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Chris
04-14-2012, 07:50 PM
Thomas Sowell Live (http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/13/thomas-sowell-live/) is an interview of Thomas Sowell of the second edition of his book Intelectuals and Scoeity.

He's asked about the inculsion of a new chapter on race:
AmSpec: Obviously this affects the issue of race. But why did the first edition of Intellectuals and Society not have any sections on race, and why did you add them into the second edition?

Sowell: Very simple. I learned from the history of the book The Bell Curve. It was not a book about race. There were only two chapters on race and intelligence out of twenty-two chapters. Yet when the book was published, those two chapters became the tail that wagged the dog. And the whole major thrust of the book was lost in all the controversy and hysteria over those two chapters. So I decided that if the message I was trying to get out in Intellectuals and Society was to have any chance of being examined it would be by leaving out any chapters on race.

AmSpec: Have you gotten any critical feedback on including the chapters on race this time?

Sowell: No. And I would say more generally I seldom get any critical feedback on my writings on race, and the reason is the people who run the civil rights movements and "black leaders" and so on, they're following what is their best strategy which is to ignore what I say and even if it gets a certain amount of attention just wait until that blows over and then resume saying what they've always said.
He's asked about intellectuals and race:
AmSpec: Could you give a general overview of how intellectuals impact the issue of race?

Sowell: Intellectuals can predetermine the whole position on race. One of the peculiar things of the 20th century is that for the first two decades, intellectuals, by which I mean primarily progressive intellectuals, were the biggest promoters of racism in the country. The seized upon evidence that was emerging from IQ tests, studies of difference in crime rates and rates of advancing and not advancing in the schools and so on, in order to argue that there were superior and inferior races, that they were genetically predetermined. And they were pushing very hard for a ban on or severe restrictions on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that actually became law in the 1920s. They were also for eugenics, with any number of them calling for the sterilization of people. Our only president with a PhD, Woodrow Wilson, was right in the middle of all that. People who are admirers of Wilson try to portray this as an odd aberration of his, but by no means was it. He was absolutely in the mainstream of progressive thought at the time. He became president. There were government agencies that were unsegregated. He segregated them. When the movie Birth of a Nation, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, came out, he had it played privately at the White House, and he invited political dignitaries to come and watch it with him.
In the later decades of the 20th century the intellectuals went to the other end of the spectrum. And now all differences in racial or ethnic groups were attributed to how they were mistreated by the larger society. So all the problems of the minorities were due to the minorities in the view of the intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, and all of the problems of the minorities were caused by the majority as the intellectuals saw it at the end of the 20th century.

...In both eras, they would not even engage in any serious discussion with people who went against the prevailing vision. Madison Grant called people who disagreed with genetic determinism "sentimentalists," and someone else called it the "Pollyanna School." Of course, toward the end of the 20th century, those who dared disagree with the prevailing vision were called "racists" or at minimum people who were "blaming the victim," which of course is a great phrase that begs all questions.

AmSpec: Why do they behave that way? Why won't they subject their vision to tests of logic and fact?

Sowell: I'm convinced it is because they have a huge "ego stake" in the vision of the anointed....

MMC
04-15-2012, 09:35 AM
Chris did you see the piece I had up from Prager.....on Still the Least Racist Country? He mentions something about that anointed or saviors. With regards to that Ego. Avoiding logic and fact. As well as those looking to be saved.

Chris
04-15-2012, 09:47 AM
I'll go look for it though I read Prager's piece...

MMC
04-15-2012, 09:50 AM
I'll go look for it though I read Prager's piece...

Ah.....you don't have to look for it then. You know what I was looking at then.

Chris
04-15-2012, 11:18 AM
Meant your thread, found it, added to it. Prager and Sowell seem to be aligned on this.

MMC
04-15-2012, 11:27 AM
I took it from Prager's Jewish Review Site.....could have taken it from Townhall to. I usually listen to him and Medved when I am at work. Which is a repeat of their shows. Medveds more moderate than Prager.

I have seen it all my life in Chicago. One need only look at Jesse Jackson and Emil Jones whom they called the Godfather of Chicago politics. Then watched Braun and Jackson run for the Presidency. Braun has ran for other Offices. Jackson hasn't nor does he need to with his Kid as a Congressman. What's amazing is that after 20 years you would think people would wake up and smell the coffee.

But then just with what we have seen around here lately. Tends to show what has taken place. Which then, it's send in the drones. That don't know anything else.

Chris
04-15-2012, 01:16 PM
Prager's OK unless he's on his Judeo-Christian kick, Medved never liked him.

Grew up northwest suburb, Cary, where my dad was once mayor! Never paid much attention to Chicaga politics tho.

MMC
04-15-2012, 03:51 PM
Economically NY, L.A., and Chicago, plus the states of those 3 cities. The left cannot get around that record of complete and utter failure.