Obviously excluding like Hitler, that’s a gimme.
Can be a good or a bad person.
My vote goes to Churchill or Reagan. Absolutely ignorant people of history.
Obviously excluding like Hitler, that’s a gimme.
Can be a good or a bad person.
My vote goes to Churchill or Reagan. Absolutely ignorant people of history.
okay so as a guy who was Very Online in 2006, Hitchens never commanded the legions that Dawkins did. This could entirely be down to who has a following in 2020 and What That Following Cares About. The Dawkins followers 15 years ago were everywhere on the Left, because the Bush-era right was pretty Christian and Dawkins was avowedly anti-Christian, so the Atheists came over here. They were the vanguard of today's logic guys. It's well known now that the Atheist Community is misogynist and racist, and that exact Atheism Community comes from the Dawkins community.
The only reason I think Hitchens fans are less insufferable is that Hitchens's work is more diffuse, less focused, and rarely interesting, while Dawkins is extremely focused and his public appearances are comically antisocial and hostile. If you want to be a Hitchens fan, you have to put in a fair amount of work before you can get started, with Dawkins you can get a grasp on the basics in about 90 minutes.
I wasn't online until two or three years after that, but yeah you're right. One reason might be that I feel like Dawkins fans grew away from him whereas Hitchens had this punkishness to him that made him stick a bit better. Also he died early enough that his biggest gaffes (dear god do you remember "women will never be funny"?) never caught up to cancel him.
I would say though, Dawkins and Hitchens were both equally New Atheists at the time even if Dawkins was the bigger pop star.
I fully agree with you here, I think Dawkins' incredible uncharisma + his number of public appearances undid him, but he is the guy who created Sargon, et al. As someone who briefly affiliated themselves with the Atheism movement, I always found Hitchens' writings to be threadbare and infrequent compared to Dawkins, who wrote voluminously on one of his great points of obsession. In 2006, I wanted to like Hitchens because I was told he was Cool, but always found him hard to grasp.
I think you're right though, if he lived even two years longer that punkishness would be 0.