Hitchens

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
personally I'll never be able to get past that video of him being waterboarded for 15 seconds while a trip hop version of O Fortuna inexplicably plays in the background.

always found his Norman Mailer-lite bad boy persona tiresome/ridiculous and thought his supposed intellectual honesty vastly overrated, as if he were the first dude ever to move to the right as he aged. his latter year empire apologetics were/are pretty appalling. OTOH he was quite a lot more interesting than most of his pundit peers, and his embrace of the role of public intellectual (whether or not he actually was one) was admirable in a society that is highly, and as the years go by increasingly, anti-intellectual. plus he gets bonus points for things like being willing to publicly call bullshit on Mother Theresa. and for sticking to his guns about God, or lack thereof, until the bitter end.

reckon his punishment for his sins will to be remembered primarily as a neocon mouthpiece for Iraq, which I'm sure he would hate.
 

version

Well-known member
I nearly made a new thread for this, but the cult of Hitchens is ridculous these days. I quite like him at times, but fucking hell...

"Consider myself very very lucky to have lived at the same time as Hitch, equivalent to having lived at the same time as Beethoven, Da Vinci , Einstein and so many other giants of the mind."

"MLK didn't create anything original, he just led the campaign to make changes in society and criticised a system that was starting to be questioned, Hitch did the same against Christianity in America, and against Islam worldwide"

"I wouldn't put him up there with Einstein, but probaly with Beethoven,"

"Salman Rushdie is on par with mark twain"
 

luka

Well-known member
it's the voice and the fluency. it's compelling. he's absolutely brilliant on camera and that suits youtube clips.
 

luka

Well-known member
he extemporises better sentences than he writes, which is highly unsual. perhaps he was more sober in public performances than at the writing desk.
 
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