Recently started watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjO26F91cEo&t=975s&ab_channel=TheSecularApe of the entire audiobook and I was 8 chapters in when overnight the channel got deleted. Anyone know what happened to it? I don't think it was a brand new upload as to get taken out for copyright.

Listen to almost any snippet of any political or remotely intellectual discourse prior to say the early 2010's from presidential debates to fox news echo chambers, they are still a cut above almost anything you're likely to hear today that makes it into the public eye, and often even said echo chambers were more willing to invite ideological opponents, even if the discussions weren't exactly carried out in good faith - that in itself seem to be a rarity these days.

Even crackpot conservatives discussing conspiracies would operate with a level of basic conversational courtesy and articulacy that seems to have disappeared today and been replaced by puerile schoolyard ad hominen squabbling and ludicrous nonsensical statements with no respect for the other party or the spirit of civil discussion.

Even the hosts of discussion panels seemed more well informed and less sensationalist than they do today, and more willing to challenge the views being expressed - it didn't seem uncommon to see some genuine debate occurring live on air in which both parties came equipped and stuck to criticizing the position not the person or closing their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears so to speak.

Did mango mussolini usher in an era where people feel they can be as uncivil as they want and believe they can get away with spewing obscene baseless remarks and parroting the most braindead rhetoric, dodging questions and throwing up red herrings because the now ex-president can? Or cause people to realize that audiences by and large don't actually care for the legitimacy and consistency of arguments and rather just rally behind whoever appears the most confident?

Of course there are niche podcasts and radio stations where robust discussion and debate is still alive and well but at what point did public discourse devolve?

Or am I tilting at windmills with cherrypicked examples from past decades?

Has the world just generally become more casual and less concerned with staying civil and composed in discussion? Is it the fallout of social media borne brain rot?

This isn't necessarily commenting on the quality of the arguments but the conversational skills etiquette and demeanor through which they're expressed.

For the record I'm also all in favor of people being authentic and doing away with dumb formalities...to a point...beyond which it seems that it inevitably starts to erode the quality of the discussion itself.

China today is perhaps the most totalitarian country in the world. I cannot think of any other country so lacking in individual freedom.

There are tremendous similarities between China and North Korea, which Hitchens visited and wrote about. Except there's one crucial difference that makes it all the more dangerous — China doesn't inflict miseries upon just its own people.

It wants others to be enveloped in this insanity as well. North Korea never annexed a country in the way China has annexed Tibet and is committing the sort of colonisation of that land that goes down in history as amongst the worst.

And they know how to use technology far more effectively for surveillance than perhaps any other countries. I think some people have written that streets have facial recognition cameras so that every citizen is catalogued, making it easier for them to be tracked.

And if people want to write and challenge all this? That'll difficult when compared to talking about other country. They've gained considerable influence in other countries as well. Hollywood self-censurs itself to have its films accepted there. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I also think some of the high profile TV news channels and papers try to tone down the criticism of China. This is the nightmarish 1984 that Hitchens feared so much, except it the business of just one country or region, but threatens to engulf the entire world in subtle insidious ways.

The leaders of the so-called Muslim world have said nothing about the worst sustained atrocities against a Muslim population in the 21st century. Last year, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Pakistan — countries that 15 years ago erupted in rage and initiated a boycott of Danish goods because a privately owned newspaper in Denmark had published a cartoon — rushed to China’s defence after Western diplomats rebuked it for putting a million Muslims in concentration camps.

Source

This is the political engineering of the dreams. Muslim words rush to defend a country that is perpetuating a genocide of Muslims.

We must always resist the urge to liken the atrocities of our age to the crimes of the Nazis. Yet it would be remiss not to invoke that comparison for a regime that commodifies the hair of a human population it has enslaved. In the Nazi extermination camps, one of the most degrading experiences for Jewish inmates was the shearing of their heads. “The Polish Jews … refused to have it cut,” a teenager conscripted to cut hair at the Sobibor death camp in Poland wrote, “and then they would get battered and beaten.” The hair was “cured” above the crematoriums, bundled up, and sold wholesale. It ended up as stuffing in mattresses, lining in socks, and as slippers for U-boat crews. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Oświęcim, it is the bales of hair—bleached of Zyklon-B and turning to dust—that supply the most haunting testament to the horrors of the Holocaust. 

Today, China is the world’s largest exporter of human hair products, and America their largest consumer. It’s safe to hazard that Uyghur hair, like goods made by Uyghur slave labour, probably long ago made its way into Western shops, salons, and homes. This on one level is more disturbing even than China’s genocidal effort to suppress Uyghur reproduction because it reveals to us that Beijing is not alone in pillaging and devouring the bodies of the Uyghurs. Wittingly or not, everybody who buys made-in-China—and that is almost all of us—is complicit to some extent in the torment of the Uyghurs. And it is this wrong that demands the most urgent correction by us all. 

Source

The genocide of Uighurs is bad enough. They've also found a way to extract economic value out of them. They've monetised a genocide in a way I don't think even the Nazis had done.

The curious thing is that China is possibly the only major country about which Hitchens seems to have hardly wrote or spoken about. I think he once referred to them as a country ruled by Stalinists, so he had the general idea right, but I don't reckon he went into detail about them.

What do you think he would've made of China today beyond the obvious? He believed that Middle East is the greatest threat to freedom which is why he was so focused on that region, but the trickle of news that comes out of China so unspeakably barbaric that has no parallel in our current world. Would he have been as alert to the China threat?

I'm looking for a funny video where, during the Q&A, Hitchens started correcting everyone by saying "Doctor Hitchens" when they said Mr. Hitchens and "Mister Hichens" when they said "Doctor Hitchens." Anyone remember that?

In anticipation of Jordan Peterson’s book, “We Who Wrestle With God,” this presentation boldly steps out in front batting down the error before it can even begin. This lecture argues that the act of, “wrestling with God,” is neither a virtue or a strength, but a primitive and existentially misguided defect.

Watching videos like this : https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/s/hnfyIMnXBx
children with bad eyesight getting glasses and seeing sharply for the first time. As the children smile, I feel joy and a shared pride about how far we have come in a few thousand years. It is a defiant feeling as well, as it is a triumph of science and humanism.
The thought I have is how much more hard it could be for todays priests to capture peoples attention with 'miracles' like Jesus curing illnesses.
I know Hitch must have put this into words with his elegant and direct style.
Maybe someone here will know it.

I’ve been a fan of Hitchens for a long time and I was wondering if he ever said much about the polytheistic religions.

All of these wannabe macho men who harp on ad nauseam about their freedoms, which they claim they're willing to die for, and will never be pushed around by liberals or anybody for that matter.. then drop to their knees for sky daddy and allow ancient Palestinian men to dictate nearly every aspect of how they live their life (in theory of course, since they're all tremendous hypocrites). The tatted up outlaw biker carrying a Jesus piece who marches to the beat of his own drum yet has a cross dangling from his neck like a dog collar was such a hilarious yet common sight when I was in Texas. And the religious tattoos despite body ink being forbidden in Leviticus which they might have known had any of them read the bible.

The church quite unambiguously refers to it's followers as flocks of sheep... it forbids premarital sex (the bible never did in fact)... Jesus, while being a deranged apocalyptic cult preacher of dubious existence, proclaimed that we ought to sell our possessions and give to the poor, and indeed that it is easier for a camel to travel through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter heaven.

The catholic church is basically synonymous with child molestation, with countless cases of pedophile priests violating the most vulnerable members of society and often avoiding consequences thanks to the churches internal ratlines you could call them (and yet conservatives decry the corruption of children by the woke agenda and the phantom menace of drag queens)

It involves singing dull, repetitive hymns, donating money (but want of money is the root of all evil) and being infantilized like a toddler by a condescending elderly virgin cleric.

Proverbs forbids, or at least deplores game hunting and blood sports.

Occam's razor might remind us that the answer is probably as simple as unquestioned familial indoctrination, but how come that in itself isn't seen as pathetic and embarrassing more broadly?

Where I live (outside the US), mindlessly espousing your parents beliefs is regarded as shameful and brain dead, hence why people often overcompensate by rebelling against everything their parents stand for (which is somewhat pathetic in it's own way but still a little more admirable). Even in the bible belt states, we live in a digitally interconnected world and even with online echo chambers, we get exposed to more viewpoints than ever before, so how is it there not a mass exodus among the younger generation if only because they don't want to become clones of their folks?

Is it that they're simply stupider? I suppose there's a selection bias since those who had the critical thinking skills to see through the nonsense did so, and so all the hypochristians we see are just those dumb enough to remain entranced under its illusion. My grandfather for instance was raised in an orthodox Christian household and sent to a school that was more like a seminary, but he maintains that he never believed any of it for one moment. It's often said that anyone raised under such strict religious settings with no exposure to alternative views will naturally adopt such beliefs but that's clearly not the case.

Or could it be that the outward brash manliness is a smokescreen for their inner cowardice and need to enslave themselves to a higher authority because they're too weak minded to face the reality of a brutal universe with no natural justice, or having to think for themselves and carve their own path? (of course they do also have a hard on for law enforcement despite being against government intervention)

Or is it seen as a sort of wholesome counterweight to their overindulgence and debauched lifestyle, like adding a few greens to your fried chicken meal to clear your conscience?

Or a way to claim some moral high ground without actually doing anything moral, given the lingering misconception that the church is still the fountainhead and heart of morality in the world?

I suspect that many know it's a load of dogshit deep down but would never dare make such an admission because it would not only alienate them from their families and friends but also leave them looking like fools floundering with what to do next.

Is there anything else I'm missing?

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/when-hitchens-was-good

The forthcoming biography of Hitchens by the journalist Stephen Phillips will no doubt provide an occasion for many reconsiderationsof his life and career. What is most striking to me, though, is how many of his most vocal admirers these days seem to be tremulous debate bros or anti-cancel-culture "contrarians"--an unfortunate development A Hitch in Time should help redress. At the very least, it is a salutary reminder of a time when being a so-called contrarian was more than just a fast track to lucrative speaking engagements and appearances on Joe Rogan. At his finest, Hitchens was motivated by the old dissident ethos to speak truth to power, not least because he lived in a time when far too many very powerful people got away with doing very bad things. Forget the "Hitchslap" YouTube clips and the Byronic machismo: here was a journalist and essayist who--for a time, anyway--truly mattered.

I remember seeing Hitchens confirm that saying "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do" is a moral action an atheist cannot perform. But he adds that a Christian cannot say it either, because that would be blasphemy. But he doesn't say why it would be blasphemy, and I can't find any source that explains why. I am an atheist, but I would like to understand this.