Such A Simple Matter Is Apparently Over Their Heads

I CAN DISLIKE MIDGE DECTER, NORMAN PODHORETZ AND GORE VIDAL.  I CAN EVEN DISLIKE WILLIAM FASCIST BUCKELY AND GORE VIDAL, AND I CAN DISLIKE THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME FOR DIFFERENT REASONS AND MORE OF THE SAME REASONS THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE THEM HAVING IN COMMON. 

Buckley and Vidal were products of the same elite background and they shared far more of the attitudes of that class than the keepers of the legend of Vidal would ever stand having pointed out.

If your contention that because I no longer like Gore Vidal it must mean I've come to like Decter, Podhoretz and Buckley is true, your liking Gore Vidal must mean you like Timothy McVeigh, Randy Weaver and the other violent, neo-fascists whom Vidal had defended out of what was rather likely perverse fascination with violence and a dislike of egalitarian liberalism.   It could have more to tell you about Vidal's classic WASP elitist racist tendencies than you'd ever want to think about.

I have found out that just about everyone who is an iconoclastic celebrity of the left, especially someone who is rather perversely amoral, as Vidal relished being, will eventually turn out to have feet of clay.  Those who maintain their idealized image of such characters well after they have disproved their own PR will turn out to have heads of clay.  

My dislike of Norman Mailer is for entirely different reasons than my dislike of all named above.  He was a violent sexist pig and like Frank Sinatra he was pretty much phoning it in from the middle of his career to the end of it.  

 Hate Update:  "Buckley, the Pod and Decter were wrong about fucking everything. Mailer and Vidal were right about lots of things,"  

Oh, well, you have to excuse me for as the guy you've been libeling as being antisemitic for the pat five or so years because I'm critical of the Israeli government for being rather amazed that you think those three were and in the case of Midge and Poddy are wrong about everything.   I think you'd find you and they agree that "Israel has a right to exist".  And I'm pretty sure you would agree with them on any number of issues in relation to the state of Israel and the the consequences of its founding in the way it was founded.  You're as close to an Israel right or wrong guy who pretends to be on the left as I've interacted with.  

I don't think states have rights, that rights inhere to people, individually and when considered as groups.  I don't know if I'd agree with any of the above about that but it leads me to conclude that no nation states possess any rights.  The concept of that is a holdover from feudalism in which individual monarchs, feudal lords, etc. asserted that their "rights" were superior to the rights of other individuals on the basis of them being the personification of the nation.  I think, instead, that governments have responsibilities derived from the collective moral obligations of poeple which are even more important to insist on when they act collectively as an entity, magnifying their power.   Those moral obligations are an aspect of the universal possession of rights.

I could go on but I have chores to do that are more important than wasting time on this today and I know you won't understand that.

So, how long have you agreed with things like beating up underage rent-boys and stabbing wives?