Hitchens has stated often that he no longer identifies with any political stripe. Arguments about whether he is with this party or that philosophy belie his own stated position, and few people state their position with such eloquence or frequency than Christopher Hitchens.
He is now an Independent, and demonstrates his independence by trashing every idealogical opponent he can get to debate him. He is clearer drunk than they are sober. He never uses the obfuscating and emotional debating tactics that his opponents rely upon, and he doesn’t care about his public image.
The one thing I disagree with Hitch about is the Invasion of Iraq. He is wrong about that, but his argument in favor of the invasion transcends the bulk of the drivel put forth by the Neocons. Saddam was, in point of fact, a world-class asshole.
To claim that Hitchens is a conservative based solely on his support of the invasion of Iraq displays a left-wing bias to me.
Unfortunately, esophageal cancer is almost always fatal. That surprised me when I found it out, because, c’mon, the esophagus is a piece of hose. But your odds of surviving are terrible.
I started reading him when we received a gift subscrip to VF. After 3-4 attempts I stopped reading his essays. Impress me as extremely self indugent and I derived neither information not enjoyment from them.
No, I think people can say things like that and sincerely mean it. They aren’t asking him to convert or anything (and if they are really fans, they already know there’s no chance of that).
I’m sure they mean it, but do people always have to say everything that they think? Religious people who know me don’t tell me they’ll pray for me, or whatever, because they know all it’ll do is irritate me. And if there’s one person alive who I can think of who is more hostile and irritable than I am, it might be him.
I don’t find them obnoxious. I do find them pointless. IMHO, such statements are intended to give comfort, at least a bit, to the person in question. Unless Mr. Hitchens reads the Dope, which I doubt, such statements are pointless. Further, unless such statements are directed to a religious believer, which Mr. Hitchens certainly isn’t, then the statements are doubly pointless.
I’m reminded of an interview Terry Gross did with Richard Pryor (I think this is it, but I can’t be sure because I can’t listen to it where I am right now). She asked him at one point what he does to fill his time and he answered “smoke crack.”
Yeah, it doesn’t look good. In learning more about esophageal cancer it seems that by the time by the time symptoms appear and the disease is discovered most tumors are no longer operable and chemo is intended mostly as a way of extending life as much as possible rather than as a cure- although in some rare cases chemo will shrink the tumor enough to make it operable. Wiki has this to say about the disease’s prognosis:
So it looks like Hitchen’s future depends upon how soon his cancer was discovered.
There’s a tremendous archive of Hitchen’s various speeches, debates and TV appearances on Youtube which I’ve been watching the last few days and now I’m afraid I’ll miss him even more than I originally thought should his illness prove fatal. Here’s a link, in case anyone would like to see more of him in action.
Yeah, but who knows? Buckley was a slim, strong, active guy of the type who might have made it well into his nineties if not all the way to a hundred had he not developed the emphysema which made his last few years so miserable. Same with Johnny Carson. They both lived what would be regarded as suitably long lives by most measures, but I’d wager they’d both have lived at least a decade more if not not longer had they never smoked.
Thanks! I’ve been reading The Portable Atheist, which he edited (superbly, I might add) but I’m not too familiar with his other work, besides seeing him once on either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report when he was promoting God Is Not Great. I thought he came across as a shallow asshole then, but The Portable Atheist has made me curious about the other things he’s done. Until I read this thread, I had no idea he was known for anything other than his writing about atheism.
