--- Nancy Bauer/Dennis Perrin
<bauerperrin at mindspring.com> wrote: > >As far as I can
tell, the central meaning of "sense
> of humor" is "Don't
> >let the other person's pain bother you so much."
> >
> >Carrol
>
>
> Yes. That is EXACTLY what that means. Dance on the
> bodies of the raped and
> slaughtered, for your critique will be otherwise
> ignored. Laugh at the
> powerless -- isn't that why they exist?
>
> Now, let us return to our sullen states, where
> virtue reigns, and serious
> criticism may flourish sans the sneers of the less
> enlightened.
>
> DP
Oh come off it. It's not exactly as if the pro-pornography crowd are exactly chock full of wizard gags either. I've never seen such a bunch of self-righteous windbags, banging on about their body parts with missionary zeal, producing ream after ream of tendentious guff on the wonderful spirituality of it all, and boring, boring, boring on the "challenging" nature of the kind of stuff Rob identified. And all the while portraying themselves as the champions of free speech (as David Stove pointed out "the proprietor of a dirty book emporium might owe a debt to Milton's Areopagitica, but he would not necessarily want to find him in his shop").
It's partly the emergence of the born-again sex bore that motivates my animus against the democratisation of porn (it also revived Toyah Wilcox's career, which is a pretty heavy black mark). That and a fat man's intrinsic hostility to people pretending to be more attractive than they are. But in general, I'm against democratisation of the production of art, simply because so many people aren't any good at it.
Gordon made the good point that some people like naive art (folk, punk, etc). But even out of this bunch, how many of them actually prefer the local finger-in-the-ear club to listening to Ewen MacColl? Damn few, and with many of them, you get the feeling that they're doing it because they feel they ought to rather than because they want to.
hey ho hum
dd
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