More Sowell

Anyone who has spent anytime on this blog knows how I feel about Thomas Sowell. Simply put, he is a national treasure. Here are some quality excerpts from a couple of his recent columns.

A regular feature Sowell has is "Random Thoughts" where he writes short pithy thoughts, ruminations, etc. rather than a full-length column on a particular topic. Here are some of those thoughts:

We all enter the world knowing nothing but, by the time we are teenagers, we know it all. Sometimes it is decades later before we know enough to realize how little we know.

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Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.

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What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.

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It is hard to think of any word that has confused more issues than the word "rights." Nowadays, almost anything that anybody wants is called a "right" -- a magic word that does away with the need for evidence, logic or even common sense.

The Duke "Rape" Case story has pretty much fallen off the news radar screen. (Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the "victim" changed her story umpteen times, or that the prosecutor was more interested in creating headlines while he ran for re-election that he was willing to deep-six evidence exonerating the "perpetrators".)

Thomas Sowell saw the real agenda behind this story from the beginning. Here are some excerpts from his column entitled "Duke Case: The Larger Tragedy":

The larger tragedy is what this case revealed about the degeneration of our times and the hollowness of so many people in "responsible" positions in the media, in academia, and among those blacks so consumed by racial resentments and thirst for revenge that they are prepared to lash out at individuals who have done nothing to them and are guilty of no crime against anybody.

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All it takes is something that invokes the new holy trinity of the intelligentsia -- "race, class and gender." The story of a black woman gang-raped by white men fit the theme so compellingly that much of the media had no time to waste trying to find out if it was true before going ballistic.

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The unraveling Duke "rape" case should be a wake-up call, both for blacks and for liberals, on how easy it is for their emotions to be manipulated by even a third-rate demagogue with a flimsy fraud. The time is long overdue for some of those who consider themselves "thinking people" to start doing some thinking.

Many liberals can at least afford their mindless crusades. They may end up looking silly, but that has never stopped them before.

The biggest losers from getting sucked into these frauds are blacks, especially young blacks who go off on an emotional tangent that leads nowhere, at a time when there are so many opportunities in other directions, if they will direct their time and efforts in those directions through education and other serious interests.