http://unspeak.net/forum The Unspeak™ Forum™ en http://backend.userland.com/rss http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=135#135 135@http://unspeak.net/forum The embarrassment is like torture to me. Even though, in the honorable tradition of my family, I have been trained to be impervious to shame, I shall never be able to visit, or even think of, this page without the hideous remembrance of such an egregious oversight. That I sloppily assumed the link was to the Guardian article is neither defense nor consolation to one of such inflation as I. Try as I might, as try I do, my gag reflex is, as the human body and mind are what they are, a reflex. Involuntary. Not subject to rational control. I look. I think. I gag, no matter the deep and arcane mental training I received from the Monks of Zenn during my years of intrepid travel in the Orient [My Years in the Intrepid Orient, 1994]. There are, I surmise, two possible actions, or, in the Zennish way, inactions, which a ruthlessly compassionate blogowner might take, or, as it were, again in the inscrutable way of the aforementioned Monks, not take. The first, which magically precedes the second, would be to remove the excrescence and mercifully hide my shame. But both of us would know the truth and the retchable reek of it would remain to taunt with its blank, accusating whiteness. There would be no consolation. The second, which equally miraculously succeeds the first, would be to leave the shameful, reeking stool extant as a new challenge to deepen my already considerable existential skills (to which I fancy I may have alluded in relation to the Zennist monks above). The choice is up to you, dear owner. I am at your mercy and sans, this time, any pre-arranged "Uncle!" with which I might mercifully terminate the prolongation of this awful nightmare.--------By the way, putting Hitchens' piece into wordle (to mash a couple of posts) and allowing common words shows that HItchens' second most used word, after "the", is "I". You could of knocked me down with a fevver! Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:23:02 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=134#134 134@http://unspeak.net/forum Eh, I already linked to that above. ;) Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:52:14 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=133#133 133@http://unspeak.net/forum http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/g … k-fro.html Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:28:02 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=132#132 132@http://unspeak.net/forum roger migently wrote:Approaching Hitchens' prose is like walking into a closet where he has been farting for a week. That's perfect! Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:02:55 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=131#131 131@http://unspeak.net/forum It seems parts of Australia may be catching up with the UK.  London had the scientologists, Sydney has the catholics.  The PopeMobile is due to arrive in Sydney in a minute for the "World Deluded Youth Day[s and days and days] and Catholic Recruitment Drive". The New South Wales government has made a new regulation that, amongst other things, makes it a criminal offence punishable by a fine of $5,500 [for Brits that's a bit over two an' a half farsan' knicker] to cause "annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event". You don't even need to cause "offence". Annoyance is enough. As someone said, if you were to expose yourself to a WYD participant you might be fined $1,100 but wear a t-shirt that says the whole thing is a waste of money and the fine could be $5,500. The country is up in arms, of course, at this ridiculous over-reaction to the fear either of protesters waving condoms at "pilgrims", or of what The Chaser crew, the TV comedians who made a mockery of the APEC conference in Sydney last year, might get up to. Bar associations, senior catholics, civil liberties organisations and apparently the majority of "ordinary" people are enraged. Until this regulation was announced a couple of days ago there were a few, sporadic, small protests planned. Now people are travelling from all over Australia specifically to be annoying and inconvenient to people who believe in talking snakes. Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:15:22 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=130#130 130@http://unspeak.net/forum I read Hitchens' piece in VF and I agree it is entirely self-presentational. It's all about him. The world, he seems to think, needs his assessment in order to know what to think. The self-deprecation is pretense because it is always couched in a way that is miraculously self-aggrandising ( e.g.  "Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my [wheezy, paunchy] breath"). Approaching Hitchens' prose is like walking into a closet where he has been farting for a week. Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:29:39 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=129#129 129@http://unspeak.net/forum George Packer has an interesting post about the Hitchens piece, though I don't agree with the following: Packer wrote:he strikes a balance between self-presentation and self-effacement (always apologizing for mentioning his own feelings) Surely apologizing for mentioning one's own feelings is not self-effacement? It's just as self-presentational as the kind of direct self-presentation with which Packer is contrasting it, just with a view to presenting a more sensitive self. The whole setup of the piece is inevitably self-presentational. The most pressing question of our day is whether Christopher Hitchens personally can bring himself to believe, long after the rest of the civilized world knew it to be true, that forced partial drowning is torture. Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:02:58 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=128#128 128@http://unspeak.net/forum I agree wholeheartedly. It demonstrates an astonishing failure of imagination, or a sociopathic lack of sympathetic feeling, or possibly willed ignorance on the part of the people who claim being drowned isn't torture. On the other hand, it always seems to work... Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:54:31 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=127#127 127@http://unspeak.net/forum I think there is something deeply wrong with this "test" or stunt, which anyway several people already enacted before Hitchens. The idea that you can't really know whether forced partial drowning is torture or not until you've been drowned yourself is bizarre, isn't it? Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:40:16 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=126#126 126@http://unspeak.net/forum Now we just need Bush, Cheney and Yoo to try the same test. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:19:08 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=125#125 125@http://unspeak.net/forum Took him long enough.The article itself is a very peculiar piece, with a strange obsession about not lasting as long as KSM, and queer attempts at "writing": Hitchens wrote:As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:20:36 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=124#124 124@http://unspeak.net/forum http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/ju … rights.usa Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:40:55 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=123#123 123@http://unspeak.net/forum That's wonderful, and I didn't know about TED at all. Thanks! Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:07:25 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=122#122 122@http://unspeak.net/forum As TED says, 'The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."'Had to share this with the most intelligent blog community I know (not pissing in any pockets, either). I've watched a few TED talks and they're always excellent. This one, though, is exceptional. And uproariously hilarious in a truly British way. Standing ovation at the end.You Brits will know Sir Ken Robinson. You may not have seen this talk. This is the link:http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_ … ivity.html Do yourself a favour. Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:20:27 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=121#121 121@http://unspeak.net/forum 'I take it that Hitchens is protesting that the brilliance of Amis's book lies in the fact that it's so tedious  it's, like, lethal? (Assuming that "lethal" is how the kidz say "bad" or "wicked" or "sick" these days.)'I've long given up trying to decipher Hitch's laborious efforts to be the neocon answer to Saki. Still, according to the reviewer Amis's strongest point is 'his willingness to forgo political correctness', which is true enough if we take 'political correctness' to mean being correct about politics. The legend says that someone dies if they meet their doppelganger. I wonder what would happen if these 'liberal hawks' visited the Daily Mail office. Then maybe they would discover that their supposedly bold contravention of 'political correctness' is pretty much indistinguishable from demented right wing rants. Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:04:44 -0400