Dull, dull, dull (was Re: [lbo-talk] Ann Coulter's Living)

Brian Siano siano at mail.med.upenn.edu
Mon Aug 4 19:08:34 PDT 2003


On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 19:19:55 -0500, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
>
> Shane Taylor wrote:
>>
>> I think it's prudery. As in, "It's all so horrible, we have to be
>> serious." Nonsense. Satire, parody, sarcasm, humor, wit, etc. -- all
>> of
>> these can trade in grim materials. Kubrick should have settled that
>> decades ago.


> You are speaking as though you know not only the inner psychic secrets
> of 10s of thousands, perhaps 100s of thousands, of people, over decades,
> but _also_ know the inner psychic secrets which they share in common.
>
> Prove it.
>
> I maintain that the claim is self-evidently absurd, and the burden of
> proof, an enormous empirical and analytic burden, is on those who would
> make a claim so absurd on the face of it.
>
> Unless such proof can be provided, to make the claim is mere tomfoolery.

Translation: "That's not funny."

But seriously, folks. Carrol, I think you're raising a useless point here. We're discussing why the Left publications are so amazingly dull next to those of other factions. And to discuss this, we _have_ to speculate on the mind-sets and values of heaps'o'people. Can't be avoided, really. So it's a bit silly to jump on Shane for imprecision and lack of empirical data. Nobody expects this question to be answered by a Zogby poll and factor analysis from the MMPI.

But I agree with Shane only so far. There's prudery and excessive moralization, but I don't think that's the complete answer. BTW, it occurred to me that the _Village Voice_, for whatever faults it has, is usually fun to read, so maybe we shouldn't be castigating ourselves too much for humorlessness.



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