Tag Archive 'Christopher Hitchens'

How to Order a Hitchens


(image: Rational Response Squad)

Here’s a tip for the uninitiated: When you order a whiskey in a hip bar, request it “Whiskey, Hitchens.” If you’re already slightly sloshed, you might merely say “Hitch me.” What is a Hitchens? It’s not a cocktail, it’s a serving size. It means to fill a glass with scotch whiskey –preferably Johnny Walker– all the way to the rim, in the manner Christopher Hitchens does (see above). This is essentially like ordering a quadruple shot, so I take no responsibility for the state you’ll wander out of the bar in.

As a supplemental device, if a bartender fails to fill the glass to the rim, you can protest “Don’t Dinesh my Hitch!” A nod to Dinesh D’Souza, who is according to Hitchens, his most formidable debating opponent.

Jason adds via email that ordering a Hitchens is an evocative expression of a certain spirit and lifestyle attitude:

“The Hitchens”, in terms of a glass of scotch poured a certain way and to a certain height, embodies the spirit of Christopher Hitchens, a man who doesn’t give a rats ass about you, your feelings, or anything you have to say about his well formed opinions. He can be a great author, debater, commentator, whatever… yet he can still live his life the way you don’t want him to as he goes out every night and gets completely sh*tfaced and in your face. The Hitchens drink embodies that spirit…

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Christopher Hitchens & Political Irresponsibility

interrogating Christopher Hitchens over his rather weakly supported endorsement of Barack Obama for president.

Hitch’s primary position in this chat is that Obama should be supported because he is “evolving” toward support of a more aggressive policy against international terrorism. Hardly the most persuasive pitch to say the least. Perhaps all those years of arguing for evolution through natural selection may have given him too much of a preference for the word itself.

His auxillery case is that McCain has become senile and temperamentally unfit for leadership. That’s something which is supposedly entirely and exclusively demonstrated by his “irresponsible” selection of Sarah Palin for vice president. Hardly more persuasive.

But in reading Hitchens’ recent writing on this matter, one tends to think that last point is what is actually driving the others (something Laura instantly zeroes in on). There is a certain reflexive personal hostility to Mrs. Palin in Hitchens’ writing, which is far closer to a definition of political irresponsiblity than McCain’s selection of her allegedly is.

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The Folly of Heroes

What a day for indignity. Just when I’d stopped shaking my head at the image of Paul Krugman accepting the Nobel Prize, I read two of my most cherished heroes offering rather embarrassing endorsements for bad things.

Christopher Hitchens, always aloof from the elderly McCain, has been pushed into a categorical and insulting rejection in Slate, animated mostly by a festering hatred of Sarah Palin that seems to grow more infected by the day. It’s not quite an Andrew Sullivan endoresement in that it lacks the enchanted fascination with Obama, but it’s still advocacy that makes you wince at the superficiality.

But worse is yet to come. Francis Fukuyama, in his most aggressive Obama endorsement yet, reboots history in The Times (adapted from the Newsweek piece) by denouncing the entire edifice of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution for capitalism and democracy as destructive and driven by uneducated American swing voters, who are stupid enough to endorse the philosophy he once championed as the endgame of civilzation itself.

Sad affairs. I suspect I shall have to become an antiquarian for these men’s opinions in order to remain a fan. Their current thinking seems only demonstrative of the strangely stupefying effect partisanship for Obama can have on otherwise able minds.

(ht: Ghost of a Flea)

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Immunizing Sarah Palin


(photo: Tom LeGro)

Christopher Hitchens notices a pattern with anti-Palin rumors: their troubling tendency to turn out highly exaggerated or entirely fabricated, in a very short turn.

[A]s often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn’t.
(Slate)

Hitch gets close to what’s happening there by recalling Walter Dean Burnham’s prescient 1960s prediction that Ronald Reagan would one day be president, based on Ron’s inability to exude hostility and thus not attract it. This is slightly misdirected. Reagan attracted as much hostility as any politician in the modern era from the political left, save perhaps Nixon. The trouble consisted in that the product of that hostility, criticism, didn’t seem to stick. Or even worse, seemed to possess a counterproductive property.

(more…)

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Christopher Hitchens on Robert Mugabe

I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
(more…)

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Dissonance Control in Political Paranoia

Bird watcher
(photo: companyink)

After writing about the Ronpaulist fear mongering of Jordan Page, and then reading Lance’s splendid post on the latest contheorist pandering of Glenn Greenwald, a common insight has reoccurred to me: the absurd amount of cognitive dissonance conditional to political paranoia.

This is something Christopher Hitchens explored quite adeptly last year at the “Four Horsemen” chat with his three fellow atheist luminaries, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (, skip to 8:17). In a response to a point by Dennett, Hitchens argues that the stress of cognitive dissonance is the inevitable state deriving from belief in political unreality, and furthermore, that this condition exists and persists on purely survival grounds (seems true in miniature too).

I’d add that it’s the compartmentalism that political paranoia necessitates in an open society that is the most conspicuous betrayal of its essential cynicism. Something especially apparent when you run into it face to face.
(more…)

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Defending the Second World War

Here’s a five part Uncommon Knowledge segment featuring a superb pairing of Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson, to discuss the new World War II revisionism led by Pat Buchanan. While it’s an entertaining exercise for a Saturday, I’ll warn you that there’s a certain weakness to the discussion, given that both Hanson and Hitchens are in agreement. It’s left to poor Peter Robinson as host to present the revisionist case.

But, Robinson probably does as well a job as Pat Buchanan could. As Hitchens and Hanson both deftly demonstrate by different courses, Buchanan is advancing arguments which are largely indefensible and occasionally even crazy.

Part One of Five:

(more…)

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A Sexual Imagination is Not a Crime

Leggy sexy model

(photo: Serguei Kovalev)

Christopher Hitchens once said that the trouble with biographers of Thomas Jefferson, is that there appears to be the collective assumption on their part that the great man was without a penis. I’m reminded of this truth in reading about the very hot water Mr. Al Franken –the all-but-certain Democratic nominee for US Senate in Minnesota– has gotten himself into, over a satirical and sexually explicit essay he wrote for Playboy magazine in 2000. Hot water originating not only from GOP women, but also from within the Democratic Party.

The piece is without doubt salacious, even enormously kinky (naughty NSFW excerpts available here). But one could be forgiven the crime of commonsense in expecting that a writer tasked with composing anything for such a magazine on contract, would tend to produce something somewhat sexually suggestive if he wished to be paid. One might even go so far as to posit that writing something entitled “Porn-o-Rama,” for an unabashedly pornographic publication, isn’t all that shocking. I mention the title because in defiance of reason we are told by Liza Porteus Viana that the title itself (and neither the publisher nor the substance of the essay), is what is most politically objectionable here.

(more…)

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Jefferson Memorial Follow Up

Following up on Jon’s post a few weeks ago on the group dancing at the Jefferson memorial, we have some more information. A group of friends and other people at the incident have set up a web page. Free the Jefferson 1. The girl was arrested at the incident for “interfering with an agency function,” not “disorderly conduct” as originally reported. The group has also set up a donation page to aid the girl’s legal defense. Lastly you can watch of on .

Watching the videos, it seems obvious the security guards overreacted. The group’s preaching aside, I would blame it on the disposition of the guards, and probably poor training about what the actual rules are for the memorial and park.

UPDATE: For those of you in/around the the DC area, you can join the group Bureaucrash this Friday the 2nd from 5:30-9PM at the Union Pub for a fundraiser. It’s $5 to get in, all of which will be donated to the defense fund. Plus, you’ll get a free drink (well drink or draft Bud, Bud Light, Miller or House Amber) and while supplies last, a bottle of 5 Hour Energy Drink.

The Bureaucrash group will be joined by the First Friday folks and their guest, Christopher Hitchens.

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Beware the Believers

Heh, a response to Richard Dawkins and the unbelievers amongst us. Right or wrong, arrogant condescension does not go unpunished.

Hat tip: D.A. Ridgely

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