[Cold Heat]

That not how I define it.

Intellectuals are more like a song writer or a musician. All the same words and notes have been used before many times over, but they create a new song, a new thought or idea from them.

That is what they do, and sometimes they are right, and more often they are wrong.

Today, the media as always is the distributor of intellectual thinking although often not attributed. The media as we know is controlled largely by the left and it follows that the left's thinking is widely distributed in the West and other types of thinking in the east and middle east.

Sowell is simply making that case from what I read in the lead paragraph.

[Finny]

Good post! Good way to put it.

[The Comedian]

Intellectuals are more like a song writer or a musician. All the same words and notes have been used before many times over, but they create a new song, a new thought or idea from them.

That, unfortunately, is overly-optimistic. In an ideal world, that would be the case. In fact, it was the case regarding great thinkers of the past. I stand by my philosophical and moral evaluation stance. Logical abstraction that simultaneously maintains philosophical and moral cohesion is the definition and expression of a true intellectual.

However, there is nothing new under the sun, and today's rearranging of the Scrabble tiles (calling theft "taxation" or abortion "family planning" or Stalinists "Progressives", and lying to come up with justifications) does not equate to inventing a new word or alphabet. That is all today's "intellectuals" do.

And again, I don't disagree with Sowell, but this particular article had no impact on me because of the lack of a definition of the subject: Intellectual.

Part of the problem with Western society today is the assumption of shared, identical definitions of terms, philosophy, and morality. This is rapidly becomming a fatal communications failure. "Hope and Change", anyone?

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.