappointed by most prominent conservative voices. There's much more of value in conservative thought than people hear from conservative mouthpieces in the media, but instead we get ugly stupidity.

I agree. Even though I'm a liberal, I'm sad to see the conservative intellectual tradition in such bad shape. I always felt it would be better for your opponents to rally around their best arguments/figures rather than their least savory arguments/figures. I think it has also made us (liberals) lazier--we don't need to bring coherent, reasoned arguments because we can settle for "well, at least we're better than Trum…

I agree with this as well. It would be wonderful if there were a major political party in the US advocating for liberties, families, and the cultivation of markets. Modern Republicans claim to be this, and in practice... aren't.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#136

Post by seneca »

brodouevencode wrote: post #72
f154hfds wrote: 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…

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…

It's a Motte and Bailey, by design (which I seem to end up pointing out a lot on HN, apology for the repetition but it's a common and important pattern).

The core BLM organization are subversive Marxists. Their tenants are extremely un-American and probably not shared by most of the people marching under their banner. When you point this out, they can retreat from the Marxist Bailey to the racial equality Motte and attempt to shut down criticism.

This pattern of equivocating between subversive ideas and basic liberal tenants is extremely damaging for the liberals accidentally aligning themselves with extremists, but this smokescreen tactic has existed longer than most any HN posters have been alive. This is the proverbial "Useful Innocents" (and its more pejorative alternative).

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#137

Post by chmod600 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #65
lbj wrote: post #21

Great piece. I have to admit I'm a bit of a fan when it comes to both Friedman and Sowell. They seem to have the rare gift of understanding subjects so well and intuitively that they can explain those subjects more plainly than anyone else. Where most economists have disappointed me greatly in their understanding of math, Sowell has done to opposite.

I have this feeling Sowell isn’t liked/respected by AOC/Pelosi because of how hard he disagrees with them. Can anybody tell me how he is perceived by liberals? Not trying to get political. Genuinely curious if he is an outcast to the left because a ton of what he says seems to fall into “conservative views”.

He's mostly dismissed/ignored by the left.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#138

Post by ycombinete »

zucker42 wrote: post #79

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.…

Every thread I’ve seen on him has a comment such as yours to complement the the fanboy comments.

This is common. Discussions of almost any author here draw the same set of responses.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#139

Post by ctrlp »

chumich1 wrote: post #19
nullifidian wrote: post #13

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

This suggests you didn't get a degree in the humanities in the past 20 years and don't understand the Leninist part of Marxist-Leninist.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#140

Post by ralusek »

m0llusk wrote: post #117
ralusek wrote: 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 valu…

Yes, I think Thomas Sowell and most people on that list use "race" synonymously with "populations with certain phenotypes or ethnicities who are going to be bucketed together as such."

Culture isn't the only thing by which he differentiates people bucketed across "races," but is definitely a primary one. He also very frequently talks about cultures within "races," as you've mentioned here. The drastically different performances between white immigrants to the US, depending on where they came from. Or the stellar performance of black immigrants from Nigeria or Ghana or the West Indies.

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