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This is a pretty weak article with a smarmy attitude and mostly just a hit piece on Buckley (who I certainly have no love for) and a lionization of Baldwin. It's also filled with quite a few misleading, if not actually false, statements. See the paragraph mentioning Malcom X for an example.
Nonetheless, it's interesting to watch old episodes of Firing Line on YouTube. Buckley doesn't generally come across as the smarter person, but the guests themselves are usually worth watching. The show is a calm, rational discussion between people with diametrically opposed worldviews. This seems almost unthinkable in the shouting match, tribalistic media we have today.
+1, I also fell down a rabbit role of old Firing Line episodes recently. Buckley can be condescending and paternalistic; but he nonetheless engages in good faith with the other side, letting them sink or swim by their own words, which is an immense improvement compared to today's soundbite-strawman media landscape.
A couple elements I found interesting: young Arianna Huffington was explicitly anti-feminist [0], and Ann Coulter's case for impeaching Clinton [1] provides an interesting contrast to her modern support for Trump.
Except when he gets talking with Gore Vidal.
True. As overloaded/charged as the term has become, it's hard to describe Buckley's reaction to Vidal as anything other than "triggered". :)
> This is a pretty weak article with a smarmy attitude and mostly just a hit piece on Buckley (who I certainly have no love for) and a lionization of Baldwin.
Additionally, it does a poor job of actually connecting Buckley and Baldwin. I was hoping for some sort of entwined drama between the two, but the connection narrated was barely there.
>> quite a few misleading, if not actually false, statements. See the paragraph mentioning Malcom X for an example.
How so?
Poking around, I also found this interesting article about Buckley, Vidal, and the movie The Best of Enemies: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/buckley-vs-v...
Buckley vs Chomsky:
I thought this was going to be a take on "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" but how scrappy startups should be building a house like in a ghetto where they make do with anything they can in contrast to building a mansion where the ornate fixtures and appliances are highly expensive, specific purpose, and more refined quality. Boy, was I off!