So it's really just a matter of being PC. Fine, swap it with "better than" and "worse than" and the broad left still has the same problem.
"Better than" and "worse than" are still poor qualifiers if we're not specifying institutions or programs.
In Intellectuals and Society, Sowell cleans up what is left and—in his eyes—on the left, intellectuals who influence policy. They are not necessarily "public intellectuals," but "writers, academics, and the like" who have enormous impact on society. The question of who these intellectuals are does not much interest Sowell. He specifies that his targets are less engineers and financiers than sociologists and English professors. Their influence on millions of people, he writes, "can hardly be disputed." He mentions the impact of Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, but does not explain how English professors influenced those figures.
Sowell is more eager to skewer intellectuals than quibble over definitions. His position is straightforward. Intellectuals do not understand the genius of the market. They ignore empirical evidence. They are elitists. They operate with ideological blinders. Ultimately, they are "unaccountable to the external world." They judge ideas by how clever or complex they are, not whether they work. "But no one judged Vince Lombardi's ideas about how to play football" by their complexity or novelty, writes Sowell, but by "what happened when his ideas were put to the test on the football field." Mr. Sowell champions what might be called the Vince Lombardi Interpretation of Ideas, or VLII. Test ideas in the field.
VLII might be a tad simplistic. After all, Nazism "worked" and yielded a bustling economy, until it was militarily defeated. Would Sowell say all was well with Nazi ideas until 1945?
Sowell likes history, but he likes it on Post-it notes. He also prefers to revisit stale arguments rather than intervene in current controversies. In a book about intellectuals and society, he manages to ignore the health-care and financial crises. Instead, he argues that intellectuals have misunderstood Herbert Hoover. Wouldn't VLII help us with the current economic crisis, to find out which ideas "worked"?
In a rare foray into something immediate or contentious, Sowell ducks. He discusses the Iraq war in just a few pages. His focus? The 2007 increase in troops under George W. Bush known as "the surge." Guess what? The intellectuals opposed it. Sowell employs VLII. The surge succeeded. "There was fierce resistance among the intelligentsia to news that the surge was working."
What does this mean, the "surge" worked? That Iraq has become a peaceful country? Sowell does not say. Even if one accepts that the surge "worked," what about the larger Iraq war and the role of intellectuals? What about the reason and ideas for the war? The plan to bring democracy to the Middle East? Is the aggressive foreign policy Sowell cherishes "working" in Iraq after eight years? Moreover, many "intellectuals," armed with facts and verifiable theories, supported the war. How does the accountability he champions apply to those foreign-policy intellectuals? This would seem a perfect situation in which to employ VLII.
I'm sorry, and the "broad" right isn't?
Honestly, what you call the "broad left" isn't any kind of homogeneous group or accurate metric by any means. We're using terms that are virtually useless in action. If we're talking about people who would take the time to actually present an argument, then the answer is yes--the "left" is against broad statements.
Of course. The right are the ones who can point out that a shithole is a shithole.
Hahaha. All that privilege rhetoric is so specific and detailed. Calling everybody a fascist, or calling Asian conservatives "white supremacists" is so pinpoint in its accuracy.
In broad and general terms, anything can be a shithole.
You're just taking the usual platitudes and repeating them. There's nothing tactile here.
Compared to what?
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Nice broad statement there.
There aren't people whose sole job it is to decide what manholes should be called. It's neither difficult nor a costly to make such proposals. You're strategically picking a molehill and making a mountain out of it.
I've only read excerpts and articles by Sowell, but I've also read that he cherry picks data.
Also, Krugman's written a ton of academic books.
I laid out the costs across the board. Precisely because it isn't their sole job is part of the reason why it's costly. If there was a division of labor the cost could be at least mildly contained. That particular example was taken as a salient (agreeably extreme) example. But it's simply endemic of the inability to address real problems that plays out across the nation. Even more importantly, that example stands out because it's a recent college graduate who, through his "education," has been made aware that words matter more than concrete. I expect this problem to get worse as the "educated" are less knowledgeable than the uneducated about anything other than wordgames.
How is a comment about something you said broad?ermahgerd
Not more than, but words certainly matter as much as concrete. If you can prove me wrong without using language, then you win.
I still think you've attached yourself to a nuisance and magnified it into a travesty.
Largely based on an erroneous belief that individuals who are preferentially attracted to minors are necessarily sex offenders, queer communities have distanced themselves from this population over the past several decades. There are now those who object to the use of labels such as “gay” and “queer” by minor-attracted people (MAPs), raising the question, “to whom do queer-spectrum identity labels belong?” I engage with this question using data from my research with 42 MAPs, exploring their uses of queer-spectrum identity labels and the conflicts they have encountered regarding their use of these terms. I then discuss the potential consequences of accepting the use of these labels by MAPs.
To literally do that would require me to physically attack you, so that's ridiculous.
Yeah, I get it. The point is you need words to make your argument about concrete. I'm saying that very fact makes language as important as resources like concrete.
And none of those things are "more important" than any other thing. The only way they become so is through language. The tide isn't more important than language simply because you can't argue your way out of drowning.
That good ol slippery slope:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2019.1613856?journalCode=wjhm20
Importance is determined concretely prior to subjective insertions, because subjective insertions require concrete ability to insert.