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Peter Hitchens - On being Insulted by Experts (and non-experts), and my evening...

edgarshade

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On being Insulted by Experts (and non-experts), and my evening with Russell Brand

Daily Mail

15 March 2012 3:48 PM

With reader comments

Well, not an evening, exactly, but a few joyous minutes, connected by some sort of electronic miracle of the kind that has become all too easy in the modern world. The occasion can be found in full at about 40 minutes into this YouTube link

I appear again at around one hour 48 minutes and also briefly at one hour and 54 minutes. And I’m not planning to rehearse arguments on drug legalisation which have been held many times here and can be found in detail in many indexed items, and the comment threads that follow them.

Mr Brand was one of three people that evening who chose to abuse me personally and crudely. Another was Julian Assange, a person I have never previously met and for whom I feel, in general terms, some sympathy. If he wants to call me lavatory-wall names, that’s his privilege. But once again he offered no serious counter to my point. And, like Mr Brand, he received the general support of the audience for behaving in this way. The third was the extraordinarily over-rated lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who – on every occasion when I have debated him – has shown himself to be rather poor at reasoned debate.

More...
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co...xperts-and-my-evening-with-russell-brand.html
 
Jesus, is that asshole related to the late Christopher (he sure looks like it). What an insufferable prick, and what a pathetic lot of commenters. Wish I could say I had seen the debate, I'll have to catch it soon.
 
^Yes they were brothers.

Christopher (the infinitely more reasonable and smarter one) thought of his idiot brother as exactly that up until he found out he was dying. Although some of the debates they had after he decided to reconcile were just barely civil lol.

Seriously why do the good ones die and the idiots like this asshole continue on living polluting the world with their brand of bullshit.

It saddens me to no end.
 
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Here is one of the greatest comments I have ever read in any comments section ever lol.

Your humility level is 0, as is your willingness to engage in self-criticism or even a modicum of self-reflection.

You don't like an audience? They disagree with you? They must be a strange fringe, selected purposely and distortingly to persecute you. They are essentially not people - or at least not real British folk.

Don't like or understand an area of science that people work harder on that you have ever worked on anything in your life? Easy - it's a psuedoscience. They made it up. To trick you.

A concept like addiction tricky for you? Doesn't quite fit in with your folk psychology free-will ideology, based on religon? Easy, doesn't exist. Don't need to say why it doesn't exist - you need to say that you've 'never been shown a good argument'

Your behaviour is anaethma to the very concept of intelligent engagement and yet disgustingly you clearly view yourself as one of the last great free-thinkers of modern times in a world gone bad - typical, narccasitic, self-aggrandaising stuff. Haven't achieved anything? Then pretend the world around you is utterly corrupt and evil ands then you'll achieved so much through just not being one of them!

I'm sure your response to this would just be more faux scholarly, passive-aggressive eyebrow raising and snark, as usual. But for once I just cannot pass without leaving comment.
 
My comment seems to have been accepted then promptly deleted. I submitted it, then refreshed and it popped up, then refreshed again and it disappeared after the next batch of comments popped up.

When you know you're wrong you don't want to give people room to point it out, I suppose.
 
He was right that none of those people refuted his points, they each went on not to answer his questions and go off on a tangent. Which is a shame because they were piss poor points to begin with, and it would have been nice if they had actually showed him up. That seemed to happen a lot, there were tons of weak arguments on the "no" side that went uncountered.
 
I'm getting tired of Daily Fail readers calling everyone in favour of legislation, liberals.
 
I'm getting tired of Daily Fail readers calling everyone in favour of legislation, liberals.

So are the majority of Daily Mail readers!

Say anything anti-Christian, pro-labour or anti-Conservative = get red-arrowed to oblivion
But say "legalise drugs" = get green arrowed
 
Insult and Injury
Daily Mail - 19 March 2012 4:41 PM
With reader comments

Accustomed as I am to being deliberately misrepresented, may I just add a few words on the Russell Brand matter. I was not even slightly complaining about the puerile rudeness and baseless slurs deployed against me in the drugs debate last week. I have, as I say, been insulted over many years by experts, and these were not they. A little abuse is a reasonable price to pay for being unpopular, and unpopularity with fashionable people is seldom a bad sign.
One last point. All I ever said about the alleged comedian’s hat was that he was wearing it. I didn’t say it was silly (though it was) or that gentlemen shouldn’t wear hats indoors (well, he was indoors), just that he was wearing it. That cannot be an insult. He had put it on himself.

As for being an alleged comedian, I didn’t say he wasn’t one. I said it had been alleged that he was one (as it has been). My implication was that it wasn’t proven. He had an easy way of proving the case. Anybody who wants to call me an ‘alleged journalist’ is welcome to do so. Anyone’s welcome to study the evidence. You’d have to do better than that to make me cross.

More...
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/03/insult-and-injury.html

For those that missed it...
http://youtu.be/8-Vuh7puWfc
 
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