Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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Wrong for the Right Reasons might best sum up his position in these years, as perhaps it always did, even during his time as a Trotskyist agitator in the 60's. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. Such cultural debasement would have appalled the man, as we can tell from his book of letters which contains the following advice to young people: "Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. When such a precious and irreplaceable word as "irony" has become a lazy synonym for anomie, there is scant room for originality.

Regarding the second approach, here is where the one weakness of Hitchens' writing starts to glare through. The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.Christopher Hitchens professes a great admiration for Oscar Wilde in this book - mainly for Wilde's wit, but you can see that Hitchens is also influenced by Wilde's public facade. Hitchens examines the fine points of questioning all authority, whether it be statist, political party, religious, the media, and the masses; no dogma goes unchallenged.

It has been said that many stars have died in their advanced years long after it would have been tragic. Sinister phrases of coercion, such as "stabbing in the back" or "giving ammunition to the enemy" have their origin in this dilemma and are always available to help compel unanimity. It can be understood from them that society, like a benign family, tolerates and even admires eccentricity. It might easily be titled Hitchens' Little Book of Big Ideas and to do it justice might require, at minimum, keeping it on your nightstand for a brush-up before bed.The term "intellectual" was coined by those in France who believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Bear in mind that you are only dust, as the Christian book says, or you are only fashioned from a clot of blood, as the Quran says; bear in mind that you were convicted and found guilty, before you were conceived, of crimes in which you couldn’t possibly have been involved, and you have all the burden of proof in your own defense, and you’ve been found guilty. The halo of all those unchallenged presuppositions, gaslighting your drunkards walk through the dark spaces between true knowledge and puffed up pretensions to it. Although Hitchens is often the star of his own books, he is able to put himself to one side to concentrate on the subject. A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough.



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