Re-reading some of Christopher Hitchens work post 9/11 is unsettling. You can see him become progressively unmoored. Not dissimilar to stuff we've seen during pandemic among some thinkers.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Yeah, I remember how immediately after 9/11 he still sounded fairly reasonable and then progressively less so.
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Replying to @EmpressNorton
It's actually a little shocking that for the first few days after 9/11 he kept his cool and then something snapped. And after that he got worse and worse. Very noticable.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @EmpressNorton
I watched a lot of that very up close. It made a certain sense in the milieu of writer dc at the time.
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2/ having said that it's hard for me even to quite explain to my self even just what the logic of it was. i guess i would say that watching it up close i didn't seem surprising. i had a few very uncomfortable interactions with him in that 2002-2003 period after I'd ...
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3/ written highly critical things about him and his defenses of war on terror nonsense. there was just already a lot of ground work laid for that switch in his social set even prior to 9/11. a lot of it kind of flowed naturally from a certain slivery of ...
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4/ human rights intellectual world at the time. how that was is kind of hard to explain. but you could sort of see it play out at the interpersonal level.
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I don't think you can fully understand it without taking into account the chic atheism of the day. He was already coming out of a movement - which i appreciated - but instead of punching up in the us against christian evangilicalism, he turned to punching down against Muslims
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I think that's a very key part of it. I was just rereading this 2010 piece which goes into precisely this point. His atheism was in many ways a contempt for believers which paved the way for his turn.https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-odd-confluence#more-121652 …
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Then there's other wild stuff. Like this from 2006 where he'd gone full dead-ender for the Niger uranium thing like 3 years after it had been debunked. Like Chinese biolab verging on qanon stuff.https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/95516
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This goes to your point about "social set" in an earlier tweet. By 2006, Hitchens was heavily plugged into the Wolfowitz/Cheney/AEI world. Those were his trusted sources and his articles from this period echoed their understanding of the world.
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He thought waterboarding was no big deal until he actually got waterboarded and said "Oh, this is torture"
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