>That and a fat man's
>intrinsic hostility to people pretending to be more
>attractive than they are.
Fat can be phat, at least for some. Ever heard of chubby chasers?
>But in general, I'm against
>democratisation of the production of art, simply
>because so many people aren't any good at it.
Democratization is here to stay, so you might as well get used to it (while avoiding karaoke bars, perhaps).
>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").
For the consolation of your troubled soul, here's Stanley Fish on Milton:
***** ...There is one part, however, of Milton's Areopagitica that is rarely noticed in such discussions and when noticed is noticed with some embarrassment. About three quarters of the way through the tract Milton says, "Now you understand of course", and the tone in his prose suggests that he assumes that most of his readers have always understood this, "that when I speak of toleration and free expression I don't mean Catholics. Them we extirpate".1 Milton's admirers, especially those who have linked him to John Stuart Mill as one of the cornerstones of the free speech tradition, have difficulty with this passage and attempt to explain it away by saying that Milton, because of the limitation of his own historical period, was not able to see what we are able to see. The idea is that our conception of free speech is more capacious, more truly free, than this because we do not have an exclusion up our sleeves, ready to be sprung.
But the difference between Milton and us is a difference in what we would exclude from the zone of "free speech", not a difference between exclusion and inclusion. When Milton names Catholic discourse as the exception to his toleration he does so because in his view Catholic speech is subversive of everything speech, in general, is supposed to do -- keep the conversation going, continue the search for Truth. In short, if speech is really to be free in the sense that he desires, Catholics cannot be allowed freely to produce it. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it is Milton's recognition of a general condition: free speech is what's left over when you have determined which forms of speech cannot be permitted to flourish. The "free speech zone" emerges against the background of what has been excluded. Everyone begins by assuming what shouldn't be said; otherwise there would be no point to saying anything....
1. John Milton, Prose Writings (London: Dent Dutton, 1974), 182.
<http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-February-1998/fish.html#1> *****
Liberals, pro-porn or otherwise, do not acknowledge what "free speech" of necessity represses as the condition of its possibility. Liberals advertise liberties as if they could be had at no cost, but that is not true. Nevertheless, it's been an effective propaganda....
Yoshie