For newcomers, more items from the archives.

The Humble Among Us. 

Novelist Brigid Delaney wants a nicer flat in order to write about those non-creative people. You, taxpayer, come hither.

As a member of our creative caste, Ms Delaney wants to capture the buzz and thrum of city life. She wants to inspire “recognition” and above all “empathy.” It’s just that she’d prefer not to empathise too much with those non-creative people. Say, by working for a living and paying her own bills. And who will write about those ordinary people and their non-artistic lives if we don’t encourage Ms Delaney and her peers to live way above their means, at our expense, in places they can’t afford? Places they can’t afford because what they create isn’t as vital to the public as they might wish.

Pearl-Clutching Pornographers. 

Campus feminists combat “male-centricity” by making unerotic pornography and rubbing eggs on their breasts.

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description: “It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.” The finished political opus, titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop and extended scenes of floor-wiping. 

Militantly Nude. 

A San Francisco “nude-in” reveals more than intended.

Some may register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably one that’s embarrassed and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. What’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals. And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

And I’m told it’s possible, if not wise, to while away an hour in the greatest hits, now updated. 

Tim Worstall reads The Lancet, where socialism trumps reality: 

Lifespans are still getting longer, communicable disease continues to reduce, age adjusted cancer rates are falling: there’s simply no evidence at all that the health of the population is declining. So, given that we’ve not got any sign whatsoever of declining health, it’s very difficult indeed to say that increasing inequality is causing something that isn’t happening.

And again here. When supposedly learned people talk unironically about “social justice,” a good mental response is “yellow alert.”

Some random thoughts from Thomas Sowell: 

In Thomas Piketty’s highly-praised new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he asserts that the top tax rate under President Herbert Hoover was 25 percent. But Internal Revenue Service records show that it was 63 percent in 1932. If Piketty can’t even get his facts straight, why should his grandiose plans for confiscatory global taxation be taken seriously?

Why indeed? 

And via D in the comments, Aurelius marvels at the wonders of modern academia. Specifically, the winning oratory in the Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship. I implore you to watch the video of highlights. It’s a thing to behold, serving as both a bold new standard for eloquent persuasion and a measure of the education these young ladies have received. Here’s a very brief transcript:

Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!

Go Team Dada. Embrace the jive.

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets below.

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.

At least we are according to the aesthetes behind Swansea’s taxpayer-funded art festival Art Across the City, which improves the locals with things like this, and specifically conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, whose work, above, is sited in a car park behind a shopping centre. The press release for this mighty piece tells us, “Deller’s plaintive request gets straight to the point. Everybody and everywhere could do with more poetry.” Likewise, presumably, “everybody” could “do with” more conceptual art too.