Kevin D Williamson corrects the comedy economics of U.S. senator Bernie Sanders: 

Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear… Free markets are a reflection of what people actually value at a particular time relative to the other things that they might also value. Real people simply want things that are different from what the planners want them to want, a predicament that can be solved only through violence and the threat of violence…

Markets adapt to political changes, and the hierarchy of values that distinguishes between an hour’s worth of warehouse management, an hour’s worth of composing poetry, an hour’s worth of brain surgery, and an hour’s worth of singing pop songs is not going to change because a politician says so, or because a group of politicians says so, or because 50 percent + 1 of the voters say so, or for any other reason. To think otherwise is the equivalent of flat-earth cosmology. In the long term, people’s needs and desires are what they are; in the short term, you can cause a great deal of chaos in the economy and you can give employers additional reasons to automate rote work. But you cannot make a fry-guy’s labour as valuable as a patent lawyer’s by simply passing a law.

Williams quotes the socialist Mr Sanders objecting to consumers having a wide choice of sports shoes and underarm deodorant, as if such things were a sign of wickedness, which reminded me of another socialist’s encounter with well-stocked shelves, in 1989, quoted here by Tim Blair:  

[Russian president, Boris] Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s supermarket nodding his head in amazement.” He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.

And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, filmed by Rick Suddeth. As you can see, the egalitarian retail experience is leaving shoppers happier and more morally elevated:  

Devorah Goldman on “diversity” in schools of social work: 

[The professor] explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking… until I realised he wasn’t.

Dave Huber on Duke’s vanishing “noose” story and faculty demands for “eliminating white supremacy” on campus: 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, chair of the Sociology department, added that “Duke is not a neutral racial space,” and that the school “oozes whiteness.”

If oozing whiteness sounds a bit much, you may want to revisit previous mentions of Professor Bonilla-Silva. When not denouncing “white logic,” the professor equates critics of affirmative action with 19th century supporters of slavery. One of the more bizarre indicators of Bonilla-Silva’s mental state is his written insistence – published in a course syllabus – that students must control their “body language” and avoid “irresponsible contestation” of his arguments. Black students who disagreed with the professor’s lurid racialist theories have been denounced by him as “Uncle Toms.” Professor Bonilla-Silva, a grown man, a tenured academic with a six-figure salary, refers to the United States, in class, as “AmeriKKKa.”

And Bryan Burrough on the “revolutionary” terrorism of the Weather Underground: 

Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorised. There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers: ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson of the New York cell. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would always insist there were never any plans to harm people. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what [the group] actually planned. In the middle ranks, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were going to be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls a Weatherman named Jon Lerner. “I remember talking about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.”

But hey, why endure the tedium and pretension of far-left politics if there isn’t a little pay-off, a little personal gratification…?

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Charles Cooke on the Rolling Stone “gang rape” saga and the contortions of certain feminists: 

Just a few short weeks ago, when Rolling Stone’s story was almost universally believed to be true, we were urged to read each and every sordid detail of the case so that we might better acquaint ourselves with the broader problems that are presented by “rape culture.” Today, as the story continues to collapse, the opposite view is regnant, and the very same people now contend that we should not be focusing on an individual case such as this in the first place… “Not sure,” Vox’s Libby Nelson asked last night in a tweet that summed up the volte-face, what the Washington Post’s “endgame is in continuing to pursue” the facts.  

Somewhat related, James Ceaser on the madness of crowds on campus: 

Every adult [on campus], if not every student, knows what happened at Duke eight years ago, where, under pressure from the same kind of academic crowd behaviour, members of the men’s lacrosse team were tainted and criminally prosecuted for rape, under charges that ultimately proved baseless. Every professor in media studies is fully aware of the spectacular hoaxes of modern journalism, from the accounts of urban poverty by Janet Cooke in the Washington Post to the multiple fabrications of Stephen Glass in the New Republic. And scholars of literature and history cannot be ignorant of the psychology of false accusation, from the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife down to the rape charges by Tawana Brawley, cynically perpetuated by Al Sharpton. Yet, in the climate of the moment, none of the perspective that these teachers could have offered, even if they had wished to do so, was ever brought to bear.

Speaking of Mr Sharpton, Ms Brawley and their lies, here’s Bill Whittle on identitarian politics and the new barbarism: 

In 1991, legal scholar Patricia J Williams wrote that Brawley “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime no matter how she got there, no matter who did it to her, and even if she did it to herself.” Are we all clear on that now? A Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School and current Law Professor at Columbia University said that Tawana Brawley, who slandered an innocent man with the most vile charges imaginable, was not the perpetrator of an unspeakable crime but the victim of one.   

And Katherine Timpf reports on academia’s ongoing cultivation of stoicism, fortitude and self-possession: 

Princeton University students recently launched Tiger Microaggressions, a service that takes other students’ reports of microaggressions and publishes them on its Facebook page — so that no one has to “carry the burden alone to call out” offences against political correctness… The page, by the way, also refers to microaggressions as “papercuts of oppression,” which are “so small but slice deep.” […] According to the operators, “microaggressions are all around us” and anything can be a microaggression because “there are no objective definitions to words and phrases.”

Yes, “papercuts of oppression.” And “no objective definitions.” At Princeton University. Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.  

Norwich City Council’s first computer being delivered, 1957.

It’s an Elliott 405, since you ask. Here’s one being used by schoolboys in 1969. Via System 360, via Things. 

Robert Stacy McCain on feminism’s mainstreaming of extremists:

Any honest person who undertakes an in-depth study of modern feminism, from its inception inside the 1960s New Left to its institutionalisation within Women’s Studies departments at universities, will understand that without the influence of radicals — militant haters of capitalism and Christianity, angry lesbians who view all males as a sort of malignant disease, deranged women who can’t distinguish between political grievances and their own mental illnesses — there probably never would have been a feminist movement at all…

Once we go beyond simplistic sloganeering about “equality” and “choice” to examine feminism as political philosophy — the theoretical understanding to which Ph.Ds devote their academic careers — we discover a worldview in which men and women are assumed to be implacable antagonists, where males are oppressors and women are their victims, and where heterosexuality is specifically condemned as the means by which this male-dominated system operates.

As noted previously, when it comes to identity politics, the boundaries between mainstream and delusional aren’t as clear as one might wish.

And Thomas Sowell on cultural inequalities:

While cultural leadership has changed hands many times, that leadership has been real at given times, and much of what was achieved in the process has contributed enormously to our well-being and opportunities today. Cultural competition is not a zero-sum game. It is what advances the human race. Cultures are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life. Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures… Spanish as spoken in Spain includes words taken from Arabic, and Spanish as spoken in Argentina has Italian words taken from the large Italian immigrant population there. People eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in Singapore and stay in Hilton hotels in Cairo.

This is not what some of the advocates of “diversity” have in mind. They seem to want to preserve cultures in their purity, almost like butterflies preserved in amber. Decisions about change, if any, seem to be regarded as collective decisions, political decisions. But that is not how any cultures have arrived where they are… No culture has grown great in isolation — but a number of cultures have made historic and even astonishing advances when their isolation was ended, usually by events beyond their control.

At which point readers may recall the Guardian’s Emer O’Toole, a “postcolonial theorist” and assistant professor of Irish Performance Studies, for whom all cultures past and present are equally vibrant and noble, except of course the culture in which she currently flourishes, on which opprobrium must be heaped ostentatiously and often.

Ms O’Toole famously bemoaned the colonial propagation of Shakespeare, whose works she denounced as “full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores.” And worse, “a powerful tool of empire, transported to foreign climes along with the doctrine of European cultural superiority.” The possibility that at any given time one set of values and insights might be preferable to another, even objectively better, bothers her quite a bit.