Let me tell you a story about Bret Stephens. Until COVID, I used to run into him several times a year, usually when we debated each other. Once, I mentioned that my father was in poor health. After that, Bret asked after my father every time. Those interactions illustrate a truth I’ve learned over and over in my life: There’s no simple relationship between political ideology and personal decency. I completely disagree with Bret’s views on foreign policy—and will devote much of this newsletter to explaining why. And I like him nonetheless. If you’re a leftie who is snorting right now, ask yourself whether you’d be happy living in a world where people saw you as nothing more than the sum of your political views. There is such a world. It’s called Twitter. It consists of pundits and politicians endlessly trying to body-slam their ideological opponents, usually without recognizing them as anything more than two-dimensional villains. It’s an interesting place to visit. But it’s certainly not a place I’d want to live.
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.
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 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.
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 !
Hi Peter,
Thanks for this. A quick correction request: Issa Amro lives in occupied Hebron—not Israel.
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?