Christopher Hitchens- c/d

"Unprincipled" is generally an irrelevence: exaine and test his ideas and accusations, not why he cleaves to them.

During Monicagate, Alexander Cockburn (ex-bud and godfather to CH's child) called CH "a man of the right who thinks he's a man of the left" – tho AH has stood shoulder-to- shoulder with non-left populists like Pat Buchanan on anti-war rallies, so who's counting? (apart from me, apparently)

The Christopher Hitchens Web

Me too - it's no shock. I'm just thinking about how much my frequent defense of the man's political mobility (which basically = that his apparent "rightward drift" is at least the sign of a mind engaged in actual thought rather than the voicing of some entrenched unbending position disconnected from time and space, etc) - if not his more blatant shortcomings - has been pathetically tied to the idea that his criticism was validated by coming "from within" the left itself.

now that The Nation will be that much closer to what he accuses it of being, some kneejerk instinct in me is suddenly calling his motivations into question - as if some symbolic cutting-of-ties on his part somehow negates his criticism. It's reactionary and awful, particularily given my supposed grounds for defending him in the first place. (I guess a lot of people have been through this w.him already, over the testimony thing or Afghanistan or any number of previous bridge-burnings but it really bothers me)

I like his going after Kissinger, but the attacks on Chomsky annoy me. (Predictable.)

I agree with a lot of his criticisms of the American 'left,' the Democrats and the rational anti-Clinton stuff. I disagree with his conclusions (that you apparently need to jump in bed with the right when you start criticizing the left, yuck) and his methods, and his attempts at being a personality (the awful "lookie-lookie I'm breaking Bloomberg's laws!" piece in Vanity Fair), but if he ever came back to sanity, it would be nice.

His love for Bush is particularly ridiculous, given (1) how Bush carries the things Hitchens hates about Clinton to a huge new extreme, and (2) Hitchens's big anti-fundamentalist bent.

the mel gibson thing is more what i look to him for and it was great.

it's a slippery slope that will lead hitchens down the path of rationalization toward moral irresponsibility; i wonder how long before his rhetoric resembles that of kissinger's?

His brother Peter. The most ludicrously rightwing man in the world...

And he's an enormous vinegar-and-dud douche. Not only because he's vile, but because it turns out he has nothing to say. AND he's the cheapest sort of ad-hominem debater. The man is actually MAKING FACES and COUGHING LOUDLY because he doesnn't like what George Galloway is saying.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,785574,00.html

http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/08/occupation-foole.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3UFqpylaM8

All that's particularly ridiculous is this statement.

(Maher is a circus ringmaster with an occasional good joke, nothing more weighty)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/hitchens

funny in view of stone's more, uh, equivocal take now.

GET A BLOG DUDER. (And a Flickr account so we can see the Spongebob suit for ourselves and laugh at you like God intended.)

I read his letters to a young contrarian book. I was struck by how impressive a prose stylist he is, though I was also amused at all the famous people he describes as "my very good friend". He has a lot of friends.

dudes his entire career is one giant cry for help - i dont know how this could be more clear

Have you a degree in psychotherapy?

he has a book called letters to a young contrarian holy fuck so gross

uh alfred wtf

http://lookstudio.com/rickastley/imx/album/CryForHelp_400.jpg

Hitchens on Open Source Radio from monday, a conversation that goes okay for a bit, but when they bring in a professor of theology, completely goes to shit and CH switches into dick mode.

classic for taking BFF martin amis to task about culturally offensive muslim comments

Jesus, did you see him on "Question Time" last night? What a (physical) state he is in! He looks like a sweaty booze-soaked alkie who, if you saw him get on a bus, you'd move to another seat - honestly, he's giving us ordinary, decent, boozebags a bad name! His brother was on it too, competing to see who could be the most goggle-eyed "batshit" (to use ILX's favoured term) crazy.

I kinda hope that his performance on "Hannity & Colmes" has helped make his new book his biggest seller.

I'm thinking his "I don't know anything about Britain and Europe and don't care anyway" attitude on "Question Time" will not greatly help sales on this side of the Atlantic

bit of it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEVA4EAP_S0

LOL @ Hitchens saying Vera Brittain's daughter knows nothing about literature

GRRR @ audience applauding buffoon Boris lampooning Rushdie's writing when i bet around 5% of those clapping have ever read a page of his stuff.

Spot the boozey brother.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_page_id=1787&in_article_id=459427

His new book is bad.

Make a note of the name.

pwnj (if the links doesnae work):

Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle
Christopher Hitchens
Published 05 July 2007
Print version
Listen
RSS
In 1976 Christopher Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East
From The New Statesman 2 April 1976
Hitchens, now an American citizen, remains one of the fiercest and most unrepentant enthusiasts for the US-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But, back in 1976, when working for the New Statesman, he took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator, as this article shows. Young Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East.
Selected by Robert Taylor
An Arab country with the second largest proven oil reserves, a fierce revolutionary ideology, a large and recently-blooded army, and a leadership composed almost entirely of men in their thirties is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Iraq, which has this dynamic combination and much else besides, has not until recently been very much regarded as a power. But with the new discussions in Opec, the ending of the Kurdistan war and the new round of fighting in Lebanon, its political voice is being heard more and more. The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.
Dining with an old man on a houseboat moored in the Tigris. I discovered that he inadvertently embodied the history of modern Iraq. He had been imprisoned in 1941 for opposing the British, again in 1959 for hostility to Kassem’s pro-Russian line and finally in 1969 by the present regime. The last of these had, he said, been easily the worst. He was personally interrogated by Nadim Kzar, then head of the secret police and since executed for his crimes. There had been torture and brutality of a far worse sort than his previous incarcerations. And yet he declared that he thought the present government the best Iraqi Administration he had seen. Why? ‘Because it has made us strong and respected.’ There seems no getting round this point. From the festeringly poor and politically dependent nation of a generation ago, Iraq has become a power in every sense — military, economic and ideological. Currently, it is pressing for a more aggressive Opec pricing strategy in order to raise more cash for its development projects, and envisages a doubling of oil production from 2m. barrels per day to over 4m. within the next ten years.
Strangely, its ally in this push against the Saudis is none other than neighbouring Iran, with which Iraq has only recently ceased a near state of war over Kurdistan. The Shah and his ‘White Revolution’ also need quick money to finance internal development, enormous military expansion and foreign aid programmes. The difference is that while the Shah ranges himself against communism and sends troops to the Gulf to fight Arab guerrillas, Iraq is dedicated to the idea of a single socialist Arab nation from Gibraltar to the Indian ocean; the original Ba’athist dream.
In their different crusades, both Iraq and Iran take a distinctly unsentimental line on internal opposition. Ba’ath party spokesmen, when questioned about the lack of public dissent, will point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings. True enough, there are such efforts, but they fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition. The argument then moves to the claim, which is often made in Iraq, that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue. Somewhere in the collision between Baghdad and Teheran on this point, the Kurdish nationalists met a very painful end. We now know, from the US committee of investigation, chaired by Congressman Otis Pike, that there was a Nixon- Kissinger strategy of arming and encouraging a Kurdish revolt, not for the purpose of creating a Kurdish state (which would have horrified the Shah) but for the purpose of de-stabilising Iraq. It was specifically argued, by those who planned the operation, that the Kurds should not be allowed to win.
They were allowed to take heavy casualties and suffer appalling refugee problems; and then were dumped unceremoniously when it became clear that the Iraqi government was not going to crumble. ‘Even in the context of covert action,’ says the report, ‘ours was a cynical enterprise.’ As one who had, on previous visits to Baghdad, scorned the argument that the Kurds were foreign puppets, I should say that ‘cynical’ is the mildest adjective that could be used about this latest triumph of the Secretary of State.
The Kurds now have a very attenuated version of autonomy, and former members of the Barzani armed forces are being moved to the South. At least, however, Iraq constitutionally recognises that she is a partly Kurdish state, which is more than Iran or Turkey do. Further tests for the regime lie ahead. The quarrel with Syria, which involves differences over Ba’athist ideology as well as a dispute over Syrian damming of the Euphrates river, has now extended to the Lebanon, where Syrian troops have attacked newspapers and buildings controlled by Iraqi-sympathising Palestinians. Relations with Iran are still far from cordial. In response to requests for criticism in the party press, some demands were raised for a constituent assembly, and other complaints voiced about the tightness of the regime. All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful.

But that was before 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKkOSMaTk4&mode=related&search=

Great pay off.

'If you gave Falwell an enema he'd be buried in a matchbox.'

He may have trouble with God, but Hitch most certainly believes in the war on terror.

He's on his way to Gitmo.

poetic justice.

a good way to dry out though.

That Statesman article doesn't strike me as particularly damning.

He admitted in the late eighties that he was wrong (I think he used the word "deluded").

If somebody ever makes a film about Christopher Hitchens, Roger Allam is a shoo-in for the title role

he's the guy who played not-Hitchens in V for Vendetta?

not-Littlejohn, surely?

I think this qualifies as classic:

New York Observer

Media The Media Mob
Hitchens Mulls Memoir, Gets Groped at National Book Awards
by Leon Neyfakh Published: November 15, 2007

It was a little after 7 p.m. on Wednesday night and Christopher Hitchens was having a whiskey on the 6th floor balcony of the Marquee Marriot hotel. He was there for the National Book Awards (see post below), and because he’d been nominated for best non-fiction book of the year, he was wearing a shiny medal around his neck.

The awards ceremony would not start for another half hour, and Mr. Hitchens was talking about how he was thinking of writing a memoir.

“I’m not sure I should be doing one yet, but I realized that I have started thinking about how I would do it,” he said. “I’m just realizing that I’m remembering things I’d forgotten. I’m thinking about the past.”

What had Mr. Hitchens remembered so far?

“Things about friends, things about childhood, things about books I’d read. People I’ve known. Which means my mind has started working.”

Once the awards ceremony got underway, Mr. Hitchens sat at a table in the main banquet hall with his editor Jonathan Karp and Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch. “Look, there I am!” Mr. Hitchens said during intermission, pointing happily to the large screens on stage showing his face and the cover of his book God Is Not Great.

Chuck Shelton, the editor of the publishing trade publication Kirkus, came over to the table to say hello to Mr. Karp. Mr. Shelton greeted Mr. Hitchens, whom he said he knew from cocktail parties. Shortly thereafter, according to Mr. Shelton, he was inexplicably touching Mr. Hitchens’ penis and rubbing his balls.

“He had an empty wineglass and there were only empty wine bottles at his table,” Mr. Shelton said later in an interview. “So he grabbed me and we ran over to Viking’s table where he grabbed a full bottle of red wine and filled his goblet and my sorry excuse for a wine glass.”

Mr. Shelton had read some articles that Mr. Hitchens had written recently for Vanity Fair about waxing his “crack, back, and sack.”

“We started talking and I said ‘Hey, Hitchens! You’re lookin’ really sexy, with your crack, back, and sack!’”

Mr. Hitchens asked Mr. Shelton if he wanted to feel. Mr. Shelton said he did.

“He looks around and says, ‘is anybody looking?’ And I said ‘no, of course not!’ And we’re standing in the middle of the ballroom at the Marriot Marquee.” Mr. Shelton said. “He unzipped his pants and he said ‘feel it, feel it.’ So I stuck my hand in there and all I really felt was a very clean… penis. That’s all I really felt. So I said, ‘Wow! That’s really great! I mean, nice penis!’ Then I pulled it out and he zipped up.”

Mr. Hitchens asked Mr. Shelton if he’d felt how smooth everything was. Mr. Shelton said he had not.

“I said I really didn’t feel, you know, where it would be smooth and all that,” Mr. Shelton said. “He said, ‘Do you want to feel it again?’ And I said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I do.’ So he says, ‘Do you want me to guide your hand?’ And I said, ‘yes, as a matter of fact I do.’ He said, ‘Is anybody looking?’ And I said ‘No, of course not.’ He said, ‘Do you want me to guide you?’ and I said, ‘Yes, please guide me.’ So he takes my hand and he guides it into his open fly and he goes on to rub it all over his very smooth pubic area. You cannot believe how smooth it is. And I said, ‘Hitchens! That is really smooth!’ And he said, ‘I know.’”

At that point, Mr. Shelton took back his hand and Mr. Hitchens refastened his trousers. Just then, one of Mr. Shelton’s colleagues from Kirkus came over and said hello. Pretty soon, according to Mr. Shelton, her hand was in Mr. Hitchens’ pants as well.

“Her hand went in there and it went everywhere. She didn’t need any guiding at all,” Mr. Shelton said. “They sort of both looked at the ground.”

Later, back at the press balcony, Media Mob approached Mr. Shelton’s friend and asked her to comment on her experience. Before she could respond, a magazine writer named Boris came over to her and asked her not to say anything.

“Can I just have this? Can I have this?” Boris said, before turning his attention to the Media Mob. “Tomorrow, you’ll get it tomorrow. I’m sorry, I just need something fresh for my blog in the morning.”

“I can’t betray Boris,” the woman said. “He’d be very upset.”

UPDATE: Asked in an e-mail whether Mr. Shelton was telling the truth, Mr. Hitchens responded with an oblique but suggestive message: "The standard of fact-checking for Vanity Fair articles is very high."

http://www.observer.com/print/60447/full

uh.jpg

I will say that he brought a banana into our lobby with him, ate it while completely ignoring the receptionist right in front of him, and then left the peel on the coffee table on his way through.

war monger shave pubes lol

That is not classic. That is the fact that Christopher Hitchens is apparently so freaking drunk that the opening phrase "Christopher Hitchens was having a whiskey" is entirely redundant. You could just say "Christopher Hitchens was awake" and have done with it.

The amazing thing is that in addition to the obvious writing-all-the-time evidence, I've heard testimony that the guy is basically one of few in the world who can stay mentally sharp and un-sloppy and actually think well and remember what he's doing despite being constantly off his ass.

he would have been a legend in college

Well, granted, if I like more of his ideas I might find the drunken-asshole act more charming -- he doesn't really have what it takes to back it up, though.

This is the way with all people like that, obviously, public intellectuals or not -- all a question of whether you're on their side in the first place.

Just read his literary essays then.

I've heard testimony that the guy is basically one of few in the world who can stay mentally sharp and un-sloppy and actually think well and remember what he's doing despite being constantly off his ass.

one of the few in the world? wtf r u on abt dude

1st functional alcoholic in recorded history !!!!

i saw him at a martin amis reading once and he stood one aisle away from me and he was llllllll-oaded.

Great. Well, you try writing perfect sentences for major publications. Then get back to us.

(xpost)

uh this dude is so gross and his whole career is enabled by literary/journalistic professionals who find his writing and shenanigans charming in a way that completely escapes most of people.

"enabled"

charles bukowski, hunter s. thompson, ernest hemingway, jack kerouac, edgar allen poe, dylan thomas

this perfect sentences bullshit is fucking everywhere and 3/4 of the people who believe it dream of being drunken famous jerks.

i mean im sort of in awe of how a guy can be so public an alcohol and still be totally famous and respected and employed, but lets not pretend that there isnt a v. v. long history of writing (esp. journalism) and alcoholism

*public an alcoholic

just read his literary essays and realize what a terrible literary critic he is.

I have, and disagree, although he's wrong about the worth of Anthony Powell.

He's at his best when literature and politics intersect. My favorite Hitchens essay is about how George Eliot deals with Judaism in Daniel Deronda -- lucid and surprising.

dude freely admitted the reason he was in favor of the iraq war was because he luuuuvd the kurds and yet he was still hired all over the place to write supposedly reasoned pieces on the topic

WTF

Writer supporting unpopular, wrong causes shockah

...for reasons perfectly consistent with what he's articulated for 35 years.

uh in 2002-03 the war was not an unpopular cause in the mainstream media. he went along with the consensus, along the way bitching out 'the nation'.

I didn't really know about him until the "women just aren't funny" piece and gotta admit nothing else I've heard about makes me wanna dig deeper.

maybe tomorrow ill dig up some of his kurd-boners but he basically goes: i know it sounds like a bad idea but these charming people who were nice to me deserve a shot.

while i cant say that i have any sort of comprehensive grasp on hitches-ideology throughout history he does sound like he might be passionately betraying himself in the process.

anyway obv wrongheaded asshole, only appealing to believers in "the perfect sentence" and/or nebbish wannabes.

omg i forgot abt women arent funny gaaah. christopher hitchens arent funny.

he went along with the consensus, along the way bitching out 'the nation'.

Hitchens didn't go "along with the consensus" -- in a sense he helped create the liberal consensus. And he's hardly a Bush devotee. He's devolved, regrettably, to his Marxist roots: putting the cause before the politicians and people.

while i cant say that i have any sort of comprehensive grasp on hitches-ideology throughout history he does sound like he might be passionately betraying himself in the process.

He's been consistent in his hatred of religion and fundamentalism in particular since Christians allied themselves with Reaganism and the fatwa was issued against Rushdie.

the-women-aren't-funny-thing is very stupid.

not sure what the iraq war had to do w/religion? but god that old retarded hobby horse that religion is the source of most human problems. especially coming from someone w/communist sympathies. i mean i wouldnt want to look in the mirror if i were that dude either. but people caring more abt themselves than others is the cause most of human problems. start by not leaving yr banana peels around for other people to clean up.

god that old retarded hobby horse that religion is the source of most human problems. especially coming from someone w/communist sympathies.

You'll have to explain this one -- unless we're going to discuss the religon-is-opiate jive.

He's devolved, regrettably, to his Marxist roots: putting the cause before the politicians and people.

okay, i have no idea what you like about him if you *dis*like his marxist roots. they're about his one claim to credibility: he wasn't all bad back in the day, and i'd read his memoir for that reason.

i would have thought keeping true to the cause was more admirable than slavishly following the beltway consensus, really, and that's what he did in 2002. creating the 'liberal consensus' on why invading a country for no fucking reason and with no fucking plan is not something to boast about, of course, and anyone who bought it who thinks themself a liberal can eat it.

uh yeah because communists were the first ideologically a-religious group is history to like have a hueg army and they were terrible. xp

Does Hitchens use the "well, it woulda been a good idea if not for that meddling Bush" excuse for Iraq?

lol yah and the we are actually winning one too

okay, i have no idea what you like about him if you *dis*like his marxist roots. they're about his one claim to credibility: he wasn't all bad back in the day, and i'd read his memoir for that reason.

i would have thought keeping true to the cause was more admirable than slavishly following the beltway consensus, really

No. My huge problem with his unyielding support of the war is his putting the cause before the human fuckups that led to the preparation for the war and the occupation. A classic liberal fallacy, I guess -- putting faith in corrupt institutions to change years of entrenched behavior. At his worst he's like fucking Victor Davis Hanson.

If you think Christopher Hitchens "slavishly" follows any "consensus," then I can't change your mind.

its unpossible cause hes a contrarian duh!

i don't think there's a writer i've changed my mind on more than CH - even at his worst he's rarely boring, and even at his best there's often something problematic.

his much-vaunted "honesty" is true enough on the surface, but sometimes i wonder how deeply he's thought about the issues he's so devoted to. when i read something like his trotsky essay in the atlantic, a remarkable and evocative piece of writing, i just wonder how someone who claims to hate totalitarianism, someone who broke with nearly all his friends because of how much he hated totalitarianism, can call trotsky, a man who believed that totalitarian rule was the salvation of humanity, a "saintly" character.

this sounds glib, but having to publish a political essay every week for 30 years is hell on your deliberative powers.

maybe he should give ditch-digging a try.

He already buried Reagan and Falwell.

did anyone else see his debate on BookTV with D'souza?

"having to publish a political essay every week for 30 years is hell on your deliberative powers."

OTM. We can't be right all the time...

did anyone else see his debate on BookTV with D'souza?

clash of the douches

"I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard" is one of the better parting shots at a political figure we've seen.

FUckingBloodThirstyBastard

Great. Well, you try writing perfect sentences for major publications. Then get back to us.

(xpost)

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 16 November 2007 00:20 (4 hours ago) Link

Do you hang out on ILM and tell everybody who criticizes a band to come back when their record has gone platinum?

with hitchens i've kind of reached a point of only paying attention to him when i know i agree with him. i enjoyed his pissing on falwell's grave, and i think his subspecialty in speaking ill of the newly dead is a sort of valuable community service. on things where i think he's boneheadedly wrong, the rhetorical devices i enjoy in other instances become just grating, so i tune him out. ok he's a drunk dotty uncle, but he's a kind of funny drunk dotty uncle and he'll start a fight with just about anyone. iconoclasticism for its own sake is probably a well of diminishing returns, but it's not like we're overstocked with iconoclasts.

this is good writing, from the new book the portable atheist:

'believing then—as this religious objection implicitly concedes—that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. there are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. there is the consolation and irony of philosophy. there are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in john donne or george herbert. there is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. in all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, ufo tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. one can appreciate and treasure the symmetry and grandeur of the ancient greek parthenon, for example, without needing any share in the cults of athena or eleusis, or the imperatives of athenian imperialism, just as one may listen to mozart or admire chartres and durham without any nostalgia for feudalism, monarchism, and the sale of indulgences. the whole concept of culture, indeed, may partly consist in discriminating between these things. religion asks us to do the opposite and to preserve the ancient dreads and prohibitions, even as we dwell amid modern architecture and modern weapons.'

indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy and substantial material wealth

still, it is a good passage

the human fuckups that led to the preparation for the war and the occupation

looooooooool

The man is actually MAKING FACES and COUGHING LOUDLY because he doesnn't like what George Galloway is saying.

-- rogermexico (rogermexico), Monday, 26 September 2005 06:10 (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

This is surely the correct response to anything George Galloway says?

Every time I see this thread rise to the surface I think he might be dead

Shakey Mo can do a Christopher Hitchens act on him when he dies.

prob is it all catches up w/you at some point, even literary drinkers w/Herculean consitutions like the Hitch.

Smokes like a lum too I belive?

one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion

uh yeeeaaaah great writing. i guess hearing this ridiculous florid misanthrope argue for beauty does have some comic charm?

interesting to note that passage is wholly dependent on material external phenomenon. id be curious to know if anywhere in that book he mentions that just being alive can feel so good and heartbreaking on its own.

i don't think it's good writing.

nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, ufo tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond.

what the fuck. seriously, is he really saying art culture literature and philosophy are somehow free of those things? silly boy.

prediction: hitch suffers heart attack has spiritual experience kinda takes it all back but in a smarmy i have deeper understanding of the spiritual experience than you sort of way.

haha shit... you can take that to the bank.

btw i watched like 5 minutes of that debate and dude was using the most absurdly immature rhetorical tactics. he kept saying things like you should really know this and youre better than that. i was surprised he didnt just spit on the guy.

I imagine Americans aren't familiar with his brother? The comedy value is doubled (at least) when you factor him into the equation.

his brother isnt totally unheard of - but yah i dont really know anything abt him. didnt they have a falling out?

peter hitchens (for it is he) is a church-of-england right-wing lunatic.

and anti-war from the start lol.

i think they have an um complex relationship, partly relating to the jewishness thing and their parents, but they appear in public debates against each other sometimes and stuff.

They fell out over Iraq. Left wing firebrand Chris was in favour, right wing dingbat Petey was against. (xxp)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZGWMC7DZQ0

How untypical of Trotskyists to fall out with each other

Hitch's greatest crime is inspiring professional Hitchogram Nick Cohen. Now there's a piece of work.

and johann hari, who is even worse.

It's like that New Bob Dylan craze in the 60s

hari and cohen are beefing now:

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1161

but still.

The Hari-Cohen spat was hilarious. Cohen ended up looking even more deranged than usual, but then Hari spoiled it all by threatening Harry's Place with legal action.

Saw Cohen, hic, in action at a party once - not a pretty sight. Now every time I read the man defending the rights of women, or accusing Islamists of sexism, I emit a low, hollow, bitterly ironic laugh.

Like this.

Ha!

cohen is a gashhound? who knew.

At least you can't accuse jung Johann of that

cohen is a gashhound?

Nothing so charming.

i don't think it's good writing.

nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, ufo tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond.

what the fuck. seriously, is he really saying art culture literature and philosophy are somehow free of those things? silly boy.

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Friday, 16 November 2007 12:09 (6 hours ago)

Not at all. Believing these sorts of things are real is another matter entirely than their being use as storytelling devices in fiction.

use=used

lol john milton lol dante lol william blake

no but dont you see we must separate their retarded ideas from the overall aesthetic glory and shave our pubes

max and jhoshea bringin it

im pretty sure i already had this fight with dally

we went over this on one of the atheism threads. separating art/culture/literature/philosophy from religion/spirituality = not possible

it was very hard to do but i got through that observer clip

very difficult reading, many o_O and >_<

Functional alcoholic at life = one thing

Functional alcoholic at writing fiction/poetry = another

Functional alcoholic at keeping up with reading and news-absorption, turning out a hefty volume of workable articles / criticism / essays, and doing it professionally enough, and enough on deadline, that people come to you as if you're reliable, not as "that drunken erratic what-will-he-turn-in guy" (the way Thompson was at points) = I will confess to finding this kind of surprising, in large part because I am probably not organized enough to handle his kind of schedule even at my most well-rested and in-shape and totally sober

I mean, c'mon, Bukowski? Bukowski never had to get an intro essay to the publisher on Tuesday, re-write a column for Wednesday morning, and oh, gotta read the new Harry Potter by midnight and start a review for the NYT Book Review

does the hitch employ a researcher(s)?

Just saying, if I were getting through a bottle of whiskey a day before night fell, I would start falling down on the job production, I'm guessing

(also dying)

xpost - he's got to have SOME kind of assistant organizing this stuff

i would assume so, they all do

lol nabisco "Hitch drunk/awake"

has he said anything about the Dem prez field? Given his hatred for the Clintons (salud), I mean about the others...

Hitchens and Paglia should get together and make some kind of hideous drunken reactionary attention-whore offspring

Pags is NOT a reactionary, or drunk that I'm aware of. I bet she shaves more often too.

(sorry)

don't be sorry, that was pretty funny

lolz

nabisco there are actually a lot of people in many different fields who drink a lot and do a lot of work - most of them arent as flamboyant or famous as hitch - but still. and yeah i couldnt handle it either but i value sleep and feeling good and im incredibly lazy so...

He HAS said that he probably won't vote, which, depending on how things go and how often I stay away from the 2008 prez thread, may be the only way to go.

we went over this on one of the atheism threads. separating art/culture/literature/philosophy from religion/spirituality = not possible

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, November 16, 2007 1:52 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Who is trying to do this?

his name is christopher hitchens

I mean, c'mon, Bukowski? Bukowski never had to get an intro essay to the publisher on Tuesday, re-write a column for Wednesday morning, and oh, gotta read the new Harry Potter by midnight and start a review for the NYT Book Review

-- nabisco, Friday, November 16, 2007 1:57 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Except for perhaps the first few, awful novelist and even worse poet. In the early '90s a whole generation of liberal art student men read B. and emerged thinking that being a disgusting drunk with skid marks in your underwear was some kind of transgressive act...but that might be more the fault of "Barfly," come to think of it...

Hitchens is touched on in this thread as well

i believe nabisco was saying that CH does more with his drunkenness and is more responsible and meets deadlines more than CB ever did

his name is christopher hitchens

-- jhøshea, Friday, November 16, 2007 2:18 PM (1 minute ago)

Hardly, he's only saying that appreciating and enjoying "divinly" inspired works does not require a belief in the supernatural.

Hitch argues in several passages for the moral authority of art/literature/philosophy while simultaneously ignoring/denying said art/literature/philosophy's roots in spiritual and religious thought. The guy inexplicably cites Dostoevsky, for example, apparently entirely ignorant of Dostoevsky's very serious and very deep roots in Christian theology.

x-post

Hitch: "serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."

^^^ total idiocy

The passage you quote doesn't jibe with your characterization of it.

yeah totally.

No, he argues that complex moral issues are dealt better with in art/literature/philosophy than they are in scripture, because religion should properly evolve into philosophy, just as alchemy evolves into chemistry and astrology evolves into astronomy. For some people, at least.

x-post

Hitch: "serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."

^^^ total idiocy

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, November 16, 2007 2:24 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

If you get more out of the parable of the mustard seed than Middlemarch than I guess god is the only one that can help you.

uhhhhggggg blaaah

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/images/hitchens.jpg

I read that line as stating that art (particularly fiction) allows us to explore morality/beliefs/etc. without relying on absurd truth-claims or being told, explicitly, the proper way to live and 'do right.' That there may be some value to 'religious thought' but it is better expressed with the vision and complexity of human experience, rather than didactic dogma.

lol grinning dude in national review shirt

anyone think Hitch might be bi, or closeted? on several occasions he's described English boarding school in the 40s and 50s as years of 'homoerotic torture.' Did a lot English students in short pants get buggered by their masters/upperclassmen back in the day?

um, yes

they called it "recess"

yeah whatever, its a bunch of sloppy citations on Hitchens part that make no sense, considering the majority of those authors explicitly referenced and basically just re-wrote classic Biblical/Christian themes - makes me wonder if Hitchens has read Dostoevsky's "Devils", for example. Is Hitchens praising them just because their writing is better? Because in many cases their basic positions and ideas are not any more "advanced" or complex than those in the Bible - cf. Bros Karamozov, any number of Shakespearean plays, etc.

x-post

Hitch argues in several passages for the moral authority of art/literature/philosophy while simultaneously ignoring/denying said art/literature/philosophy's roots in spiritual and religious thought.

NO HE DOES NOT. Please read the goddamn book, and watch any YouTube clips that his fanbois recorded on his book tour.

Because in many cases their basic positions and ideas are not any more "advanced" or complex than those in the Bible - cf. Bros Karamozov, any number of Shakespearean plays, etc.

You have got to be kidding.

u cant make us read his books cause we dont want to

he argues that complex moral issues are dealt better with in art/literature/philosophy than they are in scripture, because religion should properly evolve into philosophy, just as alchemy evolves into chemistry and astrology evolves into astronomy. For some people, at least.

OTM.

haha - in that picture Hitchens probably smells like pulled pork.

That there may be some value to 'religious thought' but it is better expressed with the vision and complexity of human experience, rather than didactic dogma.

but didactic dogma comes from the interpreter/the priest/the church/power structure, not the source text. The Bible is totally contradictory, as has often been noted, and is wayyyy complex.

x-post

anyway I'm sick of this argument and we've gone over it on other threads and I'm on a bunch of painkillers so

blah

anyone think Hitch might be bi, or closeted?

the marvelously named Alexander Cockburn has hinted as such.

Yeah, D. "just re-wrote a bunch of x-tian themes"...okaaay.....

In the bible it's more of a sin to be jealous your neighbor's slave than to stone a woman to death. I think morality has evolved quite a bit since the bronze age.

so many of Dostoevsky's characters convert to Xtianity, he was obsessed with themes of sin and repentance, he was highly critical of socialists/nihilists/atheists - this is all basic Biblical stuff. Your trite interpretation of specific moral laws notwithstanding, I don't really see how Dostoevsky's themes can be separated from his Xtian beliefs.

Where does Hitchens suggest that they need to be?

x-post

sure, they can't be seperated, but this doesn't mean they are not advanced. if you believe that then you must think that Kierkergaard and Joel Osteen are spiritual brothers.

YOU CAN'T separate them. Hitchens' point is that the mastery with which fiction renders conflicts of faith present more human ideas of order than the holy books.

Is your underlying argument, Shakey, that you could not have had a Dostoyevsky equivalent without Christianity?

yeah i dont think shakey ia as offtm as you guys are making him out to be. dostoevsky goes out of his way to argue against the simplistic understanding of the bible so aptly demonstrated by dally just now. there's a priest character in one of his books (its been a long time jeez) who talks abt taking the bible as a whole as being the only true way to understand it.

anyway im not sure how anyone could read him and not think that he could at least partially be described as: negative christian jerk.

which is kinda funny cause hitchens is: negative secular jerk. and theyre both probably better appreciated for their prose stylings than their often underwhelming philosophies.

Hitchens' point is that the mastery with which fiction renders conflicts of faith present more human ideas of order than the holy books.

this is like woah.

please go and read about the impact of the king james bible on the english tongue, and its literature. please go and read about milton.

more or less... to me its all just a history of ideas, one idea follows another and complexity develops over time. To say that a later set of ideas deals with the present better than an older set of ideas is sort of, I dunno, unnecessarily obvious...? But that doesn't mean that those older sets of ideas are somehow automatically wrong or invalid; they're the roots and they proved necessary and served their function and can often still be quite illuminating... Obviously I'm not gonna argue that the ONLY book people need to read is the Bible. I am not a fanatic or a fundamentalist.

fucking x-posts

No one ever made a case here for Hitchens' Deep Thoughts – and I should admit that I'm not a fan of the God book. I was defending him against ad hominem attacks ("lolz of course he's a right-wing war monger, he's an alcoholic").

please go and read about the impact of the king james bible on the english tongue, and its literature. please go and read about milton.

I teach literature, thanks. And reread what I wrote.

No, he argues that complex moral issues are dealt better with in art/literature/philosophy than they are in scripture, because religion should properly evolve into philosophy, just as alchemy evolves into chemistry and astrology evolves into astronomy. For some people, at least.

this is an argument based on chronology.

this is lole writing a book saying "omg those astrologers were so STUPID till PROPER SCIENCE came along".

xpost

jesus, seriously?

I'm not totally sold on the premise that you can separate Christianity's impact on literature (never mind Dostoevsky; what about medieval monks copying manuscripts?) from how it HAS improved people's lives, btw.

now now everybody play nice

x-post

his is lole writing a book saying "omg those astrologers were so STUPID till PROPER SCIENCE came along".

You keep trying to rewrite his premise. He says we no longer NEED astrology because science has explained what stars are. Astrology served its purpose.

xpost

of course you don't think that the only book you should read is the bible, you're sane. Hitchens can seem like a "negative secular jerk", but when you are dealing with people who believe the bible to be the absolute limit and end of moral and even scientific truth, then i'm afraid you don't have to many other options than to be somewhat arrogant.

Hitchens comes from a long line of military men, and one thing that seems essential to understanding him is that he views much of it as a fight. perhaps you don't, and for the most part i don't either. but i'd choose someone like hitchens over Ted Haggard, the intelligent design-ites, and the rest of them any day of the week

what about medieval monks copying manuscripts?

this is exactly the kind of thing I try to bring up whenever Dawkins or whoever goes off on some "religion is the WORST evil in the history of humanity ever" kind of tack. I don't know how far Hitchens goes down this road but he does strike me as a "let's throw out the baby AND the bathwater"-type in general.

x-post

xpost It's true, I did run into financial problems that week

with science that's a tenable argument, but with philosophy or literature or writing pertaining to the spiritual, i'm not so sure.

xpost

i'd choose someone like hitchens over Ted Haggard, the intelligent design-ites, and the rest of them any day of the week

I wouldn't choose either - they all seem unhappy and self-destructive and full of anger.

x-post

when you are dealing with people who believe the bible to be the absolute limit and end of moral and even scientific truth, then i'm afraid you don't have to many other options than to be somewhat arrogant.

yeah and back them in every batshit colonialist escapade they embark on at the same time. bipolar or what.

"I'd take him over Haggard" really IS as not-saying-much as I've ever seen an argument get

re: 'monks copying manuscripts': why does that require Christianity or Islam, and why does it impart some value on the belief system, rather than simply the monks themselves? Is it inconceivable that people would do things of value (such as maintain historical knowledge) if particular religious practices had never existed?

It is a fact to say that religion has protected knowledge throughout history - but it is equally factual to say that religion has denied knowledge at the same time.

How any of that gets translated into value statements about the importance and worth of religion is where things get sticky.

I'd like to read Haggard on Daniel Deronda or Powell.

He says we no longer NEED astrology because science has explained what stars are. Astrology served its purpose.

^^^^
this is basically the most boring way to think about human knowledge

why does that require Christianity or Islam, and why does it impart some value on the belief system, rather than simply the monks themselves? Is it inconceivable that people would do things of value (such as maintain historical knowledge) if particular religious practices had never existed?

its not really inconceivable, but the fact is they didn't, and the monks did. And as far as I know, there are no orders of non-religious monks.

o god are those our only two choices. anyway advocating arrogance because the people yr dealing w/are seemingly so intractable that they just cant be reasoned with is an excellent example of the sort of imagination deprived attitude that creates warfare and the most of the nasty things that hitchens is supposedly fighting against.

as for the military family theory - uh fine thats too bad then, plz take break from influencing geopolitics until you get those issues worked out.

xp to swinburningforyou

"yeah and back them in every batshit colonialist escapade they embark on at the same time. bipolar or what."

well, if i understand hitchens argument, he views "Islamofacsim" (his term, not mine) as of the same kind of poison as any sort of religious fundamentalism. i agree that we obviously should fight this, but i'm unsure (as any sane person is at this point) that America is doing anything that even comes close to this.

and one of the reasons the monks/priests/rabbis did that is because their religions placed a primary value on the BOOK, the written word, because they grasped the importance of preserving knowledge/information across generations.

x-posts

"yeah and back them in every batshit colonialist escapade they embark on at the same time. bipolar or what."

well, if i understand hitchens argument, he views "Islamofacsim" (his term, not mine) as of the same kind of poison as any sort of religious fundamentalism. i agree that we obviously should fight this, but i'm unsure (as any sane person is at this point) that America is doing anything that even comes close to this.

-- swinburningforyou, Friday, November 16, 2007 8:24 PM (15 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

so we should "fight" religious fundamentalism (with guns?) wherever we find it? because hitch plainly argued we had to fight in afghanistan and that hotbed of militant islamism, saddam's iraq.

but i'm unsure (as any sane person is at this point) that America is doing anything that even comes close to this.

http://www.gopusa.com/images/america.jpg

I haven't said this yet, but I'd like to thank everyone for making this workaday Friday afternoon more entertaining.

and one of the reasons the monks/priests/rabbis did that is because their religions placed a primary value on the BOOK, the written word, because they grasped the importance of preserving knowledge/information across generations.

Yeah I'm sure humans wouldn't have figured out writing without monks.

oh come on que everyone knows the monks helped out a lot w/the books

Umm I'm just sniping from the sidelines and whatnot, but the transcribing monks here are a bit like the old "are you glad the pyramids were built" thread -- i.e., the question has a lot more to do with a power structure extracting resources from the masses to be able to do with things than it has to do with theology on any level. You can of course congratulate periods of the church for being interested in collecting and preserving knowledge and living a life of the mind and suchlike, but I would venture that Christianity's relationship with art and literature and science and the life of the mind has been, umm, pretty scattershot and swung to extremes on both ends, and I'm not keeping score but I'd guess that AT BEST it maybe evens out (but what do I know).

yeah and the books they transcribed were not for the "masses" they were for priests, right to spread The Word around the globe? Like monks may have given a shit about books, but i don't think they gave a shit about people reading.

"so we should "fight" religious fundamentalism (with guns?) wherever we find it?"

well, thats the problem isn't it? welcome to the 21st century.

don't think for a moment that the fundamentalists of any creed don't think the non-believer to be evil and expendable. we can talk all we want about common ground, but the simple fact remains: if you are not with "us", whoever "us" may be, then you are a sinner, a non-believer, a heathen...

Yeah I'm sure humans wouldn't have figured out writing without monks.

there's no need for hypotheticals - the role of religion in writing is pretty clear in the historical record.

Me, I'm eternally grateful that the Catholic Church - for whatever reason - preserved the only existing manuscripts of people like Cicero, for example.

x-posts

xpost - oops - And it's pretty late in the game to try and imagine hypothetical courses of a civilization WITHOUT religion (and how!!!), but part of what I'm trying to get at above, there, is that ANY given early power structure that collected resources in such a way -- (aha and yet were early power structures possible without some sort of religion? aha and what counts as a religion? etc.) -- would have been making decisions and/or contributions about the preservation of knowledge, whether the knowledge was of law or science or of gods.

eh yeah but there weer certainly other powerful contemporaries of the catholic church that were far less interested in books, no?

don't think for a moment that the fundamentalists of any creed don't think the non-believer to be evil and expendable.

exactly - and the problem is with the fundamentalist, not the creed. (A kidn of "hate the sinner, not the sin" inversion haha)

nabisco's points are good... tho I do feel the need to point out that there were power structures that stayed at a tribal/nomadic/oral tradition level and never felt a need to accrue written information or material wealth. Although whether those cultures can be described as having "power structures" is I guess kinda debatable...

xpost - Dude, the Catholic Church doesn't have Cicero manuscripts as a favor to you, they have Cicero manuscripts because they were the ones with the power to get them and keep them someplace where they wouldn't mold or get stolen or sacked by rampaging killers. And they were "nice" enough to never see any reason to burn them / save the world from them.

xpost - Yeah, J, the church definitely was the institution of the Life of the Mind / Knowledge / Academic Posterity for a while, but part of what I'm saying is that that track record is countered by an equal amount of hostility to art and science, over the years. I mean, it'd be pointless to start counting it up, but it's REALLY gone both ways on this issue.

re: religion and writing--lets not forget that "religion" means something very different to ancient egyptians than it does to us

-- max, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 2:32 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

i.e. religion was NOT separate from art/philosophy/literature or whatever

-- max, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 2:33 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

Because (organized) religion, supernatural belief, etc. are his targets.

yeah but i think what im trying to say isnt that he should attack all bad things but that you cant really separate out religion from capitalism or philosophy or science, so games like "WOW WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE WITHOUT CHRISTIANITY PROBABLY A LOT BETTER HUH" are just totally useless

-- max, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 2:34 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

we talked about this a lot on this thread: Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

nabisco it seems like what youre criticizing is the attempt to link "organized religion" to "writing/art/scholarly work" not necc. the idea that religion informs, defines, helps produce etc. that writing/art?

yeah maybe but i dont really think you have to consider their whole history to be thankful for whatever nice things they did - questioning their motivation is imo a bit more relevant

xp to nabisco

did anyone ever actually figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

i think its like nine or ten

yes, the idea that religion is a distrete and distinct thing from not-religion is a VERY recent innovation, borne out of inTRA religious conflict.

even in just thinking about the latin west and "the life of the mind", the record of the catholic church is pretty good -- it only starts to get nasty when there are other loci of power than the catholic church, with ideas of their own! the roots of science, political liberty, feminism etc are all tied up in monasticism. dialectics, innit

xpost

xpost

well, you can say "hate the sin love the sinner", but if fundamentalism takes control this attitude is a moot point. and anyone who thinks it can't happen here hasn't read enough sinclair lewis.

"so games like "WOW WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE WITHOUT CHRISTIANITY PROBABLY A LOT BETTER HUH" are just totally useless"

OTM.

if only u read this 1 guy u would see

thats not what i'm saying. we live in a country where the majority of people believe that God exist and that he loves them.

I love how quickly this has gone from Hitchens' alcoholism to the Name of the Rose book club.

nabisco it seems like what youre criticizing is the attempt to link "organized religion" to "writing/art/scholarly work" not necc. the idea that religion informs, defines, helps produce etc. that writing/art?

My point was just chipped in from the sidelines -- what I'm suggesting is that a lot of the contributions "organized religion" has made to art/science/philosophy might have more to do with the "organized" part than the "religion" part, if that makes sense.

(For long stretches of history, the church and the state/empire have been the only two institutions even capable of having organized or preservative effects on these things -- not because of theology or ideals, but because they were the only ones with the resources, the buildings, the money, the continuity! So -- e.g. -- the churches of Europe may have commissioned and preserved much of our great art, but this wasn't just some kind of art-lover's favor: it was because the church was one of two institutions with the power and resources to fund, say, a Sistine Chapel ceiling, and you can just as much ask yourself if having the church in that position skewed or diminished the productivity of art as it did support it. And that's without even getting toward the times Christian churches/sects has been flatly hostile to art/science.)

(Point being you can't look at the history of the church as just "religion" purely, like some people are saying: it's organized religion, it's been an institution and an entity of power -- political power, social power, all kinds of non-theological power -- as well, and that really figures in here.)

yeah, sucks to be us, huh

i'm starting to move to the position of enjoying religion as the crazy stitch-up job of incongruous borrowed parts that it all is.

xpost lol yeah i've been reading eco lately!

(Maybe the impossible hypothetical I'm looking for is something like "yes but what would have happened if the church existed as a power structure and a continuous institution but not for theological reasons" -- sort of like asking "yes but what would the state have done if it were just an institution, and not an instrument of political power")

yeah and the books they transcribed were not for the "masses" they were for priests, right to spread The Word around the globe? Like monks may have given a shit about books, but i don't think they gave a shit about people reading.

-- Mr. Que, Friday, November 16, 2007 8:33 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

damn those priests for not inventing the printing press and initiating a programme of mass education! elitist bastards!

wait does that zing even work? "lol jesuits" << did i do that right?

lutheranism was the killer app of the gutenberg press (or is that the other way around)

what I'm suggesting is that a lot of the contributions "organized religion" has made to art/science/philosophy might have more to do with the "organized" part than the "religion" part, if that makes sense.

This is legitimate in a lot of ways, but I think in terms of writing in western culture, the importance of the first lines in the bible - "In the beginning was the Word" - cannot be overstated.

lutheranism was the killer app of the gutenberg press (or is that the other way around)

-- gff, Friday, November 16, 2007 9:20 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

synergy

check out my sweet fundamentalist hack

Me, I'm eternally grateful that the Catholic Church - for whatever reason - preserved the only existing manuscripts of people like Cicero, for example.

x-posts

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, November 16, 2007 3:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Ah yes, the Catholic Church: no child's behind left; aids is better than condoms; millions of orphans are better than abortions; unbaptized babies souls's sit in limbo forever (until last year, that is). They've given us SO MUCH to be grateful for.

AND the Lord Jesus, and all the hospitals they run and people they feed. Be fair.

to think this all started w/ Hitch wearing Squarepants.

nice churches and music too, to be fair.

Plus we're the one true faith on this planet, that's gotta be in our favour

ticket to Paradise!

but the systematic hiding of centuries of child abuse is despicable and cancels out the good forme. I'm sure there were tens of thousands of cases, and the cover-ups have been going on for centuries. And how about when they handed out monetary compensation to victims this year and decided the amount based on the type/severity of abuse: so if you only got fondled you got so much, cuddled even less, buggered or blown, one presumes more. Sick.

Plus we're the one true faith on this planet, that's gotta be in our favour

http://photos6.flickr.com/9958184_1d3029f0e7_m.jpg

if only John Paul I hadnt been killed after hearing Michael Corleone's confession.

fwiw I have a visceral and deep antipathy to the Catholic Church whenever I am in one of their churches or forced to sit through a wedding ceremony or whatever. (Being a Jew and a leftist, I've got my own axes to grind against them on a whole host of issues). But I give credit where credit is due, and they haven't been all evil all the time.

you should send them a nice note to that effect.

The Catholic Church: We're Only Kinda Evil.

Inquisition, collusion with Nazis, anti-birth control insanity vs. Antonio Gaudi, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Augustine

sexy schoolgirls

As with all gigantic long-lasting institutions, there are many people within it who have been humane and charitable. I wonder what CH thought of those 'liberation theology' nuns, like the ones who were raped and killed by Reagan's freedom fighters in the '80s.

(of course, they won't be made saints anytime soon)

also, Pope JP2 voted against both Gulf Wars, unlike Al Gore and Hil.

sexy schoolgirls

-- s1ocki, Friday, November 16, 2007 5:09 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

Oh yeah. Nevermind!

don't tell me there aren't sexy jewish schoolgirls

As with all gigantic long-lasting institutions, there are many people within it who have been humane and charitable. I wonder what CH thought of those 'liberation theology' nuns, like the ones who were raped and killed by Reagan's freedom fighters in the '80s.

-- Dr Morbius, Friday, November 16, 2007 5:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

He would say that they were good and admirable and brave people but that their deeds do not REQUIRE religion.

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/3402696.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=BD2794AE0B3E23ADFD191B756FE68063A55A1E4F32AD3138

xp

no? take vows, get funded.

I just spermed my leiterhosen.

do sexy Jewish schoolgirls wear plaid skirts & navy knee socks?

oops, I'm too late.

I don't really understand how any action REQUIRES anything, in Hitchens' sense. People act for all sorts of convoluted reasons, separating out definite intents/motives is next to impossible.

no uniforms = no sexiness

My neighbor is a sexy Jewish girl who wears plaid skirts & navy kneesocks, oddly.

xxp

it's a pretty ecumenical look

xpost

This is legitimate in a lot of ways, but I think in terms of writing in western culture, the importance of the first lines in the bible - "In the beginning was the Word" - cannot be overstated.

I hate to be picky, but those aren't the first words of the Bible. They're the first words of John's Gospel.

haha sorry you are correct - I was gettin my Hebrew interpretations mixed up

(Genesis 1:1 being "In the beginning God..." with lots of debate about the first three words' meaning in the original Hebrew)

you mean two words

(braysheet adonai)

I don't really understand how any action REQUIRES anything, in Hitchens' sense. People act for all sorts of convoluted reasons, separating out definite intents/motives is next to impossible.

Not once in your life has a stranger, or, hell, a family member, performed a good deed and said they did it in God's name? Didn't you want to punch them in the mouth?

um, I don't remember if they did. as far as my family goes, certainly not.

It's like those Christian charities who help AIDS victims. To criticize their motives would be monstrous, but I grit my teeth when they cite the approval of God or a heavenly reward. I mean, simple human decency doesn't motivate you?

doesn't the action matter more than the motive in such cases?

Yes. But I'm a churl.

there's a charity for that too.

It's like those Christian charities who help AIDS victims. To criticize their motives would be monstrous, but I grit my teeth when they cite the approval of God or a heavenly reward. I mean, simple human decency doesn't motivate you?

Simple human decency and religious motivation are not mutually exclusive.

I'd be grateful if you told them.

It's like those Christian charities who help AIDS victims. To criticize their motives would be monstrous, but I grit my teeth when they cite the approval of God or a heavenly reward. I mean, simple human decency doesn't motivate you?

OTM. Hamas and Hezbollah also does a lot of admirable community service, but that says nothing about the belief system involved. So do Christian missionary organizations To quote Hitchens again, it may be true that the Nation of Islam helps wean a lot of young black men off narcotics, but that still doesn't change the fact that the NOI is a racist, crackpot organization that still sells "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" on its website.

"doesn't the action matter more than the motive in such cases?"

i suppose. but also I think of Hitchens' insightful remarks on Mother Teresa, namely that she loved poverty and not the poor.

in her own words, asked if she taught the poor to endure their lot:

"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

Hitchens might wanna consider his own (completely hypocritical) associations with religious fanatics before casting aspersions on other do-gooder associations with questionable beliefs.

I think maybe there's some passage in the Bible about that...

another funny thing occurred to me on the way home about Hitchens' asking what moral action "requires" a religious belief - one could argue that Dostoevsky's writings required his Xtianity. Certainly he wouldn't have written the novels he did had he not been such a devout Xtian. (I know this isn't the kind of moral activity he was referring to, but still)

you mean two words

-- s1ocki, Friday, November 16, 2007 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

(braysheet adonai)

-- s1ocki, Friday, November 16, 2007 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

It's three I think. "b'" and "raysheet" are separate words, even if there isn't a space between them in Hebrew. </pedant>

xpost to shakey

what relationships are you talking about?

hotdog_and_donut.jpg

what relationships are you talking about?

Hitch signing on with a President who says God talks to him

He's never done this.

It's like those Christian charities who help AIDS victims. To criticize their motives would be monstrous, but I grit my teeth when they cite the approval of God or a heavenly reward. I mean, simple human decency doesn't motivate you?

i used to think this too, but i think they equate "simple human decency" with "god." belief in a deity is really kind of a more complex thing than atheists like hitch and dawkins will admit. i guess there's probably a lot of people who think of god as kind of an invisible dad figure, but for most people i think it's bound up - in an admittedly confusing way - with their basic ideas of morality, decency, et al.

"i guess there's probably a lot of people who think of god as kind of an invisible dad figure, but for most people i think it's bound up - in an admittedly confusing way - with their basic ideas of morality, decency, et al."

i think this makes you quite an optimist in my book. i'm quite sure its the other way around...

#1 back
#2 crack
#3 sack

oh come on Alfred - he publicly endorsed Bush over Kerry in the election (however "qualified" that support was), and his pro-Iraq invasion position is well documented.

actually, he endorsed Kerry; and since when did supporting the war also mean supporting a president who talks to God?

so smooth

Hitch unenthusiastically endorses Dubya
"Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration."

From the article:

"The Kerry camp also rightly excoriates the President and his Cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq. "

" "Anybody But Bush"--and this from those who decry simple-mindedness--is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it's nihilism at best. If it isn't treason to the country--let us by all means not go there--it is certainly treason to the principles of the left. "

The first quote proves the point that he isn't just some wanna-be neocon yes-man. And as problematic as the second quote is, i believe he has a point. can anyone here honestly say that Hillary or Obama have offered any sort of actual alternative to the present administrations catastrophes?

It was my mistake -- I was thinking of Slate's compendium of endorsement shortly before the election, and Hitchens was so disgusted with Bush that it sounded like a Kerry endorsement.

This will ultimately matter not a bit to those who want to indict him for bad faith, but he's open about his being a one-issue-voter; he's always said that he will only vote for a candidate who understands that "Islamofascism" is a threat. It matters less to me than to Hitchens, but "lolz drunken neo-con blowhard" is a stupid reduction of his beliefs.

*of endorsements

i dunno, kerry wasn't calling for an immediate pullout, was he? a lot of leftists weren't happy with his stance, and a lot of pro-war ppl i know voted for him just because they wanted a *competent* war president.

thinking that Bush understands Islamofascism as a threat is a total headscratcher. I dunno how anyone could sensibly draw that conclusion.

Kerry would fight a "smarter" war, remember?

as far as a "smarter" war is concerned, I'd love to understand what exactly that is. Again, I must make the point that our current situation is that this is a brand new sort of war/problem. And before you try to call me Rumsfeld, I'm not saying that the US is completely justified in doing anything it feels like doing. But to bring Hitchens back into the argument, his attitude that the west must do something about islamofacism is one that i share.

where are these mythical strawmen that don't think the west needs to address Islamofascism. The debate is always about HOW to address it, everybody already accepts it as an issue.

he's open about his being a one-issue-voter; [...] but "lolz drunken neo-con blowhard" is a stupid reduction of his beliefs.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, November 19, 2007 3:20 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

wait what.

Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes.

lolz drunken neo-con blowhard

since when did supporting the war also mean supporting a president who talks to God?

about march 2003.

swinburning: what must "the west" (include me out) do?

haha yeah "anybody? including muqtada al-sadr?" is about on the level of "anybody? even your mom?"

yeah I totally voted for Muqtada

he had the best healthcare plan

hey, i said the quote was problematic (at best). But if you think he means Muqtada for realz, then you don't get the ironing...

and as for "what the west should do", i'm afraid that i don't have a good answer for that. the terrible thing is neither does anyone else, especially on the american political stage.

listen, im a student of Vidal much more than Hitchens, and accordingly i think that most things in this country have been kinda fucked since the "National Security State" began (Vidal's term, not mine). But AGAIN, to reiterate, the problem of islamofacisim in particular and fundamentalism in general might be the greatest danger that both secularism and humanity face in the coming century. Those that believe in the slaughter of the infidels and a fiery armageddon have the materials to make these things possible. That seems to be Hitchens' point, and I don't really see how one couldn't agree

you know what else the west needs to do something about is all those poor starving africans!!!!!

http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2005/06/12/bobgeldoff_wideweb__430x275.jpg

and jeez my car is getting dirty maybe the west could wash it for me?

no. and you're not funny.

maybe the west can do something about that

i doubt it.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2288/2049214132_52b077beca.jpg

oh, man, Hitchens self-improvement

"The combined effect was like being tortured for information you do not possess." - awesome.

http://www.faithmouse.com/cartoon688.jpg

pwnt

Awesome

i don't get it

i will never ever get tired of reading him piss and moan about religion, yeah bring on the futile tilting at 'the holidays' you fat drunk crazy knowitall t(^_^t)

on huckabee: "a moon-faced true believer and anti-Darwin pulpit-puncher from Arkansas who doesn't seem to know the difference between being born again and born yesterday."

Here he is on Monday on Joe Scarborough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAejscXAui4

Hitch on Romney: drop dead

That's prime Hitch. He's dead on right, too.

okay that was pretty funny

Hitchens's rhetorical style is almost as faulty as the religious people he criticizes. Take a bite out of this, homos:

There are also those who think that Romney's disowning of past Mormon polygamy is too opportunistic, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does still offer the consolation prize of multiple wives in heaven (just like the sick dream of Mohamed Atta).

What purpose does making that comparison serve other than to associate Romney with an established Enemy of America (EoA)? It mistakes degree and extent based on casual association to a shallow, muckrakey effect.

How is there a difference in degree or extent there? Mormon heaven has a 71-wife maximum?

It's fairly clear that, in his mind, Atta and Romney suffer from different kinds of religious lunacy – like, say, the promise of heavenly reward after committing a horrible offense against mankind. Whether you think polygamy - terrorism is another story.

polygamy = terrorism

Hitchens puts Romney and Mohamed Atta at the same level due to their similar beliefs in multiple wives in heaven - this associates Romney with Atta in readers minds, eliciting emotions, etc. "man, that dude's crazy! religion is fucked up!" But just because a certain belief can be connected between the two in some casual relationship, does that mean Romney's going to fly a plane into a building?

Why use the comparison to Atta at all if not to elicit that emotion? It's just cheap, manipulative writing... that's why I can never get into Hitchens or his buddies.

Umm yes, I can indeed read: point being that's not a difference of DEGREE or EXTENT.

The rhetorical problem Hitchens is having there is that he's running the trick of pointing out the equal strangeness of religions' Official Beliefs in things -- in this case, getting multiple chicks in an afterlife. This is not a problem of degree or extent, it's a problem with pretending that the official theology of a religion has anything more than a VERY casual relationship with what adherents actually believe or how they exist in a religious culture. We have a bad habit in the U.S. of understanding this about Christians and not understanding it about anyone else (e.g., we all know that if you ask a Catholic how often he/she eats human flesh, that person will not respond "every Sunday").

When the Mormon terrorist cells start to form, then Hitchens comparison can be justified. Otherwise it's just dirty and cheap, the kind-of stuff people complain about when liberals are equated with terrorists by the Coulter Crowd. .

So you're saying you DON'T have an answer to that question, okay

It's about the emotions he's trying to get out of the reader that he makes that comparison - why use Atta then as an example of the "official beliefs" inconsistency thing rather than more level, equal example that has less baggage? Atta is probably one of the most reviled human beings in recent American history, thanks to his role in the 9/11 attacks, so his use will guarentee a strong emotional response. It's like comparing something Bush does to Adolf Hitler. It doesn't help that we can already assume Hitchens is very anti-Romney.

Almost everything Hitchens writes makes use of really shoddy writing. It's just sad so many advocates for non-religion have such heavy handed ways of making their cases, and this is just a small example of a common problem (yes, including Dawkins and those guys).

Banging head on wall over here

(P.S. I would actually guess that the comparison is deployed less to manipulate the reader's emotions -- this is Hitchens we're talking about -- and more because of the author's own midset, which is one in which these specific bits of theology are ridiculous and precisely, unimpeachably comparable)

Well, his mindset is as flawed as Coulter's then, where dissent against American values = terrorism.

Hitch says ABOLISH THE CIA

http://www.slate.com/id/2179593/?gt1=10733

After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

er yeah.

chin chin.

Women still are unfunny: in fact "they can't even read" my columns accurately.

Hitchens isn't exactly the LOLmaster though. he ain't zinging womens pants off in that vid, fer sure.

It's pathetic, actually.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/furore-over-hitchenss-sapphic-slip-808483.html

uhhhhh

Love the comments on the Gawker version of that -- with the correct vid -- where folks are repeatedly failing to understand the reason the jibe is a metaphor and not a generalization about the discursive qualities of lesbians.

yah i was like 'i missed where he said lesbian'... but posted it anyway.

http://gawker.com/5005176/chris-hitchens-lesbian-moment-with-andrew-sullivan

Hitchens isn't exactly the LOLmaster though. he ain't zinging womens pants off in that vid, fer sure.

sockpuppetwatch

In his favor, Hitchens appears to value thinking as a method for arriving at his positions. This beats parroting whatever this week's PR memo lays out, as so many prominent US 'pundits' do. He deserves a modicum of credit for this.

However, in his disfavor, Hitchens appears to stop thinknig after he has arrived at his position, to the extent that he doesn't seem to profit much from second thoughts, new information, or superior arguments. To change his mind is an admission of previous imperfection, and this seemingly will not do.

modified dud

Prospect Magazine interviews him:

If there's anything that still identifies Hitchens as a man of the radical left, it's that he's willing to take this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion; to declare there is a map of positions that everyone should have navigated correctly since the fall of the wall. "Wanna hear?" Certainly I want to hear. What he outlines is a checklist for being right—as a leftist—over all the big international issues since 1989: "First, everyone should have welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall and the overthrow of Ceausescu… As they should have been pro-Tiananmen crowd earlier that year. That's the baseline." Next, he continues, everyone on the left should have defended Salman Rushdie, "unequivocally, against the ayatollah." The left should then have perceived that the "semi-utopian, Fukuyama, end-of-history stuff" was an illusion, and that the age of the totalitarian state hadn't stopped. And when Milosevic invaded Bosnia, and Saddam invaded Kuwait, they should have been "not just for stopping that, but for overthrowing the people responsible… One has to be opposed to totalitarianism and its racist and theocratic version in particular. And the inescapable thing that lies behind all this is that it's bound to make 1960s people reconsider their view of the US… anyone who hasn't reconsidered it at all… I have no respect for."

This taking of positions and deriving a "line" from a set of immutable principles belongs to a kind of Talmudic Trotskyism. "It teaches you forms of argument and method that you never lose, and that I wouldn't be without." Is that all that is left? The only regard in which Hitchens professes a modicum of empathy with religious believers is over the matter of losing one's belief. "I say this as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded," he writes in God is not Great. "When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical materialism was not an absolute and it did not have a supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had mutually excommunicating rival papacies."

From the age of 13, the public school his father scrimped to afford made things more interesting. He recalls the Leys school in Cambridge as full of the sons of Methodist Yorkshire businessmen who "thought it was their perfect right to be there." His nascent socialism was triggered by boys who considered the working classes to be oiks. "It came at me," he says, "not so much as from sympathy for the oiks but from a real dislike for the people who called them oiks." He developed a taste for political polemic inspired by Arthur Koestler's Hanged by the Neck and by Orwell. "I was magnetised by Orwell, because in his social novels he writes about the sort of family I came from, and he had the same experience of going to a school where everyone was richer than him."

i had had no idea he went to the leys -- like martina topley-bird. this explains a lot.

So did JG Ballard.

JG Ballard hates oiks.

he hates those who call oiks oiks.

it isn't a school for gentlemen.

is he supporting McCain?

JG Ballard 'hating oiks':

What really kept me away from the polling booth was the sense that the rate of political change has been slowing since the early 1990s. Do the possibilities for radical political change still exist? I would like to see the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords, inherited titles and the public schools, a move that would bring us into line with the rest of the English-speaking world. I would like to see Oxford and Cambridge turned into graduate uni- versities entirely devoted to research, which at a stroke would cool the ardour of the "tiger mothers" of Holland Park and Hampstead determined to set their three-year-olds on the path to Oxbridge, whatever the human cost.

he's more often referred to political change as basically trivial.

the last sentence is like wuht: this would simply make the tiger-mothers try harder to get their kids into US universities (which is already happening) and inflate the reputation of bristol, london, etc.

the "tiger mothers" of Holland Park and Hampstead determined to set their three-year-olds on the path to Oxbridge, whatever the human cost

lol i have no idea what he is talking about, i wasn't at school or uni with about 3000 of 'em

http://www.faithmouse.com/cartoon688.jpg

Needs repeating

lol wtf? The final word on atheism v religion!

A frog sitting on a panda reading the bible! The lord is in me! I've seen the light!

delirium tremens

I got a bit confused and read the first couple of posts of this thread thinking it was about Christopher Biggins.

are "tiger mothers" like "cougars"?

Are they people who pilot Tiger Moths?

The election has just started to get interesting, and of the two boyish Democratic front-runners I'd say Edwards was the one to watch.

from january:

Only one of these men has any poetry about him. John McCain, the white-haired old lion in winter, embarking on his last hurrah, quixotically indifferent to money or polls, can still bring a lump to the throat. Stubbornly loyal to his comrades in uniform, adamant for victory in Iraq, he commands a certain respect of the kind that professional image-builders can only dream of. This may not turn out to be the year for old lions, but it’s nice to know, amid all the moisture and bogus emotion, that the country can still produce them.

Thanks for reminding me.

old, borderline senile lions

but lions nonetheless!

Wait--the VV rebutt: "dykes, Jews and butch" women?

One assumes always now that "in his disfavor, Hitchens appears to stop thinknig after he has arrived at his position" is the defining aspect of nu-Hitchens. But--who ARE these dykes he lists? (And looking like he's tasted a dyspeptic pig's ass while doing so, as if the mere idea of a femme who would never consider fucking him is as loathsome as the post-death dreams of Atta and Romney squared.)

He looks like he's taking a piss-take on the notion of a dumbed down version of the more cartoonish elements of the posh-bad-boy thing he's worked so terribly hard to craft; when he sucks down the booze at he end, it's like he's trying to neuter his own bile, while knowing there's no hope and finding that terribly droll.

the notion of a version of the elements of a thing

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

o_O

It's along time since I read a Hitchen's piece I thought was good. That qualifies.

He also lent his name to a petition protesting the circumventing of the FISA court a couple of years ago.

i was going to look for a hitchens thread to revive with the waterboarding thing today!

oh well

p.s. when did blind links become totally ubiquitous, it is turning into my total pet hate lately

probably one of the better bits of journalism i've seen in a while. kind of stunty possibly, but... at least it's more empirical than yr usual bullshit opinion piece.

The video.

probably one of the better bits of journalism i've seen in a while.

no, just... no

i mean it's okay but i don't think he has anything especially enlightening to say and he makes absolutely no contribution to the torture debate. it's interesting because it's hitchens - a celebrity puff piece and nothing more.

shame they didn't carry on after he panicked really

I swear, waterboarding looks so laid back in practice. Kinda scary.

The fuck was with that music?

George Packer weighs in:

The uncharitable view is that Hitchens will do anything to be noticed, that celebrity elicits a kind of masochism in him, and that being unpublished or unheard or unseen for even a day must be more agonizing for him than having his pubic hair removed by strips of hot wax or trying to breathe while water is poured over a towel spread across his face. And this view might well be true, but there’s more to it—there always is with Hitchens.

His greatest weakness as a writer is his need to put himself at the center of attention, to win every argument, to walk away from every encounter in prose, as in life, having gotten the better of someone else. And yet the same impulse is essential to his ambition and power as an essayist. Hitchens is working, consciously, I think, in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell, in which ideas are the flower of direct experience and everything depends on the strong presence of the “I.” Hitchens’s limitation in this form is his inability, maybe unwillingness, to make literature out of the most interesting kind of argument which happens with oneself.

Kinda generic - yes, waterboarding is horrifying and brutal, as we've heard/seen from numerous other sources (including people who had it done to them). Further undermined by his obsessive need to bring up the damn dirty Islamists and their brutality.

[Hitchens’s limitation in this form is his inability, maybe unwillingness, to make literature out of the most interesting kind of argument which happens with oneself.]

Yes, I think I see this, and that it's a strong criticism of one who fights others so much.

Hmmmmm.

a challop for the ages

This shows you "capitulationists" that he recognizes a capable steward of the imperial war machine when he sees one.

A good article4, apart from the usual neocon bullshit at the end.

vote for obama because he's a more interesting mark to bitch about for the next four years

when he bloats the Pentagon budget and bombs Iran?

This shows you "capitulationists" that he recognizes a capable steward of the imperial war machine when he sees one.

― Dr Morbius, Monday, October 13, 2008 12:03 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Dr Morbius quotes that read like Christopher Hitchens quotes

xpost no Morss when he raises all our taxes and installs HilRod as Chief Justice

eh Morbs

Dan, from what year?

morbs = geir hongro of american politics

It's impressive how Hitch can come off as insane even when writing something broadly not-insane.

*makes drinky motion, etc

http://www.piesnthighs.com/images/pig.gif

morbs = geir hongro of american politics

o i am slain... and yr still gettin' war.

But Morbius, apparently, recently enjoyed hot erotic action with strangers! I doubt that Hongro did.

The Hitchens piece shows me, to an extent, that I admire anyone who agrees with me and dislike anyone who disagrees with me, even within the space of a column or a paragraph.

i thought this was a free country until recently

http://blog.nj.com/hobokennow_impact/2008/05/large_f2b.jpg

alan alda! one of my heroes (seriously).

Pinkos and commies, the lot of them.

It's like Hitch is just catching himself up on this whole "election" thing.

what was that kerfuffle in Slate in 2004 involving his endorsement?

"Hey guys did you notice that the two candidates in a two-party system don't differ much on 'the issues'?"

it's kind of true but not really.

Tell that to Hitch and he'll break a scotch glass over yr head or something.

yr still gettin' war.

― Dr Morbius, Monday, October 13, 2008 5:22 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

If only we would see the light and burn down Wall Street and levitate the Pentagon

i could kick his behind so hard he wouldn't know what hit him.

eat shit, hoosy. I'm no hippie -- there's nothing to be done. NO-thing.

we can complain endlessly--that's something, isn't it?

Lighting a cig and watching the world burn seems a bit melodramatic even for you, Morbs! Come on, this party or that party, there's plenty of work to be done in our communities. xp

a bit melodramatic maybe "quietly bombastic" is what i was going for here

I'm talking about the election for Imperial Mgr.

Morbs, you're slipping: Gore Vee-dal called it Emperor of the West.

Emperor of Rolling Into the Shitbin is more like it.

lord of the flies!

snakes on the flies!

master of the domain

store manager of crap-mart

B-b-but Morbs and Hitchens are kinda like the same guy with different BACs and different opinions!

like jekyll and hyde, in a political sense?

I couldn't stay conscious long enough to imbibe Hitch-like quantities.

i can drink in my sleep.

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/10/20/cartoons/081020_cartoon_1_a13528_p465.gif

morbs, last night

i say this with love

yeah well eat shit hoosy!

can't we all just eat ambergris?

YAY SEMEN

he wants us to say we like eating semen!

^^^ posts in character amirite goddamnit xpost or. uh. is it?

lolz

Wait, I DIED is also named Dan?

I find this thread contemptible and frivolous.

(Freedom)

Freedom Passantino amirite

http://www.piesnthighs.com/images/pig.gif

HI DERE, I DIED, ALL CAPS on a Monday.

i get them mixed up sometimes too

It's not like I keep that continually close an eye on Hitchens, but does anyone feel that he is trying to swim back to the left somewhat?

That looks naive. I know he's always been a maverick, contrarian etc; and maybe his right-wing stuff is specific to attacking Islamists / Iraq / perversely backing W post 9/11 - maybe it wasn't a fully fledged conversion to neo-conservatism or whatever.

But he's done that (anti-) torture piece, he's made atheism his big schtick (which is at least vs US religious right in principle), he's attacked McCain and Palin in the kind of stinging terms that make you glad to have him on your side, and on Newsnight last night he said that he'd voted for Obama. I wonder if he wants perceptions of him to change.

maybe his right-wing stuff is specific to attacking Islamists / Iraq / perversely backing W post 9/11 - maybe it wasn't a fully fledged conversion to neo-conservatism or whatever.

this is the way I always saw. all that makeover stuff in vanity fair awhile back suggested he's trying to clean up his act so maybe there's a bit of hangover/morning-after clarity too? I doubt if he's quit drinking but maybe the right-wing stuff was a 'bottoming out' so to speak.

Blimey, when did he become a US citizen? That's taking it too far...

funny thing abt is rightward swoon is it was all predicated on the fact that he had some kurdish friends - a butterfly flaps its wings etc

Surely he's been a US voter for ages - he's lived in DC for decades.

I've rather enjoyed Hitchens' appearances during this election, it's a novelty seeing an intelligent person on the telly at any time

his shift was too little too late this year - did it really take dude 5 weeks to figure out he didn't like sarah palin?

lol @ the early, weird cameron carr sighting on this thread.

Like so many people who make their living by capturing the public's ear, Hitchens wants to retain some small measure of relevancy. Post 9/11, it appeared that the anti-war left was reduced to a small and irrelvant rump, which is not a place a 'commentator' like Hitchens can easily tolerate. Now, post economic meltdown, the neocons are the small irrelvant rump he aches to diasassociate himself from.

However, while public opinion often veers about and the public views this fact with complacency, the same public frowns upon public figures who veer to wildly and too often. He's only tolerated now because he has a talent for insult which is entertaining. His opinions throw no weight any more.

only tolerated now because he has a talent for insult which is entertaining

opinions throw no weight

small and irrelvant rump

are you talking about hitchens or dr morbius?

morbs is consistant hand him that

Only citizens can vote, and Hitchens isn't one yet, last I read him on the topic. He put in the papers after 9/11 but it's a long-ass process in this country... His pieces in the past couple weeks have been very good. I started reading him regularly after he called on the U.S. to buy Afghanistan's poppy crop, which I hope Obama heeds.

He became a citizen last year according to wiki.

Yeah, he's a citizen, voted for Obama, according to an interview he did on Australian TV just after the election (in which he was entertainingly bad-tempered and typically looked as though he'd fallen through a tree, but also wilfully misunderstood what other commentators were saying by clinging to a very literal interpretation of the interviewer's questions). I have no idea if that last bit makes sense.

Stepping off the ski lift, I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition. What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. "Sir, that would be inappropriate." In what respect? "At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level." In that case, I said, make it a double.

<3 <3 <3

i don't get that frog/panda/bible cartoon

Should have said "reading him regularly again" above. I've been fascinated since the early '80s, and won't ever stop being, despite everything...

Like a lover who force feeds you gin at a high altitude.

Seeing that anecdote made me think, "Has Hitchens ever encountered Stephen Fry?" and well whaddayaknow

I was so infuriated by these smug, white, Oxbridge twits turning up on my iPOD that I have tracked down a site that almost no-one reads to sign-up and have a mini-rant.

It was all pretty nauseating but I reached my limit when they got to the part on the religious intolerance bill. How can rich white people who live such cloistered lives dare to dismiss the experiences of those of us from the inner-cities who are at the sharp end.

Their towering arrogance was matched only by their ignorance of real life. Two bloated �academics� quoting the scriptures of the �classics� in a tasteless show of erudition and name dropping, as far removed from today's England as their beloved ancient greeks.

Gut wrenching.
Posted by motte on May 24, 2006 11:57 PM.

haha burn

a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition
a tasteless show of erudition

jsthere2watchvideos (3 weeks ago) Show Hide
-6 Poor comment Good comment
Marked as spam
Reply | Spam
is the music really necessary hes some fat white smart guy not a dying super hero

http://www.faithmouse.com/christopher-hitchens-spaghetti-monster.jpg

christopher-hitchens-spaghetti-monster.jpg

http://img.slate.com/media/1/122939/2181108/2205602/2206782/CA_081215_waronxmas.jpg

Hitchens reportedly beaten up in Beirut after defacing a SSNP (Syrian Nationalist Party) poster:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/christopher-hitchens-beat_n_168035.html

The attackers had apparently come out of nowhere on posh Hamda Street, where they had gone to buy shoes

I'm a little drunk rite now so I can't parse^^but somehow this seems significant

Christopher Hitchens on Beirut attack: 'they kept coming. Six or seven at first'

James Robinson
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 19 February 2009 17.49 GMT

As a professional provocateur and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Christopher Hitchens has been engaged in countless verbal punch-ups with his ideological opponents, most of them conducted from the safety of a TV studio.

However, when the controversial author, journalist and broadcaster defaced a political poster on a visit to Beirut last week, he found himself at the wrong end of a bruising encounter that has left him walking with a limp and nursing cuts and bruises.

Hitchens had been drinking on Beirut's main boulevard, Hamra Street, on Saturday afternoon with two other western journalists after attending a rally to commemorate the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. They spotted a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a far-right group whose logo bears an uncanny resemblance to the Nazi swastika, and Hitchens decided to act.

"They would be better off calling themselves the Syrian National Socialist party, and that's what they are", he said, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk today after arriving in the UK by plane. "I couldn't tear it down but I got my marker out and wrote on it, effectively telling them to 'fuck off'."

Hitchens' political statement was witnessed by a group of SSNP activists, who have a strong presence in Beirut. "With amazing speed, in broad daylight on this fashionable street, these guys appeared from nowhere, grabbed me by the collar and said: 'You're coming with us'. I said: 'No I'm not'. They kept on coming. About six or seven at first with more on the way," he said.

He described how he was knocked to the floor, ended up with his shirt covered with blood after he cut his arm in the fall, and "skinned" two fingers on one hand. Hitchens added that was walking with a limp for several days after. "They were after me because I was the one who had defaced the poster," he said.

After scrambling to his feet and "picking up my glasses and my notebook", Hitchens and his companions flagged down a taxi, but a member of the gang who had assailed him jumped in and they climbed back out on to the street, escaping to the safety of a busy coffee shop. A crowd confronted their assailants and the three men managed to escape.

The journalists then caught another taxi to a waterfront hotel "to throw them off the scent in case we were followed", although not before Hitchens had "taken a punch to the face through the car window". They returned to their own hotel later that afternoon.

Hitchens said he had been shaken by the attack. "I've just got off a flight. What shook me is how nearly it could have got fantastically nasty. We could have been hurt or taken away. These militias have their own private dungeons. I wouldn't fancy spending time in one of those."

He stayed on in Beirut to deliver a scheduled talk at the University of American in Lebanon yesterday evening, where he was confronted by another group of SSNP members. "By that time they had worked out who I was and where I was going to be," he said. "So I took along some very nice comrades from the Popular Socialist Party to sit near me. [The rival activists] were outnumbered."

Hitchens added that his hosts had offered to take him to hospital but he had refused. "I'm too old to take chances. If you get kicked in the head or the stomach you should get yourself checked out but I didn't get a blow to my head or anything."

He is recovering in London today before flying back to his Washington home tomorrow and insists he is bloodied but unbowed. "It was a scrape. It wasn't 'honours even' but it wasn't a rout."

don't fuck wit fascist shoe-shoppers

Everyone buys shoes. Actually, think about it: Facists have always been very into shoes. Especially boots. Wait, are boots shoes?

I think you're missing the really important question here--are all shoes fascist?

y

Hitchens had been drinking on Beirut's main boulevard, Hamra Street, on Saturday afternoon

hahaha

Hitchens said he had been shaken by the attack. "I've just got off a flight."

Assuming he was coming from Europe, that meant his internal clock would have been earlier than noon.

lol good point.

and how do you think chris hitchens gets through a flight?

Hithc let himself get waterboarded, he should've been able to take all these guys at once. WTF, Hitchens?

blog post by guy who was with Hitchens in Beirut

MIKE
I don't know. Let me ask you something. I mean, I got. I got some pretty good ones in there. I mean it's not like I. I mean you wouldn't say I got my ass kicked.
CYNTHIA
I don't know, you know. I don't know. After a couple of years people won't even remember really who won or lost.
MIKE
Yeah, yeah, no. It's true, You know you're right. 'Cos I read about, um, like Jackson Pollock or Ernest Hemmingway. You read about those guys. You never read about who won or lost just that they got into a brawl.
CYNTHIA
Exactly.

worth checking his overtime with bill maher clip on hbo's website. being a real dick to mos def.

Mos Def sounded like a dumb ass, though.

yeah i got a minute or two in; after salman rushdie started giving a brief history of afghanistan 1995-2001 my cringe reflex kicked in and i had to close it. i heard tell CH called him "mr. definitely" but that wasn't enough to soldier through

I like Chris Hitchens because he's a great drunk.

yeah, Mos Def making cheap platitudes throughout, but felt bad for the guy getting the Hitchens treatment.

and Mos is smarter than this.

sonned

i love that both of these guys are basically 12 year olds goin 'u mad'

I don't think Hitchens was being a dick, I think Mos Def was being an incoherent idiot, and he was rightly called out.

The Overtime stuff's even better. Mos Def, losing the argument, starts spouting conspiracy theories:

Agh, I didn't mean to post this version with the bubble commentary, for the record.

a calling out is fair enough, but hitchens lays it on thick, backing mos def into a corner and it just gets worse. being as it was live, there should be some kind of courtesy.

especially considering mos def is basically the entertainer guest.

this is kind of great; mos def has the same look of frustration as when jack black erased all his tapes. rushdie is all patient dad. i guess that makes maher the mom who tries to joke-out a socially awkward situation, but makes it worse. WHO WANTS GINGER SNAPS

That Hitchens in Beirut story is funny. The SSNP logo looks more like St. Bridget's Cross than a swastika, I am now intrigued by the idea of all these Ba'athists being mad Gaeilgeoirs.

being as it was live, there should be some kind of courtesy.

The courtesy of not listening to idiots talk about politics because they're entertainers.

That Hitchens in Beirut story is funny. The SSNP logo looks more like St. Bridget's Cross than a swastika, I am now intrigued by the idea of all these Ba'athists being mad Gaeilgeoirs.

― The Real Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 5:12 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Flag_of_the_Syrian_Social_Nationalist_Party.svg/600px-Flag_of_the_Syrian_Social_Nationalist_Party.svg.png

That video is no longer available.

can be found here

Mos Def be ego trippin'. That reminds me of an old Politically Incorrect episode where someone said that something Edward James Olmos just said was "stupid," and he became enraged, stood halfway up out of his seat, and started screaming about Gandhi.

ta-nehisi coates has been great on this, as you'd expect

The comments on that Coates post are...wow.

the more i read ta-nehisi coates, the more i love him

ditto

Because somewhere out there a Christopher Hitchens was waiting, and when they met, he would have no mercy.

no. mercy.

That Hitchens in Beirut story is funny. The SSNP logo looks more like St. Bridget's Cross than a swastika, I am now intrigued by the idea of all these Ba'athists being mad Gaeilgeoirs.

― The Real Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 5:12 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.michaeltotten.com/images/SSNP%20Gunman%20Copyright%20Getty%20Images.jpg
An SSNP militia man rifles through files at a Future Movement office during the fighting in May 2008. (Getty Images)

http://www.michaeltotten.com/images/SSNP%20Attacks%20Future%20TV%20Copyright%20Getty.jpg
An SSNP fighter throws a molotov cocktail at Saad Hariri’s Future TV station during the fighting in May 2008. (Getty Images)

http://www.michaeltotten.com/images/Confiscated%20SSNP%20Bomb%20Materials.jpg
Confiscated SSNP bomb materials

http://www.michaeltotten.com/images/Confiscated%20SSNP%20Weapons.jpg
Confiscated SSNP weapons

Hitchens has once again outdone himself: http://www.slate.com/id/2224159/

Best graph: "This tendency toward the exquisite is also to be noticed—or have I become completely absurd?—in the very young and the very old. Japanese babies look like small-scale models of grown-ups in a way that makes one want to laugh out loud, while their old people achieve a sort of fineness and slenderness in bone structure and bearing that causes one to turn the head and also to wish to bow in deference.

I suppose that I am risking these generalizations (Japanese teenagers appear to look pretty much like teenagers everywhere, especially the males, so who knows what's going on?) because it's only a few decades ago that Japanese people were portrayed as especially ugly and misshapen and menacing. You don't even have to look at cartoons and caricatures of the World War II epoch—more recent stereotypes from the economic rivalry of the 1980s were also pretty rough. And the first week in August is when we commemorate, or at any rate ought to commemorate, the first use of the atomic bomb. It is in living memory that this device was used on humans and the term yellow peril used to justify its use. (Japanese skin comes in several attractive shades. Yellow is a nice enough color but is not the word one would use for any of them.) "

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/brain/images/1-1-6-2-0-0-0-0-0-0-0.jpg

"(One day, perhaps, someone will write something serious about the Japanese genius for small things and for miniaturization, which extends from carvings to plants to the idea of painting on grains of rice and which seemed at one point to lead the world in the concept of the microchip.)"

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say someone has already tapped this well, Chris.

but how do they make their babies look like miniature grown-ups? someone should write a book about that

christopher hitchens, meet momus. momus, meet christopher hitchens. ok now i'll leave you two alone.

why would you give me that mental image

why

He asks one fine, fine question, at least.

Another Oxford contemporary and former Union president, Gyles Brandreth - who served as a junior minister and whip under John Major, rather than Thatcher - recalls Hitchens as 'very attractive in every sense. He dressed like Che Guevara and charmed like Marilyn Monroe'.

Mind-boggling:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255852/So-WERE-Tory-ministers-gay-flings-Christopher-Hitchens-Oxford.html

hott

politics makes strange bedfellows amirite?!!!

can't have been that unusual, rly

iirc oxford was mostly men-only until 1974

I found this whole extract from the memoirs compelling & slightly nutty reading the other weekend. Assume he's just decided to go for cash cow/big kill for some reason - at this point gossipy tales of late 60s/early 70s post-Oxford Amis sexworld likely to get more attention/larger advance in UK than 'Why Trotsky Would Have Invaded Iraq' or w/e.

he's about the age at which well-known men of letters publish their memoirs

AKA I Didn't Always Look This Bad, Honest, I Wasn't Always a Sweaty Red-Faced Boozebag, I Used to Be So Handsome Even Tories Fancied Me

'David is impenetrably heterosexual,' says one of his oldest friends.

Interesting choice of words there.

That extract is mesmerisingly mundane. I was reading Robert Louis Stevenson on writing the other day, talking about the necessity of good prose doing more than one thing at once - amongst other things he says:

In the change from the successive shallow statements of an old chronicler to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative there is implied a vast amount of wit

This is exactly the opposite of what Hitchens is doing here (or the first part of that equation is a good approximation of what he is doing if you like). Memoir as Hello fame porn.

Whatever the memoir's virtues, this sentence is a masterpiece of boneheadedness:

One may wonder just why a young man who despised capitalism and all it stood for should have dallied with future Conservative ministers rather than future Left-wing leaders.

I always used to like his style back in the 90s & into this decade, when there was less text in the world; but he's been getting considerably less lapidary as time goes on. Soggier.

This is exactly the opposite of what Hitchens is doing here (or the first part of that equation is a good approximation of what he is doing if you like). Memoir as Hello fame porn.

well, yeah, a bit. but it is a sunday times extract. jury still out on the real thing.

which i will blatantly read.

so far it's interesting how old-school -- as in, you know, pre-world war two -- hitch and his set seem. about women, about class. and that whole public school/oxbridge world seems more like the 1920s than the present, largely because of the absence of women.

and the hitch-mart milieu in the '70s has now become this "thing" a bit like that of the ny intellectuals in the '40s or bloomsbury in the '20s, which is funny, because back in the '70s, all the talk was of how the giants of way back then no longer walked the earth.

i'd be interested to know what trotskyism meant to young hitch, too. what would a britain run by trots be like? (of course, trotskyism implies international revolution, but playing along...) s.thing tells me the special place in the firmament occupied by balliol might go the way of the kulaks.

Hitch on Trotsky recently.

yeah. i was hoping he'd review the book, to save me from having to watch all 50 minutes of that! like a lot of trots, a big plank of his argument (from what i've bothered with) is that trotsky was a fine writer. another i've heard is that shit was pretty desperate for the bolsheviks and so really they had to kill all those people.

which is all fine and works for lots of other historical figures too.

but where's the *positive* appeal there, for a young lefty in britain? what is hitch's utopia that will justify whatever needs justifying?

Alasdair MacIntyre and George Steiner—the authors, respectively, of After Virtue and Antigones—have both evolved a good deal since they wrote those lines. But if either of them was again to need a figure to represent dissent and defiance, or the fusion of the man of ideas with the man of action, or the wandering internationalist, he might be drawn once more to the character of Trotsky. Of no other participant in the Bolshevik-Marxist battles of the twentieth century could this really be said to be the case. Lenin is stranded in time and place, as are Mao and Ho Chi Minh. Stalin is annexed to the general study of pathological dictatorship. Combative and brilliant intellectuals such as Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Nikolai Bukharin are for specialists, and were localized before they were defeated. Fidel Castro has at least made it into the twenty-first century, but at the price of becoming a bloated and theatrical caricature. Only Che Guevara retains a hint of charisma, and he made no contribution whatsoever to the battle of theories and ideas.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/07/hitchens.htm

idk, I feel like Amis-world has always been a thing, at least since I started following 20 years ago. It's def changed - used to be more Amis-Barnes-McEwan focused, but then Hitchens has become more a focal figure for w/e reasons (writes a lot, in a lot of places, web suits his translatlantic thing, Amis in Experience).

& I still don't know if anyone outside themselves & Mark Lawson really thinks of them as *literary* giants, at least in the way the Roth-Bellow-Updike generation looks to the literary consensus. They seem big in a gossipy way - like we've been talking about them & their romances, bromances etc for thirty years. That doesn't seem possible nowadays in the UK - Zadie Smith could generate that sort of interest, but doesn't seem to want to. Not much in the way of publicly entertaining writers.

They are v old fashioned in other ways, it's true. I think of them a bit like the thirties crowd I suppose, without the spread or depth of talent - prep-school/officer class confidence, women a bit blank/alien.

i dunno, re updike-bellow-roth. haven't read enough updike to know. but have read enough roth to know that's subject to its own kind of puffery. and also those writers weren't bros. people love gossip.

Yeah, I meant as the lit-establishment consensus sees it, rather than imo - that US generation I think are the will-not-see-their-like boys. But yeah, it's def a gossip thing.

That is a v good question about the Utopia that young Hitch dreamt of. Is it huge equality, workers' councils making decisions, state power used to assist oppressed labourers abroad? I don't have a proper answer. When I phrase it as 'what did he think he would be doing post-revolution?' it doesn't get much clearer. No real mystery on some level - brilliant young sort wishes to be man of action, commits to struggle that offers theoretical justification for testosterone-driven combat-lust - but yeah, tricky on the details.

well, yeah, a bit. but it is a sunday times extract. jury still out on the real thing.

which i will blatantly read.

Oh absolutely. I didn't know about it, but now I can't wait. No idea about the politics of young Hitch (cd be a mock german romance?) but I do think they don't really realise how odd they look to the outside world - in all the glorious gossipy detail. I mean, I think they almost see themselves as maverick mandarins (if that's not a contradiction) but they're almost more like literary grimaldis. Wyndham Lewis wd have done a great, cumbersome satire on them.

As an aside, Hitch and Kingsley Amis clearly got on like a house on fire - you get this from Amis' side as well.

I don't see why not though. If Experience and that 2004 bio are to be believed, K. Amis was a charming old goat.

(I wouldn't have married him though)

TMI @ the sex bits in that memoir excerpt

xpost. Jesus no. I'm a big fan of KA so need no convincing of his charms whatsoever. At the risk of stating the obvious I think part of the mutual attraction was the boozing - something Martin was never quite so keen on.

most left-wingers of the 1970s did not regard kingers as charming. he was a drunken right-wing misogynist. nothing wrong with that of course, but people (by which i mean trotskyists) were pretty sectarian.

so again like the bloomsberries, personal loyalty (to the amis family, or its men) is more important than ideology for hitch.

i think i read him recently saying robert conquest (kingsley's good friend and fellow ex-communist) was his favourite person-to-have-been-born-in-1917. it's the fact that he made a big deal out of conquest's birthday that is interesting -- his life's work has been saying that the russian revolution was a disaster. so they can't have much in common in their view of trotsky.

he was a drunken right-wing misogynist.

Perhaps fairly inevitably I'm going to make some mild protesting noises here. From '69-'76 he seems to me to have been at one of the pinnacles of his creative powers. (The other at the very beginning and the other at the end specifically with the Memoirs and The Old Devils).

I think, despite what Hitchens says, that the charge of misogyny is more understandable with Martin (whose women - I haven't read The Pregnant Widow) have never convinced me as being at all solid. That's aside I think from Jake's Thing and Stanley and the Women. Otherwise KA shows considerable sympathy and compassion for women having to put up with men, as well as giving them proper autonomous roles in his writing (and there's even more compassion in his poetry).

He certainly drank a lot in the '70s, but I don't think the real excesses of his right-wing, boozy, establishment progression really made themselves felt until the '80s and his split with Elizabeth Jane Howard. This was when his misogyny was also at its height. He retreated from the literary misogyny with The Old Devils, but he was probably fairly difficult on most 'progressive' themes in person for the rest of his life.

As for the majority of the '70s, he seems to have had a rip-roaring time with an awful lot of people, left and right.

(multi-x-posts)

Will read, no q. I hate myself a bit for it tbh. I can be a bit rough on middle-aged types who prefer chatter about Driberg/Connolly/etc to reading novels/poems/etc, but I just can't resist when it comes to Hitch/Amis.

I do think they don't really realise how odd they look to the outside world

Ha, yes.

That's aside I think from Jake's Thing and Stanley and the Women. Otherwise KA shows considerable sympathy and compassion for women having to put up with men, as well as giving them proper autonomous roles in his writing (and there's even more compassion in his poetry)

This. I read That Uncertain Feeling last month, noting for the third or fourth time that the witty, well-adjusted women came off a lot better than the male protagonists.

I think, despite what Hitchens says, that the charge of misogyny is more understandable with Martin

Worth noting Hitchens' defence of Amis from the article:

Martin possesses the rare gift — enviable if potentially time-consuming — of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it.

'He fancies 'em all - how can that be misogyny???'.

yeah, his account of their visit to a brothel where he calls the prostitutes "cynical witches" and one an "avaricious bitch" doesn't really improve his standing as a character witness.

i've ben reading 'blood class and empire' or whatever it's called, recently. well, i started on it. and my feeling is that robert l0u1s stevenson may have a point. i like hitchens, but idk if he has managedd the trick of writing a book as opposed to series of essays. i'll still read this o'course.

the Orwell book is good.

i made the mistake of subscribing to the atlantic earlier this year

hitchens often writes book reviews for them. typically they are formless (meandering from one subject to another with little larger purpose in mind) and showboating (showing off his oxford education, mostly, but sometimes also how many famous people he has met and been unimpressed with). i think he's talented and can be interesting, but right now perhaps he's (1) overextended and/or (2) lazy. that he's an asshole seems like a given.

the collection Unacknowledged Legislation, dealing almost exclusively with literature, is worth a glance (it inspired me to read Powell and Conquest, actually).

^^ yeah i think that's good. a collection, like most of his books. the orwell book is short! so that could work

I really like him as a lit critic - the meandering canon-quoting anecdotal style, w/ occasional short punch is fine by me. He can be a good reader, & likes poetry. I mean it's v Oxbridgey, but I'm comfortable with that.

Didn't think much of Blood Class and Empire. Really bitty. Don't think he can manage much over 80-120pp as a sustained book (the Orwell, Clinton, Kissinger books all about that length?); but he's an essayist at heart, yeah.

eh not bad really

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_lM61aDyPg

Took a look at it in a shop yesterday - long! Ordered, hoping it arrives for the weekend.

Odd sort of jolly hatchet job interview from the Guardian.

Oh, it= Hitch 22

That really was a pitiless hatchet job! By Decca Aitkenhead, of all people!

she is a moron

I don't know, "Put a Xerox in that" is pretty lame.

think everybody 'gets' that he's a saloon bar bullshitter by now: i just mean her inane argument that his political stance is to do with fading male potency or something. which she immediately contradicts by saying, oh look, he's always LOVED WAR because he was against the argentinian occupation of the falklands. and as we all know, lefties hate war! hate it!

I dunno, I found the stuff about his dad pretty convincing!

i think it's very typical -- don't engage in arguments, just try and explain via psychology. it cuts both ways, but obviously the interviewer wouldn't (and shouldn't) say they think what they think ("argentina should have the falklands" or what have you) because of their daddy.

hitchens wrote a fair bit about the phenomemon of neoconservatism before people called him one. but he actually debated ideas.

Agreed, and the opening para is just pure Daily Mail - "Oh look, hasn't he let himself go". I'm surprised they didn't have a before and after pic.

"You may look in vain for logic or consistency,"

Excellent.

I think the psych angle on Hitchens is fair game to an extent – he does like the rhetoric of toughness, the courage-cult is there – but yeah, it's a cheap substitute for argument. Lynn Barber does that side of him well I think - avoids the arguments, is only really interested in Hitch the man, gets a better read of how he works because of that. Lifstyley, but not pretending to unmask the prophet.