>Hitchens: What I wanted to say was something from his book, something I have a feeling you will agree with. Taylor writes at one point 'When I read other people writing about George Orwell, I keep thinking "hey, this is my author you're talking about."' Do you ever get that feeling?
>Packer: I do.
Who is ***your*** writer, Veeky Forums?
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Why do people like this guy? I missed the train with Hitchens.
he talks all smart like and stuff
Cuz muh atheism
Not preferring the redpilled Hitchens.
He's the dad I never had
Cuz muh cancer
Nigga was a closet christfag,who peddle muh atheism cuz being edgy sold more copies.
What an absurd claim he is making.
It's called the redpill, friend
>muh pills
Take your meds
someone explain the difference between peter and christopher psychologically
They are exactly the same. They both equated intelligence with being a contrarian. They just got there by different means.
Shelley
>They both equated intelligence with being a contrarian.
holy shit. they're like me!!!1
He was a living atheist power fantasy. Most atheists are fedoras who exist only on the Internet and shit themselves whenever they're made to debate theism and religion in person, but Hitchens was openly confrontational with people in the real world and held his own (against lunatic Protestants).
Niot at all, Intelligence is merely a tool which one uses to justify and legitimize ones contrarianism.
Hallo chaps This is Peter Jolly good jolly good All of you get jobs right now Shame on all of you Your all ROtten to the CORE! Spiritual deserts all of you Cheerios matey
i love based peter
he's a patrician
...
If that is true why are people contrarian?
He's a Blairite.
>muh drugs cause Islamic terrorism
>Islam dindu nuffin. Islam good religion.
>Purging Blarities is bad
Fucking bluepilled Blairite motherfucker.
...
Joycean
chesterton tbhwufamalam
I've read at least a hundred of his essays and I still read one a day
could we get some real responses? thanks
Probably not, /pol/ and arcanine ruined this board
This is the most disapproving face I've ever seen Peter make. What did the person say? It must have been especially atrocious.
Unification is not absurd.
It's not massively absurd for certain sections of the population. According to my dear ol mum they used to go on about garlic in food a bit like they go on about curry smells now, and treated it like a totally foreign ingredient.
However 1960s Britain also had a sizeable immigrant population and obviously very few shared Peter's warm ale, bland food, racist homogenization as it's p much been completely dropped.
>racist homogenization
oh boy here we go
>He's a Blairite.
He's a card carrying conservative you dunce. He even wants the party to split so you have the hyper traditional party again (he's closer to Andrea Leadsom than Theresa May p much). He liked Thatcher but remembers her as more of a traditionalist than she was.
1960s had such tory campaigns as "if you want a nigger neighbour vote liberal or labour". That particular class of divisive politics called for homogenisation through racial conflict (get anyone not local enough out).
Nice history lesson. As far as I'm concerned the "traditionalist values" don't call for a re-institution of race-based hatred but rather a uniformity of identity and a strengthening of values. I doubt Peter would deign to advocate for discrimination.
>I doubt Peter would deign to advocate for discrimination.
So do I, but Peter is also looking at the past with the rose tinted glasses of pure ideology as conservatives are wont to do. There is no way of taking the politics and climate of 1960s Tory Britain and applying it to "unify" anyone culturally without racism, so Peter constructs a non racist unifying narrative to fantasise about most likely. Then mixes up fantasy and reality.
I don't think it's stupid to look at cultural unification or bad, just that the answer isn't there.
>There is no way of taking the politics and climate of 1960s Tory Britain and applying it to "unify" anyone culturally without racism
Absolutely wrong, but I don't live in Britain so I guess it's not worth arguing.
You know it would be nice to go out in public and not be able to smell people's food coming out through their pores. I live in a very homogeneous East Indian neighborhood and the inside of stores often stinks to the rafters of curry and BO. I'm not talking about restaurants either.
Sometimes when I go for my swim the change room stinks of a combination of what I can only describe as a mix of garlic and feces. Some of them are obviously aware of how bad they smell but instead of bathing they overcompensate with spray on deodorant, which combines to make chemical-curry-BO, a toxic agent banned in California.
It's so bad that I will hold my breath when I walk past certain people. I wish those panchods would take a shower every few days.
I doubt it can even apply to anywhere outside of England anymore. If you want an idea of how truly ridiculous Tory thinking is then look at the Centre for Policy Studies where you'll find such claims as "we lost the 1997 election because of something that happened in the 18th century" without any irony or anything like that. They're all either really crazy and traditionalist or a bit less crazy but neoliberal (and sometimes a weird mix of both).
Autism.
Irishfag here. You can have old timebase values without racism; old time values a free e working class values. Fair pay, hard work, fuck nepotism and everyone does their share. Talk shit about old time values all you want but parents used to watch all children back then, not just their own. Neighbours were very friendly then as well, compared to now;even in Irish cities you get the friendliness you ld expect from suburbs and that used to be a lot more common.
Not all conservatives or alt-rights are crazy. Sure, the idea of nationalism is quite similar to the idea of maintaining cultural identity at its core.
That poster was fake man. It's not real.
Reminds me of the time my media teacher read out this ludicrous "50s vintage" article on how to be a good housewife, insisting that it's real and using it as an actual example of 50s values, despite it being a fake satirical contemporary thing.
Early Pynchon
V to Vineland that guy is writing for me and me alone it seems. I still enjoy his later works but not to nearly the same degree. When someone starts blabbing off about their reading of Gravity's Rainbow or God forbid how "incomprehensible" Pynchon's works are I foam at the mouth.
a simple google search shows it was not fake and that you're full of shit. or is google also part of the librul media?
If you mean this, then yes it is fake and also from New Zealand.
If it is something else then post it.
sounds like the whites didnt want to get displaced
rip
He was a smooth talking sophist
>Not all conservatives or alt-rights are crazy.
I broadly agree. It just doesn't apply to that what Peter Hitchens is talking about.
I wish there were a more Irish mentality in Britain to some degree but it is really crazy neoliberals and crazy traditionalists. The sort of things traditionalist conservatives focus on here tends to relate to their god given right to torture small animals instead of something more fun like duck hunting or fishing or pigeon shooting or whatever. It's like they are actively trying to make themselves disgusting to outsiders iykwim. And I think that's also what was behind the political racism of the 60s, a desire to have "our club" after the older pillars holding up elitism had fallen.
As an aside I'm finding the revival of the whole banana box argument (if a cat gives birth in a banana box are they kittens or bananas, i.e. foreigners can't have truly British children). Nobody ever see the repeats of Rising Damp? Like there was a whole TV series way back making fun of the idea.
>I'm finding the revival of the whole banana box argument
I'm finding it weird btw
You're finding it weird because of a TV show? Is that how we determine things now, through television? Or do you mean that you think the TV show represented the death of that argument. I would disagree because television writers are a different stock to the rest of the country.
...
The play and the TV show killed it off for a good 40 years or so. Amongst other things. It's just a poor argument that some people seem to think has traction.
chekhov
I picked up one of his non-atheist works on a whim, Unacknowledged Legislation, a small collection of short pieces by Hitchens on literary personalities in the public sphere, in which he defends Eliot's early Sweeney Agonistes, for example, against people like Anthony Julius that 'advance the novel theory that anti-Semitism was "Eliot's muse"', and writes in closing that you should 'make the assumption that you like, given Eliot's sympathies. But the Julies book reminds one, yet again, to hesitate once, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry'.
I obviously skipped his argumentation, but it's quite sensible and the closing statement moderate, he makes one or two snide comments in the piece but it doesn't overshadow the point he's trying to make, so people can think of his pompous atheism what they like, at the very he least he didn't seem to be an aesthetic illiterate.
youtube.com
Peter Hitchens is best Hitchens.
Skipped his argumentation in my post here, that is*
Richard Yates is my writer, to go back on topic.
Eliot, though only for The Waste Land. Mostly because, as a student, I know that 90% of English students (I'm not one) cannot sympathise with a work so unapologetically conservative.
Stupidest post in the thread so far
But I'd love to hear your explanation of how The Waste Land is "so unapologetically conservative"
Are you thick?
elegant argument
I woke up about five minutes ago. What on earth do you think The Waste Land is about if you don't see it as being conservative?
>Labour are nigger lovers
I don't see anything controversial about this statement.
Eliot being conservative shouldn't be a problem. You are allowed to disagree with his outlook on life and his works, but it is retarded to judge one based on the other.
>What on earth do you think The Waste Land is about if you don't see it as being conservative?
It's about having a hard on for James Joyce and trying desperately to impress him.
It's not a problem, it's fucking glorious. My point is that the average English student can't even sympathise with the worldview he presents.
>can't even sympathise
Worst kind of lit student desu. This is worse than "you don't really understand Virginia Woolf because you're not a woman" tier
Please explain how the average English student, who probably thinks queer liberation is mankind's greatest achievement, is supposed to be able to sympathise with someone who already thought civilisation had become a waste land a hundred years ago.
>is supposed to be able to sympathise
Why do you hold having some feeling of camaraderie/sympathy in such high esteem? It's not important to academics m8.
It's not about camaraderie. You can't hope to have any meaningful understanding of a poem that forcefully presents a certain worldview that you have no understanding of. The average English student (at least in the UK) would simply find the beliefs of Eliot, or any other genuine conservative, absurd.
>You can't hope to have any meaningful understanding of a poem that forcefully presents a certain worldview that you have no understanding of.
Uh oh spagghettios. It's the old "you can't understand this work unless you have privileged access to the author's mind (btw I have that unlike everybody else)" argument.
No, it's not, as I've already made clear. You don't need to agree with someone's views, you need to be able to sympathise with them. If you are a 'progressive', you almost certainly have no understanding of why anyone would be a conservative. The Waste Land is meaningless outside of the context of a conservative worldview.
>You don't need to agree with someone's views
>If you are a 'progressive', you almost certainly have no understanding of why anyone would be a conservative
Self contradiction already. W E W
I will try to spell this out to you one last time.
If the views underlying a poem are alien to you, you will find it more or less impossible to gain a meaningful understanding of it, depending on how critical those views are.
Views not alien to someone are not necessarily the views that that person holds.
Comprende?
>I will try to spell this out to you one last time.
You're just dumb as a bag of shit bro. If you're really a first year lit student expect a third if you pull your socks up.
>If the views underlying a poem are alien to you, you will find it more or less impossible to gain a meaningful understanding of it, depending on how critical those views are.
Author is dead. Who cares what (highly specific) views your fantasy of the author happens to hold? What matters is the work in front of everyone.
Sorry chum, but you're the dullard.
That Eliot had a conservative worldview is neither a highly specific or fantastical claim. It's completely fundamental to the poem and uncontroversial.
>Author is dead.
>What matters is the work in front of everyone.
What is it like to be so utterly vacuous?
I'm sorry that you lack the critical insight to make any sense of the most significant poem written in the 20th century.
Bye.
>Bye.
Kek. The pseud runs away.
And if your fantasies were less specific maybe other people could understand the poem too :^). You don't seem to be able to make up your mind either on what bars access to understanding the poem: politics, stupidity or vacuity?
what do you think conservatism is about if it's not about conserving the civilization as it has been for the last hundred years?
A man who wants society to be as it was 60 years ago is a conservative. A man who wants it to be as it was 200 years ago is not. Eliot isn't quite either, and there is a case to be made that his political confusions have a net effect of making him a conservative (he could not, for example, imagine any alternative to capitalism). But the Waste Land is not the expression of his content with the current state of civilization. The poet who weeps to see what a hundred years of industrialism have done to the river Thames might have been conservative in an age when the rapid expansion of industry was new; but in Eliot's own time it is not conservative, because it wants to conserve something that is long gone.
>militant atheist
>bad taste
All checks out
My writer is Austrian - it's either Ransmayr or Rosendorfer, can't decide
Both wrote wonderful books that I accidentally read at the beginning of my "reading career", and they've both convinced me that in books nothing is pointless and everything is allowed.
You should read both, they're never discussed on Veeky Forums
How can you respect a man whose entire personality is derived from the fact that his older brother died before he managed to figure out a single comback?
>working class values
>hard work
Typical irish villainy
