Vox Popoli

So Christopher Hitchens is a drunken, uncouthe buffoon. This isn’t exactly news, of course:

Eyewitnesses report that Hitchens erupted into a drunken rage at a recent promotional event for his book. Hitchens reportedly descended from the stage, visibly inebriated, approached a Roman Catholic priest in the audience, and began shouting at him, only inches from his face. Hitchens’ manner appeared so physically menacing, witnesses say, that a plainclothes bodyguard on duty at the event rushed in and escorted the drunken scribe from the room.

All of this happened four and a half months ago, on May 1. It was never reported in the press. A conspiracy of silence shielded the bestselling author from the negative publicity his behavior seemingly should have earned him. Indeed, the world at large would know nothing of this incident, had Hitchens himself not chosen to mention it in the September 2007 issue of Vanity Fair….

One eyewitness states that Hitchens’ “drunken, rambling, anti-Semitic, bigoted and foul-mouthed rant” caused “two-thirds of the people to leave in disgust” before the talk had ended.

Hitchens responds thusly: “You probably know that the charge against me is a standard and oft-repeated one, which would either mean that I am always incapable with drink (in which case one wonders how I manage to meet all my deadlines) or that a cliché is at work.”

Now, Hitchens is far too literate to be unaware that the drunken asshole who nevertheless manages to write interesting prose while intoxicated is somewhat of a cliché in itself. His denial at the linked site is interesting in that it isn’t so much a denial as an attempt to deflect the subject. It seems he may actually be a little ashamed of his behavior, since he was trying to spin it even though he was given the every chance to put it behind him.

But being a socially autistic bully, he just couldn’t pass up the chance to take a free shot in print at a priest. Given that there was a room full of people at the event, I have a feeling the story of his boorish behavior will be confirmed in due time. But what is more troubling than Hitchens’s behavior is that no one saw fit to speak up about it until Hitchens himself decided to drew attention to the incident in his Vanity Fair piece.

It’s a pity that no matter how drunk Hitchens might get during a debate with me, he still wouldn’t dare to get in my face. I’m just not sure if it’s my stunning good looks or the 17-inch guns.

Here’s the transcript; I found the following exchange to be rather more interesting than the brouhaha:

Unidentified Audience Member: [inaudible] wasn’t the Marxist dialectical materialism a form of religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I won’t have a word said against Marxist dialectical materialism.

Unidentified Audience Member: Repeat the question, please?

Christopher Hitchens: The lady asked, Wasn’t Marxist dialectical materialism a form of religion? Well, the answer to that is that yes, in a way, it was. It was designed as it was to be the negation of faith.

Here’s the common misquotation in modern discourse. Who here has not heard it said that Marx said that religion was the opium of the people? Hands up who hasn’t heard that. Good. He said absolutely no such thing. In his contribution to the — his introduction, actually, to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right– Karl Marx says the following about religion. He says, “Religion is the heart of the heartless world, the spirit of the spiritless situation,” and adds that religion “has plucked the flowers from the chain, not so that we shall bear the chain without any consolation, but so that we shall break the chain and cull the living flower.” It’s very important that you understand that difference.

And the lady asked me as a supplementary question, Isn’t it the case that he learned all this from, as it were, Western civilization? It’s true to an extent. I mean, he was the son of a rabbi, but he repudiated Judaism. But it is the — I think you’ll see it’s the absolute negation of the vulgar parody of what Marx is supposed to have believed.

And for this reason, of course, I would say, to declare oneself a Marxist in any sense at all is to say, No, it’s not a religion; it is defined as a non-belief in the supernatural and as a repudiation of anything could be called a faith. Marxism’s great mistake was it believed it had found material evidence for a past, a present and a future; and that material means alone could install it. You could say that that was a terrible idea, but you can’t call it a religion.

So not only does Hitchens nearly attack a priest, but he also manages to undercut Sam Harris’s attempt to delink atheism from Communism.

This has to be the funniest mismatch between the audio and the video that I’ve ever seen. If the humor is lost on you because you don’t follow the NFL, it might help to know that Buffalo tight end Kevin Everett fractured his spine and was thought to be permanently paralyzed in the Bills game against the Broncos a few weeks ago.

Billy is out of order:

[I]t’s a startling coincidence that the wealthiest, freest countries in the world – generally speaking – are functioning democracies or on that path.

I don’t see it as a coincidence, I merely conclude you have the causal order reversed. From what I have observed, I conclude that freedom leads to wealth, which may or may not lead to democracy, which subsequently leads to decadence, tyranny and societal collapse.

The United States has more democracy as measured by the number of voters enfranchised but less freedom and economic growth than it had at the end of the 19th century. A century from now, I expect it will have very little of the three, assuming it even exists as a sovereign nation.

Freedom and democracy are not synonymous, from ancient Athens to modern Switzerland there are many examples demonstrating how the relationship is intrinsicly hostile. Consider the results of three of the most one-sided democratic results ever recorded on a national level: averaging 95.9 approval with 95.5 percent of the registered voters showing up to vote, the German Reichskanzler was able to affirm that the will of the German people supported his decisions to assume dictatorial rule, seize the Rhineland, and annex Austria.

Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night. Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion). The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President’s Texas ranch….

“The Eqyptians are speaking to Saddam Hussein,” said Mr Bush. It seems he’s indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he’s allowed to take $1billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction.”

Asked by the Spanish premier whether Saddam – who was executed in December last year – could really leave, the President replied: “Yes, that possibility exists. Or he might even be assassinated.”

But he added that whatever happened: “We’ll be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

I imagine Hussein would have settled for the money, since we now know that he was bluffing about having any nuclear weapons. (If chemical weapons are WMDs, you probably have the necessary ingredients in your house.) Of course, taking him out the cheap and easy way wouldn’t have allowed the neocons to thump their chests and play Masters of the Universe, so it was never an option that the world democratic revolutionaries were likely to choose.

After all, it’s no fun to occupy a country if you don’t get to blow things up first.

UPDATE: Contrary to what some Bush defenders are claiming, the full transcript clearly shows that Bush had no interest in negotiating with Hussein:

Bush: Saddam won’t change and will keep playing games. The moment of getting rid of him has arrived. That’s it….

Aznar: An exile with some kind of guarantees?

Bush: No guarantees. He’s a thief, a terrorist, a war criminal.

I took the presidential candidate matching test. It’s interesting to see how far my views diverge from both the Democratic and the Republican frontrunners. And it does tend to support my contention that from my perspective, there is no difference between the Lithper and the Lizard Queen.

Paul
96.30%

Thompson
60.19%

Giuliani
25.00%

Clinton
24.07%

Women are no happier, but men are:

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.

I find two things to be rather peculiar about the wide variety of responses to these recent findings. Since work generally sucks – if you wanted to do it, they wouldn’t have to pay you – it shouldn’t take a genius to determine that the feminist agenda of encouraging women to enter the work force wasn’t likely to increase their happiness.

Second, the more that women push to assert their newly acquired power, the more men are comfortable just kicking back and doing whatever they feel like at the moment. Few women understand that once a man feels that his opinion doesn’t matter, he completely checks out and ceases to care about it. Sex hasn’t been so easy to obtain since the Clan of the Cave Bear rape-them-at-the-stream days, and what with 24-hour sports channels, video games on giant flatscreens and free Internet porn, there’s not really much for the average guy to be unhappy about.

Sure, the law is stacked against you if you want to roll the traditional way, but that’s easily avoided. No ring, no foul.

Granted, this probably does not bode terribly well for societal survival, but today’s young men have been told their entire lives that women are more capable than they are, so why should they feel any need to lift a finger? Why not let women do all the work; they’ve been screaming for the opportunity anyhow and HALO 3 just came out, so you might as well crack a cold one, fire up the old bong and leave them to do their thing.

Rod Dreher doesn’t like what he sees coming down the road:

In my experience, this is where most (but not all) business people are politically. To the extent they back Republicans, it’s out of hoping that GOP pols will say what the religious and social conservatives want to hear, but not deliver on it…. If I were betting on it, I’d say that every traditional religious organization in this country is on track to lose its tax-exempt status in the next 10 to 20 years.

12-15 years sounds about right to me. Two terms of Hillary Clinton will other have the country ready for the second coming of Ronald Reagan or else so demoralized and decivilized that her successor will have carte blanche to really twist the knife on the remnants of the Christian Nation.

A crucial GOP fundraising committee is nearly broke, according to its latest monthly filing with the Federal Election Committee last week. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) reported $1.6 million in cash on hand and $4 million in debts as of Aug. 31. The group helps bankroll House campaigns for GOP candidates. Its counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reported $22.1 million, more than 10 times its Republican counterpart.

It looks like conservatives are following up on their threat to stop giving money to Republicans following the president’s pro-immigration push earlier this year. Here’s hoping they all stay home on election day if Rudy McRompson is nominated and the Republican Party takes such a horrific, historic beating that the neocons and pragmatists will run like lemmings to the Democratic Party where they always belonged.

Those now supporting Ron Paul should remember these words from National Review’s Rick Brookhiser when he is pleading with Paul’s supporters to help Rudy McRompson defeat Hillary Clinton instead of sitting at home watching the Republicans sink on election day:

Ron Paul is a pencil head, leading a jacquerie of wicked idiots.

Yes, those wicked, idiotic libertarians are practically Jacobins because they refuse to goose-step behind a fascist faux-republican like Rudolph Giuliani.

As I have repeatedly written before, the Republican Party doesn’t deserve Ron Paul. If they refuse to nominate him, they will richly deserve the crushing electoral defeat that is in the making.

And don’t fail to notice that whatever they say about the woman George Bush is secretly advising, their real antipathy is reserved for the only presidential candidate who honors the U.S. Constitution.

He who does not believe in God will often find very strange ways of occupying his time. Perhaps some of you will recall my statement that from a societal perspective, atheism is but a halfway point en route to paganism. NRO’s Corner was waxing lightheartedly apocalyptic about an upcoming Furry convention in Atlanta yesterday and the first thought that struck me was that the fetish sounded like the sort of thing that would harbor inordinate appeal for the socially autistic:

Religion:
33% Agnostic/Undecided
20% NeoPagan
18% Christian
10% Atheist
05% Non-denominational Theist
05% Jewish
01% Eastern Philosophy

Unsurprisingly, that appears to be the case. In case you don’t recall the general statistics, that’s 20x overrepresentation for High Church atheists and 2.4x overrepresentation of Low Church atheists. Pagans were by far the most overrepresented with 133x, which contrasts greatly with the Christian underrepresentation by 4x. The survey also showed 3x overrepresentation of the most highly educated. Obviously, one can only conclude from this that attending church is crazy, but dressing up like animals and engaging in homoerotic frolics is simply a rational, scientific way to spend an afternoon.

And here I thought the one sci-fi con I attended was a bit of a freak show.

Now, I fully support your right to dress up like a dragon-squirrel and molest the nearest stuffed panda if that’s what you want to do, but please do not expect me not to laugh or view it as a positive sign of societal health.