Neal Pollack knew Christopher Hitchens better than you.

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool.

Compare Dave Zirin, … Read the rest

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Yesterday I expressed (via Katha Pollitt) reservations about a certain kind of combative anger that Hitchens sometimes deployed. Daniel Dennett talks about when rudeness is necessary.

He starts with an example.

We were both appearing in a debate as part of the program of Ciudad de las Ideas, an excellent gathering held annually in Puebla, Mexico. (It’s modeled on TED-I call it TED Mex. Go. It’s well worth the visit.) One of the speakers for the other side, the God side, was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and after our short set pieces, the rebuttals started with the rabbi. We each were allotted four minutes only for rebuttal, and the rabbi launched into a series of outrageous claims trying to besmirch

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I said maybe I should do one of these, because sometimes people do go OT and that can be tiresome if you want to talk about the T, but it’s fine if there’s no T to begin with. If the particular set of people who bump into each other here want to talk about everything in general, I might as well make that possible.

I have a cold. I asked Facebook to sing “Soft Kitty” for me, and it did.

Newt Gingrich plans, if elected president, to arrest judges who don’t do their judging according to the bible.

Kim Jong-un is not sure he’s crazy enough to run North Korea.… Read the rest

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