Wow! May "auld acquaintance be forgot indeed"! But once you step back and think about this for a moment, this is actually really distasteful. Look how it continues:SeN wrote:I was especially disheartened and depressed when a member of my extended family to whom I had made a holiday-greeting phone call told me that s/he was effectively severing ties with me because of the occasional political comments I’ve made on this only occasionally political blog. My parents and my brother, s/he said, would be very disappointed in me.
A couple of thoughts here. First, it is absolutely shameful that he'd be airing his family's dirty laundry on his blog like this. I mean, come on: let it go! And you can see the desire here to stick it to the person: "Good grief," he says, and he's doing this *out in public*! Seriously, can *you* imagine doing something like this? Dr. Peterson ought to be ashamed of himself. Does his relative know that he's bitterly pounding out a missive like this on New Year's Eve, in front of his audience of readers? Notice, too, how he uses a neutral gender pronoun: "s/he." What's the point of that? Plausible deniability? So, like, when Cousin Jeanine calls his wife to complain about how he's trashing her online on his blog, he can still say, "Oh, no, I wasn't talking about her!" (Plus, he's obviously trying to dodge accusations of sexism.)DCP wrote:Good grief. It’s not as if I’ve suddenly declared myself a Nazi or a Marxist-Leninist or in favor of mandatory partial-birth abortions. I’m still the free-market and pro-life conservative, the strong believer in limited constitutional government and federalism, that I’ve been since my early teens. I really haven’t changed.
I’m horrified at the way our current toxic politics have divided friends and families, separating us into mutually exclusive, seldom-communicating, warring factions.
Which is one of the reasons that, after a lifetime of deep political interest and deep political commitment, I’ve resolved to forego public partisan political comment. I shall be silent.
And you have to wonder who it was: a daughter-in-law? He says "extended family." A cousin? Uncle? I think you have to assume it's someone younger than him, given his age. And why doesn't he specify what the specific issue was? Did it go something like this, "I'm sick of you constantly gang-piling on Gemli, so I'm never speaking to you again?"
Really, no matter how you slice it, this is incredibly shameful. And it really only gets worse:
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that this is really all about Interpreter and how important it is to him. I mean, this was the guy who opted to take a vacation to Australia over spending time with loved ones during the holidays. So, of course, the lesson here isn't, "We should try to patch things up with our family," or "I'm renouncing political blogging because my family means to much to me." No, instead it's, "I love Interpreter. Won't you please fork over your money?" I mean, he's cracking jokes here about how having to restrain himself from skewering "irresistibly tempting political" targets is more meaningful to him than his family relationships.SeN wrote:The other reason is simply this: I value the work of the Interpreter Foundation much more than I value personally bloviating on politics — even in today’s peerlessly target-rich and almost irresistibly tempting political environment.
Maintaining silence these days about political matters requires virtually superhuman self-restraint on my part.
So, if you’re still thinking about perhaps maybe possibly making a donation to the Interpreter Foundation on this last day of this wretched year, please do so. If it will help, please devote a moment or two to contemplating my noble self-sacrifice and be inspired.
The post wraps up with this:
In other words, he's saying "Screw you!" to his relative. If you've been following Mopologetics for any length of time, you'll know that on at least one occasion, they've tried to wriggle out of situations like this by claiming that something along these lines is "satire." But even if that's true, consider the way the joke is structured: it's still all about trying to leech dollars out of you for "Interpreter," and it's doing this at the expense of DCP's unnamed relative, and he's basically saying that he's willing to walk away from that relationship because the other person is stubborn and stupid. And plus, who cares about family? Because Interpreter is all that matters in the end.P.S. — I reserve to myself the right to speak out on non-electoral political matters in the future, when I so choose. For example, on topics related to the Middle East and to religious liberty. And I’m contemplating a an occasional series of posts on economics and political thought in general. If people want to unfriend me over such things, they will be entirely free to do it.
Really, quite a shameful way to close out the year.
Or, to put it another way, Happy New Year, Friends & Colleagues!
