Portland State University’s 5th Annual Law and Disorder Conference, a gathering of self-styled anarchists, feminists, anti-capitalists and other radical titans, was a little disorderly.

Some things of possible interest. Among them, this:

Readers may wish to ponder Mr Monbiot’s urge to romanticise poverty and pre-modern living, an urge perhaps best expressed in his claim that “we” should be more like the peasants of Southern Ethiopia, who “smile more often” than we do and whose fields “crackle with laughter.” These noble, laughing peasants may live in homes constructed from leaves and packing cases, and they may have Stone Age sanitation and alarming child mortality, but at least they’re not being “isolated” by sinful material trappings, like dentistry, double glazing and TV remote controls. Think I’m kidding? Think again.

The national organ of the British left:

Would you rather hear about how conventional grammar is obviously “right-wing,” according to Harry Ritchie, or would you be more tempted by Nick Baines’ account of eating his wife’s placenta? Both as a garlic taco and liquidised as a smoothie, albeit one that’s grey and with a grim metallic taste. Because apparently eating afterbirth is “a modern obsession.” Perhaps you’d be compelled by Tracy McVeigh’s conviction that “rewards don’t make anyone happy,” and that two-year-olds, the universal yardstick of human selflessness, are being rendered grasping and unfeeling by “post-industrial capitalism.”

Oh, there’s more.

More items of possible interest, among which, this:

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

Some helpful illustrations of this phenomenon are, of course, provided. For instruction, I mean, not laughter.

A round-up of things, among them, this:

Ah, but reality be damned. Morality be damned. We must have racial quotas in school discipline. It’s the progressive way. Because nothing says fairness like dishing out excuses according to how brown a student is. And attempting to reduce disruption and violence by punishing it less when racial quotas have been reached… well, what could possibly go wrong?

Further to Saskatoon’s latest adventure in publicly-funded art, here’s a little background on the artist, a Ms Keeley Haftner.

Ms Haftner has at least, albeit inadvertently, captured the ethos of so much “public” art, which is to say, socialised art in which the public has no say, and the mindset of the people it very often attracts. What with beauty being so “problematic” and, perhaps more to the point, difficult to achieve by people whose self-regard outstrips their ability to a comical degree. And so the good people of Saskatoon will get what they’re given. By people who know best. It’s the egalitarian way.

As you’ll see, Ms Haftner’s previous efforts are no less colossal in their scope and profundity.

Further to the Paul Krugman salary saga, more leftist imperviousness to irony and hypocrisy:

The Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee rails against “the unjust rewards of the rich,” by which she means, “the 1.5% who earn over £100,000.” These, she says, are the “extravagant earners” who “feel profoundly entitled to take what they like in salaries… untouched by public disgust or a sense of propriety.” Toynbee’s Guardian salary, for years a subject of speculation, was eventually revealed as £106,000 – excluding royalties, advances, media fees, rental income, etc. Curiously, Polly’s own financial rewards are not deemed “extravagant,” “unjust” or in any way improper, such is her ability to tolerate dissonance.
In September 2011, Toynbee struggled with a reader’s suggestion that instead of demanding others pay even more tax she could make large donations to charities of her choice and thereby ease her conscience. “The point about tax,” she replied, “is that it’s collective – it’s an ‘I will if you will’ deal. I see no hypocrisy in any of this.” The paper’s foremost class warrior waved aside suggestions of hypocrisy as merely “empty spite,” the smears of “malevolent” people.
But if Polly’s idea of “being progressive,” as she puts it, hinges on the coercion of millions of people who may already feel over-taxed, her preferred tomorrow isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Come the next election, those she wishes to see taxed more heavily, indeed punitively, will most likely resist. And thus “social justice,” as she sees it, is indefinitely – and conveniently – deferred, leaving her free to be indignant without consequence. For a six-figure salary, of course. As Polly’s conscience is apparently troubled more by what you earn and keep than by what she earns and keeps, that life-changing gesture, that personal action, will simply have to wait.
And if a well-heeled person bangs on, week after week, about how terrible unequal incomes are and how something must be done urgently, and then says they won’t do anything to help directly until the state forces them, along with everyone else, this isn’t a resounding affirmation of their professed morality.

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.

No, don’t. You mustn’t belittle their suffering. They’re doing it all for us.

I’m watching a man picking his nose inside a dead bear. I didn’t see that coming when I got up this morning.

Said in response to this monumental work of performance art.

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.”

To me, [Britain] now seems a strange, immoral place. For example, I read articles in the Guardian and the Times this week about the abolition of inherited wealth. The Economist also recently wrote about it. It did not even occur to any of these columnists that they were talking about the property of others. They did not create it. They did not inherit it. They have no just claim to it. Yet they have no moral concerns about proposing its seizure.

Three more can found here.