Economic Ethics and the Opaque Language of Fashion

I apologize for the long delay in posting. I hope to post a bit more in the near future. For now I would like to simply point any readers still poking around out there to two items I recently uncovered.

First, I came across an article discussing the ways that insurance firm AIG got itself into trouble. Apparently it was through a fairly complex insurance tool called a credit derivative. These little buggers almost brought down the company. The impact of complex financial tools is twofold: it makes it increasingly difficult to understand the highest end of economic discourse, and also, by means of the intensive jargon, it keeps the rich wealthy since only they have access to such financially lucrative and ethicaly questionable products. This is not to mention that the credit derivatives in question were nearly the cause of another global economic downturn. Link

Also, I discovered a few things regarding Paris Fashion Week. The lessons I have learned are twofold, one that high fashion is intensely impractical, and two, that fashion critics apparently speak another form of English than anyone in the world. For example (the caption is my own):

The first model is apparently trying very hard to fly. The second is wearing a victorian style ruff. The third is sporting the newest trend this season, a ream of paper.

I also uncovered this little tidbit, which makes me think that there is a future for the philosophy of language. I will include the image with the caption provided by the website from which it came.

So intertwined with futurism and in contrast to the rigidity of a single gauntlet or plastic triangles poking from eyelids, was a watery softness: stiff square plates collapsed into a drowned world, emerging as a hooded coat.

I apologize if I am offending the critics of high art and high fashion, but that caption is not an intelligable sentence. I believe that this would qualify as ‘bullshit’ under the more technical, philosophical definition offered by Harry Frankfurt (further info). I furthermore believe it would also qualify for less technical definitions, but I will leave that decision to the reader.