Hitchens - The Principle of Uncertainty

Debate on religion: Ciudad de las Ideas 2009
Puebla, México

Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett vs Dinesh D'Souza, Shmuley Boteach, Nassim Taleb. Neutral: Robert Wright.

"Don´t exploit the news because it would leave people to despair; I don´t want anyone to despair. We have a number of consolations; we have our own solidarity, we have love, we have literature, we have our duties to each other. What leads to despair is to live the only life one has being told what to do by despots and crackpots and pseudoscientists who claim the right to order us around in the name of god. Humanity has to outgrow and transcend that oldest of all the tyrannies."

Watch the whole debate at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnqo4_X7PE

Category:

Education

Tags:

• ciudad
• ideas
• christopher
• hitchens
• religion
• atheism
• ethics
• moral
• uncertainty
• tiranny
• despair
• humanity
• reason

[rollsthepaul]

Hitchens throws religion into serious doubt for anyone who pays attention. I have yet to hear a religion apologist adequately defend the tenets of the faith. There is an old saying "better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". This appears to be the position of religion. Whatever our spirits may be, religion certainly does not capture the essence.

[disdanic]

Yes the quote ‘may’ be a correlation to the wiretap, and it ‘may’ not imply impeachment based on the Iraq war, except that it is taken from a chapter titled Mesopotamia From Both Sides, that deals explicitly with Hitchens’ involvement in the debate over the Iraq war. You probably know that though, having ‘studied much of Hitchens work.’

[disdanic]

Now, I had stated clearly that I believe it was a mistake to invade Iraq, both strategically and from a humanitarian standpoint. But that had far more to do with America’s incompetence in the aftermath than it did the legality of the war. I don’t know why you’re bothering with the Marxist references. The negation of private property is not a feature of Marxism Hitchens endorses; the negation of sovereignty when one commits genocide against one’s own people is.

[disdanic]

Furthermore, he has argued that there is no distinction between the two Iraq wars; they are one continuous war. Read his book The Long Short War. Removing Saddam was considered unfinished work; the reasons for deposing him in 2003 were unchanged from the reasons in 1991 (perhaps a few brutal butcherings longer). Thus questions of legality seemed somewhat immaterial; if there were justifications for removing Saddam in 1991, which it certainly were, then there had to be justifications in 2003.

[disdanic]

Hitchens was thoroughly convinced that Saddam’s regime had relinquished all claims to sovereignty over the Iraqi people as a consequence of its heinous crimes against them. As such, he did not consider removing the regime from power to be an infringement of sovereignty. You can debate the sovereignty claim (it would be a brave person who defended Saddam on that charge), but you cannot claim that Hitchens ever advocated an ‘imperial’ invasion of Iraq.

[disdanic]

@TheGreatPrince Ah I knew it was a mere matter of time before the shameful quest for moral equivalence between Bush and Saddam slithered into this discussion; it is a favourite of the pro-fascist pacifist movement. Saddam’s Ba’ath Party essentially consisted of a minority tribe from the Sunni minority. If you fail to distinguish between the Iraqi people and the savage kleptocrats who ruled them, that is simply your own deficiency of awareness (to add to the list).

[TheGreatPrince]

--apparent inability to accept the possibility of his pseudo-intellectualism, and the numerous personal attacks on my character being demonstrations of that.

[TheGreatPrince]

--about the wiretap piece, but the quote doesn't imply impeachment based on Iraq war causation. You [more specifically], again, may not openly admit imperialistic motives concerning the Iraq war, but the premises used follow to that conclusion. I am not in the least convinced concerning Hitchens', though. Nor did I presume any 'lowest possible motive', as I stated earlier, I have studied much of Christopher Hitchens' work, which you seem to not believe, but perhaps that may be caused by the--

[TheGreatPrince]

--state. The very idea of the United States 'reconstructing' a sovereign country is another demonstration of imperialism. As for my 'rant', you compared the Gulf war, a proper demonstration of interventionism following Constitutional principles and due process, to the Iraq war, an improper demonstration of interventionism. The comparison was dishonest. Quote; rather misleading, it states 'impeachable incompetence' about the administration, which may be a correlation, as I mentioned earlier--

[TheGreatPrince]

--that if the Iraq war was truly a 'liberation' movement, while [being] illegal, then the premises to the Iraq war were necessarily tyrannical and thus supporting the Iraq war is to support the illegal imperialism of another sovereign country; that is not 'childish hyperbole', that's following the premises to their logical conclusions. That is also not liberation, that is Marxism; the arbitrary negation of private property and due process through the philosophy of interventionism by the--

[TheGreatPrince]

@disdanic So, it's justifiable to illegally attack another country, and then assert it was a war against tyranny, while the means to removing that tyranny was inherently tyrannical to begin with? And the reasoning to avoid blatant contradiction is to play semantics by differentiating between 'Iraq' and the Saddam Hussein regime? Really? Christopher Hitchens may have never explicitly stated his advocacy for the 'conquering' of Iraq, but his line of reasoning follows to the conclusion--