Cuban and Derrida

Mark Cuban isn't dumb.

I like what he says about outsourcing, which is that it only really hurts the US economy if the labor savings aren't re-invested in the company. (And he proposes not allowing selling of stock or corporate bonuses in any year a company outsources. A dissenting opinion is found here. I agree with Cuban because anything making execs think twice about outsourcing and preventing them from overprofiting is a good thing. Notice how the other guy doesn't propose an alternative solution, and never mentions if he believes in Cuban's overall point. And he never explains why we the people should care if some outsourcin' executive has to deal with not being able to just sell some magic stock to pay for his/her kid to go to college.) If outsourcing just allows a company to make profit goals and help its stock price, or the extra money is given to "insiders", that's (to sound like an insane Socialist for a sec) betrayal. Altogether too much betrayal going on these days.

So, there are many many blogs out there, and as many different agendas as there are blogs. My agenda, I swear, is just to entertain the readers.

With that in mind, consider the life and death of one Mr. Jacques Derrida, father of deconstruction and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was also, from the point at which he thought of deconstruction to the point that he died, dead wrong about everything. How's that for a hot sports opinion?

His main contribution to the philosophical world, deconstruction, is a linguistic parlor trick designed to confuse the intellectually naive. It says that the words we say and hear don't have inherent meanings, but only mean things in relation to and because of the absense of other concepts. What does this mean? We'll never know, because what it means to me and what it means to you may be different. Everything we think is real can be deconstructed to show that it doesn't mean what we think it means (Even deconstruction itself, and when Derrida was asked to define it he went into apoplectic fits of hate-rage, reportedly). And this paragraph makes no sense to you, but it does to me. It has no inherent meaning because it only means something in relation to all the other, more coherent, paragraphs in the world. All this linguistic madness paved the way for the wretched Postmodernism, and then things really went to pot.

What Derrida ultimately accomplished was getting millions of college students reading books -- not to understand them, but to point out things in the text that subvert the book's meaning. This has made millions of college students stupid smarty-pantses. For this sin alone, Derrida should have been smited from the earth years ago. With him gone, maybe we can move on and start talking to each other for real again.