back to pensive

Just about everything he said made perfect sense to me

Great speech!!❤

Although the two comments here are rather selfdisqualifying and apparently not even read or cared about I'd like to give my 5 cents on the topic of immigration to the unexisting audience. I ended up here because I read the article "In the shadow of the Holocaust" by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker which I liked, not because it revealed stunning new interpretation but rather what to the phenomenological common sense thinker is obvious since a long time but hardly anyone is allowed to say. Here, in her acceptance speech, she delivers humanistic and empathetic reasonability which should be the basics of civilization. However, she, as so many others and I dare to say nearly all political figures and thinkers, forgets one crucial aspect, the most crucial of all perhaps, which in the beshadowed Germany of the above mentioned article has even found the opposite ideology (Merkel: "keine Obergrenze"), which is the limit in capacity of meaningful absorption of refugees in one single country or should I say, one cultural context. It should be clear to anyone that the African continent has a growing population of approximately 1.4 billion and the South American continent of over 400 million. All these people would like to migrate north. But the capacity of Germany and the U.S.A. is not sufficient to integrate these numbers. Not only are they clearly lacking space and funds but also the social and cultural resources and tolerance for meaningful aid. In Europe and in Germany especially, the numbers are already higher than what society can handle. In my city, the roman foundation Cologne, over 50% of the population has a migration background. That means that Cologne is not Cologne anymore. And the migrants who get here are not jewish journalists from Russia but muslims with no education whatsoever if not polygamy and suppression of women's rights and, connecting to the above article, surprise, surprise, real antisemitism. This tragical circumstance should lead to a Realpolitik, which clearly is empathetic with refugees, but also recognizes what it can carry.

Thank you for posting

Blah blah blah, bla blah blahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Is there a single prize this prostitute didn't get yet?

Good bladdered speech.

Thank you for keeping the memories of Christopher alive.

I’m sitting in Texas listening, admiring, and then in the same breath as he says Texans were dying of a drought, he gleefully recalls hoping it wouldn’t rain for a while longer. That is pretty ugly stuff.

Christ what a caricature Amis has become.

Love Mr Amis. Love Mr Hitch. These and similar are saving the world ( which is all we have) and, at the least, make it a worthwhile place in which to live.

Thks for posting, anything about the Hitch is interesting.

We all miss you the Hitch

Thanks for posting

Marty's work on the Catholic pedo-cabal was a heroic and widely appreciated effort in journalism. Hitchens was a champion of anti-totalitarianism and a champion of the truth. For this reason I don't think Hitch would be happy that Marty won this award (Hitch might not even like the idea of the award itself), because Marty has recently been at the center of a very sordid trumpeting of fake news and unsubstantiated red-scaring. If Hitch dropped in on this stuffy pretense, I don't think he'd hang around for long. Look at Glenn Greenwald's coverage on Democracy Now! to see what he has to say about WaPo and Baron these days.

Salman make it too? Hoping all that stuffiness was leavened with some foul wordplay games.

Bravo, Marty!

Sadly the audio quality makes it difficult to follow Marty Baron's insights on the role of the media and journalism in our troubled times. The full text can be found here and is well worth reading. A worthy winner and great to see the Hitch remembered in this way: www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/washington-post-editor-marty-baron-message-to-journalists

Will you be capturing the 2016 Hitchens Prize Ceremony? Would love to see it if so!

Just great to see one of the world's best documentary directors honoured in the name of the legendary Christopher Hitchens. So Alex Gibney first met Hitch in a Bar [Hitch's Chapel]. The Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Prize, in this instance, is in honour of bother men. Pity that Hitch could not write Henry 'War Criminal' Kissinger's obituary. This award is just wonderful!!!

lovely I hope his family is doing well.

thanks for putting this up

Thanks so much for posting.

This is wonderful.

That's a really sweet video:)