This was great, Peter, and as usual you're willing to occupy the space so many people refuse to recognize even is a space to be. Way to evade simplistic binaries and stay human. Thanks.
For sure, more plaudits please for people whose first concern is the protection of the upper-middle class, regardless of what else they may say. I mean really, shades of gray here.
I am reading your notebook for the first time......almost too much food for thought !
One point I want to mention is that Israel is the second or third largest exporter of arms in the world to more than one hundred countries. The US should be doing much soul-searching for the world-wide havoc it creates and add to that rhe incredible financial and political support it gives to Israel to create more havoc ! Allies in creating the most destruction in the world !
To read you, Peter, is to understand just exactly how low men set the "he's a good guy" bar for each other. First Mitt, with his knees knocking together and his voice shaking as he risks very, very little to say the obvious, which is that Trump should be impeached, and now this. It's like you're a much brighter Max Boot, except that Max eventually figured it out.
I dislike Bret Stephens because (a) he's demonstrably a thin-skinned twat who went after the career of someone who got people to laugh about a New York Times columnist who'd said something asinine (him, of course); and (b) because he's continuously, smugly not just wrong but lazily and ideologically wrong about what's likely the most serious emergency we've had for decades, which is climate change. I actually thought that any serious science writer ought to have left the Times after they decided he was there to stay, since clearly the Times is no different from those Mississippi-riverbanks-dwellers who'd rather rebuild and see their houses drown again than actually take the climate news seriously. But here you are championing the guy because he demonstrates the bare minimum of collegial civility to you personally. It's the social equivalent of showing up wearing pants, but from you this gets an arm slung round the shoulder and a hail fellow.
I don't understand. What does a guy have to do to prove to you that he's not a good guy? Get caught setting fire to democracy? Or is there a whole territory of chivalric/comedy-of-manners outrage, too, like not giving up a subway seat for an old lady, and failing to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party?
This seems to be mainly a response to the first two paragraphs, but if you read them in the context of the rest of the post, don't you think they make more sense? I don't think Peter wrote this post in order to praise or defend Bret Stephens. The main point is a strong disagreement he has with Stephens over US foreign policy. Those first two paragraphs read more to me as "softening the blow" for the substantive takedown that follows.
The structure of this essay is "I'm no ad-hominem attack-maker; I'm better than that. I argue on _substance_. And so should you, dear reader! Because those are the rules of powerful argumentation!"
Except that that's garbage. Bret Stephens is a miserable louse, and his miserable lousiness is shot through everything he says. That's why he says it. He says it, and takes those pernicious stances and goes around pushing them, because he's a miserable louse, also wildly egotistical. If he were a thoughtful, decent, much less selfish and paranoid human being, he'd make different arguments with the same admirable rhetorical equipment, and maybe he'd make them in other places.
To pretend that the things he's saying are separable from his inherent lousiness is a feint that I am guessing Peter believe protects his own legitimacy. But this is also baloney, because all he manages to do is to stand there saying he's perfectly happy to be admiring, warm friends with a louse who goes around advocating for the harm of other people who don't happen to be Peter's father, about whom Bret is solicitous.
Which is all a long way of saying "if it's bad policy to make your argument ad-hominem, it's worse policy to defend louses on a personal basis to avoid looking ad-hominem in your argument. If the lousiness is part and parcel of the terrible advocacy, you can say so."
There's another point, too, which is "don't outsource the louse-identification to other people just because you want to avoid what you regard as a bad look." This is a trope that shows up routinely in the movies, in which the moral agency's handed to the dispossessed, and they're called in unpaid to denounce some misery in human form because nobody else will. Usually the truth-teller is some combination of black, poor, toothless, female, old, or other such dispossessed. I think the technical description of outsourcing that kind of thing to the dispossessed, especially when you're never going to pay them the fat contractor fee they deserve for doing the work for you while you keep your tie straight, is "sucks".
This was great, Peter, and as usual you're willing to occupy the space so many people refuse to recognize even is a space to be. Way to evade simplistic binaries and stay human. Thanks.
Thanks. I appreciate it
For sure, more plaudits please for people whose first concern is the protection of the upper-middle class, regardless of what else they may say. I mean really, shades of gray here.
I am reading your notebook for the first time......almost too much food for thought !
One point I want to mention is that Israel is the second or third largest exporter of arms in the world to more than one hundred countries. The US should be doing much soul-searching for the world-wide havoc it creates and add to that rhe incredible financial and political support it gives to Israel to create more havoc ! Allies in creating the most destruction in the world !
Thanks
Hi Peter,
Thanks for this. A quick correction request: Issa Amro lives in occupied Hebron—not Israel.
My point was that he lives under Israeli control.
To read you, Peter, is to understand just exactly how low men set the "he's a good guy" bar for each other. First Mitt, with his knees knocking together and his voice shaking as he risks very, very little to say the obvious, which is that Trump should be impeached, and now this. It's like you're a much brighter Max Boot, except that Max eventually figured it out.
I dislike Bret Stephens because (a) he's demonstrably a thin-skinned twat who went after the career of someone who got people to laugh about a New York Times columnist who'd said something asinine (him, of course); and (b) because he's continuously, smugly not just wrong but lazily and ideologically wrong about what's likely the most serious emergency we've had for decades, which is climate change. I actually thought that any serious science writer ought to have left the Times after they decided he was there to stay, since clearly the Times is no different from those Mississippi-riverbanks-dwellers who'd rather rebuild and see their houses drown again than actually take the climate news seriously. But here you are championing the guy because he demonstrates the bare minimum of collegial civility to you personally. It's the social equivalent of showing up wearing pants, but from you this gets an arm slung round the shoulder and a hail fellow.
I don't understand. What does a guy have to do to prove to you that he's not a good guy? Get caught setting fire to democracy? Or is there a whole territory of chivalric/comedy-of-manners outrage, too, like not giving up a subway seat for an old lady, and failing to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party?
This seems to be mainly a response to the first two paragraphs, but if you read them in the context of the rest of the post, don't you think they make more sense? I don't think Peter wrote this post in order to praise or defend Bret Stephens. The main point is a strong disagreement he has with Stephens over US foreign policy. Those first two paragraphs read more to me as "softening the blow" for the substantive takedown that follows.
No, I don't think they make more sense.
The structure of this essay is "I'm no ad-hominem attack-maker; I'm better than that. I argue on _substance_. And so should you, dear reader! Because those are the rules of powerful argumentation!"
Except that that's garbage. Bret Stephens is a miserable louse, and his miserable lousiness is shot through everything he says. That's why he says it. He says it, and takes those pernicious stances and goes around pushing them, because he's a miserable louse, also wildly egotistical. If he were a thoughtful, decent, much less selfish and paranoid human being, he'd make different arguments with the same admirable rhetorical equipment, and maybe he'd make them in other places.
To pretend that the things he's saying are separable from his inherent lousiness is a feint that I am guessing Peter believe protects his own legitimacy. But this is also baloney, because all he manages to do is to stand there saying he's perfectly happy to be admiring, warm friends with a louse who goes around advocating for the harm of other people who don't happen to be Peter's father, about whom Bret is solicitous.
Which is all a long way of saying "if it's bad policy to make your argument ad-hominem, it's worse policy to defend louses on a personal basis to avoid looking ad-hominem in your argument. If the lousiness is part and parcel of the terrible advocacy, you can say so."
There's another point, too, which is "don't outsource the louse-identification to other people just because you want to avoid what you regard as a bad look." This is a trope that shows up routinely in the movies, in which the moral agency's handed to the dispossessed, and they're called in unpaid to denounce some misery in human form because nobody else will. Usually the truth-teller is some combination of black, poor, toothless, female, old, or other such dispossessed. I think the technical description of outsourcing that kind of thing to the dispossessed, especially when you're never going to pay them the fat contractor fee they deserve for doing the work for you while you keep your tie straight, is "sucks".