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Originally Posted by peter12
He wasn't rigorous, and was actually quite a sloppy thinker. Good writer, great speaker, but also highlighted his strengths by taking ugly dates to prom.
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Did he really get to choose who he debated in these public forums? These things are typically set up by third parties who want participants with some kind of public profile. Who would host or broadcast a debate between Hitchens and some bookish academic from Pennsylvania who nobody had ever heard of?
Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
All told, I really liked Hitchens, but I can't stand the cult of celebrity that continues to surround him. He was North America's exposure to a public intellectual personality type that is actually very common in England.
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I agree that his stature in North America was overblown because a public intellectual is almost unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. But would you rather
no intellectual have a public profile in North America?
The thing that irks me about Hitchens' public profile in the U.S. is most people know him only as a strident atheist. So I'm not sure the notion of a public intellectual with diverse areas of interest and knowledge even did sink in.