Ticomaya wrote:blatham wrote:You are correct...I have little respect for Sowell and the above is a perfect example of why I don't. The truth or accuracy are less important than his political agenda. You or I could mail him the relevant and correct information but the chances of us ever seeing a correction (have you ever seen him do such?) would be perhaps zero.
Yes, chance of a correction = zero. Sowell would likely reply by trying to explain to you what I tried to explain to you, albeit with bigger words, but you wouldn't believe him either, so I say let's not.
You are playing possum again, possum. EhBeth said "stupid", but I'll reduce the indictment out of good will. You avoid everything of importance here to in order forward your (and Sowell's) insistence that the media has been unfair to the Bush administration. And there's that curious resistance to admitting Sowell's inaccuracy or ingenuousness. We get NO sense from him of how great the loss has been.
But let's say, for arguments sake, that the sentences in question are merely insufficiently clear and that's where our problems sits.
But that is not all he (and you are guilty of in the same small passage. This is Sowell...
Quote:While military action was still raging in the early days of the Iraq war, there was media condemnation of our troops for not adequately protecting an Iraqi museum from which various items were missing.
This is your rewrite of Sowell...
Quote:"While military action was still raging in the early days of the Iraq war, there was media condemnation of our troops for not adequately protecting an Iraqi museum from which its entire collection was missing,"
He forwards another falsehood here, and then you do too, likely without even being aware of it. Both of you fall to this out of laziness or out of an habituated propaganda line or worse.
You both claim that the press criticized "the troops". How mean of the press. But that's an untruth.
The criticism both in the press and from the anthropological community was directed towards the decisions and ommissions of Rumsfeld's office and the military command under him, not "the troops".
It would be a fine thing if you and Sowell played this straight, tico. The unrelenting partisan push doesn't serve the principles of truthfulness and it's tough to imagine how we are going to end up in the right place if we make truthfulness, clarity and accuracy as inferior considerations.
It seems apparent that neither you nor Sowell nor Rumsfeld have any notion at all of the value of what has been lost. Take just the 'cylinder seals' mentioned in the article I linked. These represent the origins and evolution of written language for the entire western world. (I'll do this briefly, it is important).
When the sumerians made a business deal (I sell you three goats) the cylinders functioned as an invoice or promissory note. We would mold three little figurines of goats, then roll them in clay, then you would mark that sealed roll or cylinder with your own personal stamp (really just like the red wax seal and stamp tecnique) and give it to me. Effectively, that meant you (your stamp) owed the bearer of the cylinder three goats. A wonderful part of this story is what happened next. Somebody, somewhere finally twigged that molding little figurines and rolling them in a cylinder was not the brightest way to do this task. Why not just make a quick incised drawing of the goats on the clay. But it took something like a thousand years for that seemingly obvious idea to dawn on that somebody (a fine example of how 'tradition' can impede). Then, slowly, we are off to incised symbols representing phonic elements and written language as we know it.
It takes a deep and abiding anti-intellectualism to skirt or ignore how important to our understandings of ourselves the contents of that museum are. Or were.
