More Loury/McWhorter

According to my web hit counter,  the internet is crazy for news about John McWhorter and Glen Loury, so I’m doing you all a service by pointing to their latest Bloggingheads. Listening to them puzzle out Barack Obama’s campaign over the next 5 months is gonna be great.

Can I just tell you how much it warms my heart that one my most popular articles is about these guys? If you’re new to Bloggingheads and or John and Glen, please be sure to read the fascinating NYT bio on Glen Loury, you won’t be sorry.

Ok, so my other popular links are really dumb… but hey!! I’m 1/9th urbane ‘n’ intellectual, 8/9ths dumb, I can live with that.

Test bloggingheads post

I think I got the super-secret Byzantine code figured out that lets me embed a bit of a Bloggingheads debate. Like so:

EDIT: Ah, crap. WordPress won’t let me do the fancy embed thing. Oh well, here’s a link to the debate clip I wanted to show you. (It’s about 9 minutes long.)

This is Jonah Goldberg debating with Will Wilkinson about his new book “Liberal Fascism”. Remember all that nice stuff I said about the debate between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter? This debate kinda makes me feel the opposite. Will tries really hard to be neutral about Jonah’s book, and give him a fair hearing, but this clip of the debate is where Jonah really lets loose his id.

For the beginning hour of the interview, Will does an OK job of walking through the early parts of Jonah’s argument — I feel like I learned some interesting things about the history of the progressive movement, and I definitely have some things to ponder about President Wilson (America’s first dictator, says Jonah). But Will could have been a lot harsher on him as the interview wrapped up… putting a smiley-face Hitler on the cover and coyly dancing around the notion that modern liberal policies are a slippery slope towards death camps? It’s just appalling.

I need to watch this clip a few more times before fully commenting on it, but there’s a lot to be mortified by here.

Bloggingheads: Glen Loury and John McWhorter

One of the things I’ll have less time to do when I’m working is watch Bloggingheads.tv. That’s too bad –I’ve learned a lot by watching these things, but I probably won’t have the hours to spare and/or I’ll use my time differently when I have less of it.

In any case, I hope you’ll watch a few minutes of a recent debate here. I’ve watched several Bloggingheads with these guys, they’re completely fascinating.

Glenn Loury — As a brilliant young economist in the late 70’s and 80’s he was adored by conservatives for his contrarian opinions on affirmative action and entrepreneurial (not governmental) solutions to endemic poverty among inner city blacks. He enjoyed being a “thorn in the side of the civil rights establishment”, and did pretty well as a “token” black conservative, but after going through several startling personal crises he came out the other side more liberal, more friendly to Jesse Jackson, and far less likely to blame blacks for their predicament. The full NYT bio on him is here, and it’s one of the most interesting things I read all year.

John McWhorter — John writes for the NY Sun and has think-tank spot at the Manhattan Institute, and now and then gets tagged as a token conservative black, a label he’s pretty good at fighting off. He’s definitely more conservative than Glenn is these days, though, and dialog between the two of them is sometimes like Glenn arguing with himself from 25 years ago. I don’t know as much about John’s history, but their conversations have been enlightening.

In this clip they’re discussing their Democratic nominee choices. Glenn likes Hillary, John’s a fan of Obama — for some of the same reasons I like him, as it happens. Obama to me represents something “new”, a fresh start to our politics, a chance to rethink the way we see each other and the rest of the world. I understand why people have concerns about his experience, but I don’t worry about that myself; I’d much rather have someone in the office whose judgement, personality, charisma and political instincts are more to my liking than a experienced, mainstream centrist like Hillary Clinton.

In part 2 of the diavlog, to be posted next week, they’ll talk about Bill Cosby’s Come On People, a book that I’m guessing made Glenn pretty mad.

PS: I really wish I could embed the bloggingheads player in my blog, but I can’t figure out how to do that yet.