When do you stop reading an article?

Answer: when something is ridiculous.

Chris Peterson begins an “article” on Something Awful by referencing a “crazy college professor” (a hippie) who along with being completely crazy, sometimes dispensed words of wisdom. Because crazy people know things.

Just so we’re clear on how crazy this old professor was, Chris tells us that he lives in a shack on some property owned by a crazy rich man who believed he could take to bears. And bribed the bears with jelly donuts.

So, after establishing all that, we get to the ridiculous part. The part that makes me stop reading. The part that makes me think “you should have paid more attention in class” or perhaps “that teacher should have done a better job.”

That’s this:

As is the case with many crazy college professors, he told me many things I’ll never forget. Most of them had to do with aliens running the White House, but one thing which struck a peculiarly reasonable chord in me was his description of globalization as a mechanism for removing consequences from actions. It’s easy to comprehend the labor that goes into creating a sweater when it’s grandma knitting it in the corner–less so when it’s some kid in Indonesia.

I suppose it seems distinctly less insane, crazy, or even oddball that the rest of it. But the understanding that globalization is a mechanism for removing consequences is not new. The idea that the finished product masks the production process is not an insight shared only be crazy college professors who swan around with bears.

It’s actually Karl Marx’s Fetishism of Commodities [Wikipedia entry], and is a somewhat natural result of German Philosophy in the early 19th century and its post-Hegel focus on the distinction between the the abstract and the particular – or the real and the perceived, etc.

It makes sense, of course, that a “crazy old hippie” would be citing Karl Marx. Sort of. It makes considerably less sense that a college graduate who took a class with this professor neither understands the argument nor knows the basis for the insight. And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous enough for me to stop reading.