Oh, Academia

 http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

These two rather delightful webpages have made a bit of a splash in the UD facebook world of late. Each one, taken on its own, does more to explain why I'm not going into academia than would several hours of lecturing on the "state of higher education." Of course, these are satirical, but the oh-so-true part of it all is that a good half of half the critical articles I read over the course of my undergraduate (in particular those I read while studying Mrs. Dalloway) sounded more or less like this. That is, a good portion of the authors seemed perfectly comfortable with taking a few key words from their main argument, combining them almost randomly, and using them to fairly blatantly pad the writing. I thought we learned not to do that in high school?

Capitalism vs. Corporatism, Again

I've expressed my disapproval of the current usage of the term "capitalism" several times before on this blog. My recent perusal of "Project Syndicate" updates led me to this article, which upholds my basic point, but elucidates it in much more economically savvy language than I would have been able to come up with. Capitalism vs. Corporatism. A rather important distinction to be able to make.