Christopher Hitchens has travelled the world debating religious people. Here's what he has learned.
I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe.
From Freed Journalists Return to U.S. in the NY Times:
"Thirty hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea," Ms. Ling said in brief remarks to reporters, blinking back tears. "We feared that at any moment we could be prisoners in a hard labor camp. Then suddenly we were told that we were going to a meeting. We were taken to a location and when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton."
One could imagine a chart of the possible range of human experiences from negative to positive circa 2009; near one end would be "prisoners in a North Korean hard labor camp" and near the other, "personal meeting with President Bill Clinton".
Update: Christopher Hitchens says that Clinton's trip did little but gratify and flatter Kim Jong-il.
The Kim Jong-il gang was always planning to release them. They were arrested in order to be let go and were maintained in releasable shape until the deal could be done. Does this not -- or should this not -- slightly qualify and dilute our joy in seeing them come home? Does the Dear Leader not say to himself, That was easy? Are the North Korean people not being assured, through their megaphone media, that the sun shines so consistently out of the rear end of their celestial boss that even powerful U.S. statesmen will appear at the airport to bring apologies, pay tribute, and receive custody of uninvited guests in the workers' paradise?
I often enjoy what Christopher Hitchens says and how he says it. Here he wades smartly into the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest.
It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right.
(via gruber)
Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama for President.
To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact -- if it happens to be a fact -- that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
To hammer home his point, Hitchens compares McCain to Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate in 1992. Oh yes, he went there.
Christopher Hitchens is an expert on the tumbrel remark.
A tumbrel remark is an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines. I can give you a few for flavor. The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, "I see no point at all in being poor." The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, "That was a lot of money in those days." The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper "in any of my houses."
Someone please start a Tumblr of tumbrels. (via clusterflock)
Christopher Hitchens writes about getting waterboarded for the July issue of Vanity Fair.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning-or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.
As you can see in the video, Hitchens maybe lasted 15 seconds or so.
Maybe I should institute a recurring feature on kottke.org...the Christopher Hitchens Quote of the Week or some such thing. This week's installment comes from an article on the media's over-exuberance in reporting on the death of Tim Russert and the "miracles" (bipartisanship, Springsteen, a rainbow) that followed.
No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky
Christopher Hitchens, worried about tall buildings carelessly built in the West Village of Manhattan, makes his case for non-gentrification.
It isn't possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of -- in no special order -- insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran.
We were talking about the cocksure Christopher Hitchens at lunch today and when I get back to my desk, a link to an interview with Hitchens appears in my newsreader.
Oh, and I do not "profess" to despise religious extremists. I really do despise them.
(via clusterflock)
Christopher Hitchens has written a pair of articles for Vanity Fair on the growing self-improvement industry for men, offering himself up as a guinea pig for our education and entertainment. In the second article, he gets new teeth (before photo, after photo...only 6 hours between the two) and gets his nethers waxed...the male version of the Brazilian. The description of his "sack, back, and crack" epilation is too good not to share at length:
Here's what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this "wide stance" position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened. Ms. Turlington doesn't have this problem. The businesslike Senhora Padilha daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy... Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.
Hitchens' first article is here.
Christopher Hitchens on his forced contemplation of Paris Hilton. "Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks -- indeed it reeks -- of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse."
Christopher Hitchens takes Garrison Keillor to task for slamming Bernard-Henri Levy's take on the US, American Vertigo. I'm patiently waiting for someone to take on Hitchens on Keillor on Levy on America.
Near the end of his article entitled A War to Be Proud Of, Christopher Hitchens offers 10 reasons why the war in Iraq was successful. (via 3qd)
