Quote Originally Posted by Mark O'Neill View Post
I may not be a smart man but I know post modernist babble when I see it.
This should help, Mark:

HOW TO SPEAK AND WRITE POSTMODERN

by Stephen Katz, Associate Professor, Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Postmodernism has been the buzzword in academia for the last decade. Books, journal articles, conference themes and university courses have resounded to the debates about postmodernism that focus on the uniqueness of our times, where computerization, the global economy and the media have irrevocably transformed all forms of social engagement. As a professor of sociology who teaches about culture, I include myself in this environment. Indeed, I have a great interest in postmodernism both as an intellectual movement and as a practical problem. In my experience there seems to be a gulf between those who see the postmodern turn as a neo-conservative reupholstering of the same old corporate trappings, and those who see it as a long overdue break with modernist doctrines in education, aesthetics and politics. Of course there are all kinds of positions in between, depending upon how one sorts out the optimum route into the next millennium.

However, I think the real gulf is not so much positional as linguistic. Posture can be as important as politics when it comes to the intelligentsia. In other words, it may be less important whether or not you like postmodernism than whether or not you can speak and write postmodernism. Perhaps you would like to join in conversation with your local mandarins of cultural theory and all-purpose deep thinking, but you don't know what to say. Or, when you do contribute something you consider relevant, even insightful, you get ignored or looked at with pity. Here is a quick guide, then, to speaking and writing postmodern.
I've always loved this part:

At some point someone may actually ask you what you're talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided. You must always give the questioner the impression that they have missed the point, and so send another verbose salvo of postmodernspeak in their direction as a ``simplification'' or ``clarification'' of your original statement. If that doesn't work, you might be left with the terribly modernist thought of, ``I don't know''. Don't worry, just say, ``The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek. I can only say that reality is more uneven and its (mis)representations more untrustworthy than we have time here to explore''.
In fairness to the article by Coined, his writing isn't really postmodern at all.

However, I'm not sure that the piece offers anything that anyone is likely to find particularly surprising. Virtually no one that I'm aware of believes that Western COIN operations don't involve all 3 "Ds." The challenge is getting the mix right, coordination, and making them work with insufficient resources in a complex and problematic environment. It seems to me that waving the 3D flag (something that we love to do in Ottawa too) all too often comes at the expense of tackling these more difficult issues.