Post by robeiae on Aug 31, 2019 7:49:53 GMT -5
...don't let the Bret Stephens bite!
Who saw the Stephens-bedbug brouhaha?
Short version: actual bed bugs were spotted in the NYT newsroom, accorded to a NYT employee who tweeted about it. A professor at GW University made a joke on twitter, saying the bed bugs were actually just Bret Stephens (an NYT columnist). No one cared, no one noticed (9 likes, 0 retweets). But apparently Stephens saw the tweet, wrote the guy a whiny email, and notified the school (obviously trying to get him punished/fired). Then it all blew up, mostly in Stephens' face. Eventually, Stephens rage-quit twitter, though he did go on a talking head show and claim that the insult--likening him to a bedbug--was "dehumanizing" and "totalitarian."
Really, that should have been the end of it. But no. Stephens is back with a new column, wherein he sort of implies that the professor here is not unlike a Nazi or at least an anti-Semite:
Read the whole column. It is--imo--pointless. It says nothing. It's obviously just a vehicle to carry the above dig, nothing more. What a waste of space Stephens is.
Who saw the Stephens-bedbug brouhaha?
Short version: actual bed bugs were spotted in the NYT newsroom, accorded to a NYT employee who tweeted about it. A professor at GW University made a joke on twitter, saying the bed bugs were actually just Bret Stephens (an NYT columnist). No one cared, no one noticed (9 likes, 0 retweets). But apparently Stephens saw the tweet, wrote the guy a whiny email, and notified the school (obviously trying to get him punished/fired). Then it all blew up, mostly in Stephens' face. Eventually, Stephens rage-quit twitter, though he did go on a talking head show and claim that the insult--likening him to a bedbug--was "dehumanizing" and "totalitarian."
Really, that should have been the end of it. But no. Stephens is back with a new column, wherein he sort of implies that the professor here is not unlike a Nazi or at least an anti-Semite:
The political mind-set that turned human beings into categories, classes and races also turned them into rodents, insects and garbage. “Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing,” Heinrich Himmler would claim in 1943. “Getting rid of lice is not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness.” Watching Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto burn that year, a Polish anti-Semite was overheard saying: “The bedbugs are on fire. The Germans are doing a great job.”