Christopher Hitchens and the Battle of Beirut

I'm a huge Hitchens fan and this just reinforces it. Bravo Chris.

If this wasn't actually cool, I would make some "best thing since The Dark Knight" joke.

Say what you want about the tenets of Syrian Social Nationalism but at least it's an ethos.

There has always been an undercurrent of Nazi love in the Middle East, especially among the early Palastenian liberation movements as I recall. Interesting to see that's it's still alive in some form.

Huh? Surely you aren't trying to imply that other groups in the middle east are anarchists. Because that would be very wrong.

They're nihilists don...dreary.

I went to high school with a Michael Totten who looks a little like that guy. Does he have a bio somewhere?

Hitchens once claimed Margaret Thatcher made a playful pass at him in the foyer of the Houses of Parliament and then pinched his ass.

There isn't anything left to be scared of in the world after that.

Holy Shit...Geoff Foster! Welcome back!

And yeah: I'm a Hitchens fan. Love the guy. Been an admirer of his ever since he took up the offer to be Waterboarded to prove it wasn't torture; then changed his mind and decided that yeah...it kinda is.
I don't posses those kinds of balls.

Hitchens would be awesome if he hadn't spent his entire career changing his mind. The guy has this weird habit of identifying with a movement then shunning it then moving on to something else. Maybe he has a short attention span. He plays the intellectual role well, but it's kind of hard to take him seriously anymore.

I actually think that quality of him is a 'feature', not a 'bug'.

Yeah, I like it, too. We rightly criticize those who 'stay the course' above all else, who put constancy ahead of reflection. Hitchens does the opposite, and he's nicely open about it, or that's the way it comes off to me. (There are other reasons to dislike him, to be sure, if that's what you want.) IMO, it would be weird if someone spent a few decades talking about politics, philosophy, etc. and didn't change his mind a bunch of times.

The changing his mind thing is one of the reasons why I mentioned the Waterboarding experience as a plus; he will admit to being wrong. Not that common among his ilk, ultimately.

Thanks. It's good to be back.

I don't think a person's credibility should be conditional upon an immovable set of political opinions. Someone who is willing to examine, criticise and abandon his own world view (if necessary) is infinitely more credible to me than the person who clings on to it for grim death like Captain Ahab regardless of contrary evidence.

I think it was Churchill who said something along the lines of “Show me a socialist in his twenties and I'll show you a conservative in his sixties”. Such changes happen for entirely understandable reasons – even if you don't agree with them.

It's fair to say Hitch has re-positioned himself politically a number of times. I remember when he was a card-carrying red fanatic who wrote some excellent stuff on his idol, George Orwell (who he later went on to label a proto-Neo-Conservative).

I have two problems with him. 1: the moment he became aware of himself in the media he began an inexorable slide toward affectation and self-parody. When he first arrived on the scene he could be relied upon to make insightful comment without a trace of irony. Today he's wheeled out like a mad uncle on Christmas Day to do his “Hitch” routine every time some international crisis hits. 2. His writing gives me a headache. Perhaps it is something to do with his attention span because he is the worst political commentator I know for disappearing off onto a rollercoaster tangent three paragraphs into a piece – perhaps never to return. It's like trying to make sense of the rambling of a paranoid schizophrenic.