Due to a copyright squabble among our would-be overlords: 

A radical publishing house, Lawrence & Wishart, which at one time was connected to Great Britain’s Communist Party, is demanding the removal from the Marxists Internet Archive of the Marx-Engels Collected Works — hardcover books that sell for up to $50 a pop… “What they are doing is actually restricting the masses’ ability to get these writings because they found a potential revenue flow by digitising the works themselves and selling some product to universities,” [said David Walters, a marxists.org volunteer]. “We think it’s the opposite of a Marxist approach.”

From the comments there, this tickled me: 

It seems counterproductive, in that you may have to live with capitalism in day to day affairs, but you would think the one item that you would work towards absolutely free, society ownership of is the instruction manual for making your desired mode of existence come to fruition, when that mode of existence depends on an informed, versed-in-Marxist-theory populace.

I think what made me laugh is the word “populace.” In my experience, the most willing readers of Marx and Engels, practically the only readers, are credulous middle-class college students, especially those with obnoxious personalities. 

Via Instapundit. 

Daniel Shuchman on the left’s latest Great White Hope, Thomas Piketty: 

Mr Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.” It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meagre US social state.” There must be an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation.

Mr Piketty also writes things like this. Let that one sink in for a moment. And Instapundit reminds us that the threshold for “earning too much” is very often, rather conveniently, “just above what a two-earner journalist or academic couple can plausibly make.”

Caleb Bonham on the things you can be taught in a creative writing class: 

A professor at Eastern Connecticut State University was caught on audio telling his class that Republicans will close colleges if they prevail in 2014 and that “racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people” want to suppress the liberal vote. In a four-minute recording of a classroom lecture Professor Brent Terry is heard strongly suggesting that conservatives are greedy racists who want to suppress the vote of anyone who might vote liberal. 

Readers may wish to revisit this bewildering screed from the first day of another creative writing class. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on productivity and its enemies: 

There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward. More to be feared even than the secret sadist, however, is the person who genuinely believes in the intrinsic value and even indispensability of his absurd task. He is as dangerous as any true believer.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Ace’s headline pretty much sums it up:

Selfless Crusader Against Income Inequality to Heroically Accept $225,000 for Nine Months of Sub-Part-Time Work from State-Funded Organisation to Occasionally Give a Few Quotes About the Scourge of Income Inequality.

Hiring Paul Krugman, a Guardian contributor and the left-leaning owner of this humble abode, is part of the City University of New York’s latest “inequality initiative.” Mr Krugman’s will be “a modest role” with no teaching or supervision commitments. In fact, neither party seems able to define what, exactly, that “modest role” will be. Hence the salary of $25,000 per month.

Update, via the comments:

Further to the Dartmouth “micro-aggression” saga, Victor Davis Hanson notes the comforts and privilege of our campus role-players:   

President Hanlon apparently felt the students’ pain of what they had called “micro-aggressions,” or the day-to-day psychodramatic angst that these young elites feel are their own versions of the world of the Wal-Mart checker, the roofer in Delano who nails in 105 degree August heat, or the tractor driver who has disked half-mile long rows day in and day out on the farm. If you have never done such things, and you have $60,000 a year to spend on Dartmouth, then I suppose you could conceivably dream up a micro-aggression of being tortured to read ‘women’ for womyn, or having to use either the boys’ or girls’ bathroom…

They and their faculties enjoy privileges undreamed of by 99.9% of the population. DeVry and Phoenix trade schools cannot afford to offer Dartmouth-like race, class, and gender courses to contextualise their accounting, computer programming and nursing programmes because none of their students have the cash for such psychodramatic indulgences. Our aggrieved .01% can play act that they are embattled, precisely because free market capitalism gave them those dramatic opportunities in a way unknown in Mexico or the Congo.

And as we’ve seen, the longer and more ostentatiously this role-play is indulged, the more bonkers it becomes. Seven years of it can really leave a person beyond the reach of reason. 

Larry Sand on children’s education versus teachers’ job security: 

In the last ten years, only 91 teachers out of about 300,000 (.003 percent) who have attained ‘permanence’ [tenure] lost their jobs in California. Of those, only 19 (.0007 percent) have been dismissed for poor performance. Is it possible that Golden State teachers are that good? Such an astronomical permanence rate doesn’t square with the performance of California’s fourth- and eighth-graders, whose scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests persistently rank near the bottom.

And Steven Malanga notes some more academic high-mindedness: 

Readers can perhaps get a sense of the current state of the anthropology field by considering the most absurd claim against [Napoleon] Chagnon: that he was a McCarthyite. The evidence for this was little more than [an] observation that Chagnon grew up in the 1950s in a rural area of Michigan, where “anti-Communist feeling ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support.” Critics also sniped at Chagnon for being… “a free-market advocate.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

The Wall Street Journal reveals the unspeakable suffering of leftwing students at an Ivy League college:  

The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more “womyn or people of colour” faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan (“we demand body and gender self-determination”); censoring the library catalogue for offensive terms; and installing “gender-neutral bathrooms” in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms. 

We rarely sympathise with college administrators but we’ll make an exception for Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon, an accomplished mathematician who for some reason took the job last year. The occupiers filmed their confrontation and uploaded the hostage video to the web, where Mr Hanlon can be seen agog as his charges berate him for his “micro-aggressions.” Those are bias infractions that can’t be identified without the right political training.

Mr. Hanlon left after an hour and told the little tyrants that he welcomed a “conversation” about their ultimatums. They responded in a statement that conversations – to be clear, talking – will lead to “further physical and emotional violence enacted against us by the racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and ableist structures at Dartmouth.” They added: “Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack.”

The mighty student ‘occupiers’ were also rendered tearful and distressed on discovering that their behaviour had been described as “threatening.” You see, the students’ threats of further “physical action” should be heeded and obeyed but not recognised as threats. That too would be a “micro-aggression.” Dartmouth’s annual tuition of $65,133 has evidently failed to deter fits of delinquent psychodrama by checkers of privilege whose own colossal sense of entitlement somehow escapes detection.

As noted previously, this kind of obnoxious and narcissistic behaviour is regarded as a credential by many students on the left, as somehow self-validating, something to be proud of. It’s what elevates them within their own immediate peer group. They’re achieving their in-group status, their imagined radical chic, by imposing on others – people about whom they simply don’t care or for whom they show outright contempt. It’s more than a little symbolic that the disruption and clearing up are always at someone else’s expense. Despite the guff about “social justice,” their behaviour is fundamentally parasitic.

And hey, think of how well they’re using that $65,133 a year. Think of the message they’re sending to potential employers. Who wouldn’t want to hire someone who wants to abolish capitalism, who hallucinates “white supremacy,” who dismisses dialogue as “racialized and white” and “gendered and masculine” and therefore invalid, and who threatens “physical action” if their absurd demands aren’t met?