Brianne’s topics part 2.
What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?
Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or boring or unamusing.
I most disagree with just about anything he ever said about women, and in particular the Vanity Fair article that said women aren’t funny (and underlined it by adding you know what I mean, don’t deny it). I disagree with his views on abortion.
what does your superhero costume for Fighting Fashionable Nonsense look like?
To be literal first – I keep meaning to remove that from the logo. I never liked it, I just kept forgetting to remove it once I took full ownership of B&W (apart from the domain name for the old site, which has been witheld).
To stop being literal…hmm. Billie Burke’s outfit in The Wizard of Oz? No maybe not. Mr Greenjean’s green jeans? Ok but what else. Why, an evil little thing T shirt, of course.
While Hitchens was pretty disgusting and terrible on anything regarding women, he should also be recognized for his extremely irrational, persistent, depraved, inhumane, and inhuman warmongering on Iraq and related matters.
Between women and war it’s impossible to believe that Hitchens was any kind of a skeptic or rationalist at all. He mouthed some of the mantras of skepticism and rationalism when convenient to post-hoc rationalization of his specific beliefs, but there’s simply no way any person practicing a priori devotion to rationalism and skepticism could ever have been Christopher Hitchens.
I like “Fighting Fashionable Nonsense.”
Really? It doesn’t seem too grandiose?
I don’t mind the FN part, that’s a tribute to Alan Sokal, but the “Fighting”? It feels pretentious to me.
I like “fighting”. It’s honest. You don’t want to end up “interrogating” fashionable nonsense.