Encountering Thomas Sowell
lawliberty.org
lawliberty.org
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 decide that BLM was actually antagonistic to their very goal.
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.”"
That people in the US espouse Marxist beliefs while a Marxist state commits genocide is “the same” as when parts of American society supported Nazis.
Disney thanking China for their help filming Mulan next to a camp is the same simpering we saw from corporations supporting the Nazi regime.
And then if you consider the spread of critical theory and postmodernism and the general influence of the Frankfurt school through our institutions, then the overtly "anti-establishment" protesting and rioting spearheaded by BLM and Antifa (which "doesn't exist", "isn't an organization", sure, how typically "revolutionary") starts to look very much like the start of a subversive, insurrectionist ploy, much like that of the bolsheviks that lead to the disaster of a government that my family fled.
And then it really isn't funny to me at all. And it also isn't funny to me when one considers that part of the rise of the Nazi party pre WWII can be attributed the behavior of very similar "revolutionary" communists who also were running destroying businesses and beating up citizens on the street for disagreement. No, I'd say such an overtly insurrectionist movement evolving openly in the US is not funny at all.
It's hilarious because it's so vague, not because there are guerillas or revolutionaries who have been trained by Marxists in agitprop/organizing/guerilla tactics. In short, what's the difference between being a 'trained Marxist' and 'educated in the works of Marx and Engels'? If I heard someone describe themselves as a 'trained literary critic', I'd think exactly what GP pointed out too.
My comment is just as much a criticism of the vagueness of the BLM leaders as it is the people who accept them at their word without even inquiring into what it means. For all we know, they could literally just be holding a philosophy degree completed with a Master's project in an aspect of Marxist philosophy.
A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple. The point is not to interpret the world but to change it yada yada yada. A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable to bring about the revolution and therefore an intellectual vanguard of "trained" revolutionaries (marxist activists) are required to lead the way. Time to hit the books!
There's no need for a confrontational tone. In the past I've interacted with many Marxists, activists, organizers, and academics. I'm more trying to apply my experience to the topic, not to suppose that nobody describes themselves as a 'trained Marxist'.
>A trained Marxist is an activist, it's really that simple.
Why do we see people describe themselves as 'Marxist activists' etc. more than 'trained Marxists', then? If somebody learned Marxist philosophy in private, does this make them a 'trained Marxist'? Who trained them, in that case?
>A Leninist is a Marxist who believes the proletariat is too economically comfortable
I know it's a technicality, but this is not the reason behind the vanguard party. The idea of a proletariat which is too comfortable with capitalism is more of a Frankfurt School flourish on Marxism, and bypasses Lenin entirely. The vanguard party, at least in Leninist theory, is not a specially trained force of revolutionaries, but a party (in the normal sense of the word) open to anyone to join. It's not a group of trained revolutionaries (and perhaps you recognize this by the fact you put 'trained' in quotes). In theory, the vanguard party could be completely transparent (in the sense of not even being a formal party, but encompassing all who share in the ideals), or even non-activists (such as academics) and untrained people (such as those who have come accross Marx without any outside influence or instruction) could be a part of it.
Obscuring 'trained Marxists' into 'Marxist activists' requires a non-obvious interpretation of 'trained' and 'activism' which misses out on the nuance of both. An activist for animal rights along Peter Singer's philosophy is not a "trained utilitarian", nor even a "trained animal rights activist". An an activist for Stallman's free software philosophy is not necessarily a "trained free software activist". If all 'trained Marxists' are 'Marxist activists', then the obverse would have to be true as well, but I can think of many 'Marxist activists' who have a very poor grasp on Marx and Engels, to the point where it would be farcical to call them 'trained Marxists', much in the same way a 'trained programmer' who can barely write more than a fizzbuzz would be a farcical designation.
People can be trained guerillas, trained activists, etc. - because those are things you do, and the origin of the knowledge is inherently practical and handed down by someone external. Marxism, however, does not provide practical guidance (at least not in any sense, as Marx admits, to be relevant after he initially wrote the Manifesto). It's theory, and you're reading 'activists' into it in a way that has nothing to do with the ordinary meaning of 'training' or 'activist'.
> Cullors weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says. Reading Lorde and hooks “helped me understand my identity.”
All the people happily repeating "Black Lives Matter", putting up lawn signs, and donating to them have no idea that it is led by someone who admires and is inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Zedong. They think the accusations of Marxism are a right-wing conspiracy theory, when the reality is that this is the ideological rot at the core of the Black Lives Matter organization, that its philosophies and goals are based around the same principles espoused by some of the most dangerous ideologues of all time. From https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-m...:
> the deaths caused by communist regimes [...] is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history
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 with the knowledge that BLM is a very decentralized movement, and (while anecdotal) no one I've known who's been involved has been "disruptive" towards the idea of nuclear families. If I can make any other supporting statements or answer questions that might sway you please let me know.
> Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-...
(The link you provide outlines where the money went.)
So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished, then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea. Maybe not always, but a greater than 0% chance for sure.
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. It's more "centralized" than BLM, sure, but like with a lot of things, it's not a black/white description. It's rather a range, and we can't just say "no it's not" when we can clearly see that the "central" portion has some bearing on the smaller parts.
So, my thinking on this also aligns with the Sorites Paradox:
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.
It's worse than that; it's a classic motte-and-bailey.
Try to address some issue with the Black Lives Matter organization, and you're apt to see a retreat to the banner of lowercase "black lives matter" as a principle. This is like trying to address some issue with the "Democratic Party", and then those being criticized scurry over to an excuse like, "What, you don't believe in democracy?" Of course, no one makes that kind of mistake, because such a defense wouldn't be possible. It's well understood that the capital-D Democrats comprise a concrete organization with an actual platform, etc that is identifiable by the proper noun, which is distinct from democracy as a principle, even though they share a root. In the case of Black Lives Matter, it's more than just a shared root, and this is less clear overall, so people who can benefit from the halo effect strengthening their foothold knowingly exploit it for gain.
Just a statement that we shouldn't structure our society in a way that makes it impossible for those not fortunate enough to have been raised in a nuclear family to still succeed.
While I agree we need to communicate that the nuclear family is very important and beneficial to our society, we need to do so without making children of non-nuclear families feel inferior.
I was just using it because it was the example in the thread.
It doesn't, though. There are several large national organizations (BLMGNF, M4BL, and others) associated with the movement, not a single central organization.
> 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.
The tenets of the various organizations do obviously play a role in how they distribute funds, and the tenets of the various large and small organizations play a big role in which of them get funding donated to them by various donors.
> So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished
Which, contrary to the misrepresentations, none of the major movement-related organizations do; a number of movement-related organizations have said things about policies which are punitive to families outside of that assumed norm as part of institutional racism especially in the presence of other institutional and social factors which result in more Black children not being raised in nuclear families.
> then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea
One can also assume that, if that were true, it would be competitive fundraising advantage to other movement organizations (e.g., direct donations to local orgs, if this really was the single central organization) without that belief, to the extent that the belief conflicted with the grassroots. But since there is neither a single central org nor any major org with the viewpoint being criticized, it's moot.
> With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized
No, you might as well say the that the “right-to-far-right political alignment” and the “center-right to moderate left political alignment” are decentralized movements.
The Democratic and Republican parties are centralized organizations, in ways that the BLM movement is not.
I would assume it is fair to say this organization is representative of BLM, as I'm sure they have been under more scrutiny than I can provide and I would hope any bad intentions or funny things happening to the money would have been caught by now. So if I think it's fair to say that if this organization is representative of BLM, I think it would be fair to assume they would also be sending the money to the places they are stating.
I wouldn't discredit an entire social movement about demanding equality and fair treatment because of what someone put on a non-profit's website. Further, a statement like "BLM supports disrupting the nuclear" doesn't hold up because that stance has apparently been taken down from the website in question. If it was still on the website, which admittedly I haven't checked, then I can understand taking this more seriously.
Anyone who has read Marx and Critical Theory knows that disrupting the family is a key tenet.
But the real question is, what does this have to do with racial justice? As someone like Sowell points out, many inequities are themselves the consequence of disrupting the two-parent household.
I think we can do that without disavowing the traditional nuclear family and I don't read anything there that implies that.
I guess I agree with all of that, but I don't feel like it's a strong argument.
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.
Neither the BLM movement generally not most of the organizations associates with it nor their supporters nor their donors pretend that it's about simply “racial policing equality”.
But it's cute that conservatives scaremonger about bourgeois identity politics (though they don't tend to call it out as bourgeois) for being needlessly divisive and counterproductive to their overt goals by not incorporating and prioritizing crosscutting issues that fundamentally underlie the specific problems of the groups notionally served, but also criticize progressive identity politics as counterproductive to their overt goals for incorporating and prioritizing crosscutting issues that fundamentally underlie the specific problems of groups they serve.
It's almost as if the problem wasn't about the approach to the problems of the particular populations, but that any approach is taken to those problems at all.
It's not an obscure site and lots of people equate the site with the movement.
Also tellingly, they are far from an organization focused on just policing equality, which is ostensibly where BLM began. If you look at the latest updates on their website (https://blacklivesmatter.com/blm-demands/), you'll see them advocate for various explicitly political goals aligned with the Democratic party, such as wanting Trump banned from digital platforms (censorship), wanting to expel legislators who challenged election results (violating their political rights), and more. The 13 principles and "what we believe" manifesto I mentioned above also encompass the vast majority of the progressive political platform rather than focusing on the policing issue.
As a south Asian person, I find the aggressive push to move Asian Americans to the left quite troubling. The intense social norms in south and East Asian culture in favor of two parent households is an incredible advantage we should not give up lightly. But it’s almost taboo in socially progressive circles to say that family structure matters (even though this is obvious to Asians).
You must hang in some especially woke circles
Many/most social movements start on college campuses, so I would consider it pretty relevant.
Woke twitter is a small minority.
Not saying that makes it bad, but it's certainly boldly progressive.
And if you don't believe that the media doesn't have any influence on people, particularly Biden's base, try reading Chomsky's _Manufacturing Consent_, or even Walter Lippman, if you want to read someone who thinks this influence is a positive thing.
ie, a single parent.
BTW, I'm kind of on the left as well, in some ways (eg, I think income inequality and poverty is a huge problem). I just can't stand the current leftist orthodoxy, which is belligerently anti-fact if they don't like where the facts lead (two-parent households being a great example).
I guess I'm a Laschian leftist, or Laschian conservative, depending on your view of Lasch.
I've never otherwise had a difficult time supporting that position in front of young SJWs at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766155
The implication of your comment is that the alternative to "the nuclear family" is "single-parent families". But the other alternative to nuclear families is "extended families", which you yourself have written about on HN numerous times.
There is an important racial justice issue involving nuclear vs. extended families; to wit: high-status municipalities (and their school systems) discriminate against them, both by mandating single-family housing and by working to exclude students who reside with extended family care networks. That's a thing we're grappling with in Oak Park, where I live just outside of Chicago, right now. It's not random; it's in fact a lot more legitimate than other BLM grievances (against, for instance, capitalism writ large).
I agree with you about the need to remove barriers to multi-generational households that include other relatives in addition to two parents. I just don’t read the platform that as being directed to that.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another , especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. (em mine)
It's explicit about extended families.
I think we should be able to quickly agree that there are two things going on here:
First, the part you're responding to: Black culture contends with a great deal of blame and social disapproval regarding single mothers and absence of fatherhood (something Thomas Sowell talks a lot about).
Second, like many cultures around the world, including several in Europe, Black culture relies on multigenerational extended family networks for child care. Those family networks were, as I'm certain from previous discussions you agree, explicitly targeted by housing segregationists to keep Black families out of suburban enclaves and to keep Black students out of the best-performing schools.
There's apparently this whole sort of internal cultural debate about Black advancement --- I'm a white dude and talking out of my ass here, but, like, I read some stuff --- between what you might call the Booker T. Washington school, which says Black advancement has to come from Black people improving their own circumstances and correcting the problems that are holding them back, and the W.E.B. DuBois school, which says that the first order of business is to secure formal, recognized equality with white people. It strikes me that you can read Sowell vs. BLM in that light.
They might both be right, with regards to families! Certainly, Oak Park needs to stop rigging systems to keep extended Black families from taking root here. And it's hard to deny that children are better off raised by more than one loving stable caregiver, though we might go back and forth about how important it is that the other stable caregiver be a father, vs. for instance a same-sex partner or a committed grandparent --- I had friends growing up raised by grandparents and those grandparents were probably a lot more conscientious than a lot of our parents.
At any rate, my main argument here is that this "nuclear family" stuff is a weird bone to pick with BLM. They're an easy target! They believe that we can beat back racism without reforming all of capitalism! Pick that fight, not the one that actually does implicate 75 years of racist housing policies that created the impoverished neighborhoods that have trapped and killed so many Black people.
> There's apparently this whole sort of internal cultural debate about Black advancement --- I'm a white dude and talking out of my ass here, but, like, I read some stuff --- between what you might call the Booker T. Washington school, which says Black advancement has to come from Black people improving their own circumstances and correcting the problems that are holding them back, and the W.E.B. DuBois school, which says that the first order of business is to secure formal, recognized equality with white people. It strikes me that you can read Sowell vs. BLM in that light.
My point is the internal debate is filtered through a media and academic framework controlled by white social progressives that elevate one view and suppress the other based on their ideology. Don Lemon faced intense criticism when airing the Booker T. Washington view, because Bill O'Reilly said the same thing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2013/07/29/don.... It's pretty hard to get tenure at an American university doing work based on the Booker T. Washington view. But the W.E.B. DuBois view gets amplified through those same outlets. That's not because the Booker T. Washington view isn't extremely common. It's because the alliance between Black people and white social liberals suppresses the strong social conservatism in the Black community, as a matter of political necessity.
Now, I understand why the alliance exists. But as applied to Asians, I think the Booker T. Washington view is obviously correct and the W.E.B. DuBois view would be disastrous. I worry that the increasing affiliation of Asians with the left will suppress the very necessary and important social conservatism that exists in the Asian community.
We probably don't disagree that much! The bullshit I am on, generally, is that left liberals underestimate just how conservative Black people are, and instrumentalize them in the service of their own policy agendas. It's not hard to find Black advocates of the Booker T school; I think you provided one a week ago!
I think it's important to recognize the validity of both trains of thought.
By all means, take potshots at trust-fund leftists. They richly deserve it! But I'm going to call you out when you pick bad targets, as you did here. There's stuff to criticize even in the specific BLM messaging about families (BLM is a deeply imperfect advocate), but to suggest as you did that "nuclear family" bias is a baffling leftward shift is beyond the pale. It's square in the middle of real, practical problems.
I appreciate the response, as always!
You speak as if single parent households are that way by choice. I'd wager 99.99% wish they had a stable partner helping them out.
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 matter?" This is a brilliant move.
"I disagree with you."
"What, you're against progress?"
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).
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).
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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 justice work.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. -----------------
You need to be very generous to interpret this as anything other than an attack on the traditional family.
In contrast, single parent households drastically reduce the chances of success in life along a ton of metrics. Those kids get worse grades, drop out early, suffer learning and mental disorders at a much higher rate, are much more subject to domestic violence, etc. A shocking statistic is that around 85% of people in prison had no significant father figure in their life. This isn’t a one-off statistic either as incarceration rates do seem to track with single mothers over time. It even affects the mothers themselves who report higher rates of mental health issues (this tracks over time and across racial and ethnic groups).
Note: This probably would occur with single fathers too, but fathers are unlikely to be granted custody unless the mother has extreme issues going on and the father has a pristine record in comparison. Likewise, with 90+% of elementary teachers now being women (this wasn’t always true), finding a male role model is more difficult during the early, formative years.
That is what we see, in other countries with more robust (and more redistributive) welfare state systems than the US.
But if you are a kid that grew up with one parent, we need to have alternatives to help those kids thrive. Harping on the fact that 2 parents are better than 1 does nothing for kids with only one parent (except maybe make them feel defective and disadvantaged).
IIRC, The Occupy Movement heavily influenced BLM.
David Graeber talks about the origins of Occupy in The Democracy Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Democracy_Project
Sure Anarchists like Graeber are adjacent to Socialists, Marxists, and other groups. But Anarchists are for participatory democracy, against government. The left-wing version of libertarians. So Anarchists oppose Socialists, Communists, and Liberals (today's Democrats & Republicans) equally.
I couldn't say if Occupy or BLM are Marxist, Socialist, or whatever. Or since everyone uses their own definitions, what that could possibly mean. Things get nutty when people try to use 100 year old terms to talk about contemporary stuff.
It's on my to do list to find similar write-ups about BLM. Please share if you found any.
You can say, at least regarding the founders of BLM: https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives
"BALL: ...he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?... CULLORS: Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right. We’ve seen after Sandra Bland. We’re seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation presidential forum. What I do think, though, is folks–especially folks who have been trained in a particular way want to hear certain things from us, that we’re not sort of framing it in the same ways that maybe another generation have, has. But I think it’s important that people know that we are, the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t just live online, although there’s many people who utilize it online. We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame. But I argue that it’s not. "
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...
The writers are African-American women. Working has been a feature of most African-American women's lives for the entirety of America. It's not a dig at the fathers, who have historically also been working. The traditional African-American family has typically had two workers. (The "double-shift" is working for someone else, then coming home and doing homemaking. Commonly, the father would be working a second job during the evening hours.)
I think reading this as an attack on the traditional American family is making a lot of assumptions about which families are considered "traditional."
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.
What's a "traditional family"?
Increasingly, lots of different kinds of families are being recognized as good, and they're pushing back against people who insist that only one kind of family is acceptable.
What is your vision of traditional black family?
> mothers, parents, and children are comfortable
A commune? Your child will be raised by the state automatically?
It's hippy-dippy marxist nonsense.
"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".)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklive...
It's easy to agree on platitudes. The disagreement comes when it comes to the implementation.
That's my biggest problem with the BLM movement. The cause sounds great, but I still don't understand the solution. Everything is vague, like "systemic racism". It feels like they are just winding up millions of people into a frenzy, gaining allies to a cause that is to-be-defined. I shudder to think what solutions will finally be presented when everyone is at peak temperature.
I found this summary of the BLM language online to be pretty fair: https://www.iwf.org/2020/10/01/fact-check-is-it-true-that-bl...
I guess I believe that society functions best with households where a mother figure and a father figure are present and align as a team with the goal of providing for and raising their children. Many circumstances can get in the way of that ideal to be sure. I do see BLM language above calling into question that ideal by labeling it western which is ridiculous.
More fundamentally though it seems the solution to their problem may not be political as much as cultural. Where have the fathers gone? Honestly - where did they go? So many broken relationships, so many men in jail. These are the issues we should be fighting more than anything else _by far_.
We can tackle this in the political arena by looking closely at over-incarceration, but that's only one aspect of the problem. It seems detrimental to the actual "Black Lives Matter" cause to ignore the rest. Of course admitting that your group has a problem isn't exactly protest inducing material, and that is where my cynicism creeps in.
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 players. In reality what happened is that our media intensive culture broadcast a nearly nine minute video of a black man being strangled by a cop and there was a broad visceral reaction against that. So what is really being said here is that a cop strangling a black man isn't that much of a big deal and what really matters is the philosophical positions expounded by the founding documents of the organization that emerged as protests grew. Want to object to cops strangling black men? You better be really slick with your organizational skills and foundational document writing because that is what really matters.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/george-floyd-fentanyl/...
BLM seem to cause a lot of agitation, but I am not aware of them doing anything helpful to the communities that it claims to be fighting for.
"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.”"
Lots of Black people deal with disrespect and abuse from police on a regular basis. A lot of the seemingly flippant behavior from Black people towards police that we sometimes see during recorded interactions is well earned by years of subtle, and not so subtle harassment by some police officers.
Look up some of Amber Ruffin's videos on her interactions with police growing up in NYC. It's pretty eye opening and all of my Black friends have echoed similar stories.
Another example that comes to mind is the story of the Black women and children that were made to get out of their car and lay handcuffed, face down on the asphalt in the arizona sun while the cops slowly discovered that the car they were driving was not actually stolen and that they had read the plate wrong. Supposedly, the cops tried to handcuff the little 7 year old girl but even fully tightened her wrists were too small.
I have been unable to find a comparable story of an innocent white family of women and children made to lay handcuffed face down like that. I suspect very strongly those same cops would not have treated a white family like that.
Excess deaths at the hands of cops is just a serious symptom of a much larger underlying problem of disrespect and abuse.
Seems like just trying to redirect the narrative. Kind of like when you bring up the studies where identical resumes were sent out half with white sounding names and half with Black sounding names and the white sounding names get way more callbacks.
The response is usually something like, that probably has more to do with class/wealth, not race. As if the two are not strongly linked.
There are lots of ways to measure this, which one are you talking about? There are lots of variables to control for: # of police encounters. Person being confronted while in the middle of (or just after) a committing a crime. Person being armed or not.
Talking just about deaths I feel like distracts from the issue that really warrants discussion in American society, which is number of interactions with police and how many of those turn into physical altercations. Then we need to look into the reasons for those and what the possible solutions are. We also need to admit that this likely isn't just a policing issue, but a societal and cultural issue that needs to be addressed.
A great example of this was played out by the nypd when they came banging on the door of a blm organizer claiming to have a warrant for his arrest. They apparently did not. He didn't open his door when they refused to show him the warrant. That quickly escalated to dozens of cops and vehicles outside and pounding on his door and getting battering rams ready. What was his accused crime? Shouting in a cop's ear with a megaphone.
You get enough bs like that going on, and statistically, people are going to get killed.
There ARE also videos of whites getting killed in conditions just as tragic as e.g. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, etc. But they go largely unreported in comparison.
Long history of this. Many such cases. Follow the money and you'll see.
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.
In leftist-thinking circles. Let's not forget what "liberal" is supposed to mean.
I'm not big into politics but I don't really understand how two different parties can both use "science and data" to reach totally separate conclusions. Which one is lying/wrong?
As a programmer, it just doesn't compute. Input and output and all that.
Think of stuff that programmers do argue about. Type systems, databases, architecture, agile development, etc.
Logic is a great tool, but it's also more limited than people realize.
That's not at all how a steel man argument works. You're supposed to commit to building the best form of your opponent's argument and verify that they themselves agree with it. You don't ask someone to do it for you.
With steelmanning I mean "the act of taking a view, or opinion, or argument and constructing the strongest possible version of it."[1] If you dispute that definition[2] then mentally swap the term to one you think better fits what I proposed.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/steelmanning
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
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.
QED.
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 particular topic spans hundreds to thousands of years, across the globe. Sowell has come to the near opposite conclusion, that to expect equal outcomes between populations with different histories, cultures, patterns of behavior, etc, is insane. And then to attribute the entire disparity as evidence of racism is doubly so.
While Sowell is undoubtedly king, if you're interested in other black intellectuals with alternative takes on philosophy to the racial collectivism of critical race theory, Coleman Hughes is the single clearest thinker I have ever heard. John McWhorter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Carol Swaine, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Thomas Chatterton Williams (author of the article above), Zuby, among many others. I think every person on this list would tell you that it's irrelevant that they are black, while understanding that it is an important characteristic they possess while bridging the gap between their own liberal ideologies and the prevailing race-conscious critical race theory, for which their racial identities are paramount.
https://youtu.be/TEBPCOG5RHs?t=66
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIv4L9M1ECU
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.
I am unaware of this idea in Kendi's work, please could you reference Kendi or Sowell on this specific point?
That philosohy departs from popular understanding of MLK dramatically.
Inequities are results, so he's basically saying that you will forever be trying to manipulate outcomes to arbitrary standards of equity, or you are a racist.
> Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.
This idea of the presence of (certain) inequities as evidence of racism doesn't seem controversial to me: if we took large samples of White, Black, and Latinx households in USA, accounting for regional differences and other coincident factors in the samples, wouldn't we expect the deviation in home ownership percentages to be much, much lower?
Could you (or someone else) reference a definition of racism from MLK?
The idea that any difference is due to an "ism" is ridiculous.
That being said, we should respect and help whatever individuals need it.
It was frustrating and challenging. I fear that he's not gifted in any way, as the summary of the book suggests. He has had a load of speech problems that has slowed down his reading abilities dramatically.
Also, right now I believe we are overly-obsessed with intelligence. Intelligence is a tool; what's important is how you use it. A middling intellect with a good attitude can achieve a lot more than a high intellect and a middling attitude.
> “It’s not about color for me,” my aunt said while railing against Obama. “For example, I love Thomas Sowell.”
> To that side of my extended family, I became the stereotype of a coastal liberal, writing for the New York Times and wholly out of touch with the real America. In fact, I’ve always prided and defined myself as an anti-tribal thinker, and sometime contrarian, working firmly within a left-of-center black tradition...
Why was this published in Law & Liberty, has he burned his left-of-center media bridges?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_Whi...
On topics like this, they view college activists as authoritative, objective sources of truth on race. Those activists view Sowell, and TCW, as heretics.
He made a good point.
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.
It isn't. These organizations exist because they have money, not because they actually want to solve legitimate social issues.
No, left-of-center media is under the throes of the cultural far left, and they "de-platform" anyone who doesn't adhere to their ideology.
So conservative media, along with non-traditional dissident media like Quillette, are often the only place dissident liberals like TCW can be published.
I'm excited to read the linked biography when it's published.
Candidates who garner a lot of attention are actually viewed as a threat by the incumbents and are usually buried, destroyed, or sidelined. Take Yang, Tulsi and Ron Paul as a few examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXD4zPY4Ai0
Start at 24:53
I can't agree that he doesn't understand the value of family, markets, and liberty. He does - and these things are not complicated. The great majority of citizens in these United States have believed in them for hundreds of years.
But some people these days want us to stop believing in those values, and they are very vocal. We need more public intellectuals in the mold of Thomas Sowell, and politicians that would listen to their council.
Reading this was illuminating. I had never heard this take on the story of America and race before reading Sowell.
"This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. "
I thought Race And Culture: A World View maybe my favourite - explains a lot about the world.
I remember I discovered Sowell about that time, and it was challenging and refreshing.
I'm still a strange flavor of a utilitarian social democrat, but he's the reason why I picked up this routine of reading libertarians and conservatives. I dismissed some controversial right-wing figures in my country and reading their books (sometimes) challenge my ideas, and often improves my empathy.
There's a lot of nepotism in academia, only the filter of time seems counterbalance it.
In The Republic, Socrates famously argues that children should be raised in common, ignorant of their parentage. If you're going to take an ultra-rationalistic approach to raising children, "treat every child as if he/she is your own" is the ideal.
This debate has been going on forever with victories and losses on both sides. Public school is an example of a triumph on the rationalist side. Of course, just because public schools worked out doesn't mean we should "abolish the nuclear family" but it is a good argument for the utility of this long-running debate.
Which has been detrimental to the US right. His books/writings/talks are accessible because he communicates in ways that anyone can understand. There is no word salad, unnecessary jargon, etc.
I think part of the reason a lot of conservatives love him is that his haughty and confident attitude, especially when speaking about other intellectuals, is quite seductive. It's convenient and attractive to think that many of the worlds problems are because of people (mostly liberals) who think they are smarter than they are.
His conservative confidence seems to be his weakest spot. He is fond of claiming that any attempt to help the poor or discriminated against ends up harming them yet universal basic income trials have all had dramatically positive results. Extremists can bring up interesting arguments and information but tend to fail when it comes to realism, balance, and most important of all getting things done in order to make positive change.
Milton Friedman was on the record saying UBI is far superior to current welfare because it forces personal responsibility and choice while completely eliminating the massive welfare bureaucratic overhead.
This is common. Discussions of almost any author here draw the same set of responses.
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
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.
There are tons of smarter, more interesting people in the conservative sphere, especially around libertarian/conservative "brand". I don't get it.
For that reason alone is he better than most political commentators.
But I fail to understand how supposedly nuanced he is. To me, he looks like a caricature of the American libertarian/conservative flavor.
But in the same generic "conservative / learning libertarian" tradition as Sowell, I vastly prefer people like Tyler Cowen and to a lesser degree Russ Robert to give two very famous examples.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090624060334/http://article.nat...
You can argue that his claims about Iran's capabilities are exaggerated (Or that he was unaware of the then-secret war against Iran already going on), but the idea that Iran claims to be a sharia state and the laws of Iran are not something most Americans would want their granddaughters to have to live under is hard to dispute.
(“Left” in this context is the authoritarian top-left of the political quadrant)
I provided two examples in my comment above.
"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."
From where I sit, the quadrant is the least bad way to classify and categorize ideological views. It's certainly less lossy than categorizing on a single dimensional left/right spectrum.