Thomas Sowell should be banned!

The BBQ Pit
61

Whether willful or not, if one attempts to write a meaningful commentary on any issue, one should know something about the said issue. Sowell did not research or confirm his statement, and this was willful or negligent (your choice of words).

I will admit that I am unaware of Dr. Sowell’s other accomplishments. I can, however, say that unless this is an editorial error (which seems highly unlikely), Dr. Sowell is at least lacking in knowledge, if not completely ignorant towards, the topic he chose to write about. If his column does not print a retractment of his error, I would say that one could add “distributed propaganda” or “lied” to his list of accomplishments (again, your choice of words).

If I write thousands of newspaper columns, that doesn’t mean they aren’t all being (figuratively) pulled out of my ass. I am certain that Matt Hale and his World Church of the Creator (a white supremacist group) and other racist or bigoted groups have written hundreds, if not thousands of columns and pamphlets which contain extremely bigoted and outright incorrect statements. The proliferation of these ideas does not imply or enhance their correctness.

To want him banned because of a single mistake would seem superficial, narrow-minded, mean-spirited, and perhaps bigoted. I fail to see how this would be hate-filled, or racist. How inflammatory. The original poster has since rephrased his original comment to something less harsh, so I suppose this is really a moot point anyways.

  • Rob
62

I din’t see how anyone could read that into his words. He said and implied nothing of the sort.

I think what he was saying is that even if a certain type of frog becomes extinct it’s no big deal, because there are so many other types of frogs that are so similar that the world is not changed in any meaningful way.

You can agree with this argument or disagree - it will depend on your perspective on conservation. But I don’t see any justification for the type of accusations being made here based on attributing to him arguments that he has not actually made.

63

I have nothing much to add here other than to note that the color scheme of the article Arnold linked to bears an uncanny resemblance to that of
http://www.chick.com/
Conspiracy or coincidence?

64

*Originally posted by LoverBoy *
Whether willful or not, if one attempts to write a meaningful commentary on any issue, one should know something about the said issue. Sowell did not research or confirm his statement, and this was willful or negligent (your choice of words).

Yes, Sowell was wrong on this point and he’s responsible for his error. However, “willful” wasn’t my choice of word, it was foolsguinea’s/. My point was that his unsupported slur showed malice. BTW there’s some irony in finding an error in fg’s post. Maybe fg should ban himself or herself from the SDMP! :slight_smile:

**

If I write thousands of newspaper columns, that doesn’t mean they aren’t all being (figuratively) pulled out of my ass.**

Maybe TS pulls facts out of his ass. And, maybe LoverBoy is a child molester. But, the only point against TS here is a single mistake. If you want to accuse him of widespread inaccuracy, please provide evidence. BTW As a standard of accuracy, the New York Times lists their errors on page 2. There are generally 5 to 10 each day.

I am certain that Matt Hale and his World Church of the Creator (a white supremacist group) and other racist or bigoted groups have written hundreds, if not thousands of columns and pamphlets which contain extremely bigoted and outright incorrect statements. The proliferation of these ideas does not imply or enhance their correctness.

It’s quite a slander to compare TS to bigoted lying racists. Where does that come from?

**I fail to see how this would be hate-filled, or racist. How inflammatory. **

If I argued that Thurgood Marshall’s writings should all be banned because he once confused a species with a sub-species, what would you think of me? Or if I denigrated Colin Polwell by comparing him to the World Church of the Creators, what would you call me? Would you not assume that I was really motivated by racism?

However, LB I’ll let you and fg off the hook. I don’t think you’re racists. I do suspect that you both harbor intense, irrational hatred of conservatives – which I consider a kind of bigotry.

I don’t know why you hate us. Pubbies are so cute…

65

How is that different from what I said? Regardless, he is mistaken and it affects his argument.

66

Felt the need to respond to this. Sowell has written ‘57 books’ - and Cecil Adams has only written a few, so apparently, we should honor Sowell more? How does Stephen King fit into this? he redefines prolific writer, of course, no one, even his fans contend that the Nobel Prize shoulda been his.

The question raised here was pretty simple. Sowell made an easily disproven assertion in one of his articles. Does this mean that nothing he writes is true? no, but it certainly suggests that one recheck his data when it’s not his field…

67

Either I don’t understand you or you don’t understand me or both. Sowell’s point, as I see it, is basically “big deal, who cares” if there is one less type of frog in the world? This is a judgement, a statement of values. It is not something about which it is possible to be “mistaken”. It is not a statement of scientific fact, and his terminology should not be interpreted in that context.

His overall point is that there are people who care very intensly about conservation, and that they are imposing their values on those whose interests are negatively affected by this. In this context, his argument about species merely means that whereas the majority of people support the endangered species act when considering the possiblity of whole types of animals being exterminated (e.g. all frogs), it is being applied in a more extreme manner to even sub-types whose elimination is not such a big deal (in his opinion). His choice of the word species was apparently not scientifically precise, though it probably does reflect common usage to some extent. In any event, the issue of his wording should not be used to obscure (and avoid) his larger point, which is independent of it.

68

I may have spoken confusingly. When I said “your choice of words”, I meant that you could choose which word to call him. You could say he was either “willfully ignoring facts” or being “grossly negligent”. You may choose which of these phrases is more appropriate.

I agree that this one issue is not enough to remove him from the newspapers. I was responding to the thread in the context of this particular column that he had written and in the context of your post.

Not comparing him to them. The WCC was provided as an example of how proliferation of information does not make that information “good” or correct.

I think that my general tendency would be to assume that you have an agenda against Thurgood Marshall or his political affiliations, not necessarily that you were racist. As I must point out again, the argument isn’t over whether we should burn all his writings in effigy (at least not anymore :))

I used to be a conservative myself. I don’t believe a harbor an intense hate towards conservatives. If I did, however, you would be absolutely correct in calling me a bigot. I would expect you to take my word on this as I did not mention your other comments relating to “us” being “cute”. :slight_smile:

  • Rob
69

wring said, though she probably shouldn’t have:

Wrong, wring. The OP couldn’tbe about the column as a whole, since the OP never cited the column as a whole. The OP summarized one factual statement in the column–that’s it. This is patently obvious to anybody who reads it.

Of course, I had already dealt with this back on page one, where I said:

One dead horse for sale, indeed. How much are you asking for it?

And since you seem to want to obscure the fact, here’s foolsguinea’s OP in its entirety:

The grand total of discussion of the the column as a whole is: “He was waxing dismissive about the rights of endangered species[…].” That’s all there is; there ain’t no more.

Back to wring:

It’s a correct statement, that’s what it is. Contending that it’s a defense of Sowell is assinine.

70

Good post, LB. I’m sure you, wring, fg, and the other posters are honorable people. However, I’m amazed at how casually you discussed banning Sowell, with no reference to who he is and what he has accomplished. It’s noteworthy that when I pointed out how prolific TS has been, you and wring guessed that there was something wrong with his work. E.g., you might have read some reviews of his books in Amazon.com, which would have helped you realize that he’s brilliant and very hard-working.

Here’s a brief curriculum vitae from his website:

The fact that he received his primary education at public schools in Harlem is some icing on the cake.

71

** well since the OP sums the article up quite nicely, I think we’ll just disagree about that as well. But you’ll go on and believe what you will.

I asked you for clarification of what you meant. To not answer isn’t helpful.

this:

is “a correct statement”? Well, we disagree that the OP was merely about the single line as noted above.

72

The above statement isn’t important, but it’s so incorrect that I won’t let it stand. Sowell’s article makes the following points, which are not mentioned in the OP:

[list][li]The Endangered Species Act is outrageous.[]Greens are selfish and arrogant. They’re bigots and bullies. [] They also lie a lot, as self-anointed idealists often do. []There’s no legal or moral right for the preference of greens to override those uninterested in frog-preservation. []Fuzzy words and apocalyptic visions are stock in trade for the green bigots. []Greens aren’t idealistic; they’re playing God. []Greens are unaccountable for the consequences of their actions – e.g. Calif power shortage. []Environmentalism has become a cult of pagan nature worship. []Having Greens in power is like a theocracy.[/li]
That’s strong stuff. It’s highly insulting to Greens. These points may or may not be fair, but they’re certainly important to the article, and they weren’t included in the OP.

73

wring, in what I can only assume is an attempt to drive me crazy*, wrote:

I’ve dealt with this twice, and now december has dealt with it. The OP** (A) discusses Sowell’s statement that “frogs” is a species, and (B) states that in the column “[h]e was waxing dismissive about the rights of endangered species[…].” To say this “sums the article up” at all, let alone “quite nicely,” is like summing up Romeo And Julietas “the story of two Italian families.”

I’m sure this sentence would just slay them down at the high school debate club, but I won an Am Jur award for Advocacy in law school, so it ain’t gonna impress me. You made a statement:

posed in the form of a question:

But this is no more a question than: “And then you shot the victim in the head eight times, didn’t you?”

As you demonstrated all by yourself, I didanswer the question–not in a way you like, maybe, but nevertheless. So much for stupid debate tricks…or was it perhaps an attempted defense of your own statement?

*A futile attempt–I’m as crazy as I’m gonna get.

**OP is usually taken to mean Original Post or Opening Post. Maybe wring’s position makes slightly more sense if she is attributing it to what she believes is a well-known corporate pronouncement of Occidental Petroleum.

74

Though I think the comment about the frogs makes Sowell astonishingly ignorant for a supposedly learned man, I agree with most of that stuff he says about Greens. It’s not applicable to ALL people interested in the environment, but I’d say those statements are true of the majority of the most vocal activists.

Though I don’t see extinction as negatively as most environmentalists (it’s somewhat tragic, but natural and usually inconsequential to the ‘Big Picture’) I don’t have any problems with the Endangered Species Act, however. I think it’s a good idea to do something to preserve endangered species, I just don’t think we should go to extreme measures to save them nor do I think it’s going to ruin the world to have a major extinction like what’s happeneing now.

75

And he votes for, & sometimes he flacks for, the GOP. Also, as a “pundit,” he attempts to convince people of his political views. He is a propagandist. It’s a description.

I’ll accept mean-spirited & hate-filled. I was frickin’ pissed off, & posted in anger. But it’s not just this one column. Sowell is the avowed enemy of environmental preservationists (the sort of “Green” I tend to agree with)–thus I consider him a pernicious influence. It really goes way beyond the frogs to his whole defective worldview.

76

For a so-called expert in Economics, Sowell makes a lot of ignorant-sounding statements. Is he really this stupid, or has he been corrupted? (I rather suspect the latter).

In a recent column about the California utility crisis, Sowell put down the faction that seeks publicly-owned power
plants, stating that public power is actually more expensive and also pointing out that Chernobyl was “public power”.

For Mr. Sowell’s information, we in Republican-dominated Nebraska have had state-wide public ownership of electric utilities since 1946. Our public power system is hardly a “commie plot”, and none of our power plants is like
Chernobyl. Our rates are well below the national average.

If I wanted to slander the good investor-owned utilities along with the bad, I could make a Sowellesque observation that Three Mile Island was what you ALWAYS get when you let private businesses run utilities.

One major cost advantage that public power has over private is that ownership is stable.

When your local power plant is merged with another company one year, spun-off into an LBO the next, and later merged into yet another conglomerate which will probably spin it off again in afew years–those big-bucks lawyers’ and accountants’ fees and those golden parachutes for all those top execs that are displaced by each ownership change come out of the ratepayers’ pockets. Mr. Sowell, a shill for the
dregs of Corporate America glosses over this fact.

Another facet of constant “churn” of assets is that the people who run these plants become demoralized and a lot of costly turnover results. Again, it’s the ratepayers’ money and not adime of it is going into plant and equipment.

Mr. Sowell also ignores the fact that the lights stayed on in California communities that have municipal power plants.

I wouldn’t want to ban Sowell, however. Like Rush Limbaugh,
he allows us into the minds of the monopolistic enemies of the People who have bought Sowell’s and Limbaugh’s souls, not to mention those of our national political leaders.

77

Maybe he was “corrupted” by Milton Friedman and other Nobel Prize-winning economists who were at the University of Chicago when Sowell was getting his Ph.D. there.

Glad to know that Nebraska’s publicly owned electirc power utility works well. However, Sowell has argued that, more often than not, public ownership has works worse than private ownership. The facts bear him out.

Glad to know that zenith] and foolsguinea are upset by Sowell’s writings, since they were written for that purpose. When someone this smart and this knowledgable disagrees with you, it’s worth considering that he might be right.

BTW, I love zenith’s phrase “into the minds of the monopolistic enemies of the People.” It would make a good signiture line.