Christopher Hitchens: Why Women Still Aren't Funny

[paracelsus]

Famous idiot Hitchens explains why women aren't funny, responding to a response to an article in Vanity FairNote that his argument reposes on (oh the familiar refrain!) an evolutionary anecdote: men have to be funny to attract women, but women have the luxury (and inherent inclination) of picking funny men over their more lugubrious competitors.

Comments

[cere]

Dude, you're a funny guy.

[paracelsus]

A funny goy, more to the point.

[the_christian]

Why is he even still on the cultural radar?

The guy is just a mouth, a Celebrity Big Brother waiting to happen.

[paracelsus]

I still maintain he used to be good! Not just that he was more politically aligned with my own views (and out of the atheist foursome including Dennett, Dawkins and Harris he's still clearly the only one who has the foggiest idea of what politics is - which is why his recent populist refusal to separate it from religion is all the more disgusting), but a good opinion writer.

And now he's musing about writing a book on Proust!

[the_christian]

Did you read Koba the Dread by Amis? In that, he comes off as a guffawing toff, sneering at everything,-and he always has been- while he and Amis slag off The Mob.

The book is nothing, so don't worry about reading it. But he honestly comes off as the kind of man who likes creative controversy and will say and do the most stupid, brutish things until he gets it, then be unable to back down when he realises he said, not racist or sexist things, but stupid things.

He's like the Worst Uncle at Christmas.

[paracelsus]

Yes I see what you mean. I just read a great article by playwright David Edgar on the sorts of '68 radical leftists who have moved to the right in recent times (giving rise to what he calls a genre of 'defection literature'), and how what they ultimately brought with them was a certain internationalist stance and a black-and-white, Bolshevist animus against anyone who doesn't see the world as they do. This includes the working class and third world, whose inhabitants tend to be neither needy nor heroic enough.

Now, I'm partial to this kind of thing now and again (as my post proves), and perhaps it explains some of the Hitchens attraction, but polemic 24/7? Even Courbet occasionally took some time off to work on still-lives and landscapes.

[paracelsus]

Unfortunately like most dinosaurs stomping around these days he gets a lot of attention and airtime.

[meleah]

Breathtaking. Sexist, Racist and..

...look, just hand me the gun, I'll take care of him.

Also:
I'd hate to be accused of cultural relativism, what with it being so much less ridiculous than evolutionary essentialism,
Ha!

[paracelsus]

Maybe I didn't mean evolutionary essentialism, as I don't know if that's a thing and if it is pretty much subscribe to it myself. More like, 'uncritical evolutionary psychology' or something, because I know evolutionary psychology is a field of study, but Hitchens is a peddler of scientism.

Hmm... now I'm wondering if there are any good cultural studies books out there on the general topic of 'scientism', about giving an aura of scientific respectibility to an otherwise shoddy argument or fiction. Obviously there's scientology and ID and AGW skepticism and such, but also things like how 'hard sf' works and when philosophers do 'thought experiments' (are they really experiments?). And if there isn't such a book, perhaps I should write it!

[meleah]

Being a long-lasting bugbear of mine (what the hell is the etymology of that, meantime?) the most frustrating thing about this sort of thing is that its been shifting its name. 'Sociobiology' might work, but E.O. Wilson is technically the father of that field, and whilst I might disagree with him a bit, there's still a lot that's valid. Then there's 'evolutionary psychology' which again makes some sense occasionally but is often a shield for this sort of wooly-headed thinking to hide behind.

I liked 'evolutionary essentialism' actually.. although its not really 'essential'; its almost always an argument about a culturally-based complex behavior created in favour of the authors viewpoint. It is a sort of Panglossianism or adapationist paradigm, an extension of a Spandrel. Ah, and there's Dennett again, an adaptionist. I'd much rather side with Gould and in particular Lewontin on this - I'm a big fan of his Biology as Ideology and Not in Our Genes that takes a Marxist scalpel to this sort of thing.

[the_christian]

Sorry to interrupt the big brains, but a Bwg is a goblin, or irritating spirit. Same root as boogieman.

[ironed_orchid]

It's getting so that bagging Hitchens is a bit too easy. But it's still important to do so.

[paracelsus]

I know it's easy... certainly easier than knuckling down and writing my thesis, for example!