Sowell on the “post-racial” Obama
Thomas Sowell is a wonderful writer, one of those on the Right with whom I was unfamiliar until the last few years. His writing may lack flamboyance, but it is remarkably clear and concise, and this recent piece is one of his very best.
As a black man himself, Sowell compells extra respect in speaking on the subject of how Obama uses race. Here, for example, is one of the most succinct statements of what is so deeply wrong with Obama that I’ve ever seen:
[Obama] found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has found it expedient to say a lot of other popular things ”” about campaign finance, about transparency in government, about not rushing legislation through Congress without having it first posted on the Internet long enough to be studied ”” all of which turned to be the direct opposite of what he has actually done after getting elected.
Those who were shocked at President Obama’s cheap shot at the Cambridge police for being “stupid” in arresting Henry Louis Gates must have been among those who let their wishes prevail over the obvious implications of Obama’s 20 years of association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything.
Read. The. Whole. Thing.
Great article, I see he mentions the black panthers like I did here a few weeks ago, there is no other explanation. Glenn Beck recently made the point that the current policies really look like reparations, I have to agree, look at the rich guys they have demonized so far, CEOs, wall street, bankers, now doctors and people with “Cadillac plans”, building quite a list, the only groups they haven’t demonized are lawyers and union leaders. It seems the theme is punish success and reward the people who are unsuccessful.
This is going to backfire, hopefully soon.
Sowell’s phrasing actually works for many things the left believes, i.e. “Anyone who can believe __________ can believe anything.”
Fill in the blank. I’ll start:
Mel Zelaya wants to improve the Honduran Constitution.
B/c of Persian hatred for anything the U.S. supports, therefore wise President Obama best supported the Iranian people via not publicly supporting them; except a week later, when he later did support the Iranian people via publicly condemning actions of Ayatollah Khameini. Timing.
Keynes and demand side good; Hayek and Friedman and supply side bad. If we just try demand side ONE MORE TIME, it might work.
If we just try communism ONE MORE TIME, if we FINALLY find a capable Commissar to run a communist nation, it will work. We’ve just had an unusual unlucky streak of incapable communist leaders. Just bad luck, is all.
Barack Obama is smarter than Sarah Palin.
John Kerry is smarter than GWB.
Al Gore is smarter than GWB.
Walter Cronkite: One of the smartest Presidents I ever sat interviewed was Jimmy Carter.
If Walter Cronkite can believe that, he can believe anything.
What beer should be served for the great “suck-up”?
… why, LOST NATION PALE ALE, of course.
The Beer for people who have Lost Their Nation, NOT Their Taste.
LOST NATION PALE ALE from Willoughby Brewing Company, 4057 Erie Street Willoughby Ohio.
http://www.willoughbybrewing.com/beer.htm
The Ethnic Stereotyping Parable of Beer
So…
Maybe if we were to consider the whole “beer at the White House” (Breaking and entering) thing from Sgt. Crowley’s (Prof. Gates) point of view?
You never know, he might feel a little put upon, having someone of another ethnic background automatically assuming he liked to drink (break and enter) because he was Irish (Black)? Maybe even if he is standing in a bar (In the foyer of a house with a broken front door) when he gets the invite?
I mean, especially if he knows in the depths of his very soul and through the personal experience of generations of his ethnic group that there is a history of societal-wide biased belief that the majority of Irishmen (Blacks) abuse alcohol (Break and enter)?
What if the invite was really only an innocent one – the kind of invite that someone might extend to a working acquaintance (Perp) or customer (Taxpayer) while in the course of their job?
But what if then, as Sgt. Crowley (Prof. Gates) has been conditioned to look at such pleasantries as an insult to his heritage and his intelligence, he takes offense at the invitation to “have a beer” (Show some I.D.)?
Are we to then blame Sgt. Crowley (Prof. Gates)?
Of course not — blame the inviter, not the invitee.
its funny, but when i get a neo liberal (communist) to read the original liberal texts… they are completely floored and surprised.
i gave one john stewart mill, and he read part of what i gave, and the next day i hear from him that he is glad that they were against slavery, and he was surprised that the reasoning was clear concise and hard if not impossible to debate against.
my response was of course… the civil war was before communism… was before neo liberals and all that…
and the enlightenment was even before that.
so the guys taking credit for it are not the men who created the seeds. they are the ones perverting that to extremes.
for instance, how many people reading dawkins new book would realize that he is hashing old arguments that were met with better thinkers than he… so his book doesnt bring them up. he doesnt duel the old thinkers that outclass him and would win, he just ignores their existence and bets his public is too ignorant to know. and in most cases he is right.
the contempt you notice is from them playing a game and we follow. after all, making people wear undewear on the outside, and other things like that creates the illusion that they are stupid, and that they will do anything and that they are programmable.
like a sociopath the niceness that allows a light sociopath to exploit everyone around for favors and an easier life is looked down as a weakness.
sociopaths are throwbacks to before there were larger societies. but our super large connected society allows fringes to gather in numbers that can give them weight disproportionate to their side because the masses are social and so give in to the harmony that is promised.
they are following hegel with a twist hegel is usually argued in binary. smash a into b and you get a new c… but power people play hegel in trinary… entity A smashes B into C, and stands above the ruins of both…
so socialists put heterosexuals against gays, and when done, family and the core cohesian of free society is smashed. the gays think that what they are going to get is what the heteros have, and the heteros know that fringe can never create a society of maximum happiness, thatts why they are fringe.
when all is over, the power people dont care as to what each gets. the gays do not know their history, and so they do not know the reward they will get. its easy to pretend to like someone to get them to do something you need, but after that, what is your respect and regard for the people you used?
the elite think they are making lots of progress.. but progress is arbitrary… they are running headlong to a different future that they believe they will be happy.. but that kind of persuit is meaningless.
say they get all taht they want… the rest of us are gone, and the world is 20 million elite… what do you think then will happen? their birth rate is low, their desease rate is high, their ability to create social harmony without force is minimal…
and this is why the persuit of total power is futile… life has billions of years to wait till your children forget why you did what you did, and a new society of free individuals arises.
their systems are not productive for stability… they do not want to allow any space expooration… why? hey… the small group of people who end up living on the moon successfully will rule the earth.
the point being that it creates the same situation that england and the USA had which made middle class the rulers of kings
with sowell above, i would change expedient, a word that is more postitive than pragmatic the moral system of those without morals.
Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything.
ah… well.. no public narrative weaves in the information of the back story. churches are favored by dissident groups and such… historically speaking, they have been exploited for other reasons, and they end up holding the blame afterwards.
wrights church is not a normal church. its full of too many thinkers and manipualtors. and thats because such a church makes a great cover for other things.
that is, with a reverend like wright connected and in the know, he spouts nasty stuff and useful idiot rhetoric of an extreme kind. this means that crazies are in the pews, but sane people who would watch and notice things are not. the rest are fellow travelers who realize the more offensive wright is, the less likely their games can be seen.
so while wright is giving his sermons and things its easy for others to meet in the rectory, bathrooms, what ever. they can meet and be from very different lives and have only the church as a connection. the church can collect lots of cash and disburse it to the right areas, without accounting.
visitors from foreign places that would look very odd meeting someone, can easily attend a service and meet that person and no one would think anythig, or even be able to know who was attending at the time, where they sat, who they talked to, etc.
churches also can keep their books secret from the state and pretty much everyone… (the reason for the animosity of socialism to the church its twofold. one its a source of other advice and such, and two… they use such things to destabilize places and things and so they are not going to let such convenient things exist)
the hardest part for eveyrone to understand is that they dont believe things… that is, the leaders are not following a belief system in the sense that a christian follows the bible… but in the sense that a con man may follow the bible because it facilitates the real end.
entity A smashes B into C, and stands above the ruins of both…
i should have added that in this game the C, is only loved or pretended to be liked loved and promoted not for what they actually are, which is their fatal conciet, but because of what damage they will do to the other hated B.
so its not that they like gays and actually think their lifestyle is a good one, its that by pretending that they can facilitate a head to head between gays and heterosexual families… like two fighting fish they will destroy each other.
in this way, you facilitate a fringe, which in power can NEVER make the masses happy, and by doing so you ligitimize fringe and place them on the train tracks in front of the middle class.
the nice thing is if the fringe wins, they are not smart enough to not be set upon the next and the next… till the one orchestrating the fights is the winner.
its also interesting to note about alinsky and his dedication to lucifer… the first radical.
there is more to that dedication that is not there if one takes the time to actually pay attention to negative space.
his quote celebrates lucifer for opposing god, and winning his own kingdom… right?
well… from the view point of followers and such, and from the view point of our nation as the one the poor all want to be in as their heaven, is a different one.
lucifer was able to convince angels that heaven wasnt good enough!!!
that lucifer facilitated the kingdom by conniving angels into believing that heaven was not heaven and that hell was a better heaven.
alinsky is being most truthful at that point.
that he would rather rule in a hell of his own creation than serve in heaven.
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
Neo,
I also think Sowell’s following quote, “An 18th-century philosopher said, “When I speak I put on a mask. When I act I am forced to take it off.” Barack Obama’s mask slipped for a moment last week but he quickly recovered, with the help of the media. But we should never forget what we saw,” is also right on the money.
I’ve been a big fan of Sowell’s for years. He is a great writer on economics. Also, his ‘random thoughts’ articles are usually priceless.
Sowell is a national treasure.
Many years ago I read that he and Walter Williams have agreed never to fly on the same plane.
Good stuff from Sowell.
This ‘incident’ still has plenty of legs. What’s become clear is that Lucia Whelan was defamed by knee-jerk racialists on the left in the form of pundits, bloggers and newspaper editorials.
She also is at odds with Sgt. Crowley’s report. Whelan claims she never mentioned race to Crowley, but he states differently. I believe Whelan on this one and think Crowly confabulated his report in that regard.
Then, when we listen to the 911 tapes we hear a rude and dumb dispatcher talking down to Whelan.
Ex.: She stated that there were luggage on the front porch. The dispatcher responds with an attitude that won’t quit: “What’s that got to do with anything?” Well,…duh…she’s giving potentially valueable information – the men might live there and have come home from a trip or the men might be using the luggage to cart off stolen goods.
Oh, the possibilities… Here’s a start. Feel free to embellish, amend or otherwise improve.
A cop, a professor and the President walk into a bar. The bartender asks the cop “What’ll it be?” The cop says “the usual.” The bartender hands the cop a bottle of beer then asks the professor the same question. The professor says “the usual.” The bartender places a napkin in front of the professor, puts downs an iced glass and pours into it a bottle of beer, then he turns to the President and asks, “and you sir?” The President says “the usual.” The bartender picks up the professor’s drink and puts it in front of the President, serves a round of drinks to all the patrons in the bar and gives the tab to the cop.
I don’t think Dr. Sowell is going to get invited to the White House.
Despite all of the theories explored on Neo’s threads, it continues to baffle me as to how so many could be so fooled by Obama when the empirical evidence speaks clearly for itself. What is wrong with so many that they can’t see it?
I think what was wrong with so many was Bush hatred and rage fueled by years of the media telling them that everything Bush did was evil and stupid, and years of blaming everything on Bush and the Republicans. Obama the smooth-talker comes along, and says some things that people want to hear, and no one questions him, and they believe him.
Most of the people in my office voted for Obama. Some are committed leftists who would have voted for him no matter what. One was a disaffected Republican who hated Bush for the war in Iraq and refused to vote for McCain because she hated Sarah Palin. Another is a self-proclaimed centrist who is more conservative than he will admit publicly, but he deluded himself into thinking that Obama would be a centrist. I have noticed, though, that he has gotten very quiet about Obama ever since “The One” declared his intentions shortly after taking office to close the detention facility at Guantanamo without an alternative plan in place. (He said he didn’t understand why Obama would do that. I thought, well, obviously you didn’t understand who you were voting for.) A third claims to be apolitical, but he likes Obama because he likes the city of Chicago and used to live there, and refuses to look at any information that counteracts his simplistic adulation of Obama (and, need I say it, his hatred of Bush).
JohnC Question: How could so many be fooled by Obama?
Answer: Media rolled out the red carpet for The One.
Bill Whittle said, today, it’s not that Gov. Palin ought not have been asked tough questions; it is, rather, that Sen. Obama was not asked tough questions.
I add: it’s not that Gov. Palin ought not have been investigated. It is, rather, that Sen. Obama was not investigated.
The Lefties call him “Uncle Tom”. Pretty consistent with their (mental) illness…
I love Thomas Sowell. My dad says he’s the only good thing that’s ever come out of Gastonia, N.C. 😉
Artfldgr’s reference to original liberal texts is exactly why I am glad to see the term Statists come into use.
To call today’s lefties, liberal, is to corrupt the word. Statist is the word that defines them.
I also love Thomas Sowell. He writes with such common sense.
So far I have heard two black men (one on the right and the other on the left, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus) saying the proposed healthcare plan and cap-and trade legislation are really a backdoor method of reparations, a way to redistribute income from the “haves” to “have nots.”
The phrase “teachable moment” comes from that old commie thug from Chicago, Saul Alinsky.
Sowell is right, Obama was never “post-racial”. Quite the opposite. He played on white guilt better than any other politician I’d ever seen. I happen to not feel guilty about things that happened long before my ancestors ever arrived in the U.S., so for this and many, many other reasons, this approach fell flat with me. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough of us last November.
“I don’t think Dr. Sowell is going to get invited to the White House”.
Maybe in 2013 he will. If the GOP can get its head out the sand, stop being the polite nice guys and start being just a bit ruthless. The Dems give them plenty of live ammo, but the Republicans insist on shooting blanks, because that’s the “collegial” thing to do. Excuse me? When was a left-wing Dem ever “collegial” about anything, except when he needed a GOP vote? Oh, and finding a decent candidate that both the GOP faithful and center/center-right independents will want to vote for will also help a lot.
when the empirical evidence speaks clearly for itself. What is wrong with so many that they can’t see it?
because most have a relative view of reality.
yesterday someone asked me why pie is not a neat number but infinitely long… and i tried to tell him that it depends on whether you are talking about in reality… or your talking about mathematically… and i said in math, the numbers go to “infinity and beyond”, and do all kinds of strange things. but in the real world, the concept of surface, and space breaks down beyond a certain scale. then went into the fact that the pi thing leads to the knowlege of three worlds… the shared reality, the mental reality, and platonic mathematical reality… i said as humans we live in a mental construct we think aligns with and defines reality when its the other way… and i said that we live in this perceptual bandwidth in which we normally do not pay attention to things outside that scale. so things like polution only exist in certain scales of time and space.
i explained if we were to drill down to the smallest size the planck length then we would be looking at incredibly small quantieis. a unit of planck time being a point with 43 zeros after it with the next number starting with a 5… and that this divsion divided the over 15 billion years of the universe (i didnt bring up that time is fluid and can cahnge too).
i said there is also the question of what kind of space. eucleadian would have pi be irrational, but if you are talking the surface of a sphere pi can be 1/2 or .5 of the circumference. AND you would have to know what scale, because if the sphere is large enough local space may appear eucleadean.
of course he then said it was all relative..
the next day he writes an email to return the phone i left and mentions oure “science fiction” conversation. (i told him dont put contents of conversation in business emails since the bosses read them, i am old, and you dont see old programmers around here do you? he is too young to get that such things can affect my future)…
he things it is not important… and yet he still wants to know about pi…
that in a nutshell is why.. they have been moved from reality, to mental reality, and cant even tell that there is a mathematical reality that is also different. that they are more in the unreal perfected universes of hte mind is why they cant adapt to the empirical world.
they have little understanding of empirical principals, nor does their self confidence allow them to.
Overconfidence Among Teenage Students Can Stunt Crucial Reading Skills http://www.physorg.com/news168105367.html
if one wants to take a big look backwards, what one is seeing is the second roudn of the fight between philosophies of the mind sans empirical grounding, against empirical reality and its premises.
that is gallileo and science knocked philosophers off their thrones where they told the world how the world was thorugh mental gymnastics.
and here comes these empiricsts, who basically threw them to the outer fringes… the rest of philosophy has been about confusing people that the mental world, and its perfected realities llike the platonic are real, and that empirical reality doesnt even exist… that way they define reality and what it should be… but sadly they no longer have the same grounding in reality that the philosophers before them did.. as they moved more to the cities, and farther away from realities empiricism imposing on them they lost touch with it.
which is why you drop the children of such education in the wild, and they go out and starve or get eaten by bears. why? because the mental reality they have been convinced of, was falsely handed to them, and so they go out thinking their mental reality is reality.. and that mental principals of a perfect world in mind, are real world principals.
while its deadly to only a few in the case of such excursions, it completely causes mental breakdown in such things as wars. where suddenly reality imposes itself and no amount of thinking can banish it, and its so far from their reality.
such people do not rise up to meet chalenges, they curl up in little balls and hope someone will fix reality for them.
sigh
old flyer,
To call today’s lefties, liberal, is to corrupt the word. Statist is the word that defines them.
actually to call them communists would more correctly label them, and tell you what kind of statist they are, as there are many forms of such and particulars do matter.
Artfldgr, I’m just now reading Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (at your recommendation, IIRC, and it was an excellent one), and I was amused to see the Julius Rosenberg’s cover name was “Liberal.”
Not very deep cover for a communist, I’d say.
when the empirical evidence speaks clearly for itself. What is wrong with so many that they can’t see it?
and here is a salient reason why i sit alone most of the time…
and the salient answer to what your asking… much shorter than my post.
just imagine that there is a group of them and i am sitting with them… they start talking like this… and i decide to teach them.
guess what? i am attacked…
but if some other person who was smart came along and decided to work the idiots rather than just help them. and teach them.
then they would feed into it, and maybe start a group.. they would deputize the beleiveers of this.. they would then get others to collect money… they of course woudl file under 501c and use a group of communist synonyms… maybe the peoples progressive for the liberation of fresh drinking water…. and they can then cut themselves a million dollar salary… get funds from the state, to which they convince their group to vote for that person and kick back funds to.
before long… well, they are just another leftist moonbat calling for lots more regulation and tryign to grow their garden of idiots who they can guide their missives.
hows that for reality?
here is the video…
a 00:01:59 video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sq-VmBMHkw
Occams beard,
i am glad you enjoyed it and i am glad you read it… your a reasonable person with a good sense of history so i know you got a lot out of it and were reasonable in your thoughts.
but can you see how minds not so grounded in history and what is normal and such can find such reading turning them paranoid.
the other thing you will start to notice is that there is an unspoken agreement among all of us to pretend that all that doesnt exist and isnt part of anythign current.. except when whats revealed hurts our view of ourselves (which cant be held suspicious as they dont know these other things).
oh.. just to let you know.. that book is also very clever propaganda too… at the meta level.
its all truthful, but constructed in such a way that you will conclude that the kgb has fallen when they are actually much higher than then.
if the kgb was truly dead then how did we elect obama?
🙂
Neo, since Obama opened his mouth at the Obamacare press conference and inserted his foot I’ve hoped I see cracks in the media wall surrounding him. It has taken *days* to get ObamaCare back to center stage, with no one to blame but Obama. Other observers are beginning to remark upon it; Glenn Reynolds linked to a Howard Kurtz column today. Meanwhile, others have been (gasp!) reading the bill and writing about what they see.
It’s not just the patently racist and classist behavior of Obama and his buddy Skip. (Wasn’t Skip listed as one of the classic preppy male nicknames in the preppy handbook?) It’s not just the American taxpayers getting righteously p.o.’ed about Congress passing massive tax bills they don’t read. It’s not just the sight of the Chicago machine taking root in the White House. It’s all of it, all the time.
If one were talking with a co-worker who asked, “What is the deal with Obama and why is he supposed to be post-racial?,” the best one could do is hand him a copy of Sowell’s column.
Terrific essay. Thx for the link. Allowing the ‘Black Panther’ thugs to go unpunished for their blatant intimidation was what truly got my attention. A Racialist attitude among black nationalists (and presumably other racial grievance groups) will be given wider range under this president.
If one was allowed to read only one of Sowell’s works, I would recommend a book entitled: “Knowledge and Decisions” which he wrote in the early 70s and contains the kernel of, and touches upon, every single topic that he has since delved into in greater depth–edu, culture, economics, nat. defense, the law and SCOTUS–the central essence of each topic is all there under one cover…A great starter book to obtain the flavor of the man and the essence of his ideas before branching out to read his other more specialized works.
virgil x: I haven’t read that one, but I was very impressed with The Vision of the Anointed. Do you think Knowledge and Decisions is superior?
Here is a story from a Reflections of the Art of Living – A Joseph Campbell Companion: Written 1991.
I had an interesting experience when I was lecturing at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington D.C. to groups of officers about to go on assignment to the Orient or Southeast Asia. In one group there was this very smart black man, who’d just come from three years in Vienna and was going to India. The gentleman in these groups would always invite me to have lunch at a very nice restaurant at the Watergate Hotel, and this time they asked this chap to drive me over there.
He had a zoom-zoom spots car, and he was quite the guy. When he and I were at the table, the first thing he started talking to me about was being black and the things that were against him. I though, “Well, I’m going to let him have it. I’m sick of this kind of stuff.” I said, “In terms of the people I know, you are way up there. You’ve got a good life. Everybody has something against them. Some people are unattractive, and that’s against them. Some are Protestants in a Catholic country; some are Catholic in a Protestant environment. If you go on blaming everything that is negative in your life on the fact that you’re black, you deny yourself the privilege of becoming human. You’re just a black man. You are not a man yet.” Then the crowd came in, and he sat quietly the rest of the time.
When I arrived the next month for my session, I went up to report in, and the officer on duty said, “Say, Joe, what did you tell that guy last time?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Why?” He said, “Well, he’s bought all your books, and he’s downstairs and wants you to sign them. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, ‘Professor Campbell has made a man out of me.”
Now that was a big lesson to me, and it runs against all the bleeding-heart stuff. I was proud of that. So, he’d been stuck in his hell: he hadn’t been able to see past his own notion of what his limitation was. Anyway, I went downstairs, and he had all the books, and as I was signing them, I said, “Well, this’ll help you remember me.” He said, “Oh, I’ll never forget you.”
Everytime you do something like that you find it was the right thing to do, provided that you furnish the person with something to jump to. If you’re really not interested in the person, you can just agree with them, “Ah, you poor chap, I understand. It’s real tough.”
Don’t think of what’s being said,
but of what’s talking
Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?
The goal of the hero’s journey
is yourself, finding yourself.
I tried to get through “Visions of The Anointed” but it reminded me of too many of the people I know.
I had to stop reading for fear of not being civil to these morons.
When Obama describes himself as “post-racial” what he really means is post-white-race. In his heart he will always be a racist (and a fascist).
neo-neocon/
Neither superior nor inferior, but, as I stated, really a compendium of sorts of all the various thoughts/strains of inquiry he would eventually flesh out in greater depth separately in each of his later works. The kernel of “Vision” is certainly there, as are the core elements of all his other works–he touches on them all–which is why I think that book is such a great starter volume for those unfamiliar with his complete body of work.
PS:to neo-neocon/
I readily and fully admit to being an unrepentant abject worshiper at the alter of Thomas Sowell’s take on sociocultural issues. I will willingly follow that academic General as my standard-bearer into any intellectual fight at any time.
One of his better lines/quips he’s ever made was, when critiquing the minimum wage, he once said in a TV interview (referring to the union wage agreements which are keyed to the minimum wage and thus cause an upward ripple effect on all union wages to the very top when the min. wage is raised, even as small non-union employers shed jobs/stop new hires when the min. wage is raised) that: “I don’t see why black teen-agers should hang around street-corners unemployed just for the greater glory of the AFL-CIO”
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