Hitch & the New School

Rakesh Narpat Bhandari rakeshb at Stanford.EDU
Wed May 9 20:28:59 PDT 2001



>Rakesh's claim to the contrary, Hitchens is not apologizing for
>Kerry's war crimes. One of his colleagues at the New School just
>told me that Hitch sent around a blistering email to fellow faculty
>members, berating them for not protesting the university's
>wishy-washy line.

Um Doug you're the one who forwarded Hitchens' comments which Joanna Sheldon then astoundingly interpreted as a reasonable defense of the manner in which the war criminal Kerrey conducted himself in a free fire zone (though it seems all the firing was in one direction). So was I wrong to read the comments which you forwarded that way? You seemed irked by them yourself, but now you get angry at me for also finding Hitchens irksome! It's this kind of "argumentation" which I have come to expect from you.

Moreover, it stands unrefuted that Hitchens somehow forgot that Kerrey's account was contested.


>
>And we're still waiting for those UNITE checks too.

So I guess I'll forward the entire off list email exchange we had over this. But what's the point--your constant refusal to answer the serious questions which I put to you just makes the whole thing tiresome. Maybe we should have an exchange over whether Marx was an underconsumptionist, but can I count on you seriously engaging counter-evidence and -reasoning? Of course not. You'd fall back on a one liner like the above and conduct the debate at that level. I shall say again that it was my hope that your one sided treatment of the UNITE-backed protectionist campaigns-- which have already had terrible effects on Africa, Cambodia, and India-- was indeed propaganda work which you had to do for money. It's too bad that UNITE did not pay you for the hack work. I was hoping they had, for I had no other way of understanding why you and Liza left out what you did about the larger policy goals behind the campaigns which UNITE is backing.

Rakesh

ps maybe it would be best if you unsubbed me...again.



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