I’ve got a slow connection

I think that everytime I read one of his posts . . .

Hey Hemant, can we have a new thread about the actual ..you know…topic, now that we can read it in full?

this thread can be about Olvizi and his quote mining of Harris, and subsequent rationalizations when asked to put it in context? Kthxbye.

It’s hard to imagine that in three full paragraphs, you didn’t manage to include even a sentence of on-topic argument about any substantive issue. You didn’t address anything I said or pointed out, nor dealt with any of the factual claims or evidence anyone has made for anything.

Your personal opinion of people and things they’ve done is irrelevant to me: I don’t know you, and I now have even less reason to trust whether you are telling me the whole story on anything.

Hitchens could be Hitler’s right hand man: the matter is still whether what he claimed was true, and it most certainly seems to be in all the key points (nor is he the only author to write on this subject and raise those points). I have no love for Hitchens personally: I think he’s by far the worst of the recent spate of atheist books and I do not share his politics or his arrogance. But again, none of that is particularly relevant to the MT issue.

This reminds me of when Hitchens realized that his pal and ticket to massive attention, Holocaust denier David Irving, was going down for the third and last time in his attempts to turn his loss in his libel action around through appeals. Christopher Hitchens suddenly found that he was “Jewish”, quite convenient for someone who had spent the previous decade calling Irving a great historian even during the time he was an open Holocaust denier and was being exposed as no historian at all but someone who actively suppressed and fabricated to promote Nazi revisions of real history. Especially convenient as his own brother said it’s not true.

This was the period when he was also back stabbing Sidney Blumenthal, who had been a good friend of his, lying about Bill Clinton being a rapist, etc. The period of “Missionary Position”. But in a thread above, you’ll find that many people here think Hitchens is the moral superior of Mother Teresa or at any rate, someone who is fit to judge her shortcomings on the basis of his own moral superiority. Schmoozing with the foremost Holocaust denier at exactly the same time he was calling Mother Teresa a “hell bat”. Yeah, I can see how Hitchens is a reliable source, if reliable lies to suit your purpose are what you want.

His explanations sound a heck of a lot more reasonable than your interpretation of what he supposedly supports:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/