By Christopher Hitchens
Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the flavor and relish of the business of judicially inflicted death.
More: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/christopher-hitchens-staking-a-life.php?page=all
What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
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Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
Baruch Spinoza
George Orwell
Bertrand Russell
Leon Trotsky
Rosa Luxemburg
Socrates
6 comments:
Eloquent words from one of the heroes of reason, Christopher Hitchens (from Sewell interview). Thank you Christopher!
The great tradition starts with Lucretius and Epicurus who work out that the universe was made of atoms and is not created by any designer. It goes through Socrates, Galileo, Spinoza, people whose work is burned and despised by Jews & Christians & Muslims alike, through to Voltaire, to Darwin, to.. I'm abridging the story somewhat, this is almost the last chapter of my book, the better tradition, that of people who think for themselves, and who don't pray in aid any supernatural authority, thats what needs to be boosted, that's where you should be spending your life, is in spreading and deepening that tradition.
Lapham's Quarterly is a fantastic publication. Lewis Lapham's essays are almost as essential as the best of our man Hitch.
I strongly advise more people to read LQ.
Juan,
you are a monkey
@ beggar, thief, copyist
you are digging your own grave even deeper than before on the side of historical ignorance.
wake up christopher
just you and noam
listen
we're all working together on this one.
I found, and find, van den Haag’s position to be entirely repellent, and I am not alone.
cnx
about 2.4% of the following is true.
Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.”
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