Larssen
Member
+99|1857

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

Larssen wrote:

uziq wrote:

everyone i know at pwc or kpmg or so on, now they're approaching 30 and the excitement of big earnings has worn off, are like hollow men.
The consulting market is oversaturated, most young people will be overworked and not paid as amazingly as they thought/hoped they would be.

Partners are raking in ridiculous sums though. I believe they averaged 600k at deloitte in my country last year.
they still pay very well, and consultant firms are the key pipeline to executive positions. Consulting firms are a good example of the MBA-type mentality infecting corporations. Lots of short-term goals implemented at the detriment of long term stability.
Depends on the consultancy. Often good management traineeships or diplomatic service jobs etc. have better starting salary, benefits & work life balance. Companies also increasingly prefer having data science and strategy teams in house. I believe actual strategy guidance is only about 10% of the consulting market these days, the consultants hired as data monkeys and barely involved in the actual process. Essentially most strategy consultants end up being it in name only.

As for consulting and an MBA being the road to top management - this has certainly been true in the past, but I wonder if it still will be in the future. There's many more ex management & strategy consultants pumped out by big 3 / big 4 every year than there are management positions to fill. The ones who do well now end up in the aforementioned in house strategy teams rather than a real managerial position due to a lack of people & team management experience among most consultants. Companies prefer their own trainees for the management pathways.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-07 01:45:15)

Larssen
Member
+99|1857

uziq wrote:

pretty amusing long-read on buttigieg

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-pete
He absolutely decimated the man, what a piece. The writing did strike me as being of the progressivism strand which castigates any and all who do not devote themselves to kicking the power balance in the world + poverty/minority issues. In many places it's the angry factionalism and obsession with perceived injustices in the progressive left that kills its chances of succes.

Ironically the writer himself went to three 'top tier' universities in the US. I'm sure he must've already realised these were 'deeply troubling places' after his MA , so why then continue on to Yale and Harvard for a JD and PhD....?
uziq
Member
+492|3422
lots of people go to top institutions whilst remaining progressives. you can do both. see scholars from latin america or african american communities who go to elite graduate or law school in order to find a platform and make a difference. you can critique an institution and be self-aware. recognising that harvard has a homeless population doesn't seem like a revolutionary leap. would you rather your leftist political commentators, lawyers and so on went to state colleges out of 'principle' (fwiw many people get jobs teaching less-privileged people at these institutions ... after qualifying with the best possible education. this seems sensible.)

that critique is about on par with 'lol occupy protestors drink coffee from starbucks'.

progressives mostly want equality of opportunity, not to shut down elite institutions.

it still shocks me that this has to be explained to people. elite education = good. people getting into elite colleges because they're white, or their parents and grandparents went there and donated heavily = probably bad, and can be changed.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-07 11:29:49)

Larssen
Member
+99|1857
As if Harvard would've been his only choice. After a stellar MA and a yale JD which I'll forgive him he could've started a PhD of his choice at any uni in the world. Of all places he picks the one institution he seems to particularly loathe. It's not as if Harvard has a trademark on World's Best Education. While chastising Buttigieg for treating his life as a series of checkboxes the writer seems to have done the exact same until at least his late 20s. How often did he reference Butttigieg's disconnect and privilege by referencing his professor parents etc. - this guy just as well came from privilege and went to study at the most elite, disconnected places he could find.

Sure, he has a different and more worldly perspective, but it all strikes me as a case of champagne socialism.

To elaborate on this I don't personally mind people making these choices or even deciding to work for McKinsey as a young starting consultant. But if you're going to attack people for these facts have a little self reflection as well. Was dear writer out there protesting for a living wage for the janitors of Harvard?  Even if he was, just as well he contributed to the continuation and reputation of an institution he considers a hollow place which trains the elite to ignore the plebs. For his own gain.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-07 15:35:50)

KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

Larssen wrote:

As if Harvard would've been his only choice. After a stellar MA and a yale JD which I'll forgive him he could've started a PhD of his choice at any uni in the world. Of all places he picks the one institution he seems to particularly loathe. It's not as if Harvard has a trademark on World's Best Education. While chastising Buttigieg for treating his life as a series of checkboxes the writer seems to have done the exact same until at least his late 20s. How often did he reference Butttigieg's disconnect and privilege by referencing his professor parents etc. - this guy just as well came from privilege and went to study at the most elite, disconnected places he could find.

Sure, he has a different and more worldly perspective, but it all strikes me as a case of champagne socialism.

To elaborate on this I don't personally mind people making these choices or even deciding to work for McKinsey as a young starting consultant. But if you're going to attack people for these facts have a little self reflection as well. Was dear writer out there protesting for a living wage for the janitors of Harvard?  Even if he was, just as well he contributed to the continuation and reputation of an institution he considers a hollow place which trains the elite to ignore the plebs. For his own gain.
I think you're missing the author's point- that Pete is a self-described progressive without holding any actual progressive values, as determined by the content of his autobiography. The author contrasts Pete's book with Bernie's (another self-described progressive) to further this point.  Since Pete doesn't have a habit of doing anything progressive, or even repeating typical progressive platforms like social justice, asymmetric relationship between labor and capital, etc, the author goes through Pete's upbringing and policy actions as mayor to provide some insight to the reader on what Pete's really about.

The piece is not an indictment of elite institutions so much as an imputation that Pete portrays himself as something he is not. I think he highlights the Harvard, Oxford, and McKinsey tours to counter the image Pete tries to portray as a blue collar, heartland American who has deep-seated progressive blood running through his veins. The result is a portrait of a person who seems to be glomming on to the progressive movement as a means to climb the next ladder rung of his political career rather than actually effecting change.

I think of a quote Pete had about the need for a President from America's heartland as a testament to Pete's hilarious lack of self-awareness and privilege. He's throwing a bone to rural voters in a completely disingenuous way.
DesertFox-
The very model of a modern major general
+794|6654|United States of America
I didn't get that he specifically had anything against Harvard beyond the issue discussed, per se. It's not like the Ivies are devoid of progressive students or groups that are politically active. The issue is more with the people who use things like going to Harvard as resume-building steps alone --- not specifically Pete here, but the stereotypical New England prep school rich kid image.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

I think you're missing the author's point- that Pete is a self-described progressive without holding any actual progressive values, as determined by the content of his autobiography. The author contrasts Pete's book with Bernie's (another self-described progressive) to further this point.  Since Pete doesn't have a habit of doing anything progressive, or even repeating typical progressive platforms like social justice, asymmetric relationship between labor and capital, etc, the author goes through Pete's upbringing and policy actions as mayor to provide some insight to the reader on what Pete's really about.

The piece is not an indictment of elite institutions so much as an imputation that Pete portrays himself as something he is not. I think he highlights the Harvard, Oxford, and McKinsey tours to counter the image Pete tries to portray as a blue collar, heartland American who has deep-seated progressive blood running through his veins. The result is a portrait of a person who seems to be glomming on to the progressive movement as a means to climb the next ladder rung of his political career rather than actually effecting change.

I think of a quote Pete had about the need for a President from America's heartland as a testament to Pete's hilarious lack of self-awareness and privilege. He's throwing a bone to rural voters in a completely disingenuous way.
Progressivism is about more than social issues, but yes it's clear that Pete has no real principles or values at all, doesn't care much about people and is only interested in feeding his own narcissism. The many points didn't escape me. The writer was thorough, hilarious and convincing.

No alright, progressivism (bar its more radical forms) doesn't necessarily want to destroy elite institutions. It strives for a better, more just world etc. But the virtues of social activism, wandering off the beaten path, turning principles into action, the lauding of Bernie's life (who didn't value the classroom much), the argument that the injustices of this world such as the homeless outside Harvard or the ingrained power structures (to which Harvard is pivotal) should make you burn white hot with activist anger, I see none of this in the writer either. In fact on the surface his chosen trajectory seems very similar to that of Pete. I don't think it is unfair or wrong to hold up that mirror, considering his views.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-08 00:35:58)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
i mean it’s not like the author didn’t use his time at harvard to start a website, which is widely read and we are all discussing, which posts left-leaning critique and investigative journalism. no, he just went to harvard and enjoyed years of privilege and was a total hypocrit. i can also count several books he has published, presumably in his 20s, all in the same progressive vein. and the piece makes several references to how, when pete was meeting dignitaries on campus, the writer was waving pickets or protesting. what would he need to do to satisfy you? throw a stick of dynamite? (i'd never heard of the writer before this piece, in any case, and i'm not sure why he needs to be some intellectual paragon; it's a fairly light piece in an online magazine...)

i’m sorry but i just don’t understand this attitude at all. many of the most elite institutions have fostered left/progressive/anti-establishment views. it’s not hypocrisy at all if you consider that a university is meant to be a space for idea-formation and to openly debate and contest values. it’s pretty clear that a university is a big enough place to accommodate many types of students: whether that be first time yale JD’s who are ex-cons, now writing poetry for black america, or english jews who go to school in the states and found online magazines, or your typical prep-school, my-dads-was-a-princeton-man WASPs.

your point is a bit like asking why feminists or post-colonialists ever go to oxford, because most of the colleges have been only for men, and many of the universities’ colleges and scholarships were built on the back of colonial extraction etc etc. it’s just such a surface-level and asinine grasp of the way the world actually works; and such a wilful misreading of how political principles work, too. news flash: marxists don’t all throw themselves into bottom-tier state education and work in canning factories. it's not the era of the spanish civil war.

it’s fairly obvious from the piece that the author is not the same type of person as buttigieg. ‘champagne socialism’ is pretty much a blacklist term for me where i immediately know the person using it is probably some smug idiot who reads right-wing sunday papers and tries to reduce his tax contribution. it’s rhetoric only ever used by established interests.

is noam chomsky a champagne socialist because he’s been tenured at MIT for most of his political life? was foucault a mere champagne socialist because he took membership at the collège de france, and was a haute bourgeois by origin?

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-08 01:09:11)

DesertFox-
The very model of a modern major general
+794|6654|United States of America
A follow-up article just dropped the other day.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1 … ead-prices

oh my god this video clip is so fucking perfect and cringe. it says it ALL.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857

uziq wrote:

i mean it’s not like the author didn’t use his time at harvard to start a website, which is widely read and we are all discussing, which posts left-leaning critique and investigative journalism. no, he just went to harvard and enjoyed years of privilege and was a total hypocrit. i can also count several books he has published, presumably in his 20s, all in the same progressive vein. and the piece makes several references to how, when pete was meeting dignitaries on campus, the writer was waving pickets or protesting. what would he need to do to satisfy you? throw a stick of dynamite? (i'd never heard of the writer before this piece, in any case, and i'm not sure why he needs to be some intellectual paragon; it's a fairly light piece in an online magazine...)

i’m sorry but i just don’t understand this attitude at all. many of the most elite institutions have fostered left/progressive/anti-establishment views. it’s not hypocrisy at all if you consider that a university is meant to be a space for idea-formation and to openly debate and contest values. it’s pretty clear that a university is a big enough place to accommodate many types of students: whether that be first time yale JD’s who are ex-cons, now writing poetry for black america, or english jews who go to school in the states and found online magazines, or your typical prep-school, my-dads-was-a-princeton-man WASPs.

your point is a bit like asking why feminists or post-colonialists ever go to oxford, because most of the colleges have been only for men, and many of the universities’ colleges and scholarships were built on the back of colonial extraction etc etc. it’s just such a surface-level and asinine grasp of the way the world actually works; and such a wilful misreading of how political principles work, too. news flash: marxists don’t all throw themselves into bottom-tier state education and work in canning factories. it's not the era of the spanish civil war.

it’s fairly obvious from the piece that the author is not the same type of person as buttigieg. ‘champagne socialism’ is pretty much a blacklist term for me where i immediately know the person using it is probably some smug idiot who reads right-wing sunday papers and tries to reduce his tax contribution. it’s rhetoric only ever used by established interests.

is noam chomsky a champagne socialist because he’s been tenured at MIT for most of his political life? was foucault a mere champagne socialist because he took membership at the collège de france, and was a haute bourgeois by origin?
Oh Chomsky is a case you could certainly analyse in depth on this point. In the 60s his actions to ignore anti-war protesters at MIT, his defence of the institution (which was almost completely funded by and working for the DoD at the time) and of the people he worked with even if they were involved in ballistic or chemical weapons development, while simultaneously decrying American militarism, defence research and interventionism doesn't reflect all that well on him. Chomsky was especially keen to turn a blind eye to matters that would otherwise receive his strongest condemnations if he liked the people involved or if they were personal friends of him. I see that this sort of argument riles you up especially when it's against a viewpoint you agree with, but you need to realise that people can both have good points (in this instance though, I'm certainly not a fan of chomskyism) and be hypocrites, and can be criticised for it.

It's a point on moral sincerity, the exact same thing for which Buttigieg is attacked here. You and the writer seem to hold him responsible for all the misdeeds that took place in which McKinsey was involved, even though he worked there for only 3 years probably as a junior business analyst or associate at best. But how could someone with his background possibly justify working for McKinsey of all places, the World's Worst Companytm?

Well, as we are going through the McKinsey-is-the-devil narrative, let me quote the writer of this article on his thoughts with regard to Harvard as well:

Few people amass these kind of  résumés if they are the type to openly challenge authority. Noam Chomsky says that the factors predicting success in our “meritocracy” are a “combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, [and] self-serving disregard for others.” So when journalists see “Harvard” and think “impressive,” I see it and think “uh-oh.”
But there’s another fact about the world outside the Harvard gates that is instantly apparent to most newcomers: It has long had a substantial population of homeless people. In fact, it’s a scene as grotesque as it is eclectic: Directly outside the Corinthian columns of the richest university on earth, people wrapped in dirty coats are begging for a buck or two from passing students. Most of the university population has trained themselves to ignore this sub-caste
He didn’t consider, and still hasn’t considered, the moral quandary that should come with being a student at an elite school that doesn’t pay its janitors a living wage. (In fact, years later Harvard was still refusing to pay its workers decently.)

If you come out of Harvard without noticing that it’s a deeply troubling place, you’re oblivious. It is an inequality factory, a place that trains the world’s A-students to rule over and ignore the working class. And yet, nowhere does Buttigieg seem to have even questioned the social role of an institution like Harvard.
The idea of “false modesty” requires you to be a little cynical about the world, to believe that there is a class of people out there who seem unpresuming but are actually shrewdly calculating. But Buttigieg didn’t notice any of this even when he was at Harvard, the global capital of false modesty.
None of this seems to reflect all that well on the institution, actually it paints a pretty terrible picture. As Buttigieg could've worked anywhere other than McKinsey, the writer could've certainly started a PhD anywhere but at Harvard. Yet his deep reflection on the social role of an institution like Harvard and disgust for many of its students seemed to wither away as soon as he could further his personal ambitions there. It's not as if he should've been working in a factory to share in the misery of the working class's bottom rung, but of all the top institutions in the United States, and he could've picked any after Yale, Harvard had his preference.

I'm sure you'll throw a fit again and argue that intellectual pursuit is different, but as junior analyst Buttigieg is seemingly complicit to all the wrongs committed by Worst Company in the World McKinsey, our writer spent at least 4 years on the payroll of and supporting an institution he sees as the capital of false modesty, a factory for systemic inequality, run by inhumane management that can't even pay its janitors a living wage and whose graduates are mostly shrewd people one should be wary of. Makes you question why on earth he chose to spend his time there in the first place. As I said before, there's no way this could've come as a surprise after his previous educational achievements.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-09 04:25:39)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
i certainly don't hold him responsible for 'all the misdeeds of mckinsey', just as i don't expect someone like chomsky to be an unblemished saint with a lifetime of singularly consistent political action – that's my whole point about people being able to go to elite institutions and also contribute, validly, towards progressive causes. you were the one espousing a critique based on this supposed 'inconsistency'. i don't see it as being inconsistent; i see it as being practical reality, and how people negotiate – and sometimes make mistakes – in complex issues. (also not a fan of chomsky's politics, for what it's worth, but i would never lambast the guy as a 'champagne socialist', because the entire term is utterly spurious; and i suspect you're more well-versed in handy dismissals of chomsky than his work itself, the old right-wing 'the left have feet of clay' trope that you're exercising on the above articles, but that's by the by.)

i think the two aforementioned articles go way over the top on attacking buttigieg, it's obviously partial polemic rather than impartial political reportage, but it's very entertaining nonetheless. that's why i linked it in the first place, which seemed quite obvious to me. this little digression on the author's background and why people should have revolutionary anarchist credentials, having bombed wall street and lived in a yurt, before criticising a vapid candidate like buttigieg, was of your own contriving. i couldn't care less about the educational path or student-activities of an author on a website. but then again i don't tend to place anyone who dares critique centrist 'business as usual' wall street shills as 'champagne socialists'. only you can answer why you're so mistrustful of leftists/progressives and why you expect them to live like zarathustra in a mountain cave.

once again, to repeat it for the third time, he speaks explicitly in the articles about how he was on the picket line or joining student/staff protests over the working conditions of janitors, which to me sounds like political activism and attempts at reform, whereas buttigieg passed by the 'SJWs' (quoted from his book). are you saying promising students shouldn't go to harvard because it perpetuates inequality? that people hoping to reform the institutions from within, or students/staff organising into unions or political groups, would be better off going to UMass? because of course harvard and the structure of higher-education will change itself, spontaneously, when all these idealistic progressives just go somewhere else and leave the campuses to the 'family donor' students. please tell me you are not this stupid.

(my own take on the author, after spending all of 10 minutes googling the guy, is that he's clearly trying to style himself as a tom wolfe or gore vidal-like dandy, firmly of the establishment but a gadfly to its values; and he's probably trying a little bit too hard in doing so, being an english-jewish transplant and not a new england native, and is probably going over-the-top on the supposed 'boston man of letters' and 'marmalade cashmere waistcoat with cravat' thing, but so what -- it's amusing and he's probably younger than both of us, and a writer on a website having dandyish pretensions is a lot less harmful than a McKinsey consultant having pretensions of being a hoosier on the back of a corn wagon. arraigning a person because they tried to get the best education possible in their own intellectual/political formation is really fucking facile).

was eric hobsbawm a champagne socialist btw? asking for a friend.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-11 10:53:37)

SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I would vote for Mayor Pete but are we really ready for a gay man to live in the White House? Can he leave his husband in whatever state he is from and we just ignore his sexuality completely?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Yang dropped out yesterday after the primary. Warren and Biden are effectively done after the piss poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. Amy K. is still around but a distant third between Mayor Pete and Sanders.

I think if Biden, Warren and Amy dropped out today, Pete would pick up their voters and win the primary.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Biden and Trump are like two withered peas in a pod. Irritable old men with senile spats of irrationality.

They should have a joint event where they verbally accost attendees together. Call it a bipartisan team-building exercise.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
it's impressive how badly biden is trashing himself. he seemed to behave with some sort of dignity over his kids various tragedies and gaffes.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Senility is just a big bundle of covfeve.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I will vote for Bloomberg as president solely on my desire for him to take away fat people's food.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg was recorded as recently as last year referring to transgender people as “he, she, or it” and “some guy in a dress” as he chided 2020 Democrats for focusing on transgender issues.

“If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people,” Bloomberg said on March 21, 2019 at a Bermuda Business Development Agency forum in Manhattan.
Based Mike Bloomberg
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
that quotation was what just started the last 5-6 pages of (now irrelevant) chat in the transgender thread.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I know the threads all are mixed up. The aboriginals should be talked about in the racism thread.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Anyway Bush won reelection in 2004 by getting people mad about gay marriage only for it to be legalized in 2013. Trump will win 2020 off of the transgender question. Transgender surgery will become a civil right in 2029 by President Ilhan Omar if my math is right.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

i think you should go back to math class.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
2013-2004 = 9

2029-2020 = 9
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
nostradamus still got it.

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