RIP Christopher Hitchens

[Bakustra]

So wait, being a Marxist is worse than supporting an imperialist, pointless war that's killed hundreds of thousands to over a million people? I think you two jokers have a very strange set of priorities.

[Count Chocula]

To whom are you addressing that last post, Baks?

[Bakustra]

You and General Mung Beans. Seriously, what the fuck?

[Count Chocula]

I'm trying to figure out what your point is, asshole. Hitchens supported both Marxism and undeclared war in Iraq. You'e turning into as much of a shitehead as Hitchens but without the notoriety or byline.

[Bakustra]

I'm trying to figure out what your point is, asshole. Hitchens supported both Marxism and undeclared war in Iraq. You'e turning into as much of a shitehead as Hitchens but without the notoriety or byline.

"shitehead"? Poser.

But here:

So you don't seem to mind that Hitchens admired real mass murderers like Lenin or Trotsky or that he once embraced Marxism but don't like he dared support the Iraq War.

Which is saying that being a Marxist is at least equally bad, if not worse, than supporting the Iraq war. Which is ridiculous. Do you agree or disagree?

[Count Chocula]

Which is saying that being a Marxist is at least equally bad, if not worse, than supporting the Iraq war. Which is ridiculous. Do you agree or disagree?

I think I'll just ask a question? So I can't be accused of having an opinion? How many people have been murdered or died under Marxist regimes? Which has nothing to do with supporting or not supporting the Iraq 'war?' And bringing up both in one post is posing an apples and oranges question? Just asking?

[Bakustra]

Please give me the definition of "Marxist" that you have, so that I can properly tailor my response to your level of understanding.

[SCRawl]

Reciprocal altruism is a well-established and observed trait of primate behaviour and exists as an elementary group-survival strategy in evolution. And since we humans are primates, this trait is also embedded in our own behaviour patterns as much as with bonobo chimpanzees. The "golden rule" would have ended up being codified with or without a religious context in any case because the underlying trait behind the "rule" is hard-wired into our brains.

Chocula, this is the kind of refutation to your "the Golden Rule came first from religion" position that should give you the most pause.

You will provide evidence that it could only have been inspired or adopted from religious teachings. Finding an early reference to same does not prove its origins, only that it was the first time someone wrote it down. If you have another tack you'd like to take in order to make your argument, I'll be glad to hear it, but if not it's either provide evidence or concede.

[Bakustra]

That's a, frankly, idiotic position to take, seeing as it relies on an unprovable assertion of evolutionary psychology and is essentially irrelevant. If it did turn out that reciprocity was first codified by a religious society, it would have nothing to do with the reason I brought it up, which is that it is independent of divinity.

[SCRawl]

Really? The thread within this thread started like this:

Does the Golden Rule pertain if you have no faith at all?

Okay, why does the Golden Rule depend on belief in a god?

I have found Chocula's responses to this question to be insufficient. It seems to me that religious moral teachings come from us, not the other way around, and his statements include a positive claim to the contrary. Others have challenged that claim, and so evidence is required to refute them.

[Bakustra]

Your position relies on a definite disproof of divine intervention. Let me know how that turns out for you, and don't forget to account for the God of the Gaps and semi-Cartesian demons as well. Meanwhile, it's actively hostile towards the concept of atheist morality, since it implies that atheistic morals would cease to exist if it were true that they were divinely inspired originally, which combined with the necessity of a definite disproof makes your position that atheistic morality is only a possibility.

[SCRawl]

Your position relies on a definite disproof of divine intervention. Let me know how that turns out for you, and don't forget to account for the God of the Gaps and semi-Cartesian demons as well. Meanwhile, it's actively hostile towards the concept of atheist morality, since it implies that atheistic morals would cease to exist if it were true that they were divinely inspired originally, which combined with the necessity of a definite disproof makes your position that atheistic morality is only a possibility.

I don't ask for any kind of proof, I ask for evidence. Mind you, I don't expect that evidence to be forthcoming; I don't think that any reasonable person believes that a moral system can only be revealed or divinely inspired. But that's just an opinion, which carries no weight.

[mr friendly guy]

Nice "proof" unfriendly guy. Do you have evidence that's not a logic chain built upon your suppositions? Citations would be nice.

If you mean by suppositions statements by other posters including yourself, then no. However the point is, unless you dispute the fact that Confuscius said a similar thing, the onus is on you to show that he "copied the idea" from someone else. You essentially want your opponents to prove a negative, ie Confuscius (and anyone else who came up with a Golden Rule equivalent) did not copy from a religious person. Even you a half wit must able to see whats wrong with that logic.

[General Mung Beans]

I'm trying to figure out what your point is, asshole. Hitchens supported both Marxism and undeclared war in Iraq. You'e turning into as much of a shitehead as Hitchens but without the notoriety or byline.

"shitehead"? Poser.

But here:

So you don't seem to mind that Hitchens admired real mass murderers like Lenin or Trotsky or that he once embraced Marxism but don't like he dared support the Iraq War.

Which is saying that being a Marxist is at least equally bad, if not worse, than supporting the Iraq war. Which is ridiculous. Do you agree or disagree?

I meant more in the sense of him supporting Trotsky and Lenin and considering the Russian Revolution a good thing. And Marxism in the sense of imposing socialism on society by seizing and expropriating everybody's property is immoral,.

[Count Chocula]

I don't ask for any kind of proof, I ask for evidence. Mind you, I don't expect that evidence to be forthcoming; I don't think that any reasonable person believes that a moral system can only be revealed or divinely inspired. But that's just an opinion, which carries no weight.]

You've asked me to prove an assertion I didn't assert. Don't hold your breath.

[weemadando]

Fucking rats display empathy and collective, assisting behaviour over person gain. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/scien ... finds.html

Golden Rule where?

[bobalot]

Seriously? I just couldn't stay away.

I don't ask for any kind of proof, I ask for evidence. Mind you, I don't expect that evidence to be forthcoming; I don't think that any reasonable person believes that a moral system can only be revealed or divinely inspired. But that's just an opinion, which carries no weight.]

You've asked me to prove an assertion I didn't assert. Don't hold your breath.

You do realise that people can just look through the thread and read what you posted?

You claimed that the golden rule required a belief in God and came up with some baloney about the Code of Hammurabi about being the first recorded version of it , implying that the golden rule sprung from religion. You tried to beat this dead horse further implying it spread through the silk road.

After all this was refuted (by more than one person), you:

• attempted to shift the goal posts by claiming it was up to others to prove that it didn't come from a belief in god (i.e. it had a secular basis).
• nitpicked minor points (like wording) that had little impact on your overall claim.
• now claim that it was never your position to begin with.

Amazing.

[D.Turtle]

Even if the golden rule first arose in a religious context (and lets face it in most of history almost everything arose in a religious context), the thing is this: No part of the golden rule requires religion, spirituality, or a belief in god. Nowhere in the golden rule is (a) god mentioned.

Therefore, the golden rule is independent of religion, religiosity, spirituality, an afterlife, etc.

[Sriad]

Your position relies on a definite disproof of divine intervention. Let me know how that turns out for you, and don't forget to account for the God of the Gaps and semi-Cartesian demons as well. Meanwhile, it's actively hostile towards the concept of atheist morality, since it implies that atheistic morals would cease to exist if it were true that they were divinely inspired originally, which combined with the necessity of a definite disproof makes your position that atheistic morality is only a possibility.

I don't ask for any kind of proof, I ask for evidence. Mind you, I don't expect that evidence to be forthcoming; I don't think that any reasonable person believes that a moral system can only be revealed or divinely inspired. But that's just an opinion, which carries no weight.

Okay, I can field this one, though I confess I'm a little confused at this point as to who asserts what.

Not only can reciprocal collective altruism be observed in many of the more intelligent social animals, it's emergent from sophisticated game theory. Most people who are familiar with game theory only know things like the Prisoner's Dilemma, which appears to say it's always beneficial to rat out your accomplice. When expanded into more sophisticated simulations, though, it's been demonstrated that a behavior pattern of reciprocity with occasional overtures of reconciliation.

I wish I could find the video explaining the program; it was actually presented by (IIRC) Dawkins, though it might have been Hitchens.

[Vaporous]

if the face of atheism is built around the annihilation of religion as an endgoal, is it really possible for atheism to be acceptable in a religious society?

Given how many times Hitchens called religion "ineradicable" over the past few years, I can't help but think you're assigning him one of Dawkin's opinions by mistake.

[D.Turtle]

Okay, I can field this one, though I confess I'm a little confused at this point as to who asserts what.

Not only can reciprocal collective altruism be observed in many of the more intelligent social animals, it's emergent from sophisticated game theory. Most people who are familiar with game theory only know things like the Prisoner's Dilemma, which appears to say it's always beneficial to rat out your accomplice. When expanded into more sophisticated simulations, though, it's been demonstrated that a behavior pattern of reciprocity with occasional overtures of reconciliation.

I wish I could find the video explaining the program; it was actually presented by (IIRC) Dawkins, though it might have been Hitchens.

Yes, the prisoner's dilemma is only a problem when you have only a single iteration of the dilemma. Once you have multiple rounds, cooperation is a better strategy.

You might have been thinking of "Nice Guys Finish First" in which Dawkins describes the study by Robert Axelrod which showed that.

[Lord Zentei]

to being a crazed Mark David Chapman-style Clinton hater, obsessed with Clinton's cock.

WTF?

No, seriously. What are you talking about?

And what's that about a forged email? The link only shows GeneralMungBeans posting one and you claiming that it was a fraud. But as far as I can see, you didn't actually show that it was a fraud nor that Hitchens was the fraudster.

[Sriad]

Yes, the prisoner's dilemma is only a problem when you have only a single iteration of the dilemma. Once you have multiple rounds, cooperation is a better strategy.

You might have been thinking of "Nice Guys Finish First" in which Dawkins describes the study by Robert Axelrod which showed that.

That's the one, thanks!

[SCRawl]

I don't ask for any kind of proof, I ask for evidence. Mind you, I don't expect that evidence to be forthcoming; I don't think that any reasonable person believes that a moral system can only be revealed or divinely inspired. But that's just an opinion, which carries no weight.]

You've asked me to prove an assertion I didn't assert. Don't hold your breath.

I've looked the thread over again, more carefully this time, and I've come to this conclusion with respect to this narrow issue: you're right, I'm wrong. You didn't quite assert what I accused you of. As a result I withdraw my order to provide evidence or concede. (This is really just a formality, as I assume that you had no intention of filling that order.)

[Elfdart]

to being a crazed Mark David Chapman-style Clinton hater, obsessed with Clinton's cock.

WTF?

No, seriously. What are you talking about?

Did you read any of the hysterical shit he wrote about The Clenis, or see him on TV calling Clinton a rapist? I did.

And what's that about a forged email? The link only shows GeneralMungBeans posting one and you claiming that it was a fraud. But as far as I can see, you didn't actually show that it was a fraud nor that Hitchens was the fraudster.

I meant to link to this thread. Not that it matters, since the Talking Points Memo link is now dead. It is quoted here on an MSNBC page, though:

Re: Hitchens Piffed Off
by Andy Vance on Aug 16, 2005 -- 12:12:07 AM EST
Methinks Hitch has been punk'd. Sheehan's "letter" has been seeded all over right-wing message boards, and nowhere else that I could find. Most of the links seem to point to this Google BBS post, in which the full text of the letter appears. But there's something strange about it. The prose is stilted, and there's something about how the author uses acronyms, place names and dates that makes me think it was written by ex-military. Look at this paragraph:

The very worst thing of all, is that my son was sent to rescue some fellow soldiers trapped in an ambush in the back of a LMTV..which is basically an open air trailer. It would be the equivalent of driving through Dallas on 11/22/63 in a Convertible. The troops stationed at FOB War Eagle were sent ahead of their tanks and Bradleys!!!

Also, a member of this "bull yard" group is supposedly the one who forwarded the message to Nightline:

Cindy, Skeeter Skeeter asked me to send our your letter to Nightline. I did already and believe you got a copy, as below. I added your name to the bull yard list, along with Judge P on the stuff I send out.

And check out the description of the "bull yard list:"

An eclectic group, mostly men, gathered from around the world. Many are ex priests and the discussions are mostly political and religious. On the far right there are strong Bush supporters. On the far left there are heavy Bush bashers. Not for the faint of heart.

Boldface mine. Sheehan denies writing the part about Israel, and no one has come forward with evidence she did.

Transcript of Cindy's interview on CNN's Cooper Anderson

Cooper: you were also quoted as saying, "my son joined the army to protect america, not israel. you get america out of iraq and israel out of palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." how responsible do you believe israel is for the amount of terrorism in the world?

sheehan: i didn't say that.

cooper: you didn't say that? ok

sheehan: i didn't -- i didn't say -- i didn't say that my son died for israel. i've never said that. i saw somebody wrote that and it wasn't my words. those aren't even words that i would say.
i do believe that the palestinian issue is a hot issue that needs to be solved and it needs to be more fair and equitable but i never said my son died for israel.

cooper: ok, i'm glad i asked you that because, you know, as you know, there's tons of stuff floating around on the internet on sites of all political persuasions.

sheehan: i know and that's not -- yes.

cooper: so, i'm glad we had the opportunity to clear that.

sheehan: yes, and thank you because those are not my words. those aren't -- that doesn't even sound like me saying that.

Let's assume that she did write an e-mail suggesting that her son was killed in a war egged on by Israel. Does that make her a Jew-hater or a LaRouchie? No? Well that's what Hitchens accused her of being. Alexander Cockburn (a long-time friend who had grown tired of Hitchens' bullfuckery) called him on it:

You can tell in five-minutes channel surfing how Cindy Sheehan frightens the pro-war crowd. One bereaved mom from Vacaville, camped outside Bush’s home in Crawford, reproaching the vacationing President for sending her son to a pointless death in Iraq has got the hellhounds of the right barking in venomous unison.

Christopher Hitchens attacked Cindy Sheehan, of course. Called her a LaRouchie! Why? No reason given. He obviously reckons "LaRouchie" is one of those let-her-deny-it slurs, like "anti-Semite". Let’s suppose Hitchens was writing in similarly nasty terms about Hitchens. He’d probably remember that in 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it’s cracked up to be. In Epstein’s memory Hitchens belittled the idea that six million Jews died, said the number was much less.

So, under Hitchens’ rules of polemical engagement, was does that make Hitchens? A holocaust denier, a guy who has Faurisson and David Irving’s books under his pillow. A Jew hater, or if you believe his sudden discovery (privately denied by his own brother on at least one occasion) at a mature age that his mother was Jewish a Jewish self-hater. Of course Hitchens revels in Cindy Sheehan’s denial that she said in an email that her son died in a war for Israel. Hitchens writes that this denial makes her "a shifty fantasist". What would Hitchens, who’s an on-the-record admirer ("a great historian") of the work of Nazi chronicler David Irving say about Hitchens’ shifty denial of Epstein’s recollection? What fun he would have with the witnesses the panic-stricken Hitchens, well aware that "holocaust denier" is not part of the resume of a Vanity Fair columnist, hastily mustered for his defense, a woman and a man present at that famous dinner in the Royalton. One his close friend, Anna Wintour, the present editor of Vogue and the other, Brian McNally, a longtime friend and business associate.

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel. She lost a son? Hitchens (who should perhaps be careful on the topic of sending children off to die) says that’s of scant account, and no reason why we should take her seriously. Then he brays about the horrors let loose in Iraq if the troops come home, with no mention of how the invasion he worked for has already unleashed them.

Cockburn's piece on Hitchens' death is just as scathing:

I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.

On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the “October surprise”, denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire – bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?

Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention–which fuelled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst. He also rounded on Gore Vidal who had done so much to promote his career as dauphin of contrarianism.

He courted the label “contrarian”, but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being. He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, noting that “despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish” and noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys’ Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the definitions of the Nuremberg laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”)

As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extempore speeches and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at The Nation. I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.

But Norman Finkelstein had him pegged best of all.



Hitchens must have been thankful there isn't a hell for creeps like him -unlike the hell he and other war whores created for millions of innocent people in Iraq.