***Official Political Discussion Thread***

“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.”
**** Thomas Sowell

Dude has spent his career supporting, and making arguments for, the worst of the worst.
 
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Agree to disagree

Quote still on point though
Sure, because there is no way I can be convinced that Thomas Sowell: who is basically a far right reationary now, a black man that has spent his career putting a black face on white supremacy, who spews respectability politics about black people, that ****s on black folk constantly with implicitly racist arguments, that makes bad faith arguments all the damn time, who has little respect in the field of economics because he spent his career being a professional peddler of right wing economic nonsense instead of publishing, is currently worth my respect to the point I care what he has to say. Sure I can respect some of his accomplishments, but the **** he does.

Dude is great at explaining how markets work on a fundamental level, and he uses that talent to talk about how potential market failures should be avoided by implementing economic policy that is not supporting by observable reality, research, or history.

**** him. For life.

Sure the quote may have a point, taken by itself. But it ignores a ****tone of nuance and contest to work. But I feel it is important people know dude is bad faith actor that make quotes that like to defend the worst conservatives and their nonsense. If anyone thinks he is knows what he is talking about. After criticizing Trump in the 2016 primary, right before the election he wrote the ultimate "Republican coming home essay"


All it takes is a Senate controlled by fellow Democrats to let a President Clinton’s judicial nominees be confirmed automatically, no matter how little regard for the Constitution those nominees have demonstrated.

Donald Trump shows no such ideological agenda and has no such automatic support from congressional Republicans as to have them rubber stamp either his judicial nominees or whatever other agenda he has. More than that, Trump can be impeached if he oversteps the bounds, without either the Republicans or the media screaming loud protests.

Trump seems to pose much less danger — which, unfortunately, is the most we can expect this particular election year.

So yeah, again, **** that man. He is full of it.

Him saying that is like David Frum warning us against a leader suckering the nation into going into a pointless war.
 
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Sure, because there is no way I can be convinced that Thomas Sowell: who is basically a far right reationary now, a black man that has spent his career putting a black face on white supremacy, who spews respectability politics about black people, that ****s on black folk constantly with implicitly racist arguments, that makes bad faith arguments all the damn time, who has little respect in the field of economics because he spent his career being a professional peddler of right wing economic nonsense instead of publishing, is currently worth my respect. Sure I can respect some of his accomplishments, but the **** he does.

Dude is great at explaining how markets work on a fundamental level, and he uses that talent to talk about how potential market failures should be avoided by implementing economic policy that is not supporting by observable reality, research, or history.

**** him. For life.

Sure the quote may have a point, taken by itself. But it ignores a ****tone of nuance and contest to work. But I feel it is important people know dude is bad faith actor that make quotes that like to defend the worst conservatives and their nonsense. If anyone thinks he is knows what he is talking about. After criticizing Trump in the 2016 primary, right before the election he wrote the ultimate "Republican coming home essay"




So yeah, again, **** that man. He is full of it.

Him saying that is like David Frum warning us against a leader suckering the nation into going into a pointless war.
He def does some shuckin and jiving. The way Buckley used to use him as his errand boy has always been cringe to me.....

His book race and economics, to this day is one of the most formative books for me. How he shreds the notion of proposed black inferiority. Where I have always disagreed with him is the source of this perceived inferiority. As Sowell would tell it, its from the left, even the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz knows that aint true. As you mentioned, Sowell is also excellent at making highly advanced (to me :lol:) economics very digestible and applicable for mass audiences in his writings. He also used to be quite thorough in his Howard days before he turned into a right wing talking point (unlce tom)
 
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He def does some shuckin and jiving. The way Buckley used to use him as his errand boy has always been cringe to me.....

As you mentioned, Sowell is excellent at making economics very digestible for mass audiences. He also used to be quite thorough in his Howard days before he turned into an uncle tom.
Bruh I dunno what kind of flour they put in that biscuit to turn a black anti-racist socialist into an eloquent Uncle Ruckus.

Must have gotten it in a valley in the French Alps, where the climate is perfect for making the ultimate buffoonery inducing wheat.
 
It's weird. I like Tapper sometimes, but sometimes he seems to double over to do the "both sides" game. It's like the man obviously knows there is right and there is wrong, but he can't help himself by giving the benefit of a doubt to the other side of an argument. Case in point: his Twitter rant about Disney and the NBA not condemning China for human rights violations (which one can understand, if it wasn't so obvious that folks like him play coy about protests and "riots" over here due to our rights being violated by the police). Again, it's like the media has learned nothing in four years about making false equivalencies.
 
It's weird. I like Tapper sometimes, but sometimes he seems to double over to do the "both sides" game. It's like the man obviously knows there is right and there is wrong, but he can't help himself by giving the benefit of a doubt to the other side of an argument. Case in point: his Twitter rant about Disney and the NBA not condemning China for human rights violations (which one can understand, if it wasn't so obvious that folks like him play coy about protests and "riots" over here due to our rights being violated by the police). Again, it's like the media has learned nothing in four years about making false equivalencies.

Cuomo is the current king of this

I think the media learned that there's good business to continue peddling the both sides game

Same reason why they (CNN) always give airtime to the most delusional Trump pundits and admin officials, everyday.
 
Cuomo is the current king of this

I think the media learned that there's good business to continue peddling the both sides game

Same reason why they (CNN) always give airtime to the most delusional Trump pundits and admin officials, everyday.


I swore I saw something that the top guy at CNN made some remark about Trump being bad for America but good for ratings or something. Which is why it's hard to take their stance on news serious, because its like these folks are living in another world that is free from the consequences of Trump as a president. I thought that COVID would level the playing field for once, and bring some of the media folks down to earth but....
 
I swore I saw something that the top guy at CNN made some remark about Trump being bad for America but good for ratings or something. Which is why it's hard to take their stance on news serious, because its like these folks are living in another world that is free from the consequences of Trump as a president. I thought that COVID would level the playing field for once, and bring some of the media folks down to earth but....
Yeah Moonves had mentioned similar and I bet all the media execs felt the same


I still think CNN provides good and accurate news for the most part but they are very ESPN-ish with their love for hot take "debate" segments and giving false equivalencies a lifeline. Some of their better content takes a back seat to that.
 
Sure, because there is no way I can be convinced that Thomas Sowell: who is basically a far right reationary now, a black man that has spent his career putting a black face on white supremacy, who spews respectability politics about black people, that ****s on black folk constantly with implicitly racist arguments, that makes bad faith arguments all the damn time, who has little respect in the field of economics because he spent his career being a professional peddler of right wing economic nonsense instead of publishing, is currently worth my respect to the point I care what he has to say. Sure I can respect some of his accomplishments, but the **** he does.

Dude is great at explaining how markets work on a fundamental level, and he uses that talent to talk about how potential market failures should be avoided by implementing economic policy that is not supporting by observable reality, research, or history.

**** him. For life.

Sure the quote may have a point, taken by itself. But it ignores a ****tone of nuance and contest to work. But I feel it is important people know dude is bad faith actor that make quotes that like to defend the worst conservatives and their nonsense. If anyone thinks he is knows what he is talking about. After criticizing Trump in the 2016 primary, right before the election he wrote the ultimate "Republican coming home essay"




So yeah, again, **** that man. He is full of it.

Him saying that is like David Frum warning us against a leader suckering the nation into going into a pointless war.

Thomas Sowell is, something else.

There’s the familiar dialectic whereby we see that in the aggregate, black people have fewer economic goods (Income, savings) and more economics bads (debt, incarceration, disease) and the question is why?

Broadly speaking, the left/progressive/liberal response is that this is caused by factors external to black people. There is all sorts of disagreement over exactly what those external forces and what exactly the remedy to their external forces looks like but there is agreement that there are external forces afflicting black peoples and therefore, public policy has to account for that.

The rightwing explanation for a black achievement gap is to blame it on black people themselves. The biological explanations have largely fallen out of favor (with notable and notorious exception of the “Bell Curve”). The most popular explanation, on the right, is inferior cultural.

The more sophisticated right winger doesn’t want to be seen as blaming the victim so they blame black suffering on black people while appearing to condemn an outside force. The most popular approach is to say that some combination of public assistance or a residue of slavery has removed or prevented a true Protestant ethic of thrift and industry from developing within black people.

Sowell goes even further by creating his own home brewed Historical materialism to impugn black people while appearing like he is not impugning black people.

In his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell argues that everything wrong with black people, today, began in Scotland, Northern England and Norther Ireland in the 12th through 18th century. According to Sowell, one had to be violent and averse to steady labor in order to survive in that time and place. The story goes on to say that those people cane to the southern US as settlers and as black people were enslaved and forced to live in the regions that would become the US Southern, black people absorbed that dysfunctional Celtic culture.

Sowell argues that changing material conditions allowed white Britons and white southerners to transcend their violent and labor averse culture but that black people have yet to do so.

There is so much wrong with Sowell’s argument but it’s chief problem is that he overlooks the role of socialism in a Britain and the harrenvolk pseudo socialism of the New Deal. It turns out that social pathologies can be pretty well cured when you make bankers in London and New York pay higher taxes to fund social programs for heavily exploited white people in the North of England and the Tennessee river Valley, respectively.

By Sowell’s own historical framing, the solution to what he sees as black pathologies, is clearly massive social spending for black people. But Sowell argues that reducing the meager levels of social spending, currently enjoyed by black people, is the only way to “cure” black pathology. Some how, the heavy toil and deep material deprivation of slavery, wasn’t enough suffering to prevent blacks from “catching” the social pathologies of 17th-18th century Southern whites but now forcing black people to navigate something, even more brutal than what they face now, will cure them of social pathologies.

Sowell, in attempting, to appear sympathetic to black people, ends up constructing a universe where whites, rationally, eschew thrift and industry and self restraint in the face of grim material conditions; but blacks, need to face a more materially hopeless world in order to gain values of thrift, industry and self restraint.

Honestly, he could have saved himself and the world a great deal of time and done less damage by simply driving through a city and shouting the n word from his car.


BTW, this is just one book. One book of many. He also wrote a ton of columns as well. He spews so many vile takes and has done it so many years it is impressive in a certain way.

The man is a scumbag but he’s a clever and erudite scum bag and that is one of the most dangerous and destructive types of person in our world.
 
I'm currently listening to the basic economocs ebook lol but besides that I have only seen old interview clips of him. He mentioned that throughout his career, there has only been one time that someone counter his argument or proven his argument wrong with data. Is that a fact? I tried doing my googling but no luck & I find that hard to believe, especially considering how long he has been around.
 
It's weird. I like Tapper sometimes, but sometimes he seems to double over to do the "both sides" game. It's like the man obviously knows there is right and there is wrong, but he can't help himself by giving the benefit of a doubt to the other side of an argument. Case in point: his Twitter rant about Disney and the NBA not condemning China for human rights violations (which one can understand, if it wasn't so obvious that folks like him play coy about protests and "riots" over here due to our rights being violated by the police). Again, it's like the media has learned nothing in four years about making false equivalencies.
Cuomo is the current king of this

I think the media learned that there's good business to continue peddling the both sides game

Same reason why they (CNN) always give airtime to the most delusional Trump pundits and admin officials, everyday.


For Tapper, it’s especially galling because centrists claim that because they are not encumbered by ideological baggage, they have greater perceptive powers than those with open ideological commitments. Yet, Tapper is unable to see any differences between either side in most stories.
 
I'm currently listening to the basic economocs ebook lol but besides that I have only seen old interview clips of him. He mentioned that throughout his career, there has only been one time that someone counter his argument or proven his argument wrong with data. Is that a fact? I tried doing my googling but no luck & I find that hard to believe, especially considering how long he has been around.

The normative aspects of basic economics are not so great (he’s already decided that efficiency, defined by the needs of capital, is more important than meeting human needs) but the positive aspects are good. Economics turns a lot of people off with charts, graphs and equations so Sowell’s Basic Economics does provide some good explanations of many aspects of micro economics.

As far him never being refuted with facts is concerned, he’s probably never cited something incorrectly. He’s not making up facts out of thin air but his values are trash and his conclusions that flow from that are bad.
 
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Sure, because there is no way I can be convinced that Thomas Sowell: who is basically a far right reationary now, a black man that has spent his career putting a black face on white supremacy, who spews respectability politics about black people, that ****s on black folk constantly with implicitly racist arguments, that makes bad faith arguments all the damn time, who has little respect in the field of economics because he spent his career being a professional peddler of right wing economic nonsense instead of publishing, is currently worth my respect to the point I care what he has to say. Sure I can respect some of his accomplishments, but the **** he does.

Dude is great at explaining how markets work on a fundamental level, and he uses that talent to talk about how potential market failures should be avoided by implementing economic policy that is not supporting by observable reality, research, or history.

**** him. For life.

Sure the quote may have a point, taken by itself. But it ignores a ****tone of nuance and contest to work. But I feel it is important people know dude is bad faith actor that make quotes that like to defend the worst conservatives and their nonsense. If anyone thinks he is knows what he is talking about. After criticizing Trump in the 2016 primary, right before the election he wrote the ultimate "Republican coming home essay"




So yeah, again, **** that man. He is full of it.

Him saying that is like David Frum warning us against a leader suckering the nation into going into a pointless war.
How can somebody be so wrong and so confident in their erroneous ways? How scholarly is this? What kind of scholar is unwilling to be swayed by observable facts?
 
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