Well, sowell putting milton turdbutt friedman on a pedestal just
cost him an equal amount of credibility to me as if he had
expressed the same for john yoo.

While either one may be considered of being ‘intellectual’, that
content of intellectualness for ‘good’ is highly in doubt as
something more self serving for what is really criminal or leads
to a criminality, as in milton the monster’s ‘perfect’
economics(now proven NOT to work for the good of all but the
few who will make up the rules as it goes); or yoo’s vastly
inhumane treatment of others for what in my opinion is for the
sheer unfounded paranoia or trumped up suspicions of people.

And I have been under the belief that intellectual thinking can
just as easily come from acting criminally because it does take a
good bit of intelligence to not just commit a crime but get away
with it and to get away with it by framing someone else.

But I have noticed of what I have read of sowell is that he is in
the same ‘tree’ as milton the monster and john the torturer.

Zack, March 30 at 1:30 am:
’“by the word intellectual Sowell means “leftist thinker”—not once in 317 pages of text does he indict any right-wing thinker as an intellectual”

Not true. He calls Milton Friedman an “intellectual giant” and “very atypical of the intellectuals of his time.” He applied the same language to Solzhenitsyn and others.’...

Right.  They’re “atypical”, in fact, “very atypical”, so the normal intellectual, for Sowell, is exactly as Barra says, a “leftist thinker”.

Now, why would you post something as silly as you did?  Possibly you’ve been reading too much Sowell.  A steady diet of B-level propaganda is not good for the mind.

I find it difficult to understand why Sowell is taken seriously, even by people of his own ideological camp.

A bit off the topic, but…I live in a big city (not in the U.S.) so I don’t own a gun; if
I lived on a farm I’d probably have two or three. I would like to ask what the
difference is between a ‘proud gun owner’, as Mr Barra proclaims himself to be,
and someone who just owns a gun. Is he a proud car or toothbrush owner, too?
Does he take pride in his marksmanship? In having the money to buy a gun?In
being more dangerous when he’s holding one than someone who isn’t? In being
lucky enough to have been born in a land won by people with more and better
guns than the people who’d had it before?

Thomas Sowell the anti-intellectual’s intellectual. Quite a position he has. He isn’t alone for we see them and hear them on TV and radio all of the time. A regular din of sound that could immure one to what is actually being said and the implications of if they are allowed to be implemented. Usually the mindless listeners fasten their minds onto the catch phrases and lines of thought and repeat verbatim, regular ditto references. I can recognize when they are used because I listen to enough of it to know what they are saying and wanting to do. Fore warned is fore armed and luck favors the prepared.

Neurologists have found that a certain level of emotion can enhance the intellectual function of the brain. Anger however shuts down the higher centers and lets the R-complex (reptile) take the lead which gives us violence and hatred that feeds on itself and from others. Nature is balance and regular time taken to do inventory of own’s self is a good thing. Introspection could be done more often.

Dr. Sowell is in an intellectual rut because he is an ideologue. He has his audience and it keeps him working and with money. You know the old saying? “You control ideas but ideology controls you.”

I fear Sowell has become an old record. Many a
one book thinker, for job security, keep writing
the same idea over and over.  Thor Heyerdahl of
Kon Tiki fame was once asked why he persisted
in his wrong idea about pacific island settlement
(from south america). He stated that; “You must
understand, I have my audience”.

As a wielder of words, it’s books like this that set my teeth on edge.  “Intelligence versus emotion,”
“Intellectualism versus emotionalism,” “Thinking versus feeling.”  Bad versus good.  Simple dichotomies which sound educated but are really empty abstractions that tend to mean all things to all people, change color, and dry up like raindrops in the sun.

Juxtaposed as “opposites”, they ask us to “take your choice,” either one or the other, whereas the reality is that they really cannot be separated except by the code called language, which attempts to separate things that are related and pull them out of the mush of experience in order to try to “understand” what they are, use them for often dubious purposes, and walk away from them whenever they puncture our egos.

Using words like this gives one the feeling that h/she is “in control,” or “knows the answers.”
The tendency is, when bombarded with abstractions like these, to either go to sleep, or to begin to believe them and those who wield them, instead of to consolidate one’s own experiences IN THE CONTEXT OF both mind and body—and spirit, whatever that is.

Yeah, and I suspect that even that is impossible.

Ready for President Palin?

Thank you for this wonderful review.

I would like to add another, more historic definition: Intellectuals are thinkers who consider themselves the vanguard of progress. In the early twentieth century, most thought socialism to be “the future that works.” In the 1950s and 1960s, it was liberalism. In the last three decades, we saw neo-conservatism (or neoliberalism, as it is called in Europe) picking up that torch.

Who were the people with the “great ideas” that would transform the world lately? Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Mark Stein, free market economists like Jeffrey Sachs, etc. Just think about all those thinkers who advocate war but never served in the military themselves. Don’t they fit Sowell’s definition?

On a more superficial level: Intellectuals are people who wear bow ties, and not as an ironic statement. It used to be the liberals. Now the only people with bow ties, it seems, are conservatives. Just an observation.

Great definition from Camus at the end. 

It is truly frightening that there are people who can
write out an entire book of their political and
philosophical thoughts without ever noticing its
glaring errors, self-deceits and inconsistencies. 
One might like to entertain the notion that many
ideologue nutters would achieve a greater level of
perspective were they tasked with the full and lucid
articulation of their worldview on paper - but
apparently, no, it ain’t necessarily so.  They seem
to cling to their dogmas as though for their very
survival, as if criticism is merely a wind to brace
oneself against.