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Encountering Thomas Sowell

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Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#171

Post by TomatoDash »

freedom42 wrote: post #158
calvinmorrison wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And across all the KPI's we know of - kids in a two parent household are more successful by every measure.

Does that measure have an inherent bias? Is it like saying kids with parents that tolerate each other are successful? When they don't tolerate, they separate and are not a two parent household anymore and so don't show up in the measure. Maybe it just means kids in peaceful households fare better?

It does. This text picks it apart concisely. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/03/01/the-success-...

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#172

Post by prionassembly »

bhupy wrote: post #44
prionassembly wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political quadrant model is seriously overrated. It may be that libertarian/authoritarian Left is a meaningful distinction in some contexts and not others; or that authoritarian Left/Right is a useful categorization for some purposes, but not for others.

Why, specifically?

Because the pair of distinctions chosen makes sense in some cases and not in others.

I provided two examples in my comment above.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#173

Post by throwawaysea »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #33
glasss wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hope everyone would be at least sympathetic towards other human beings wanting justice and equal treatment. I would be wary about that website and I would take whatever you see about a central organization relating to BLM with a grain of salt. I've been involved in local protests and other events in Chicago and I've never once been directed to or heard of a centralized website. I hope you reconsider your stance…

I get that BLM is decentralized and I agree that most people are just protesting injustices, but then my question is: to whom did all that money go? Clearly it went to someone . Isn't it fair to consider this organization representative of BLM? > Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-...

It's not just the $90 million given to this one organization either, although they are facing their own controversies with BLM chapters raising alarm about the lack of transparency from BLM leaders (https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-90-million-fin...). Corporations have given massive quantities to many other organizations (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/want-know-where-al...), which are pursuing similar social/political/activist goals even if they aren't the same "official" Black Lives Matters organizations. In total, $10.6 billion was given, and that's just what journalists were able to identify (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/12/10/six-month...).

It's a massive injection towards the entire ideological package associated with Black Lives Matter. It's not just about injustice in policing (which does occur but is very rare), but also about everything from environmental causes to tax policies to universal healthcare. Put another way, these donations in the name of racial policing equality are bolstering the entirety of progressive politics.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#174

Post by wrycoder »

ctrlp wrote: post #149
ctrlp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An accurate simile. Study woke and only woke.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#176

Post by throwaway894345 »

JPKab wrote: post #143
throwaway894345 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "blac…

My general impression is that the portrait we get from the media about "black America" is actually only accurate for something like 10-30% of black Americans (i.e., progressive black Americans). For example, the "defund the police" movement was marketed by the media (question #1 might be "why is the media marketing anything?" but ignoring that for now...) as a movement that black Americans wanted, but subsequent polling suggested that only a small minority of black Americans wanted less policing. I would bet that these beloved-by-the-media, "pro-black" policies are supported by a smaller share of blacks than wealthy progressive whites.

It's interesting (or it would be were it not tragic) because there seems to be an increasingly popular belief that there is some "true Black" way of seeing the world. Some people will call a black person who deviates from the stereo-type, "not 'politically black'" or suggest that they have "internalized white supremacy" or "minority whiteness". They argue that "worship of the written word", "objectivity", "wester civilization", etc are traits of white supremacy as though there is some force of nature that compels blacks toward a certain set of experiences and a certain way of processing those experiences which ultimately results in a very homogeneous, narrow set of "black opinions"--and deviations from that narrow band of opinions are regarded as pathology. It's almost as though they see blacks and people of color as a distinct species from whites, that white people are so incapable of understanding black people that, on the basis of race alone we are compelled to preclude whites from volunteering with a school board or translating the work of black poets (although it's fine for a white person to translate Shakespeare or ancient Greeks, suggesting the experiences of contemporary whites and blacks is more divergent than two white people separated by centuries or millennia).

Personally, I don't understand how this sort of ideology is supposed to get us closer to a post-racial world.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#177

Post by wrycoder »

greenonions wrote: post #135
throwaway894345 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet despite what the media constantly drums into us, this is what Trump actually stands for, if you listen to him directly.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#178

Post by anonuser123456 »

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.…

>his ideas are simply a mix of standard conservatism and condemnation of the intellectual establishment as he sees it.

I had this opinion of Sowell based on reading his public commentary/watching interviews. But I will say that, having just finished 'Conflict of Visions' some of his written work is quite excellent. I picked it up based on Steve Pinker's review and was not disappointed.

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#179

Post by AnimalMuppet »

secondcoming wrote: post #102
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…

> We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another A commune? Your child will be raised by the state automatically? It's hippy-dippy marxist nonsense.

Depends on how far you take it.

"Your kids are on their way to becoming sociopathic gang members, but far be it from me to lift a finger to help you. My kids are fine." Yeah, that's going too far on the individualistic side. Help your neighbors and your community, not just your own family.

"All children will be taken from their parent(s) at birth, and raised exclusively by the community/state." That's too far in the other direction. Take care of your own family first, don't depend on others to do it.

(And if you think I contradict myself: I'm saying take care of your own family, and help others outside it, and (to the extent you can) don't depend on others to do the same for you. Give more than you get. Yes, it's unfair. Don't look at life in a purely selfing manner.)

I can't tell, from the BLM statement, how far they want to go away from a pure no-community, nuclear-family-only position. (I must say, though, that "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" sounds to me like "We're too busy marching in the streets to take care of our own kids, so someone should do that for us".)

Re: Encountering Thomas Sowell

#180

Post by throwawaysea »

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…

What's even more shady is that they did not acknowledge the criticism directed on this point at all. Instead they quiety scrubbed their "What We Believe" page (https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant...), without actually admitting that this screed was based on Marxist philosophy (likely Friedrich Engels). In various works, such as "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Engels claimed that the modern family unit gave rise to the notion of private property, and therefore capitalism, and that it must be undone for socialism to succeed. The greater ecosystem of fundamental socialist and communist theory includes proposals to ban all home and religion education, banning concepts like property and inheritance, nationalizing various housework, and even separating children from parents at an early age so they could primarily be reared by the state (https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/29/americans-buy-into-marx...).

It's incredible to me that activists who often complain about vague "dog whistles" cannot connect the dots on an ideological relation that is so basic and clear.

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