Pseudo intellectual rags

I was walking down Exhibition Street yesterday, toward my tram stop, when I decided to check out a local newsagency. I wanted to see if I could get some reading material for the trip home. The newsagency I stopped at, near the florist, I consider to be pretty decent, stocking respectable periodicals like Foreign Affairs and The Economist, so I wasn't too fussed about what I picked out.

So, when I went to read my shiny new copy of The Institute of Public Affairs journal I was quite unprepared for how utterly shithouse and superficial it was. Though the writing sought to convey that the think tank was engaged in a genuine academic discourse, purportedly discussing the causes of war, international relations and political economy – what was really on offer was cultural war iteration XXI, bland apologetics about the narrow Washington consensus, and all the common fallacies and caricatured reasons about "perfect markets" we’ve come to expect from crazy libertarians.

With this, the Center for Independent Studies, and the Sydney Institute all vying to be our homegrown intellectual gatekeepers, with their wonderfully impartial sounding names, is it any wonder the Australian public is so politically enlightened?