The Delusional World of Thomas Sowell

In this article Thomas Sowell makes an impassioned case in favor of bullying. Well, that's not entirely accurate - his impassioned case is that gays, specifically, should be bullied.

It starts out reminding people of the famous case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and how the nation got up in arms about their railroading while hundreds of blacks were being lynched for no reason at all. His (not-unreasonable) assertion?

"To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups were in vogue at the moment among the intelligentsia. Blacks clearly were not."

Nice that he goes out of his way to indict people with educations here. Because it was only a group of snooty elitists who were upset about Sacco and Vanzetti, don't you know? Here he's suggesting that all public outrage is an elitist conspiracy, where a couple of smart people decide what's 'in' on the topic of victimization, and trick the stupid masses into going along with them. According to Sowell's logic, if the nation had been up in arms about lynching (as it eventually became), that too would be just another fad, and better left out of the public eye.

Then Sowell gets to his point:

"For years, there have been local newspaper stories about black kids in schools in New York and Philadelphia beating up Asian classmates, some beaten so badly as to require medical treatment.
But the national media hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Asian Americans are not in vogue today, just as blacks were not in vogue in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the media are focused on bullying directed against youngsters who are homosexual. Gays are in vogue."

I'm not dismissing tensions between Asian and Black communities - I mean, it showed up in Do The Right Thing, so Sowell can't be making it up out of whole cloth. He does sabotage his own point by admitting that it seems to be a regional issue in two cities. Could it be that the primacy of gay-bashing coverage in the press is due to the fact that anti-gay hate crimes are far more frequent than Black-on-Asian violence?

Maybe I've been misinformed, but until just a couple of months ago, were Asians kept from joining the armed forces because they're Asian? Are Asians not allowed to marry other Asians in most states? Can Asians be fired from teaching in schools if the board finds out they're Asian? Does the Christian majority in the country tell Asians that unless they stop being Asian they'll go to hell?

Unless I'm grievously misinformed, it's worse to be a gay youth in America than it is an Asian one. Even in a New York or Philadelphia school.

Of course, Thomas Sowell isn't just being an idiot in general terms - he wants to achieve a specific goal here. That goal? Protecting people's right to call gay teens 'faggot' on the internet!

"But there is still a difference between words and deeds – and it is a difference we do not need to let ourselves be stampeded into ignoring. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech – and, like any other freedom, it can be abused. If we are going to take away every Constitutional right that has been abused by somebody, we are going to end up with no Constitutional rights."

So if you punch a kid for being gay, that's a problem. But if you surround him or her with vicious psychological abuse and cruel taunts every single moment of their public lives until they commit suicide, well that's just your first-amendment right!

Notice how Thomas' argument is essentially hollow. Yes, freedoms can be abused - and when they are, we punish the offenders. You can't yell fire in a crowded theatre because of the first amendment, you can't hoard chemical weapons in your doomsday bunker because of the second. When people exceed the rights allotted to the constitution, there are punishments. That's always the way things have worked. A constitution exists, but doesn't enumerate every possible contingency, so the courts work out exactly where the lines of those rights extend to.

So, Thomas, if you want it to be okay to call someone a faggot in school - as you so clearly do - then all you have to do is find a teen who has been suspended for doing that and get them to sue the school board. With you acting as their attorney I'm sure you'll be able to make a powerful case for why people should be able to shout faggot in a crowded schoolroom. If your arguments are persuasive enough, maybe we can even get one of the amendments specifically listing 'gay-bashing' as constitutionally protected speech!

Now it's the time in the article where Thomas tries to back up his idiocy with hollow claims about the downtrodden people in power.

"Already, on too many college campuses, there are vaguely worded speech codes that can punish students for words that may hurt somebody's feelings – but only the feelings of groups that are in vogue. Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police – as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion."

Note how Thomas doesn't include links to related articles or any evidence to back up his point  - I'm sure he's talking about some crazy thing that excessively PC universities out in California have done - but people like Thomas don't actually need 'links' or 'evidence' - because they're not actually interested in changing minds or even making an argument. This article, like so many others, is designed simply to reinforce the beliefs that bigots and homophobes already hold. They imagine they're living in a fantasy a world where women and minorities are oppressing right-thinking conservatives (pun intended). Naturally, as with anyone who lives inside a delusion, they need to constantly have that delusion reinforced, lest the real world accidentally seep in. This creates a huge market for people like Sowell and his cohorts - every time his fans get out into the real world and see that maybe women and gays don't actually have the run of the place, the fundamental principles they live by are called into question, and they have to run home and have it reinforced by the kind of shoddy anecdotal evidence that these articles provide.

Want proof of the bizarre alternate world that Sowell and his think-alikes live in? Consider his hyperbolic example above. Let's a say a woman at one of those super-PC universities calls her professor or another student nigger in the middle of a classroom. Does anyone but Thomas Sowell think that doing so would go super-well for her?

He's got one more bit of awful smug crap to offer, so let's just get it out of the way, shall we?

"Meanwhile, a law has been passed in California that mandates teaching about the achievements of gays in the public schools. Whether this will do anything to stop either verbal or physical abuse of gay kids is very doubtful. But it will advance the agenda of homosexual organizations and can turn homosexuality into yet another of the subjects on which words on only one side are permitted. Our schools are already too lacking in the basics of education to squander even more time on propaganda for politically correct causes that are in vogue. We do not need to create special privileges in the name of equal rights."

I've got a question for Thomas Sowell, and while it's doubtful he'll ever read this, I've got to ask: What do you think the 'other side' of the homosexuality topic is? We know what the one side is - that they should be an accepted and valued part of society. What's the counterpoint that you're so desperate to protect?

And if you love free speech so much, why were you afraid to put it in your article?

Walter Williams Wants Your 65-year-old Grandmother to Clear Brush

There are plenty of different opinions on the Social Security debate - some people think it's part of a social contract between citizens that implores the most able to contribute to help those most vulnerable, while others would prefer if the old just died in a gutter somewhere out of sight.

I kid, of course, the social security debate is too complicated to go into here, although the whole 'inverted pyramid' the right-wingers worry about causing problems 25 years down the line will largely be gone, since the main problem social security faces is that the baby boomers (who didn't have a lot of children) are aging into it now. Of course, in 25 years most of those baby boomers will be dead, and their children, the Generation Xers, will be going on social security with a more robust base of workers, since they had proportionately more children than their parents did.

Also, you could just raise the cap, so people up to a million dollars in income paid a little more money into the trust fund. There's that.

Of course, I'm not here to offer my solutions, because it's way more fun to point and laugh at the solution that Walter Williams offers, because it's hilariously stupid.

After a few paragraphs of explaining why Social Security is evil, which includes the old standbys 'it's a Ponzi scheme!' and 'a trust fund is just a promise!' I'll just quickly refute both of those - a Ponzi scheme is when you secretly have a pyramid-based payout system, but lie and tell people you're brilliantly investing the money. The lie is why it's illegal. Social security is just a pyramid-based payout system designed to help old people by asking young people to all kick some money into a pot. As for the second claim, the one that always sounds like a bunch of guys at in the back room of the CATO institute mumbled it through a marijuana fog: "Hey man, what is a 'trust fund' anyway, but just a promise? In fact, dude, isn't money just a promise? And since a promise isn't a real thing, then money is all an illusion! Quick, somebody find me a pen!"

Yes, individualists and libertarians, a trust fund is a promise, like all contracts are. A promise made by a government of accountable people working under a system of binding laws with judicial oversight. Since your goal is a society/economy based on promises made by either a giant faceless corporation or some bearded guy in a pickup truck, I think I'm far more likely to trust the government with this one, thanks.

Let's move to Walter's solution to the financial crisis in social security, though, because, as promised, it's hilarious:

"Here's what might be a temporary fix: The federal government owns huge quantities of wasting assets – assets that are not producing anything – 650 million acres of land, almost 30 percent of the land area of the United States. In exchange for those who choose to opt out of Social Security and forsake any future claim, why not pay them off with 40 or so acres of land? Doing so would give us breathing room to develop a free choice method to finance retirement."

In Walter's mind this is a perfect solution. "I hate national parks! I hate social security! So I'll just kill two birds with one stone!"

What does Walter think would be the result of giving people these 40 Acres of land? Does he think there's going to be a new generation of geriatric homesteaders? How valuable does he imagine 40 acres of land without amenities or access is? You're a retiree living in Detroit, and suddenly the government says 'here: you own 40 Acres of trees in northern Michigan. Now go away and never call us again.' What happens next, Walter? The only thing any of these people would be able to do is sell those plots of land for something along the lines of 30 thousand dollars each - if they're lucky. Which gets the old people what, three more years of scrounging along? Five if they don't mind eating cat food and start picking and choosing what pills they absolutely need to survive?

Net result - all of America's parks, forests, and waterways would be owned by giant corporations which (thanks to Walter's brilliant no-EPA plan) have no restrictions on how they can use them to generate short-term profit! Also, a bunch of old people froze to death in condemned buildings.

Perhaps the funniest part of this 'sell off of America's assets to pay off a minor (in national terms) debt' plan is that there will be a hypothetical 'free market solution' to deal with retirement in the future. While I'm sure the stock market would love to get their hands on everyone's money (the Bush plan from 2005, as I understand it), the fact is putting everyone into retirement plans is an absurd pipe dream. Rich people don't need retirement plans, and poor people can't afford them. Retirement plans are the territory of the Middle class, and in the future Walter imagines where minimum wages don't exist and unions are illegal, the middle class will be as extinct as old people who are no longer capable of lifting a shovel.

Social security is, at its basest level, the thing America does to keep old people from dying from exposure in gutters. It's not perfect at that, but it's better than what was before, which was nothing. I'd like to hazard a guess as to why Walter Williams wants to go back to the time of crushing elderly poverty, but I'm not a psychologist. Maybe he's heartless, maybe he still resents his parents, maybe, like so many other upper-middle-class people he simply can't imagine what it would be like to be the one begging for help, rather than the one being asked.

Oh, and Walter - I know that willful ignorance is your thing, but just so that obvious lie doesn't go unanswered, let me just clarify something: When Obama said that the cheques wouldn't go out, it's not because the government doesn't have the money to pay them, it's because with all but emergency government services shut down, there would be no one to mail them.

That's right, Walter, if the government shuts down, there will be no social security cheques. Of course, we'll have bigger things to worry about, like new corporate feudalism and roving bands of marauders. So basically Land of the Dead, only replace the zombies with poor people.

Actually, you know what? Exactly Land of the Dead.

Walter Williams Finds That It`s Easy To Be Racist

Proving once again that there's no minimum IQ required to be a (supposedly nationally syndicated!) pundit, Walter Williams continues cranking out horribly-written attempts to justify right-wing policies. Today, he's angry at black people for thinking that racism still exists! Seriously, take a look:

"Years ago it was easy to be a racist. All you had to be was a white person using some of the racial epithets that are routinely used in song and everyday speech by many of today's blacks. Or you had to chant "two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate" when a black student showed up for admission to your high school or college. Of course, there was that dressing up in a hooded white gown. In any case, you didn't have to be sophisticated to be a racist."

Okay, there doesn't seem to be anything too crazy there, he's just setting up his point by discussing how outre racism used to be. I don't know how comfortable I am with his glib dismissal of 'dressing up in a hooded white gown', though, since what they often did after dressing up in those robes was, you know, lynch someone. The bigger problem with this paragraph is his suggestion that only positive action can be called 'racism' - actually calling people nigger or protesting integration was actually racist. Simply living as a white person in the Jim Crow south without doing anything to oppose it? No, that's just folks, according to Walter Williams.

"Today all that has changed. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., pointed that out back in 1994 when the Republican-led Congress pushed for tax relief. Rangel denounced Republicans' plan as a form of modern-day racism, saying, "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' anymore. (Instead,) they say, 'Let's cut taxes.'" That means the simple use of the N-word is not enough to make one a racist. If it were, blacks would be the nation's premier racists. Today it's the call for tax cuts that makes you a racist. That's why the "tea" party, short for "taxed enough already," is nothing more than organized racists. What makes tea partyers even more racist is their constant call for the White House and Congress to return to the confines of the Constitution."

So things just went nuts in that second paragraph, didn't they? I'm not going to weigh in on the validity of Rangel's claim - I think there's an argument to be made that since a disproportionate number of minorities reside at the bottom end of the economic spectrum and since the very top end is nearly all-white, that an action designed to screw over the bottom and give money to the top can be called racist, but I'm not here to make it - I want to talk about the more insidious aspect of this paragraph. The 'Tea Party' movement has been widely criticized for a lack of racial diversity, and more narrowly criticized for being racist as a result. Also the 'witch doctor' placard didn't help. Rather than address these complaints against the Tea Party movement, Williams wants to dismiss them by associating extremists "today" with something Charlie Rangel said 17 years ago. As if that one comment has become the left-wing's defining thesis. This is a wilfully specious argument, since no one could reasonably be expected to naturally follow the line of reasoning he sets out here: People call tea partiers racist. Charlie Rangel said tax cuts for the rich are racist in 1994. Tea partiers like giving the rich tax cuts. Ergo: People must be complaining about the Tea Party's love of tax cuts because they stupidly believe that one thing Charlie Rangel said! 17 years ago!

Sometimes the jigsaw pieces will never fit together no matter how hard you hammer them, Walter.

Also, that's the second time in two paragraphs that Williams seems aggrieved by black culture's attempt to reclaim the word 'nigger'. I guess as a man old enough to have been regularly called that in an oppressively insulting way seeing the youth attempting to remove the word's power must sting him a disproportionately large amount, but rather than make any kind of a point, all he does is show how out-of-touch he is with modern strategies to defeat racism without abandoning culture.

Walter Williams, sadly, has never been anyone's nigga.

"Racism has other guises. Say that you're a believer in Martin Luther King's wish, expressed in his "I Have a Dream" speech, that our "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." The call to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is really code for racism. There's no question about one's racial antipathy if he voted for measures such as California's Proposition 209, Michigan's Proposal 2, Washington state's Initiative 200 or Nebraska's Civil Rights Initiative 424. These measures outlaw judging people by the color of their skin for admission to college, awarding of government contracts and employment. The call for equal treatment is simply racism by stealth and is far more insidious than name-calling and hood-donning."

And now Walter has gotten to the part of his article where he just insults his audience's intelligence. Let's just dismiss it outright, shall we? MLK was setting that day of content-character-judging as a goal. Not saying it was already here. Opposing affirmative action does not make you a follower of MLK. You can tell, because there's a surprising amount over overlap between the politicians who oppose affirmative action and those who opposed MLK day.

Yes, that was glib, but it's not like we have to seriously debunk Walter Williams' point here - no one is stupid enough to believe what he's saying - nice to see that he's continuing to dismiss the KKK, though. You know, someone who's apparently 'so over' lynching really doesn't have a right to get upset about the mainstreaming of 'nigga'.

"One might think that seeing as America elected its first black president, it would usher in the end of racism; but it's all a racist plot that's easily uncovered simply by asking: "Who really elected Obama to the presidency?" It surely wasn't black people. Of the 69 million votes that Obama received in the 2008 election, I doubt whether even 7 or 8 million came from blacks. That means white people put Obama in office, and that means he is beholden to white people, not black people."

It's a racist plot? By who? To what end? Are you saying that Obama was put into office in order to get black people to think they have political power? Again, I'm going to ask by whom, and to what end? This paragraph is just nonsense. Of course black people didn't 'put him in office' - McCain's handlers did that by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate. Nice that Walter didn't bother researching the number of black voters, black voter turnout, and percentage of black people that voted for Obama (spoiler alert: it was almost all of them). I mean, I didn't do the research, but I'm not being paid to sound authoritative. I'm not even really trying to. It just happens accidentally when I oppose the nonsense Walter Williams spouts.

"You say, "Williams, that's preposterous! What's your evidence?" Just look at the unemployment statistics. White unemployment is 8 percent, and black unemployment is double that, at 17 percent, and in some cities, black unemployment is near 30 percent. It's gotten so bad under Obama's presidency that New York's Urban Justice Center has appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Council for help. But Obama's tired of black complaints. Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus to "Stop whining!" "Take off your bedroom slippers; put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining; stop grumbling; stop crying." This kind of talk is unprecedented. Just ask yourself: "When have I ever heard a Democratic or a Republican leader talk this way to his party's strongest supporters? Would Obama tell Jews to stop whining about Israel? Would he tell unions to stop grumbling about card check? Would he tell feminists, if they were complaining about sex discrimination, to shake it off?""

Okay, first off, he didn't say that. He might have said those words, but Walter is stripping them out of context to make a point, which is just another fun kind of lying. It's like the 'global test' line that Kerry was hammered on in the 2004 debate. That's not what he meant, no one believes that's what he meant, but his opponents are happy to lie about it if they think it can drive a wedge between him and the black community. Also, what exactly does Walter think that Obama could have done to quickly deal with black urban unemployment? That's a problem largely caused by the complete deindustrialization of American urban centres, something that globalists like Walter Williams are completely in favour of.

"This kind of political treatment of blacks should not be surprising, because black people are a one-party people in a two-party system. That means Democratic politicians have learned to take the black vote for granted, and Republicans make little effort to get it. That's not smart for blacks to set themselves up that way."

Saying blacks have no electoral power is a joke. They're key to numerous senate races and a large number of congressional seats, not to mention extremely close governorships all across the nation. And those seven million votes you so glibly dismiss above come in very handy any year the Republicans don't nominate a corrupt zombie and a moron for the highest office in the land. You say blacks have no bargaining position since they won't vote Republican, but that's not true - on election day, if they're not excited about what the President will do for them, they can stay home - to devastating results. Of course, Walter, you know that already, which is why you offer up the absurd premise that Obama is the real racist because he joked with an audience that cheered in response - you want the black voters to stay home in 2012. Despite your best efforts, I doubt you'll be able to convince them to.

If I were a revolutionary socialist I would call Walter Williams a collaborator, if I enjoyed  misusing literary references I'd call him an Uncle Tom. However you want to phrase it, the fact is that he's a black guy who just got paid by a bunch of rich white people to attempt to discourage other black people from resenting rich white people. Is it actually ironic that he hates affirmative action, or just funny? Maybe he just doesn't want any other token black conservatives elbowing in on his racket.

Frankly, I don't even know how he goes in to work every morning. Oh, wait, that's wrong - I do: He drives in the sweet Lexus that his toadying bought him.