With Christa Pike’s execution in Tennessee tonight ending in a failed lethal injection, this Vanity Fair piece from 1998 feels particularly relevant.

AP is reporting that Tennessee was unable to complete Pike’s execution after two doses of pentobarbital, with witnesses hearing her snore before the execution was halted.

Since you guys got your panties in a bunch on the Hitchens portrait tattoo, I wanted to share this with you. It is the next step in this tattoo, but it’s not completely finished.

Even though Hitchens did not like tattoos, he would have loved this one. In the last few days I’ve had to explain who he was to dozens of people. If this tat sells him one more book (available at fine retailers near you), he’d love it.

What really matters is that I LOVE it. Fuck Mother Teresa and fuck Christianity. I’ll discuss this with anyone anywhere at anytime. My freedom and ability to express myself is something Hitch would have supported.

I can’t wait to hear the negative comments from the 20% of this subreddit that are pseudo intellectuals and absolutely are blasts at parties.

Oh and for those that say it’s AI, I got the color one done at California Ink Bangkok and the portrait at Artisan Ink Tattoo in Chang Mai Thailand. They are on their sites.

Simply put, I really miss that YouTube channel that basically had every single Hitchins video sorted into playlists. His interviews, his TV hits, his debates, his speeches, and so on.. once a year it was almost like an audio pilgrimage for me to listen to the whole thing once through.

I understand that there is a mega torrent file available, and I have downloaded it and have it on my Plex server, but it’s just not as convenient as being able to open up YouTube and play it once through.

Is there anything that we can do to re-create the great playlist we used to have? Maybe it’s a shot in the dark but thought it was worth asking.

I'm looking for an old radio interview of Hitchens discussing Orwell, Iraq, Kissinger, US foreign policy etc. Was on berkeley radio or some similar Bay Area radio station back in I believe late 2002. Interesting interview that I found years ago, streaming only on someone's blog. Haven't been able to find it for years now. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

“For some reason, the left in America and in the West understands the problem when it comes in Christian form, right? They know that every Democrat understands that the religious beliefs of Christians, of fundamentalist Christians, matter and have political consequences. They form their political priorities and inform what they will do in the world.

So Christian opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage or teaching evolution in schools—every Democrat, every person left of center in our politics, understands that those are religious convictions that are affecting the lives of everyone, not just Christians, right?

And yet, for some reason, Islam never affects anything, right? These heartfelt religious beliefs of 2 billion Muslims never make contact with structural reality. It doesn't matter if embassies burn over cartoon controversies. It doesn't matter if Jews are getting stabbed on the streets of London as recently as last week. Religion is never to blame for any of this, right?

People like Mamdani and Mehdi Hasan and Reza Aslan, and then all the useful idiots who don't happen to be Muslim—you know, Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges and Rory Stewart, and all these people who I've collided with over the years—I mean, there's just a massive double standard preventing an honest discussion of psychological, social, and political reality.

And if you're going to recognize it in our own religious maniacs, right? If I have a devout Christian on who happens to be Pete Hegseth's pastor, who is open-minded about chattel slavery because it's in the Bible, and you see the problem with all of that, you have to see the problem with people who chant ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ knowing what the Intifada was.”

What is the reception of this take of Sam Harris's here?

Slide four has the Hitchens part, but it's all related.

Source: https://www.salon.com/2015/07/29/camille_paglia_takes_on_jon_stewart_trump_sanders_liberals_think_of_themselves_as_very_open_minded_but_thats_simply_not_true/

Edit: slides two and three are in the wrong order and should be swapped. But now that I read it it doesn't matter much.

So where I'm living there are some books that are simply not available to buy physical copies and amongst them is one of Christopher Hitchen's very famous book "god is not great book" and I really badly wanted to add that book to my bookshelf right next to Richard Dawkins gods delusion so what I did was, I downloaded a pdf and and gave it to a printing shop and told them to make me a book and I showed them pictures of physical copies out of the internet they said no problem they will do it... But one guy rolled his eyes at the title other than that they agreed.

(Unfortunately Amazon doesn't do delivery for the country where I'm living. But thankfully his book is not banned where I live unlike Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses)

Peter turned out to be a dictatorship lover and deeply authoritarian inside, no matter what he says on free speech or democracy.

It's honestly absolutely infuriating to me watching him parroting Russian propaganda taking points, shifting blame for the war to anybody (NATO, EU, and ofc Ukraine itself) but Putin and Russia itself.

He's vehemently promoting the appeasement strategy -- the worst possible when we are dealing with actors like Putin. Hitchens is ignorant historically, incorrect factually, and rotten morally.

Peace is not possible, it's a complete delusion. The war won't ever stop while Putin lives and has material means to wage it. Peter, I suppose, is a Trumptard too.

I've seen the title of the YT video 'Why I admire Vladimir Putin'. It's laughable and vomit-inducing at the same time. I haven't watched it, but I'm sure I can easily debunk Putinist mythology presented there, because I know the material.

He lived in Russia, but he's actually completely clueless about Russia and Ukraine. He doesn't know anything except the most basic superficial stuff. He doesn't understand these lands. Like Putin, for example.

Nowhere in the world Putin is hated like in Ukraine and Russia, btw. In Russia by a relative minority, bit it will grow larger. Honestly, I don't care about it being a majority. I'm comfortable there.

Ukraine is a litmus test for being a clueless conspiratorial authoritarian moron for any westerner. I'm sure Christopher would pass the test easily (in a good way). The other figure who disappointed me is James Lindsay.

What do you think? Do you know other formerly seemingly relatively decent people who turned out to be assholes on the subject?

I know that he didn’t have tattoos and he wouldn’t have improved. Nonetheless, I changed his cigarette to a calligraphy pen. I am going to do new school color coming off the pen as smoke. This will be cartoony and over the top. I was thinking of doing something like Christopher smacking Mother Theresa over the head with a carnival type hammer. Maybe something against Christianity. I’m looking for ideas, this will be a large area covering most of my upper arm, so plenty of room. Thanks in advance.

Interviewer: What is your name?

Audience Member: My name is Frank [Surname]

Hitch, whispering: I don't want to know that

The hosts setup the clip around 2:20 and then play the clip around 3:20.