Agonizing over the Bell Jar is enough to absolve anyone for not noticing the effects of lead in the water supply, or sugar in the milk, or a million other insults to the intelligence of under-served communities, before we even get to the insult to everyone's intelligence that is the PMC twitter feed.
I think that any examination of the PMC must include a look through the lens of what David Graeber called, "Bullsh%$ Jobs," because so many of these positions and careers are essentially worthless.
While some of the posturing by elements of the PMC may be in attempt to divert scrutiny from the holders of capital, I think that some of this is also an artifact of the precarity of the PMC. In many cases, an objective review of their careers would reveal them to be about as useless as t^%s on a bull, and on some level they know it, so they must profess virtue to justify their positions.
There are some excellent observations here. However, one of the aspects of PMC commentators which I have noted is that they write and publish, without reading through what they have written, and making sure it is what they actually meant to say. To wit: 'Is it due to nature or nature?' You might wish to revisit that.
Sorry to be clogging or hogging your combox, yo, but it's not surprising that the PMC has a lock on virtue, since they are the ones defining what "virtue" means.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the word "virtue" as mediated by the PMC would turn out to mean "just like me!"
Something similar could be said about "meritocracy". "Merit" in PMC terms means "excelling, when judged on the PMC's own terms". Not surprisingly, such people also have a corner on merit.
"Sorkin himself acknowledges his work is geared towards upper class liberals, and revealed in an Aspen Institute interview with David Brooks (because of course) that The West Wing pilot bombed in its first test screening in 1999, and was only saved by Warner Brothers convening another test screening made up of viewers who: came from households making over $75,000 a year, had at least one person in the household that was college educated, had a home subscription to The New York Times, and had home internet access (relatively rare in ‘99). And scene."
I did not know that, but that is smart marketing - market a product targeted at insecure people who have disposable cash and who use their consumption habits to prove a point.
By contrast, pro wrestling has a huge audience in terms of number of viewers, but pro wrestling is not particularly attractive to advertisers in spite of its size. This is because the pro wrestling audience typically doesn't have much money to spend and their purchasing choices are often informed by price alone.
"If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves."
The two words I would have chosen to describe the PMC are "sanctimonious" and "censorious". An entire class of self-appointed hall monitors and teacher's pets.
As is common in most social commentary, it is usually prefigured in art. Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched is the PMC zeitgeist rendered in all of it’s destructive, hideous nature.
Thank you! Nice overview. Lambert Strether of nakedcapitalism.con has been saying these things about the pmc for nearly a decade, as has Thomas Frank.
Agonizing over the Bell Jar is enough to absolve anyone for not noticing the effects of lead in the water supply, or sugar in the milk, or a million other insults to the intelligence of under-served communities, before we even get to the insult to everyone's intelligence that is the PMC twitter feed.
I think that any examination of the PMC must include a look through the lens of what David Graeber called, "Bullsh%$ Jobs," because so many of these positions and careers are essentially worthless.
While some of the posturing by elements of the PMC may be in attempt to divert scrutiny from the holders of capital, I think that some of this is also an artifact of the precarity of the PMC. In many cases, an objective review of their careers would reveal them to be about as useless as t^%s on a bull, and on some level they know it, so they must profess virtue to justify their positions.
There are some excellent observations here. However, one of the aspects of PMC commentators which I have noted is that they write and publish, without reading through what they have written, and making sure it is what they actually meant to say. To wit: 'Is it due to nature or nature?' You might wish to revisit that.
Sorry to be clogging or hogging your combox, yo, but it's not surprising that the PMC has a lock on virtue, since they are the ones defining what "virtue" means.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the word "virtue" as mediated by the PMC would turn out to mean "just like me!"
Something similar could be said about "meritocracy". "Merit" in PMC terms means "excelling, when judged on the PMC's own terms". Not surprisingly, such people also have a corner on merit.
"Sorkin himself acknowledges his work is geared towards upper class liberals, and revealed in an Aspen Institute interview with David Brooks (because of course) that The West Wing pilot bombed in its first test screening in 1999, and was only saved by Warner Brothers convening another test screening made up of viewers who: came from households making over $75,000 a year, had at least one person in the household that was college educated, had a home subscription to The New York Times, and had home internet access (relatively rare in ‘99). And scene."
I did not know that, but that is smart marketing - market a product targeted at insecure people who have disposable cash and who use their consumption habits to prove a point.
By contrast, pro wrestling has a huge audience in terms of number of viewers, but pro wrestling is not particularly attractive to advertisers in spite of its size. This is because the pro wrestling audience typically doesn't have much money to spend and their purchasing choices are often informed by price alone.
"If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves."
The two words I would have chosen to describe the PMC are "sanctimonious" and "censorious". An entire class of self-appointed hall monitors and teacher's pets.
As is common in most social commentary, it is usually prefigured in art. Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched is the PMC zeitgeist rendered in all of it’s destructive, hideous nature.