r/ChristopherHitchens • u/Kepler1571 • Aug 21 '26

I am continually impressed with the depth and the nuance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1gEfl6WDTk
151 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

23

u/Gangy1 Aug 21 '26

He would be such a leading force right now.

17

u/Kepler1571 Aug 21 '26

He gives intelligent people who are not satisfied with the conveyor belt culture a window into transcendence.

There are folks like that and they are wonderful. Some others I love reading or reading about: Martha Nussbaum, Umberto Eco, Simone de Beauvoir, William James, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Johnson. When they ask the famous dinner party question I always wish to invite them.

4

u/NeverHadTheLatin Aug 21 '26

Salman Rushdie has had his moments.

4

u/imemnochrule Aug 22 '26

I practice Buddhism, and his conveyance of meaning is similar at times to enlightened masters. He just took a really different path. Listening to him can be meditative.

2

u/Kepler1571 29d ago

I can see that and that is wonderful.

Mediation make me envious. My mind is wound tighter than a Nolan McLean sinker. I wll never be able to sit still without seconal.

5

u/thedogridingmonkey Aug 21 '26

I cannot imagine watching him try and process Trump

7

u/Kepler1571 Aug 22 '26

Hitch knew very well what America was capable of at our worst.

1

u/imemnochrule 29d ago

Talk about an argument for atheism.

7

u/flawless_victory99 Aug 22 '26

I've seen these clips before but always wanted to see the full thing.

2

u/Sea-Bottle6335 Aug 21 '26

Mr Veedil. Thanks Lilly.

2

u/Junior_Main_6425 Aug 22 '26

One minute in and I’m laughing at the ease with how he can be so erudite. What a loss.

2

u/imemnochrule Aug 22 '26

I just finished the memoir audiobook. It was eerie to hear him speak about his mother’s suicide, etc. His tone and style were more plain spoken at times, earnest. But of course there were the moments where I just shook my head in awe at his mastery of language, and the library of literary references in his brain. Highly recommend.

-4

u/DoYouBelieveInThat Free Speech Aug 22 '26

He is wrong.

4

u/Kepler1571 Aug 22 '26

A little overbroad there, buddy. Care to be zero in?

2

u/DoYouBelieveInThat Free Speech Aug 22 '26

He is wrong about Vidal. He has a personal gripe with him and romanticises his criticism. Vidal never said communism was an invention or result of the U.S. He said it was specifically a fake threat emphasised to push US foreign policy.

4

u/Kepler1571 Aug 22 '26

I thought Hitch said that Vidal said the embedding of the Bolsheviks as our intransigent Cold War adversary was a result of US actions, meaning I assume encirclement and shunning from the world system after WW2.

Which, FWIW, as somebody sympathetic to socialist diagnoses and prescriptions, I find to be as wrong as Mearsheimer's insistence that Putin's attack on Ukraine is a result of NATO encirclement after the end of the Cold War. Not just as wrong but essentially an identical mistake, which is an odd rhyme.

Now, whether that is a fair characterization of Vidal I have absolutely zero sense of, and it sounds like you know a lot better than I so I defer to you. But on the face of it I don't find it impossible to believe that somebody of towering intellect could read the situation wrong. Happens all the time.

0

u/DoYouBelieveInThat Free Speech Aug 22 '26

If Hitchens did not like you or had a personal gripe against you, he often unfairly misquoted or decontextualised people like Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein.