Christopher Hitchens

[Indy]

Da, to oko Iraka sam mu i ja zamerao. Bez obzira što je on u stvari dao najbolju odbranu tog rata (koja i dalje ne drži vodu po meni, ali je svejedno najbolja od postojećih).BTW. Prasline, izvini za pominjanje fašizma (premda kultur-fašizam nije isto), ali više je nego nadmeno reći za nekog da je "jadan". Posebno ako taj nije stvarno jadan, recimo kao deca koja skapavaju od gladi u Africi. Ovako je to čisto izdrkavanje.EDIT. Dodato kasnije - interesantno, vrlo slična, samo mnogo sažetija, razmena na Twitteru. Između mog omiljenog komičara Tim Minchina i nekog Rick Warrena:

Tim Minchin @timminchin Nauseating condescending clown RT @RickWarren: Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.

Edited December 17, 2011 by Indy

[Skyhighatrist]

T.T.T.U.K.D.M.F.O.T. :(

[cmrlj]

пошто верујем да је свако ко оволико труда и енергије и очигледног интелекта уложи у размишљање о Богу - Боготражитељ.

[Indy]

Selekcija Hitchensovih odvala iz Guardiana, može čak i Praslin u njima da uživa (barem nekim; moji favoriti u boldu):"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics." – the New Yorker, 2006"[George W Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things." – Hardball with Chris Matthews, NBC, 2000"'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age." – Daily Mirror, November 2001"The noble title of 'dissident' must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement …""Do bear in mind that the cynics have a point, of a sort, when they speak of the 'professional naysayer'." "To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do." – Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction." – Slate, October 2003"The search for nirvana, like the search for utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle." – Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, 2004"Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!" – The Weekly Standard, May 2005."The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals." – God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either." – God Is Not Great"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more." – The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, 2007"I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information." – Hitch-22, 2010"What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime." – Hitch-22"Cheap booze is a false economy." – Hitch-22"Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?" – Hitch-22

[luba]

malo glupo da se prica o hicu svede na to bezizlazno gusenje ima li cike s bradom ili nema. ne malo, nego mnogo glupo. neverujuci ce stavljati plus jedan, verujuci ce ga kleti i tako ukrug. zabavno jeste, ali jednako produktivno koliko i prebrojavanje andjela na vrhu igle. sve ostalo je mnogo vaznije i efektnije.ako postoje reci kojima bi se opisao i hic i njegovo delo, to su one koje upotrebljava stiven kolber.formidable opponenti tako ga treba pamtiti.ja cu da mislim da se nasao sa gonzom i majlerom i da ispijaju ten high negde u ladovini dok puckaju tompuse i cekaju da im se pridruzi tom vulf.hvala mu na svakoj reci koju je napisao koliko god se ne slagala sa nekima od njih. i hvala mu na stalnom podsecanju koliko se velicanstveno i arogantno moze izrazavati na engleskom jeziku. i najvise mu hvala sto je bio tu kada je trebalo.no se puede vivir sin amar, lowrie. ziveli.

[Indy]

malo glupo da se prica o hicu svede na to bezizlazno gusenje ima li cike s bradom ili nema. ne malo, nego mnogo glupo.

Mislim da je nepotrebna asanacija topika, Hič sam nije zazirao ni od čega što je za ljude.

[luba]

ni ne prizivam asanaciju, daleko bilo. nego samo hocu da se doda da nije ateizam jedino po cemu ga treba prepoznavati i pamtiti.

[Indy]

Potpuno se slažem i izvinjavam na grubom odgovoru (to ti je zato što me ignorišeš; jako sam sujetan).Upravo (da ne bi Praslina) sam hteo da okačim neke primere njegovog maestralnog pisanja ne u vezi sa ateizmom. A ni Irakom.

[luba]

kako te ignorisem, vidis da mi je posle ihahaj prvi post, i to intiman, odmah posle tvog :)no sam vrlo brza na okidacu kada su neki ljudi u pitanju, a hic je jedan od njih. men i love to hate ili obrnuto.ovo mi najlepsi obit, ako to moze tako da se kaze. volela bih da umem da ga tako napisem.

[Indy]

Predivno napisano. Hitcha bih čak i ja rado oslovio sa comrade.

[luba]

da.ili sto kaze u hitch 22, the cause of my life has been that of combating superstition, which among other things means confronting the dreads upon which it feeds.uf. idem odavde da ne pocnem da pezim, sto bi se odrazilo na imidz.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAwJGBJf3Tg

[Mp40]

Боготражитељ. Koliko ja mrzim ovakve nakaradne govnarija izraze nikolajevicevsko-justinovske skole. Svenapusite mi se covekokurca i isponalapajte mi se zivotosemena, svedebilcine.

[Indy]

(Fantastičan cover, lubo.)A evo sad nešto iz Hitch-22, sećanja na nestašne dečačke igrarije iz Cambridgea. Ili, kako je on to lepo rekao, "vigorous session of mutual relief". :D _________So that was another version of doomed youth and of once-epicene but now-departed beauty. Perhaps now is the moment at which I should make my own confession here. We were taught the poetry of Owen and Auden at school, and allowed to ruminate on the obsession of Owen with wounded and bleeding young soldiers, as well as on the cunning way in which Auden opened “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love / Human on My Faithless Arm.” The master who introduced this was dexterous enough to point out that the words could easily be rearranged to make it “faithless on my human arm,” and ambidextrous enough to instruct us also in the subtleties of Catullus and his “Vivamus mea Lesbia,” but I don’t think any instructor was sufficiently phlegmatic to break the news that the two great English poets of the preceding two generations had been quite so gay. Lytton Strachey once summarized the boarding-school hothouse dilemma very aptly:How odd the fate of pretty boys!Who, if they dare to taste the joysThat so enchanted Classic minds,Get whipped upon their neat behinds.Yet should they fail to construe wellThe lines that of those raptures tellIt’s very odd you must confess—Their neat behinds get whipped no less.There were two ways in which this hottest of all subjects could “come up” in an all-male school featuring communal showers, communal sleeping arrangements, communal lavatories, and the ever-present threat of an official thrashing on the rear. The first was unambiguously physical. Most boys decided quite early on that, since their penises would evidently give them no rest at all, they would repay the favor by giving their penises no respite in return. The night was loud with the boasts and the groans that resulted from this endless, and fairly evenly matched, single combat between chaps and their cocks. To even the dullest lad, furthermore, it would sometimes occur to think that self-abuse was slightly wasted on the self, and might be better relished in mixed company. Some were choosy about the company, and some less so, but I can only remember a very few boys who abstained from (or to put it more cruelly, were so unappetizing as to be left out of) this compensation for the general hellishness of male adolescence. It was quite possible to arrange a vigorous session of mutual relief without a word being spoken, even without eye contact.It’s very important to understand that ninety percent of these enthusiastic participants would have punched you in the throat if you suggested there was anything homosexual (or “queer”) about what they were doing. (When I later read Gore Vidal’s distinction between homosexual persons and homosexual acts, I saw the point at once.) The unstated excuse was that this was what one did until the so-far unattainable girls became available. And there were related etiquettes to be observed: a senior boy might well have some sort of “pash” on a much junior one, but any action taken by him would be very strongly deplored. (You couldn’t actually treat a boy like a girl, in other words.) Yet the very word “pash” somehow gives the game away. In a minority of “cases”—another word for it, often represented by the = sign between two names written up as graffiti—things were infinitely more serious, as well as more ridiculous, because what appeared to be involved was, of all ludicrous things, the emotions. The routines of the day, from stolen glimpses across the chapel in the morning to a longing glance across the quadrangle as the bells tolled for “lights-out,” could be utterly consumed by the presence of “him.” One such episode came close to ruining my life, or so I thought and believed at the time.I had one advantage and one disadvantage in this ongoing monastic sex drama, and the problem was that the advantage and the disadvantage were the same. I was a late developer physically, was quite girlish in my pre-pubescent years and then later, if I do say so myself, not all that bad-looking once boyishness had, so to speak, “kicked in.” This meant that I didn’t lack for partners when it came to the everyday (well, not every day) business of sheer physical relief. But it also meant that I could become the recipient of attention from older males, attention that could sometimes be very sudden and quite frightening. This perhaps made me additionally vulnerable to the fantasy of the “romantic” idyll.

[Indy]

Još ovaj osvrt iz Australije:Don't be a fan. Never be a fanBy ABC's Mark ColvinPosted December 16, 2011 20:11:24This is written briefly and in haste, just hours after the news broke that Christopher Hitchens had died of cancer at the age of 62.I only met Hitch three times, but even had I never met him at all, he would have left a deep impression on me.I must have read a number of his columns before 1990, because I bought, sight unseen, a copy of his 'Blood, Class and Nostalgia' that year, and read it in two sittings.It's a book which takes America's myths about itself and inverts them, using considerable scholarship and original thinking. It shows through literature and historical documentation how much of twentieth century US policy was influenced, as Greece influenced Rome, by notions passed on from the British Empire. But above all it's readable, sharp, clever and often funny.After that I actively sought out Hitchens' columns, and indeed followed him from publication to publication. You wanted to know what Hitchens thought, sometimes because you agreed with it and quite often because you disagreed. But the real point of reading him was his reasoning: sinuous, muscular and persuasive because of its logical flow.And when you met Christopher, you realised that his writing was hardly writing at all: it was an extension of his talk.Hitchens spoke as most of us struggle to write - in unbroken sentences, organised into paragraphs. He was aided in this by an astonishingly capacious memory, which could give you the impression that he had instant photographic access to everything he'd ever read.Over dinner in Sydney in 2010 (eating outside on a cold night because he couldn't stand not to be able to smoke), I started talking to him about PG Wodehouse, whose prose style I knew he admired.I mentioned a line (Wodehouse's description of aunts calling to each other "like mastodons across the primaeval swamp"), which he instantly capped with half a dozen of his own favourite lines.And he could do that with dates, places, people, historical events: an enviable trait in itself, but also the foundation of his strength as an essayist and polemicist.As a journalist, I had another reason for admiring Christopher Hitchens. He went to the places he wrote about, and he went often.The world is now more crowded than ever with pundits writing about international affairs from London, Washington or Canberra. Hitchens seldom wrote about anywhere he didn't know, and usually know well.He disappointed many with his support for the Iraq war, but what was interpreted as a neo-conservative epiphany was actually an outgrowth of his long standing detestation of tyrants, and specifically Saddam Hussein; and that in turn was fuelled by his travels in Iraqi Kurdestan, and his admiration for the Kurds' resistance to oppression up to and including the use of chemical weapons.Similarly his writings on the Israel-Palestine question, Pakistan or Cyprus, to mention a few of his special subjects, were constantly injected with fresh insight gleaned from going there and seeing with his own eyes.When I introduced Christopher Hitchens to my son, I said, "... and he's a great fan of yours". "No, no", he said "Don't be a fan. Never be a fan". It's good advice, and could as easily have been spoken by George Orwell, whom Hitchens admired and wrote about so often.Being a fan means being uncritical, losing the capacity to see clearly, losing the ability to be a contrarian.You did not have to be a fan of Christopher Hitchens to see that he was a man who, in Blake's words, did "not cease from mental fight", and to feel that his death leaves a big hole in the world of ideas.

[bergasa19]

Malo tekstovaHitchensa