Duelling ideas about what a hostage deal would bring: one here in which Bret Stephens argues it could be, in the long run, an incredibly bad idea, causing more deaths in future; over at Foreign Affairs, Graham Allison and Amos Yadlin make a different case. All three of these thinkers are pro-Israel, so it is a good idea to read both. That said, the latter piece was written prior to the execution of the six hostages. I wonder whether that crime changed the authors’ views.

In France, Emmanuel Macron finally picked a new prime minister – a moderate conservative voice, Michel Barnier. I absolutely love that he did this – it is a poke in the eye to the fans of Hamas who were elected during the French parliamentary elections in July. (Of course, massive protests ensued.) I wrote about the election results previously, on my Substack.

All eyes on them, over at my Substack.

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s Prime Minister, was shot a couple of weeks ago. He, thankfully, survived and has been discharged from the hospital. The man who tried to kill him is in jail. But one thing I noticed was that so much of the coverage of the shooting made it seem as though, well, maybe someone trying kill Fico was, you know, understandable because he is “controversial.” By that, you can guess the rest – he is a populist. He is not in favour of arming Ukraine. He is more right-of-centre than the EU might like, and so on. So therefore, isn’t it normal that one might try to shoot him? WTF? He was democratically elected, he is hardly a dictator and hardly unreasonable. (And I say this as someone who would arm Ukraine till the cows came home if I had any power.) Have we reached the point where someone who doesn’t fit the priors of the mainstream is considered to be an expected target for violence? The more I thought about it, the more I remembered the reaction to the assassination of Shinzo Abe, which I wrote about here.

So I guess we have reached that point. It is “normal” to try to kill someone you find objectionable. Brendan O’Neill writes about the attempt on Fico’s life and the subsequent reaction here.

…at my Substack about the ongoing campus Kristallnacht.

I believe this Gerard Baker comment piece to be accurate, all the more after Iran’s attack on Israel yesterday.

…at my Substack.

My oldest brother once said that as one ages, one’s world shrinks. I don’t agree with that – in fact, I often feel the opposite is true. But in one sense, I see this happening – as we age, people that meant something to us, either personally or in the public sphere, pass away. And our world seems smaller. This week, three such people passed: Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli economist and Nobel Prize winner, who tried to explain why humans behave so (seemingly) irrationally so much of the time, died at the age of 90; Joe Lieberman, simply a fine human, died at the age of 82; and Richard Serra, abstract and minimalist sculptor and visionary, died at 85. Serra was one of the few modern artists whose work appealed to me, which I suppose is neither here nor there. All three of these men are what I call, “value adding people.” They expanded the world. They never tried to diminish or take away or make us smaller.

There’s a new piece over at my Substack.