/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17219622]

What does /lit/ think of Christopher Hitchens?

[Anonymous No.17219641]

I really liked his books on Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger. Obviously a passionate and knowledgable guy but I never liked the new atheism movement.

[Anonymous No.17219693]

>>17219622
funny how the self proclaimed free thinkers always turn out to be the most conformist and the most unoriginal.

[Anonymous No.17219704]

>>17219693
UUUUUUHHHHH IM FREELY THINKING

[Anonymous No.17219708]

>>17219641
>I really liked his books on Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger.
this

>>17219693
He was a Trotskyist after all, same as his brother

[Anonymous No.17219711]

>>17219622
I honestly and genuinely believe he was an average intelligence/midwit guy that managed to grift his way to fame and knew the bare minimum of what to say to sound smart. FYI I used to be a huge fan of his as a teen

[Anonymous No.17219719]

>>17219711
Take the statement in the OP for example, like fucking Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro say this surface level shit too. But when Hitch expresses it Redditors and atheists think he’s dropped some profound truth bomb.

[Anonymous No.17219730]

>noooo what do you mean hell is real? god please no im so sorry for being an atheist i promise ill change please!!!
>"an atheist? oh im so sorry chris, my child, you're in hell because you supported the iraq war"

[Anonymous No.17219733]

>>17219711
>an average intelligence/midwit guy
He had some combination of high verbal IQ, fluid intelligence, and theatrical speaking style, that let him spout off impressive sounding eloquent stuff off the cuff, and that is largely why he was so famous.

[Anonymous No.17219741]

>>17219622
Trotskyist that didn't manage to get fame through politics and meaningful ideas and went to atheism.I never got this atheist movement,i always thought is just autism for attentions because the arguments are brutally stupid

[Anonymous No.17219743]

>>17219719

He had the charm and a badass feel to him. Rubin and Shapiro are the complete opposite. They look like goblins.

Unfortunately the truth is most people care more about how things look and sound than what they actually are. I think Hitchens was very smart and witty, but put him in Shapiro's body and you wouldn't get the same recognition he did.

[Anonymous No.17219770]

>>17219741
that image was created with the sole purpose of squeezing the word 'niggle' in there

[Anonymous No.17220289]

>>17219622
Alcoholic socialite with a posh accent who milked dumb American pseuds

[Anonymous No.17220666]

>>17219622
>I HAVE MUH FUCKIN' OWN OPINIONS AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU CAN KISS MY ASS!!!
-Literally every single American.

[Anonymous No.17220718]

>>17219622
midwit

[Anonymous No.17221032]

>>17219622
He was a midwit but he definitely had the IQ to be something more than a midwit but he couldn't help himself. Other than that I enjoy reading and watching what he did and he had some good takes sometimes.

[Anonymous No.17221060]

>>17219743
>Unfortunately the truth is most people care more about how things look and sound than what they actually are
Not that guy, but I agree. It's all about the rhetoric when it comes to the masses, sadly. Hitchens had a "cool guy" kind of image which people stick to easily, although I always cringe when I see it, which is also why I dislike Camus.

[Anonymous No.17221069]

>>17220289
hello, based department?

[Anonymous No.17221075]

>>17219741

>belief in god is necessary because we need institutions

drivel

[Anonymous No.17221079]

>>17221075
>reductivist rhetoric
>reductivist rhetoric that misses the point of what it's reducing
A photo of diarrhea would have made a better contribution to the thread

[Mountains or Hills No.17221360]

>>17219622
Hitchens best work was published in the 80’s and early 90’s. Prepared for The Worst, For the Sake of Argument, as well as Love, Poverty, and War are certainly well written with LP&W beginning to show him drifting into more of his weaker writing.

Thing which Hitch is he was a great editor, journalist, and wrote entertaining literary reviews. It’s was not just 9/11 but his immigration that negatively effected his writing. Once he became an American, his writing became far more American. He wagered in on the religion argument which got all these seething atheists off because his prose is so obtuse, and his polemic will leave any 16 year old feeling very smart(I fell for it).

His early stuff mentioned above though is very good writing.

Also, check into peter.

[Anonymous No.17221439]

He was acerbic, brilliant at calling out bullshit from christcucks...they never recovered

[Anonymous No.17221447]

>>17219622
B-B-BASED

[Anonymous No.17221450]

>>17219693
And the opposite never have anything of value to say.

While Chris was widely regarded as an intellectual without peer, he didn't need to claim anything so preposterous

[Anonymous No.17221457]

>>17219622
Complicated guy, dislike his new atheism and conservative turn in the mid 2000s what with supporting the Iraq War but I like that he owned dogmatists of all stripes, and he was pretty clever

[Mountains or Hills No.17221461]

>>17219743
Shapiros voice is what I imagine a pair of tweezers to sound like if they could speak.

[Anonymous No.17221558]

>>17221360
Thankfully, for all of us, his oratory exceeded any literature.

Peter is a pinched arsehole in comparison

[Mountains or Hills No.17221617]

>>17221558
I can’t disagree with that.

I like reading Peter, I don’t always agree with him but he writes well.

[Anonymous No.17221772]

>>17221457
>and he was pretty clever

An insult. "Erudite" is the word.

[Anonymous No.17222360]

>>17219641
>never liked the new atheism movement.
He totally outclassed the other guys. It was embarrassing that he got involved with those philistines

[Anonymous No.17223765]

>>17219719
I wonder if Hitch would savagely BTFO Shapiro or he would he see him as a neocon ally?

[Anonymous No.17223892]

>>17219622
"If God is real... why do bad things happen?"
>frenzied applause erupts from the audience

[Anonymous No.17223914]

Really fantastic essayist. His 'Arguably' collection is great.

His political trajectory however was pretty lame and typical of post-communists. They either double down and become even more esoteric communists, or they turn into aggressive Fukuyamists and liberal internationalists just like him.

[Anonymous No.17223936]

>>17219622
He was an oratorical *genius*, but a shallow thinker.

[Anonymous No.17223952]

>>17219711
>GRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFT
New REEing.

[Anonymous No.17223982]

>>17219711
I think anyone who looks as unhealthy as he does cannot be that smart even if they otherwise would be were they healthy. Have you ever gone without a full night's sleep and tried to think straight? Ever been depressed and tried to think straight? I can tell you in times where I'm happy and healthy my intelligence increases by a huge amount, suddenly I can grasp things with ease that were previously just not penetrating.

I don't trust unhealthy "thinkers"

[Anonymous No.17223995]

>>17219693

[Anonymous No.17224026]

>>17219622
Rhetorically mighty as fuck. Rationally quite sub-par. His argument "religions create atrocities and if USSR did, it's because it was basically a religion" shows this well - upon closer inspection it has no logical merit, but he was capable of delivering it convincingly. Ever since he died, nobody was capable of doing so.

[Anonymous No.17224029]

>>17224026
Well I don't agree with him that the USSR was religious so you can blame it on religion but I do agree with him that the USSR recreated a secular version of Tsarist Russia, and that it then by necessity had a lot of the same problems.

[Anonymous No.17224041]

>>17224029
Sure, and that is the valid merit that the argument pretends to be using, but isn't. I have never ever seen anyone except Hitchens to coat "USSR was a cult, therefore religious" with "USSR inherited Tsarist problems". Outstanding. Invalid, but outstanding.

[Anonymous No.17224064]

>>17224041
It's a clever trick, but in the end you're painting yourself into a corner when you claim religion is somehow the cause of all problems.

Ironically his book God is not great can be seen as the end of his transformation from being a Marxist/materialist to becoming an idealist, so this is why he argued the way he did about religion. If ideas move the world, then there must be a singular idea that moves everything. It's like he just exchanged his radical materialism for radical idealism.

[Anonymous No.17224087]

>>17223892
every time

[Anonymous No.17224158]

>>17224064
Interesting!

[Anonymous No.17224483]

>>17219622
Much better as a journalist than a fedora tipping atheist. His atheism is intellectually void.

[Anonymous No.17224492]

>>17219622
FAGGOT