I don't know how many of you kids are old enough to remember postmodernism, but basically it was an academic movement that claimed, in essence, that objective reality was a form of oppression. Obviously, once you and your pals agree that there is no such thing as a criticizable truth claim, you can pretty much spout any old gobbledygook you want to, and get a tenured professorship in return.
Some clever geeks wrote a computer program that generates postmodernist essays that are just as good as the ones generated by humans. You get a new one every time you go there, so I'll give you a snippet of the truly awesome one I just got:
If one examines postpatriarchialist socialism, one is faced with a choice: either accept prepatriarchialist conceptual theory or conclude that the collective is capable of social comment. Brophy[1] implies that the works of Rushdie are reminiscent of Koons. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a neostructuralist paradigm of discourse that includes truth as a paradox.
Riding in the wake of postmodernism comes the New Age pseudo-philosopher and quack doctor Deepak Chopra, and guess what! He's been replaced by a computer too. His latest message to me is "The unpredictable creates deep facts." Now that's heavy.
Awesome. Prof. Marshall McLuhan was also viewed with skepticism at the U of Toronto - some of the faculty wondered if there was any actual message in his writing, and they just could not understand, or whether it was gibberish.
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