The Hitch?

CRAP
Total votes: 22 (43%)
NOT CRAP/DUDE
Total votes: 29 (57%)
Total votes: 51

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

51
NerblyBear wrote:
LutherBlissett wrote:
Steve V. wrote:
his arguments are pretty much airtight


Sure.


Hey, sorry that your political correctness seems to have made you a PPP (permanent party pooper), but that article was great.

Hitch:1
You: 0


To hell with this use of the term "political correctness". It is a lazy dodge to excuse blatant offensiveness.

NerblyBear wrote:Top-notch fellow.


I do however find your country gent styling fun, though.

Pip pip!

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

52
How about this old chestnut? Hilarious!

Mel Gibson's Meltdown
He is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, July 31, 2006, at 2:09 PM ET
Mel Gibson
I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too-loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand. That bad actor and worse director Mel Gibson, pulled over for the alleged offense of speeding and the further alleged offense of speeding under the influence, decided that he needed to demand of the arresting officer whether he was or was not Jewish and that he furthermore needed to impart the information that all the world's wars are begun by those of Semitic extraction.

Call me thin-skinned if you must, but I think that this qualifies. I also think that the difference between the blood-alcohol levels—and indeed the speed limits—that occasioned the booking are insufficient to explain the expletives (as Gibson has since claimed in a typically self-pitying and verbose statement put out by his publicist). One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.

There's a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or "unaddressed" problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don't form picket lines outside movie theaters when "stereotyped," but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as "a pronouncement from the chair"). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.


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This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or "deicide." It is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism. Allow me (as one who has Mel's father's books to hand) to give you an example. In an attempt a few years ago to heal the breach between the Vatican and the Jews, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did his best to make nice. Jews did not accept Jesus as savior and redeemer, said the man who is now the pope, but they did originate monotheism. Therefore, Judaism could perhaps be regarded in some ways as an "elder brother" of Christianity. The response of Gibson senior was to say that Abel also had an elder brother. … You know what? I think that this qualifies as anti-Semitism, too.

I do not believe for an instant that (as God told Moses) the sins of the fathers should descend to later generations. But when asked about his old man's many effusions on this subject, from the cheery view that the Jewish population of Europe actually increased in Hitler's day to the no less upbeat opinion that persons unknown brought down the World Trade Center, the younger Gibson stonewalled consistently by saying that "my father has never told me a lie." At the time he said this, I was impressed despite myself. He was being invited to disown a raging Jew-baiter at the same time that he was trying to cash in with a Hollywood epic. And he wouldn't do it! All credit for true and staunch conviction. (Scott McClellan was White House spokesman when his male parent produced a book arguing that LBJ had murdered JFK. Even in this tussle over two dead Democrats, McClellan had enough presence of mind to refuse to be drawn: He neither supported nor disowned his father's work.* Try and get Gibson to limit himself to that.)

At the time when The Passion of the Christ was being released, many nervous evangelical Christians tried to get the more horrifying bits of anti-Semitic incitement toned down. (The crazy scene where the rabbis demand the blood of Jesus on their own heads was taken out of subtitles, for example, but left as it was in Aramaic.) Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism. And the Muslim world allowed the movie to be screened widely, though from Ben-Hur to King of Kings it had prohibited the physical representation of any "prophet" mentioned, as Jesus is, in the Quran. (Don't ask yourself why this was, unless you want to feel stupid.) It was even proudly announced that Gibson's next big project would be about the Holocaust.

Whether Gibson tries this last catch-penny profanity or not, it is time to lower the boom on him. Those who endorsed his previous obscene blockbuster are obliged to say something now or be ignored ever after. But this should not be yet another spectacle of the "offensive" and the "inappropriate," swiftly succeeded by rehab and repentance and perhaps—who knows?—a joint press conference with Elie Wiesel. Gibson did not "misspeak"; indeed according to many trustworthy reports, he nearly copped the customary celebrity "get out of jail free" card and had his remarks stricken from the record. (When will the sheriffs decide to release the evidence?) No, he spoke his "mind," and in case anyone wants to burble about political correctness, it should be added that he spoke this way because of his religion, not just his warped personality. Let him keep the fortune he made from a pogrom movie, and let him by all means continue to sponsor his Latin Mass sectarian church in Malibu, where sinners are thick on the ground. But there was another touch of in vino veritas when he tearfully told the cops that "my life is f---ed," and this inadvertent truth ought to be remembered in all charity as the last words we ever want to hear from him.
Gay People Rock

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

54
How odd - I thought I'd already posted in this thread.

Anyways I say Not Crap but his Neo Con support is not good. It seems ironic to me that he said this:

therein lay the temptation to totalitarianism, to the bullying of others, to the coercion of other people into behavior in the here and now, not in the future.


In the debate posted above given that said bullying and coercion of behaviour is exactly what the people he supports do for kicks.

But for all that I like most of what he says and the way that he says it.

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

55
Just finished reading his little book, NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO, which is a 100-page indictment of the Clinton administration.

All I can say is: Wow. This is one of the most shocking and horrific exposes of political corruption I've ever encountered. I'm no fan of the current administration, but, after reading this little time-bomb, I would have to say that the Clinton White House was the nadir of the American presidency.

After reading this book, you'll rule out ever voting for Hillary even if you're a hardened Democrat.

Hitchens' writing style is excellent, as well. His wit is savage and his knowledge of facts is capacious. Although I do disagree with his position on the War in Iraq, he has come to his conclusions honorably and thoughtfully. I think he is one of the most astute political observers I've ever read.

I'm hooked on Hitch. Time to read the one on Kissinger now.

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

56
NerblyBear wrote:I'm hooked on Hitch. Time to read the one on Kissinger now.


Definitely pick up "Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies" and "Letters to a Young Contrarian."

Those are what hooked me in....
Marsupialized wrote:I bet I hand you a gold bar that sucks dick on command and you'll be bitching that it dosent have the right kind of moustache.

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

57
LutherBlissett wrote:
Steve V. wrote:
his arguments are pretty much airtight


Sure.


He's pointing out the values behind the idea of "humour" and "comedy", and that those are fundamentally masculine. You only have to browse this forum to see that humour is usually dismissive, aggressive or pushing some sort of idea of "ownership". If the idea that act of giving birth makes you less prone to ideological fetishes such as ownership, angst and the appearence of experience and paternity, isn't cold hard reality I don't know what is.

It's a strong point, made offensively. Feel free to pull douchebag paragraphs from that article, its bloated with them like Hitchens himself. The Barney Gumble of barneys and grumbles.

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

58
Earwicker wrote:How odd - I thought I'd already posted in this thread.

Anyways I say Not Crap but his Neo Con support is not good. It seems ironic to me that he said this:


This isn't as strange as it seems, a lot of the Neo-Con crew are very much on (or were on) the left. The idea is using American power to spread liberal democracy, from there most State should then build a lovely, happy, secular and "social democratic" world.

Nice theory, a total disaster in practice.
Reality

Popular Mechanics Report of 9-11

NIST Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster

Journalist: Christopher Hitchens

59
LutherBlissett wrote:
Steve V. wrote:
his arguments are pretty much airtight


Sure.


From the article:
This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians...the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres.


You douches are voting NOT CRAP on a guy who thinks "Ellen" is "formidable beyond compare" as a comedian.

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