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afddceb
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The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....
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acceptable-opinion
lively-debate
obedient
limit
passive
debate
opinion
control
passivity
obedience
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Noam Chomsky |
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0ab6b31
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About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough--and even miraculous enough if you insist--I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others--while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity--so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities... but there, there. Enough.
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existence
morality
faith
religion
god
life
secular-ethics
supernaturalism
meaning-of-life
debate
existentialism
ethics
materialism
naturalism
atheism
respect
self-respect
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f2259e1
|
Don't raise your voice, improve your argument.
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discussion
debate
shouting
persuasion
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Desmond Tutu |
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7c6d3c7
|
He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.
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thoughts
dispute
ice
disagreement
debate
heat
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Friedrich Nietzsche |
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a2fdde1
|
Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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debate
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Christopher Hitchens |
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a041cd9
|
"Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.
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myth
responsibility
morality
reason
fear
love
truth
atheist-argument
christianity-is-immoral
christopher-hitchens
compulsory
divine-dictatorship
eternal-punishment
great-atheist-argument
hitchens
hitchslap
homo-sapiens
immoral-christianity
love-your-neighbor
supreme-being
dawkins
indifference
human-sacrifice
eternal-father
totalitarianism
debate
dictatorship
richard-dawkins
wishful-thinking
belief
evidence
ethics
atheism
health
intellect
atheist
redemption
crime
guilt
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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153ce58
|
Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
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education
informed
rational
debate
perspective
ignorance
knowledge
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Carl Sagan |
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c05ceab
|
So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
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shakespeare
india
religion
annie-navasky
arthur-miller
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
desecration
eritrea
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
morocco
prague
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
steve-wasserman
synagogues
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
jewish-question
david-rieff
rabbis
temples
spinoza
normality
einstein
istanbul
security
salvation
poland
jewishness
eastern-europe
kurdish-people
middle-east
damascus
iraq
debate
atheism
islam
antisemitism
jews
germany
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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e7778f1
|
A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.
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|
ineptitude
norman-g-finkelstein
smear-campaigns
malice
debate
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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12e277f
|
Edward genially enough did not agree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the to point out that his life--the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional --would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian , another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to magazine in the late 1980s.
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feminism
books
music
1986
ad-hominem
bernard-lewis
first-intifada
interview-magazine
intifada
islamic-republic
leon-wieseltier
middle-eastern-studies
intellectualism
theocracy
cambridge
arafat
israeli-palestinian-conflict
middle-east
debate
edward-said
art
palestine
palestinians
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Christopher Hitchens |
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50f4e71
|
The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.
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campaigns
irrelevancy
polling
politics
discourse
debate
elections
democracy
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Neil Postman |
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5ae0d27
|
"From the introduction "After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closes friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed."
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difference-of-opinion
oinions
debate
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John Boyne |
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f81ee1e
|
The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the . However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it.
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|
sex
arkansas
impeachment-of-bill-clinton
lewinsky-scandal
new-left-review
verso-books
witch-hunt
mccarthyism
bill-clinton
delusion
debate
corruption
liberalism
cowardice
idiocy
leftism
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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1afa063
|
The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.
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leadership
debate
|
Joseph J. Ellis |
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4a6c2e8
|
You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.
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|
debate
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L.M. Montgomery |
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5839b0b
|
Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.
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|
light
freedom
meaning
reason
darkness
optimism
heart
truth
falsehood
optimists
public
scheme
schemes
unreason
feeling
feel
plans
debate
plan
equal
believe
vitality
nonsense
|
Roger Scruton |
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f2b58b2
|
They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.
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|
debate
ignorance
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Richard Wright |
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c769481
|
The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.
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|
war
delusion
islamic-terrorism
jihad
preemptive-war
preventive-war
debate
war-on-terror
iraq-war
united-states
islam
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Christopher Hitchens |
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5a3122f
|
And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay 'The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.' This rather shallow piece appeared in the magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of , Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, , Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, ! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged 'neo-conservative' movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?
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|
anti-intellectualism
anti-semitism
authoritarianism
commentary-magazine
debate
delmore-schwartz
dwight-macdonald
james-atlas
jeane-kirkpatrick
leon-trotsky
neoconservativism
new-criterion
new-york-times
norman-podhoretz
obscurantism
partisan-review
ts-eliot
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
manhattan
intellectuals
fundamentalism
patriotism
power
jews
communism
cold-war
new-york
|
Christopher Hitchens |