Thursday, October 13, 2011

Clever, Clever Satire

This was a comment on a post about a computer game, HOMM VI.

Do me a favor and ask Robert Paul Wolff and Brian Leiter this question: why are they spared the wrath of the 99%? Tenured professors, raised in privilege, products of Princeton and Michigan law school, living lives of luxury and leisure in comparison to the steel worker, the coal miner, the day laborer.

How does the the spoiled privileged Leiter respond to the following: Fairness is considered over the course of a lifetime. This does not exempt the privileged lives of professors, the beneficiaries of capitalism living lives of relative luxury and greed in comparison to steel workers and coal miners. We do not take current distributions as the baseline and simply move on from here. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the objection made against most utilitarian property theorists. Therefore, the unjust distributions that you have benefited from, the skills you have developed because of your privileged position within the capitalist regime, all these resources you have enjoyed will not be forgotten by We the 99%. And here we are. It is time to pay the piper, and this includes the professors as well as the bankers, CEOs and corporate attorneys. It is time for Brian Leiter, Robert Paul Wolff, Paul G. Allen, Warren Buffett, and the rest of the privileged few to make good on their debts. They must now give up their comfortable positions at Univ. of Chicago, etc. and pick up a shovel. It is our time to bask in the sun.


Not sure how Robert Paul Wolff or Brian Leiter would respond, sir. Don't know either, never met them, had to look them up on Google. I can say this: Here is the distribution of income in the U.S.:


You'll notice that 99th %ile is $506k, 95th %ile is $200k. There would be very few college professors above the 96th %ile, I would think.

As for Robert Paul Wolff....he is a Marxist Anarchist who was briefly at U of Chicago, 1961-1964. He never went to Princeton, either as a student or instructor, though of course he likely gave talks there. You may be talking about Brian Leiter, of course, but since I found looking up Robert P. Wolff (he's one of YOURS, fercrissakes!) to be utterly uninteresting I stopped my research, exhausted, and went back to my couch where nubile grad students could fan me and feed me delicious fresh fruit.

In short, what you have written simply must be a moderately clever satire. Because otherwise you are confirming that you "99 percenters" are just as loony as I believe you are.

5 comments:

Andrew said...

HOMM II was a fun game, but I couldn't really get into it. Now Railroad Tycoon II and Railroad Tycoon III sucked a lot of my time in what seemed to be an instant.

Anonymous said...

Satire, although I do believe 'income' is not the relevant metric if we are going to play on the left's distribution field. What you have to look at are "resources" in some more abstract sense, which includes quality of life, job security, educational opportunities, etc.

Also, Wolff and Leiter are vocal supporters of this OWS movement (Wolff attending meetings), which I think is ironic, hence the comment.

Dirty Davey said...

I do not believe the original comment came from a "99 percenter", but rather was written as an anti-OWS statement. That is, it's mocking the fact that OWS has the support and encouragement of the pampered professoriat and arguing that a true proletarian movement would instead want to string the faculty up from their own bell towers.

Anonymous said...

Civilization 4 is really more the game for trenchant political commentary.

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