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Encountering Thomas Sowell

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Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#141

Post by ctrlp »

ctrlp wrote: post #104
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…

BLM was founded by Marxist-Leninist activists. The original statements about the nuclear family were consistent with viewing the family as a site of patriachical oppression. None of that antagonism is innovative or surprising if you know a bit if intellectual history. I suspect they changed the language because it was too radical to hold a coalition together. Most people seem to like their families and view the nucle…

I see I'm getting downvoted. Will any downvoters have the balls to say why? Here's the relevant quote:

"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 construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”"

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#142

Post by istjohn »

collyw wrote: post #120
m0llusk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Two autopsies — one by a county medical examiner and another by a private medical examiner hired by Floyd’s family — as well as a review by military experts conducted for the federal government, reached the conclusion that Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest as the officers subduing him compressed his neck and chest."[1]

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/george-floyd-fentanyl/...

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#143

Post by JPKab »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #46
JPKab wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. He doesn't burn bridges, but left of center media elites pull up the drawbridges. On topics like this, they view college activists as authoritative, objective sources of truth on race. Those activists view Sowell, and TCW, as heretics.

Recall also progressive journalist Lee Fang, who endured a cancellation campaign from colleagues at The Intercept because he Tweeted an interview with a black man who expressed concern about black-on-black crime. Many progressive activists and the media also aren't especially keen on Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Razib Khan, or dozens of other outspoken people of color. There seems to be some strong compulsion in the…

I grew up in a mostly black county in Virginia, and at one point lived temporarily in the household of a family of socially prominent black Christians. The father was a police officer, the mother a public defender in a neighboring county. The father was not quick to anger, but the angriest I ever saw him was when a bunch of white anchors in NYC on MSNBC brought on Al Sharpton, and asked him questions about what "black America" felt about an issue. He pointed out to me that they would never bring a white person from NYC on to a channel and ask him what white people in Virginia thought about an issue.

He made a good point.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#144

Post by dgellow »

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.…

Just a thought: it might be that what you consider to be “standard conservatism” is in part what it is due to Sowell’s work and influence for the past 50 years. He basically won against competitive thought leaders and shaped parts of the conservative movement.

Maybe a better example of my thought: if you listen to Dawkins today talking about evolutionary biology, you might arrive to the conclusion that what he says is just a repetition of the consensus and isn’t that interesting, but that’s missing the fact that he’s the reason we reached the modern consensus in the first place. It’s just that his arguments/ideas won the game and seem to be banal and common knowledge

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#145

Post by cryptica »

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.

It's great that they both helped to raise awareness of the dangers of big government from different perspectives.

Milton Friedman taught me about the danger of inflation and centralized monetary policy and Sowell opened my eyes to the perverse incentives of bureaucracy.

The combined insights of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell give a very good view into what's happening in our modern economy.

I think the main blindspot that the two have (particularly Milton Friedman) is that they don't seem to acknowledge that the pursuit of self-interest is the driving force which creates big governments in the first place. Corporations need big governments to subsidize them and to regulate their competitors out of existence. It's not the public's idealism or sense of altruism which allows governments to become so big, it's just the self-interest of the elite. So the pursuit of self-interest should not be seen as an absolute virtue because it doesn't scale.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#146

Post by genghisjahn »

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.

The first sentence is "We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children." That seems very pro traditional family. What is the dig at fathers that you speak of? Is it the women working double shifts thing? If the double shift thing is true, then it's a rightful dig at fathers that should happen. We should do more domestically. If you think there isn't a double shift and that all domestic tasks are shared equally, then I can see it coming across as an unwarranted attack. Personally, I don't.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#147

Post by ctrlp »

slibhb wrote: post #71

> In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argues persuasively that, “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes. Therefore the anointed [essentially his proto-term for “woke”] necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with the family.” This is because, he continues, “the preservation of the family” is fundamentally a source of freedom. “Frie…

It's arguable whether public schools in the US are "working out" right now. As indoctrination day camps, maybe.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#148

Post by tengbretson »

m0llusk wrote: post #106
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.…

If you focus on his politics especially in a right-left context that makes sense, but his work touches on many social subjects and has considerable depth. I strongly recommend his book Migrations and Cultures where he documents how migrations tend to involve whole social groups and preserve networks. His conservative confidence seems to be his weakest spot. He is fond of claiming that any attempt to help the poor or…

I don't think I ever received a check from one of those trials, so they might not have been as "universal" as the name implied.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#149

Post by ctrlp »

ctrlp wrote: post #147
slibhb wrote: post #71

> In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argues persuasively that, “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes. Therefore the anointed [essentially his proto-term for “woke”] necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with the family.” This is because, he continues, “the preservation of the family” is fundamentally a source of freedom. “Frie…

It's arguable whether public schools in the US are "working out" right now. As indoctrination day camps, maybe.

Elementary schools are shaping up to be little Woke madrassas. We're really failing our kids.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#150

Post by [deleted] »

cryptica wrote: post #145
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.

It's great that they both helped to raise awareness of the dangers of big government from different perspectives. Milton Friedman taught me about the danger of inflation and centralized monetary policy and Sowell opened my eyes to the perverse incentives of bureaucracy. The combined insights of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell give a very good view into what's happening in our modern economy. I think the main blinds…

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