'The Parisian Nonsense Machine'

… it is the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation using the value of ‘reference back’ possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports.
--Lacan.

"Offence itself has become a cliche." -
--Scruton.

There is a 'habit of faking,' the 'collective fake,' 'fake emotions' and 'institutionalized fakery'  

I haven't read Scruton's book but there is something wonderfully irreverent about the take-down of all those 'intellectuals' who are supposed to be fiendishly clever (if only one could understand what they were saying!)

The university, of course, specializes in the production of buffoons and false experts, the theorists of nothing, who contrive to appear sophisticated by filling their poor students' heads with a jumble of barely comprehensible sentences and mangled thoughts. 

The students, bless 'em, come out after four years, their minds packed with half-baked theories, their ears full of the latest jargon, and one could excuse them if they appear stunned, slightly dazed, wondering if to be clever means only that no-one else can quite understand what you're saying.

The bright ones would have learned to nod in approval, smile at the right time and, if good enough, to replicate the same kind of mindless drivel because they have been persuaded that they can (and therefore should) debunk everything. They've seen though it all, come to the realization that it's nothing more than a wild and provocative game for grown-ups that they can play with some panache. If they are lucky the gates will be opened and they will be taken in, because they were taken in.  

~
As straight as the crow flies.

Does this apply to some other time, some other way of life that has passed you by? Crows now, as far as you can make out, are urban creatures that hop around, barely touching the earth with one foot. Or when they do settle they are too busy scurrying about, pecking at each other over discarded scraps, morsels and trash, their minds constantly alert, on the look out for all that is second-hand, like any city scavenger. 

And their flight is clumsy, awkward, broken and jagged under the morning sun, full of fits and starts and resembles nothing like a pure line of flight. Instead, a kind of erratic zig-zagging motion, darting in and out of your field of vision, like a late-night improvisation that they've only recently learned but will have forgotten by dusk.

Did crows fly any different when there were fewer humans around? Or perhaps it's the built-up environment they now face that precludes any kind of sustained grace? More likely still: they've come to the end of their time and are addicted-like us-to this scrum of half-finished thoughts and throwaways.