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Christopher Hitchens (15)

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Replies

17 Dec 11, 12:36 AM
tony999
UK, 5 yrs

lil_marie wrote:
The world is a poorer place without The Hitch!

xxx

Here Here.

And so it comes down to this. Get busy living or get busy dying.

17 Dec 11, 10:41 PM
Guidospeyer
UK(N), 10 mths

Tanos wrote:

Tanos wrote:
He also said this when Bush won in 2000: "he is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things."

Then he voted for Obama, and wrote "Fuck off" on a Syrian nazi party poster in Beirut and almost got lynched for it.

Guidospeyer wrote:
So he said those things about Bush, then supported his re-election.

He didn't have any time for John Kerry or John McCain (and the idiotic Sarah Palin) and so he had no trouble supporting G.W. Bush and then voting for Obama.

I'm not sure he had any poitical convictions, but prefered to exercise his intellect in an almost ad hoc fashion, trying to prove in a way, that he was better than all of them. On the one hand, he seems invaluable to the world & then on the other, entirely surplus.

I think he had political convictions rather than political allegiances. He seems to have judged each issue on its own terms. Time and again his reasoning prioritised civil liberties, and to people who only see the left-right axis of the political compass that can make someone's views appear to be inconsistent.

:T:

So he subscribed to a kind of pick and mix politics, where flitting about intellectually was the easy thing to do. Writing "fuck off" on a poster is a very studenty thing to do, and I'd be interested to know if he was kicking around town, in manly fashion on his own, or, as the fact that it was observed & reported suggests (& in fact not lynched), he was surrounded by a group of protective acolytes. He strikes me as being the kind of intellectual who enjoyed the fray, and said & did things to bathe in the light of his own articulation. The consequences of war are enormous, & bombing civilians at the get go, is a heinous & criminal act. He may have intellectual destroyed Blair in a debate somewhere, but he was a kindred spirit in the ill considered & random devestation visited on the Iraqi population.

Edited 17 Dec 11, 10:43 PM by Guidospeyer

18 Dec 11, 1:29 AM
Lush_Life
UK(NW), 2 yrs

lil_marie wrote:
The world is a poorer place without The Hitch!

Definitely.

"Plays vile tennis and even worse billiards"

19 Dec 11, 8:25 AM
Lush_Life
UK(NW), 2 yrs

Guidospeyer wrote:

Tanos wrote:

Then he voted for Obama, and wrote "Fuck off" on a Syrian nazi party poster in Beirut and almost got lynched for it.

Guidospeyer wrote:
So he said those things about Bush, then supported his re-election.

He didn't have any time for John Kerry or John McCain (and the idiotic Sarah Palin) and so he had no trouble supporting G.W. Bush and then voting for Obama.

:T:

Guidospeyer wrote:

So he subscribed to a kind of pick and mix politics, where flitting about intellectually was the easy thing to do.

I disagree. I think he used to ask himself the question 'what sort of society do I want to live in?" and then go out and look at the various political belief systems. Far too many, especially it would appear those on the left, buy into the 'brand' and their support of it before engaging in any serious thought or - god forbid - considering the evidence.

Guidospeyer wrote:

Writing "fuck off" on a poster is a very studenty thing to do, and I'd be interested to know if he was kicking around town, in manly fashion on his own, or, as the fact that it was observed & reported suggests (& in fact not lynched), he was surrounded by a group of protective acolytes.

Of course, Christopher Hitchens, famous political writer and commentator, went and found a poster that no one could see and wrote "fuck off" on it, so that it would never be commented on or reported about.

Are you serious ? I mean really.

Guidospeyer wrote:
He strikes me as being the kind of intellectual who enjoyed the fray, and said & did things to bathe in the light of his own articulation.

Thank goodness for that.

Guidospeyer wrote:

The consequences of war are enormous, & bombing civilians at the get go, is a heinous & criminal act. He may have intellectual destroyed Blair in a debate somewhere, but he was a kindred spirit in the ill considered & random devestation visited on the Iraqi population.

Did you support the killing of circa 1 million Iraqis up to 2003, through war and terror. So called 'enemies of the state' including spouses, friends, family members, children.

The Hitch did not. Despite his fellow travellers on the left turning against him.

To be an enemy of the Iraqi state was to criticise or to have been perceived capable of criticising a member of the Hussein clan.

Does that remind you of Syria today ? It should do. Same shit, different sand.

"Plays vile tennis and even worse billiards"

21 Dec 11, 12:38 AM
Arry_le_Switch
UK(WF), 11 yrs

I didn't always agree with Hitchens, but most of what he wrote over the last decade was spot-on. He gets my respect for his personal courage (that business with the swastika-bearing Syrian poster really did put him in danger) and the manner in which he faced his death.

This is a perfect example of the kind of insanity he denounced...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hVogaE5XeE

Edited 21 Dec 11, 12:44 AM by Arry_le_Switch