Hitchens in Winnipeg

Reader Tips 16 Comments

” Join us for an evening with an admitted contrarian, a man who
always entertains as he shatters conventional wisdom and modern myths.”
Date: April 26, 2006
Place: East Ballroom, Fairmont Hotel, 2 Lombard Place, Winnipeg
Time: Reception, 6:00 p.m., Dinner, 7:00 p.m.
Cost: $75
Please RSVP to: 977-5050 or email Sheryl at rempels@fcpp.org

More details here
Sponsored by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

16 Replies to “Hitchens in Winnipeg”

  1. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. All well and good until the original enemy is defeated. Now you have the problem of readjusting your relations from a nominal friend to old opponent. Hitchens is still a socialist and always an enemy regardless of how well he can sing a few songs from our playlist.

  2. Every now and again shit starts to taste like, well – shit, and one has to stop and throw up. Give the man some space, don’t stand too close, the stuff can splash.

  5. Hitchens is a lefty who was dragged kicking and screaming towards the right.
    I don’t beleive that he has converted, shall we say, so much as he has had to acknowledge what is front and center and rather obvious.
    To stay cemented on the left side of the spectrum would put him in the ranks with the Chomsky’s, Kleins, O’Dowds, Saul’s ( a little Can-con there)Rathers, G&M crew and the French, which in my books are well on the road to irrelevance.
    If it’s taken a guy this bright and experienced this long to get even marginally on board, I’d say he’s too strongly wedded to lefty ideology.
    A “yes, but” kind of guy.
    Give me Steyn or Trodwell(where has he gone?)any day.

  6. Yes, he’s on the left. But I’ve also heard him say that he no longer talks about leftism, especially to young people, because it’s dangerous in the current struggle. Hitch is a huge asset right now.
    Keep in mind that the original neo-cons (Kristol, Podhoretz, etc.) started out as Trotskyites, and they became so of the finest critics of ‘Great Society’ social engineering.
    Does anybody know if he’s going to be speaking in any other Canadian cities?

  8. Rebarbarian, others; of course he is not worth listening to because he does not have a nice “I am a right-winger” button that he wears. He is an internationalist who is squarely against fascism in all of its forms. He is a former Trotskyite, ok. Now what does he have to say? I enjoy people who challenge my world-view in a way that does not take pages out of any songbook. I guarantee you that the 75 bucks spent on an evening with Hitchens will be money well spent. The polarization of politics is sickening, is political discourse best advanced by a bunch of people who listen only to those opinions with which they know they will agree? Give me a chance to listen to anyone who does not resort to demagoguery and who has a well argued position and I will come out the better for it. Lets pretend for a time that there are no political parties and we are all forced to derive our opinions from first principals, what a world that would be!

  9. Give me a chance to listen to anyone who does not resort to demagoguery and who has a well argued position and I will come out the better for it.
    Or contrast someone who does try to present an argument and admit to changing perspecives based on new info against a frothing nihist demagogue – ie, take a look at the Hitchens vs. George Galloway ‘debates’. Hitchens certainly came off looking pretty good against the blustering vacuousness, evasions, and ad-hominemisms of Galloway.

  10. ‘Saw Hitchens awhile back on Tim Russert’s Saturday night show. He was debating Andrew Sullivan–and he did a darn good job.
    Sure he’s not “right wing,” but he makes a lot of sense. I love to see someone the same leaning as a lefty sock it to the lefty about what’s really happening in, say, Iraq, where Hitchens has spent a lot of time over the years. He left Andrew Sullivan in his wake because, of course, Andy has never been to Iraq, being an armchair “pundit,” in a very privileged gay-left-anti-U.S.-anti-military enclave.
    In this debate, like in so many others with left-lib types, Hitchens has the advantage of his opponents’ never being able to ad-hominum him for being a right-wing extremist. Smile. I get a kick out of that.
    OK. So Hitchens isn’t hitched to our post, and may never be, but he’s a highly intelligent and thoughtful (in the sense of not knee-jerk) guy, and definitely worth listening to. If I lived in Winnipeg I’d be buying a ticket. $75 is peanuts to see a top-notch mind in action, who’ll probably bring a lot of little-known and kick-your-ass-you-dimwit-lefty-stooges facts to the table. Let’s see, by the time you’ve paid to go to a why-did-they-bother-to-make-this-crap movie,
    paid the babysitter, paid the parking, paid for the small (aka GIANT) popcorn and medium soda (aka HUMUNGOUS and all ice), you’ve already
    put out 2/3s of the cost of hearing Hitchens.
    ‘Go see him–and then let us know how he was!

  11. I am disappointed whenever I hear “You can’t listen to So-and-so; he’s lefty/Liberal/French or whatever”. As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Discounting what someone has to say before you hear them is the height of closemindedness.
    Hitchens reminds me very much (deliberately so, I believe) of Orwell. He eschews cant, speaks and writes plainly, and is passionate in his attacks on fascism of all stripes and gas-bags.
    And before anyone here starts saying “Orwell was a socialist”, I urge them to read “The Road to Wigan Pier” (available free online), especially Chapter 11. His view of a ‘socialist’ world pretty much describes modern Canada – decent education and health care for all, a safety net for those who lose their jobs, a minimum welfare that allows some shred of dignity for those who are afflicted. Nowhere does he advocate one-party communism, or government control of the means of production. I think he would find modern Canada quite acceptable – and would have spent the last ten years blasting the federal Liberals for their assorted hypocrisies and lies.
    I always find Hitchens an enjoyable read, and if I don’t always agree with him (and I quite often do), at least when I don’t, I feel that he has given my views some consideration, and more important, doesn’t dismiss them out of hand with some comment like “reaganite” or “american”, but gives his reasons why he disagrees, and invites me to agree with him. To think that black or white, or Liberal or Tory, are the only two answers to every complex question seems the height of idiocy to me.

  13. If he started a blog I would go but 75$ yikes.
    If i had that much money I could afford to go to a robbie burns dinner.

  14. Hitch was a socialist and maybe still is; I haven�t seen anything written by him lately other than about Islamofascism. On the latter, he is a hawk. Islamofascism is by far the biggest issue of our day and he articulates it better than a lot of neo-cons or double-agents like Fukuyama who head for the foxholes when the shooting starts.
    If I were in Winnipeg, I�d go see him.

  15. I’m in winnipeg. I see a lot of debunking going on at SDA how can I say this politely,… kate’s less expensive.

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