An open letter to psychology departments at various universities (Brown and Columbia in particular here):
Subject: From the Earth to the Moon to “WUT”
To Whom It May Concern:
"That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of [does it matter?]"
— Glenn Loury
When the context suits you, such words are solid gold. What you do when it doesn’t — determines the worth of your word. The first time I ever heard of John McWhorter was in a 2017 interview. In talking about (take a wild guess), he said, “He has a rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement.” Alas, the likes of Loury and McWhorter miserably fail to see how they are unwittingly conditioning people to behave the same way. And they’re hardly alone, as it’s everywhere. This nation needs a national conversation — on how to have conversation.
Conventional means have no chance of breaching the envelope of intransigence around armies of unreachables in the trench warfare of our times. But integrate those same tools into an unconventional framework for honest debate — and now you’ve got something. Your field is forever fighting the forces of human nature whereas my idea banks on it.
A student wrote of her psychology professor: “[He] taught me the importance of breaking problems down into more manageable pieces.” Lo and behold, at the bedrock of my idea is exactly that. If you want to start solving problems, first you need to clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. To do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything. And you do it by holding one man to his own “standards”: A professional know-it-all with a cult-like following unlike anything I’ve ever seen. As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something.
His disciples see him as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes. And that — is an opportunity!
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach. I’ve got the perfect pillar — on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history (which shaped everything you see today). To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know.
I have a very specific target audience to get this in gear, so it wouldn’t take much. One email could set off a chain of events that could open the door to the kind of conversation this nation’s never had. Imagine! There was a time when we did.
"Politeness and consideration for others is Like Investing Pennies and Getting Dollars Back”
"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans — anything except reason."
“It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.”
"Compared to what?"
"At what Cost?"
"What hard evidence do you have?"
*********************
If you're a fan of Thomas Sowell and you respond to my arguments by flagrantly ignoring his bedrock beliefs above, what does that say about you? And what does it say that for over 3 years, I've been practically spit on by people promoting principles I followed to find Sowell didn't. On irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty (the manipulation of which shaped everything you see today): He flagrantly ignored the evidence -- opting to peddle partisan hackery that poisons political discourse to do this day.
My words: Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the CIA seized on as evidence in their favor. . . . DOE’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of “rough indication.”
Sowell's words: “People who talk glibly about ‘intelligence failure’ act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything.”
Which ones strike you as glib?
The story I’m out to tell takes both parties to task on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history — along with some other issues at the core of America’s decline. Sowell is simply a conduit through which to tell that story (and how his role within it could be harnessed for good). Compelling him to admit where he’s wrong will work wonders for where he’s right. But rather than discovering that, his crowd immediately makes excuses for him (which is egregiously out of line with the principles upon which he's put on a pedestal).
"So you found one small crack in Sowell’s character where he defended Iraq having WMD, does that hurt his credibility?"
This man muddied the waters of debate to serve himself: On a "little" matter of war in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11. On top of unconscionably ignoring irrefutable evidence of world-altering consequence, he has a habit of toeing the party line. Not only did Sowell flagrantly fail to follow the facts on all-things Iraq — he brazenly ignored the debauchery in his own party to "politely" pounce on the other.
In light of his history being wildly out of sync with his sanctimonious claims: That “one small crack” is a wide-open window into his character and credibility. I wouldn’t care if Sowell cured cancer: You don’t get a pass for basking in baseless beliefs that cripple the country — and have the bottomless nerve to preach responsibility and accountability to boot. That is a cancer of its own. The poison he pumped into the atmosphere helped destroy the internal organs of America. So we have very different standards as to what qualifies as a “National Treasure.”
Please review his quotes above should you decide to respond.
The Thomas Sowell Affair: “You Walked Into the Party Like You Were Walking Onto a Yacht”
I am very interested how the new movie now in theaters titled "American Fiction" is going to play out. My understanding is that this film IS calling out and naming what these men are railing against.
I'm a long time Sowell fan. The truth is challenging ideas are always a minority taste. great ideas often have to percolate for decades but for those it saturates the difference in viewpoint is obvious as with his ideas.
I don't remember this discussion. I almost can't believe that I missed it at the time, but apparently I did.
Interesting exchange. But the glaring problem with Glenn's and Riley's perspective is a lack of recognition of the circus on the right, where serious thought is no longer a main feature in their popular culture.
Intellect, rigor, intellectual honesty, etc. all took a back seat on the right some time ago (and some would argue it has been relegated to a life underneath that seat).
Proof? Note how much more popular Candace Owens is versus a McWhorter, a Loury or a Riley--even combined. It's not even worth the conversation. It speaks volumes.
When we elevate Candace et al over more serious thinkers, it's *easy* for the left--who normally dominates pop culture anyway--to dismiss any vestiges of serious thought on the right.
As someone who detested Thomas Sowell when I was in college, and yet admire him tremendously now, I can offer no intelligent commentary on this discussion. It shocks me that Sowell is not more well known, but by the same token, I was in a conversation with a (then) president on an elite university. I asked them if they had heard of Frédéric Bastiat, someone I had read and someone whom I thought was near to "required reading" for a historian. And yet, this person, proclaimed as a historian, had no clue who he was. My point: it is not unusual for thinkers to not "crossover" to people who have a particular point-of-view. Echo chambers, particularly those with a left-wing timbre, always have more room for converts?
While I was working on my PhD, I read many things by Thomas Sowell, but mainly in the area of history of ideas: His book on Say’s Law and “Classical Economics Reconsidered”. I had no idea who he was or anything about his ethnicity. I came across other writings, some of which I read, that were about the economics of race and/or discrimination. I don’t know what year it was, it might have 1979 or 1980, but he was the speaker at the Friday seminar one fall semester. I had planned to go but was too tired or did not feel well. Some of my colleagues asked me why I missed it because they knew I was interested in his work. But they also said I missed the fireworks. Apparently, the African American Studies faculty came to harass him. That is when I learned he was Black. He was probably presenting something from his book “Knowledge and Decisions” a book that Hayek favorably reviewed and was based on the famous Hayek paper “The use of Knowledge in Society.” Sometime later when black students at Virginia had a meeting with the administration about the need for more Black faculty, a professor, whom I knew quite well, went to the meeting and pointed out that the economics department had tried to hire Thomas Sowell, the response was something like this: Thomas Sowell is a super-(n-word), we just want some ordinary n____r’s on the faculty. Apparently the n-word was the term used by the black students at the meeting. I wish the meeting had been video taped.
Anyway, I can attest to the fact that Thomas Sowell is read because of the quality of his work, not because he is African-American or whatever the politically correct term of the day is.
"Wendy Beetlestone, a Black district-court judge born in Nigeria, was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama.She is clearly not an “anti-woke” ideologue. Still, the ruling declared, “the way these conversations are carried out in the workplace matters: When employers talk about race—any race––with a constant drumbeat of essentialist, deterministic, and negative language, they risk liability under federal law.”"
Friederdorf, Conor. A Constant Drumbeat’ of Racial Essentialism. The Atlantic. Online, Published January 29 2024.
Also simply from the emails I get from Verso as evidence the British left is simply farther left and has absorbed more theoretical Marxist ideas so any analysis of race must show how it can be reconciled with those.
Halfhearted comment that in Britain race is bound up with issues of immigration and empire in a very obvious way as compared to the United States so there is less danger of thinking of race as a fundamental issue. Also a lot of the mileage that the antiracist trinity of 2020 got was simply having to explain that racism was not exclusive to Southern white bigots. Britain does not have those.
As a lefty engaged in social justice and human rights work in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I received considerable comfort from the fact that John McWhorter was there. Just to help assure me that I wasn't crazy albeit feeling all alone, as was he. At that time, the hostility toward the insight that most social problems are about class and culture, rather than race, was less intense than it has become. I thought that postmodernist ideology was so absurd on its face that it would have to be short-lived. Instead, the epidemic took hold so completely that I and many colleagues simply left teaching. Many of us self-cancelled before cancel culture became known. I saw someone close to me forced out of a job by a black mob that had taken over an entire county department. I saw my own professional school cleansed completely of all male faculty and taken over by self-described non-binary, polyamorous decolonizers. This is how people like me eventually come to read Thomas Sowell, AFTER having read Cornell West. What happens then, is inner emigration. You can't overestimate the importance of your show and the work of people like Sowell, no matter how seriously I disagree with you over making excuses for a psychopathic ex-president and what I perceive to be the final year of the Republic.
Your early comments about Thomas Sowell remaining in academia missed the point that having dropped out, he was able to travel the world to amass the knowledge to further his views of the world. One cannot achieve that sitting in a classroom.
All the “new on board” black and not so black conservative commentators should mention/recommend Dr. Sowell to their audiences. Get his knowledge to a much wider audience.
I am 80 years old and white and I never get tired hearing his wisdom.
An open letter to psychology departments at various universities (Brown and Columbia in particular here):
Subject: From the Earth to the Moon to “WUT”
To Whom It May Concern:
"That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of [does it matter?]"
— Glenn Loury
When the context suits you, such words are solid gold. What you do when it doesn’t — determines the worth of your word. The first time I ever heard of John McWhorter was in a 2017 interview. In talking about (take a wild guess), he said, “He has a rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement.” Alas, the likes of Loury and McWhorter miserably fail to see how they are unwittingly conditioning people to behave the same way. And they’re hardly alone, as it’s everywhere. This nation needs a national conversation — on how to have conversation.
Conventional means have no chance of breaching the envelope of intransigence around armies of unreachables in the trench warfare of our times. But integrate those same tools into an unconventional framework for honest debate — and now you’ve got something. Your field is forever fighting the forces of human nature whereas my idea banks on it.
A student wrote of her psychology professor: “[He] taught me the importance of breaking problems down into more manageable pieces.” Lo and behold, at the bedrock of my idea is exactly that. If you want to start solving problems, first you need to clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. To do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything. And you do it by holding one man to his own “standards”: A professional know-it-all with a cult-like following unlike anything I’ve ever seen. As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something.
His disciples see him as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes. And that — is an opportunity!
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach. I’ve got the perfect pillar — on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history (which shaped everything you see today). To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know.
I have a very specific target audience to get this in gear, so it wouldn’t take much. One email could set off a chain of events that could open the door to the kind of conversation this nation’s never had. Imagine! There was a time when we did.
From the Earth to the Moon to “WUT”: https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2024/04/24/from-the-earth-to-the-moon-to-wut/
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Richard W. Memmer
"Politeness and consideration for others is Like Investing Pennies and Getting Dollars Back”
"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans — anything except reason."
“It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.”
"Compared to what?"
"At what Cost?"
"What hard evidence do you have?"
*********************
If you're a fan of Thomas Sowell and you respond to my arguments by flagrantly ignoring his bedrock beliefs above, what does that say about you? And what does it say that for over 3 years, I've been practically spit on by people promoting principles I followed to find Sowell didn't. On irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty (the manipulation of which shaped everything you see today): He flagrantly ignored the evidence -- opting to peddle partisan hackery that poisons political discourse to do this day.
My words: Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the CIA seized on as evidence in their favor. . . . DOE’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of “rough indication.”
Sowell's words: “People who talk glibly about ‘intelligence failure’ act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything.”
Which ones strike you as glib?
The story I’m out to tell takes both parties to task on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history — along with some other issues at the core of America’s decline. Sowell is simply a conduit through which to tell that story (and how his role within it could be harnessed for good). Compelling him to admit where he’s wrong will work wonders for where he’s right. But rather than discovering that, his crowd immediately makes excuses for him (which is egregiously out of line with the principles upon which he's put on a pedestal).
"So you found one small crack in Sowell’s character where he defended Iraq having WMD, does that hurt his credibility?"
This man muddied the waters of debate to serve himself: On a "little" matter of war in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11. On top of unconscionably ignoring irrefutable evidence of world-altering consequence, he has a habit of toeing the party line. Not only did Sowell flagrantly fail to follow the facts on all-things Iraq — he brazenly ignored the debauchery in his own party to "politely" pounce on the other.
In light of his history being wildly out of sync with his sanctimonious claims: That “one small crack” is a wide-open window into his character and credibility. I wouldn’t care if Sowell cured cancer: You don’t get a pass for basking in baseless beliefs that cripple the country — and have the bottomless nerve to preach responsibility and accountability to boot. That is a cancer of its own. The poison he pumped into the atmosphere helped destroy the internal organs of America. So we have very different standards as to what qualifies as a “National Treasure.”
Please review his quotes above should you decide to respond.
The Thomas Sowell Affair: “You Walked Into the Party Like You Were Walking Onto a Yacht”
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2024/03/27/the-thomas-sowell-affair-you-walked-into-the-party-like-you-were-walking-onto-a-yacht-v2/
I am very interested how the new movie now in theaters titled "American Fiction" is going to play out. My understanding is that this film IS calling out and naming what these men are railing against.
♥️Love Thomas Sowell!
Dig William Blake! ☕
"Thank God I never went to school
To be styled into the style of a fool."
I'm a long time Sowell fan. The truth is challenging ideas are always a minority taste. great ideas often have to percolate for decades but for those it saturates the difference in viewpoint is obvious as with his ideas.
I don't remember this discussion. I almost can't believe that I missed it at the time, but apparently I did.
Interesting exchange. But the glaring problem with Glenn's and Riley's perspective is a lack of recognition of the circus on the right, where serious thought is no longer a main feature in their popular culture.
Intellect, rigor, intellectual honesty, etc. all took a back seat on the right some time ago (and some would argue it has been relegated to a life underneath that seat).
Proof? Note how much more popular Candace Owens is versus a McWhorter, a Loury or a Riley--even combined. It's not even worth the conversation. It speaks volumes.
When we elevate Candace et al over more serious thinkers, it's *easy* for the left--who normally dominates pop culture anyway--to dismiss any vestiges of serious thought on the right.
What if Kendi used his original name, Henry Rogers, rather than John’s suggestion of Tony Jones?
As someone who detested Thomas Sowell when I was in college, and yet admire him tremendously now, I can offer no intelligent commentary on this discussion. It shocks me that Sowell is not more well known, but by the same token, I was in a conversation with a (then) president on an elite university. I asked them if they had heard of Frédéric Bastiat, someone I had read and someone whom I thought was near to "required reading" for a historian. And yet, this person, proclaimed as a historian, had no clue who he was. My point: it is not unusual for thinkers to not "crossover" to people who have a particular point-of-view. Echo chambers, particularly those with a left-wing timbre, always have more room for converts?
While I was working on my PhD, I read many things by Thomas Sowell, but mainly in the area of history of ideas: His book on Say’s Law and “Classical Economics Reconsidered”. I had no idea who he was or anything about his ethnicity. I came across other writings, some of which I read, that were about the economics of race and/or discrimination. I don’t know what year it was, it might have 1979 or 1980, but he was the speaker at the Friday seminar one fall semester. I had planned to go but was too tired or did not feel well. Some of my colleagues asked me why I missed it because they knew I was interested in his work. But they also said I missed the fireworks. Apparently, the African American Studies faculty came to harass him. That is when I learned he was Black. He was probably presenting something from his book “Knowledge and Decisions” a book that Hayek favorably reviewed and was based on the famous Hayek paper “The use of Knowledge in Society.” Sometime later when black students at Virginia had a meeting with the administration about the need for more Black faculty, a professor, whom I knew quite well, went to the meeting and pointed out that the economics department had tried to hire Thomas Sowell, the response was something like this: Thomas Sowell is a super-(n-word), we just want some ordinary n____r’s on the faculty. Apparently the n-word was the term used by the black students at the meeting. I wish the meeting had been video taped.
Anyway, I can attest to the fact that Thomas Sowell is read because of the quality of his work, not because he is African-American or whatever the politically correct term of the day is.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.paed.610617/gov.uscourts.paed.610617.31.0.pdf
This is one worth following.
"Wendy Beetlestone, a Black district-court judge born in Nigeria, was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama.She is clearly not an “anti-woke” ideologue. Still, the ruling declared, “the way these conversations are carried out in the workplace matters: When employers talk about race—any race––with a constant drumbeat of essentialist, deterministic, and negative language, they risk liability under federal law.”"
Friederdorf, Conor. A Constant Drumbeat’ of Racial Essentialism. The Atlantic. Online, Published January 29 2024.
John referring to Coleman Hughes: “He’s about to do TED.”
Well, we all know how that worked out. Ouch.
Also simply from the emails I get from Verso as evidence the British left is simply farther left and has absorbed more theoretical Marxist ideas so any analysis of race must show how it can be reconciled with those.
Halfhearted comment that in Britain race is bound up with issues of immigration and empire in a very obvious way as compared to the United States so there is less danger of thinking of race as a fundamental issue. Also a lot of the mileage that the antiracist trinity of 2020 got was simply having to explain that racism was not exclusive to Southern white bigots. Britain does not have those.
Well, we saw after this aired how things turned out with Coleman and TED...
As a lefty engaged in social justice and human rights work in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I received considerable comfort from the fact that John McWhorter was there. Just to help assure me that I wasn't crazy albeit feeling all alone, as was he. At that time, the hostility toward the insight that most social problems are about class and culture, rather than race, was less intense than it has become. I thought that postmodernist ideology was so absurd on its face that it would have to be short-lived. Instead, the epidemic took hold so completely that I and many colleagues simply left teaching. Many of us self-cancelled before cancel culture became known. I saw someone close to me forced out of a job by a black mob that had taken over an entire county department. I saw my own professional school cleansed completely of all male faculty and taken over by self-described non-binary, polyamorous decolonizers. This is how people like me eventually come to read Thomas Sowell, AFTER having read Cornell West. What happens then, is inner emigration. You can't overestimate the importance of your show and the work of people like Sowell, no matter how seriously I disagree with you over making excuses for a psychopathic ex-president and what I perceive to be the final year of the Republic.
Your early comments about Thomas Sowell remaining in academia missed the point that having dropped out, he was able to travel the world to amass the knowledge to further his views of the world. One cannot achieve that sitting in a classroom.
All the “new on board” black and not so black conservative commentators should mention/recommend Dr. Sowell to their audiences. Get his knowledge to a much wider audience.
I am 80 years old and white and I never get tired hearing his wisdom.