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[Bal]

Christopher Hitchens succumbs to cancer related pneumonia

Genuinely upset about this one. Agree or disagree, he had an amazing mind.

[Royal☭]

An amazingly racist mind.

[Bal]

Did someone make religion a race while I wasn't looking?

[Royal☭]

You'd be amazed at how often "Kill all the Islamofascists" translates into "Bomb all the Muslims."

[Bal]

I'm still not seeing any mention of race. Do you know what a race is?

EDIT: In any case, Hitchens never promoted "killing all the Islamofascists", though he wouldn't have shed a tear if their heads had all spontaneously exploded (neither would I).

[Thad]

I think Evanier put it pretty well:

I also admired his facility with words. I didn't always like what he did with those words and thought he was largely though eloquently full of manure on many occasions. But even when I thought he was wrong, he gave me much to think about...and I admire that.

[Shinra]

I'm still not seeing any mention of race. Do you know what a race is?

EDIT: In any case, Hitchens never promoted "killing all the Islamofascists", though he wouldn't have shed a tear if their heads had all spontaneously exploded (neither would I).

I hate the implication that hating someone for their religious beliefs is somehow more righteous than racism. And if that's not what you're implying, you sure are throwing quite a fit about semantics.

[Bal]

First of all, no one is hating anyone for their religious beliefs, just hating the religions themselves. Secondly, conflating religious belief and ethnicity is simply a mistake. Sometimes a dangerous one as with the "Islamophobia" nonsense going on in Europe right now.

No one, least of all Christopher Hitchens, promoted or is promoting hating a person for what they believed, but that certainly doesn't preclude you from hating the belief system itself. For instance, I find Islam repellent, backward, hateful, and dangerous to modernity and freedom. I'm not going to burn down a Mosque because of it though. I have similar views one practically every religion, to varying degrees, and the same, separate, view about the adherents to said religions.

About the only religion I don't have a problem with is Jainism, and mostly I just feel sorry for them.

[Ziiro]

Twitter pulled the #GodIsNotGreat trend after protest. You know, protest like this.

Ricky Gervais proves himself amazing as always.

However, I believe Stephen Fry says it best:

[Royal☭]

First of all, no one is hating anyone for their religious beliefs, just hating the religions themselves. Secondly, conflating religious belief and ethnicity is simply a mistake. Sometimes a dangerous one as with the "Islamophobia" nonsense going on in Europe right now.

No one, least of all Christopher Hitchens, promoted or is promoting hating a person for what they believed, but that certainly doesn't preclude you from hating the belief system itself. For instance, I find Islam repellent, backward, hateful, and dangerous to modernity and freedom. I'm not going to burn down a Mosque because of it though.

Hitchens would have loved it if you bombed a country or two (or three or six) because of it, using the most violent methods possible:

[On the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan] If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

Hell, he'd even get a little thrill out of it:

I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

The man was an asshole and a monster. His posts and writing little more than eloquently formed tirades advocating the brutalization of other human beings. He advocated for both wars, and towards the end of his life was practically a stone's throw away from advocating for the final solution against Muslims.

[Bal]

I don't have any particular problem with that. He clearly states that collateral damage is not acceptable, and was honest enough to admit that he found it pleasurable when people he considered enemies of everything he believed in died. I don't claim to agree with everything he said, but he was an honest, educated man who made informed opinions and was not shy about sharing them.

Monster? Vastly overstating his position. He never called for any kind of pogrom on anything other than totalitarianism, and his support of both wars was the support of freedom against tyranny and little else. If you think he hated all Muslims, then you're just ill informed. He wore the Kurdistani flag as a lapel pin in solidarity of their existence as the largest ethnic group in the region with no state.

I guess hating the theocratic and the totalitarian is a controversial position when you believe it enough to want it to be destroyed.

[Rico]

Perhaps Constantine missed the implicit counterstatement in Hitchens' first line? That is, "If you have any chance at all of hitting anyone who is not a soldier you should not be using cluster bombs."

Unless he thinks that advocating killing an enemy troop by a method approved by the Geneva conventions makes one a monster?

In any case, very similarly to what I said re: Anne McCaffrey: Can we please not have this thread be some sort of acceptable place to take a giant dump on whoever happened to recently die?

[Friday]

Wow, that's a weird fucking coincidence. I just spent all of last night reading about the man, his quotes page on wikiquote, etc. I literally spent like an hour and a half reading up on him. Until last night, I had no idea who he was, and then the next day he dies.

Coincidence, I'm fully aware, but still sort of jarring from a personal perspective.

[Brentai]

I kind of have a problem with the idea that it's okay to hate and kill violent extremists, mainly because it's a line of reasoning that can't be objectively applied without eventually committing to murdering yourself.

I'll split this stuff out later.

[Dizzy]

Hitchens at a Freedom from Religion Convention, as reported by PZ Meyers:

Then it was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

It was simplistic us-vs.-them thinking at its worst, and the only solution he had to offer was death and destruction of the enemy.

This was made even more clear in the Q&A. He was asked to consider the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not well-phrased, I'll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one less Moslem to fight you … which is only true if you assume that every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing to do so. I think that what is obvious is that most Moslems are primarily interested in living a life of contentment with their families and their work, and that an America committed to slaughter is a tactic that will only convince more of them to join in opposition to us.

Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again.

[Thad]

That's pretty much the idea, yeah.

I've a certain amount of disdain for religion too, but Hitchens had a tendency to equate "Muslims" with "terrorists who want to kill us".  And if people don't see an implicit "middle-eastern" in that equation then I'm not quite sure what to tell them.  (Granted, Bal's thought on the Islamic community center a couple blocks from Ground Zero was "That's in poor taste, because they're Muslim and so are the people who blew up the towers.  But poor taste is cool and I am for it.")

Perhaps Constantine missed the implicit counterstatement in Hitchens' first line? That is, "If you have any chance at all of hitting anyone who is not a soldier you should not be using cluster bombs."

You always have a chance of hitting someone who is not a soldier.

And all that business about holding Korans over their hearts seems pretty damn unnecessary to me.  I mean, is that a common thing that people in warfare worry about -- whether soldiers are holding bulletproof holy books over their hearts?  Because it reads more like a gratuitous "(BTW these guys are Muslims)" to me.

In any case, very similarly to what I said re: Anne McCaffrey: Can we please not have this thread be some sort of acceptable place to take a giant dump on whoever happened to recently die?

I am fairly confident that Hitchens's response to that kind of sentimentality would be "I'm dead, what do I care?"

I didn't know the man, but he wasn't the type to worry about stirring up controversy in life and I doubt he'd be too damn concerned about stirring it up in death.

[Rico]

Both those points are totally fair. I honestly don't know much about hitchens' overall beliefs, I just read Constantine's provided quote which looked like an obvious purely theoretical response for the reasons both you and I stated.

My concern for the obituary thread is that pretty much everyone has done something reprehensible in their life, just as pretty much everyone has at least one controversial position. While I don't advocate a whitewashed remembrance, it seems ... distracting? sidetracking? to have it in that thread.