Re: Review: Madmen on AMC

In article <13aj9u15jkqpo66@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Society" <Society@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"PolishKnight" <marek1@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:marek1-BF1DF7.22383724072007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Just chatting now... It's interesting how much of the below stuff we
discuss really are "men's" issues. :-)

It's strange to see the liberals both hate the tobacco companies
and now at the same time see so many in Hollywood using their
products. They're all chain smokers and getting busted on DUI's
every other week.

I hear martinis, once a symbol of upper-income elites,
are back in style with a certain part of the youth crowd.
Strange.

It may also have a lot to do with the new James Bond.

I suspect the liberals trying to bash the 1950's in "MadMen" also
suspect that many of their viewers honestly feel nostalgia for the times
when people didn't have PC thought police patrolling the aisles.

Remember the movie "9 to 5" with Dolly Parton? It's an interesting bit
of Hollywood muck that bashed the workplace of the time portraying the
boss as a "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" who wanted to
sterilizing the workplace and forbid the female workers from bringing in
personal momentos and coffee cups.

Now today, many workers long to bring him back. :-)

As you know, the left sold marxism and feminism
to the unwitting public using orwellian slogans and pitches
that would make ad men proud:

"The republicans are for the rich"
"it's not discrimination, it's affirmative action"
"Women can't be equal without the workplace helping them."

Good examples, PolishKnight. I never noticed before
just how the Left's slogans resemble a 1950s advertiser's
taglines. All they need are fresh jingles to go with 'em;
the "hey hey, ho ho" stuff became stale before Reagan
was president.

The last one isn't a jingle (it's my statement of their rationalization)
but the first two I've actually heard before from their lips.

Other real examples of modern day leftist jingles include:

John Kerry was "swiftboated".
"Bush lied, people died."

These are not mere extremist or cynical positions, many of them actually
believe it which makes elections similar to cigarette smoking ad
campaigns.

This [show, _Madmen_ on AMC] is trying to achieve more
stylish realism and to a certain degree succeeds. Much of this,
of course, you can get just by watching old 1950's movies
(assuming the 1950's movies portrayed realism.)

No, Hollywood movies of the 1950s were not intended to
be realistic portrayals of life. The 1970s Hollywood product
tended to bend toward realism and away from portraying
a fabulous, glamourous world.

Agreed. What I meant though was that the clothing, styles, and
appearance of the films were similar to that of normal women of the
time.

But I agree, back in the 1950's actresses were chosen, strangely enough,
because they were PRETTY. Not because they were lesbians (Anne Hesche),
or communists (Diane Keaton/Sharon Stone.) Have you noticed how UGLY
Hollywood has gotten?

Ben Stein observed that most of the working class people in the film
industry: The cameramen, makeup artists, grips, engineers, etc.
generally are blue stater kind of people.

They're trying to combine this with some insights into different
classical ad campaigns. They could make it work because
that is interesting.

They ARE capable of making good television, Society.
The Simpsons is run by leftists as well as the Sopranos.

Yeah, they can make good television as long as they leave
the business of sending messages to someone else, as Sam
Goldwyn once insisted at his studio.

I've seen their agenda come out during the Simpsons and Family Guy and
it resulted in poor television (at least in my opinion.)

South Park, on the other hand, can ruthlessly go after Democrats and
still have you rolling in your seat with laughter. The biggest danger
leftism faces in the media now is boredom.

[...] While the left is chucking about the barbarians on the
small screen wearing vintage makeup and smoking Lucky
Strikes, the reality is that this generation actually came out
looking good when the obvious distortions were taken into
account. Ironically, the writers exposed their own biases,
hatreds, and hypocrisy in their choice of material and
how they displayed it.

Ha ha! Only Steve Jobs is master of the Reality Distortion Field.
All others are mere weakling pretenders!

Steve Jobs is insane. He frittered away the best OS platform
in the world on bad business moves and made money selling
overpriced mp3 players. Sheer luck.

I've thought about it over the years and I don't really see what
Apple could have done against the juggernaut of the IBM PC.

Thinking about it, the PC industry could have been so much more
than it's turned out to be.

I dunno. Until recently, the biggest market for PCs was
businesses and corporate IT departments really don't like the
word _personal_ in Personal Computer.

I appreciate that home marketing campaign hurt Apple.

Indeed, many corporate IT departments WANT PC's that are difficult to
use for keynsian reasons: Windows was a godsend for IT managers that
wanted to keep the rats buzzing for cheese. "My PC hard drive is
corrupt! Send a technician immediately!"

Ironically, PC's now are the game platform of choice with Macs being
used by serious IT and industry professionals even if not so many games
run on them. You know about the billion man-hours consumed by
solitaire? :-)

When the Apple II
took off, IBM conducted a for-internal-use study that ran
the numbers and found that for some time to come, desktop
machines in the corporate setting were not cost effective.

Er, I'm not a big fan of IBM. They quickly lost the PC market despite
having a huge edge in the corporate market and that speaks for itself.

Speaking of jingles: I've come across IT managers who loved the saying
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" just because it sounded neat AND
they would buy SERVERS from IBM because of it.

But people kept pestering IBM salespeople for desktop
machines so the IBM PC was born.

Er, no.

In Pirates of Silicon Alley and industry stories agree that Jobs and
Wozniak invented the PC while Gates and others were going for a business
"minicomputer" type of approach with the Ohio Scientific and CPM type
operating systems.

But maybe you're right: Maybe IBM was so far behind the curve that it
took their salespeople getting nagged for the management to see the
writing on the wall rather than look at their navel.

In retrospect, a nut like Jobs and geek like Wozniak didn't understand
how to make money and design a business model either otherwise history
would be different even with Gate's brilliant ploy to reverse engineer
the Mac.

And for the next ten
years, the IBMers who had written that study could quite
truthfully say, "We told you so."

Oh well. Toffler's Law is "The future comes too soon
and in the wrong order."

Certainly, it was not cost effective for IBM. :-) IBM makes their big
bucks selling service agreements and proprietary systems that lock users
in.

When Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS for the IBMPC, sales plummetted
and IBM started having to do something it hadn't from it's beginning:
LAYOFFS. Apparently, even corporate America discovered it made more
sense to build cheap networks and use cheaper PC's for word processing
and spread*** (not invented at MS, BTW) than to hook up vt100's to the
mainframe.

Thank heavens for linux.

Hmmm. Linux. Oh yeah, that knock-off of an operating system
common on 1970s minicomputers which were used mostly by
techies. IMO, Linux is a step backwards. Or sideways, at best.

Apple used a Unix kernel for their OS and get this, it's my
understanding that NT was also based upon a Unix kernel...

Here's an article I ran across the other day that touches
on some of the shortcomings of Linux as a desktop (or laptop) OS:

Why I Quit: Kernel Developer Con Kolivas
http://apcmag.com/6735/interview_con_kolivas

Anyway, I don't want to get into a PC and OS religious war.

It's certainly a man's discussion. :-)

I have a Mac and home and the users I've migrated to the platform have
been happy since they had few breakdowns (and those such as rare disk
corruption issues were resolved easily). I can use main office
applications as well as most important home stuff (DVD/Cd burning, etc.)

Linux is more of a challenge since it's so open and techie that it's
difficult to standardize upon a single snapshot release and distribution
mechanism. Novell's SLED is pretty good.

For example: The new secretary Peggy is portrayed as
a helpless feminine victim who, get this, comes in at 9AM,
is sexually harassed and given multiple lectures about
feminine inferiority, goes out to a doctor to buy birth
control pills, comes back, goes out again to buy chocolates
for her co-workers, and then hits on her boss and then
at the end of the evening sleeps with her OTHER boss!

Whew! Now THAT'S a busy day! :-) Even the desperate
housewives would be challenged to match that!

Uh, why did she buy those birth control pills? (Yes, this
is a trick question.)

I give up. :-)

Well, I suppose that this Peggy character has only just begun
her climb up the corporate ladder and when she maneuvers
a man much higher up into pegging her, then she'll strategically
have an "Oopsie! I'm pregnant" moment and trap herself an
income for life. And quit her "career". THAT would be
very 1950s, yes?

Absolutely. Which is why the Alpha male in the program rejected her
sexual advances.

They were going for everything all at once to really try to
push the "1950's/early 60's were SEXIST" all the way home.

I wonder if the show's writers realize in whose interests
the 1950s and early 1960s were SEXIST. Or will the
show be packed with a lot of unintentionally ironic scenes
until it collapses into a heap of nonsense? Do you suppose
_any_ of the show's producers and writers have even heard
of Helen Gurley Brown and her book _Sex and the Single Girl_?

Agreed. They're going to have to show the women as more than simplistic
victims if they want to keep ratings.

What little you've mentioned of that character Peggy suggests
that she's just the sort of sexual predator that Helen Gurley Brown
described.

It's simply unfathomable that a new employee in the 1950's
(or even today) would take off of their first day at work
to go to the doctor to get BC pills.

Uh huh. Was that just a plot device to let this Peggy character
inform her boss, uh, target that she was using the Pill and hint
that she was up for some no-consequences sex?

No. He barely was aware of her existance with all the other plot lines
going on.

And what are desperate housewives desperate for, anyway?

Supposedly attention and excitement.

Or to put it more crudely: A good banging.

That would be something the left would say.

Ironically, the sprawl of the suburbs was created by the left pushing
the white middle class out of the cities to make room for their marxist
agenda which resulted in crime and a high cost of living.

But clearly, the cities also still have something to offer because so
many young men and women from the suburbs found marxism and the city
lifestyle alluring and exciting compared to the strip mall offerings.

Even so, it's clear that Peggy is no victim. When she hits
on her boss, Don Draper, HE backs off almost as if HE'S
sexually harassed and rightly so: We find out later
he's married. He doesn't want to jeopardize HIS job
by sleeping with an underling and possibly undermine
respect from his boss. In other words, the great myth
about sexual harassment addressing bosses using economic
extortion to squeeze sexual favors out of women is largely
a big joke.

Yup. That old bromide addressed to men about not dipping
ones pen in the company inkwell was part of that period
too, wasn't it?

Sort of... One cheap scene that they put on the previews
showed a group of men talking in a dirty fashion in an
elevator a woman got onto. That simply wouldn't have
happened since these men know that such talk would
VERY quickly get around the office and they would
look bad to their superiors as well as to any women
that they might want to DATE.

Oh, I suppose that could have happened IRL. (I know how
some women gang up and talk dirty in front of a man they've
cornered and think they can humiliate.) And that these sort
of men (and women) would talk that way in front of the
kind of person they _don't_ expect to date.

In MODERN day times, yes but usually only the women would engage in such
tactics since so many submissive men today would dismiss such bad-grrl
behavior from a woman if she was sexy enough. This is to the credit of
women unlike men whose tolerance of such behavior created feminism.

Back then, smart women wouldn't want such talk to get witnessed outside
their clique because they would lose their aura of feminine innocence.
That "capital" has now been frittered away but at one time it was
valuable.

One funny thing about post-eras is how history is rewritten.
Do you think many leftists are so ingrained in sexual harassment
culture that they forgot that at one time, women found work
to be useful for finding a HUSBAND? It's hinted at in a
sexist manner in the show, but for most women it was a good
thing to find a man who earned a good living (I even heard
fox feminists say this.)

Yep, the script writers are probably college grads who had
reality brainwashed out of 'em by their professors. You're
correct, PolishKnight, there were just as many women with
a mercenary, sexist agenda of their own as there were the
now-legendary male chauvinist pigs.

Let me know when this show brings back the wolf-whistle.

When that gravy train dried up due to Anita Hill, it created
a massive change in workplace culture that made it sterile
and cold and in many ways, unpleasant for WOMEN
to work in.

And women are once again being open about their desire
to ditch the workplace and be a SAH mommy supported by
a husband. Gee, d'ya suppose the Anita Hill/Linda Hirschmann
circus had anything to do with that?

No kidding it did. Not only that, but all the high profile divorces and
alimony cases also have taken their toll on the buffalo herd thinning
out.

It's like saying women are victims because rich men married them.

I'm almost certain Parg and Marge have tried to get away
with making that very claim. Other feminists have. Really.
See _The Cinderella Complex_ by Collette Dowling.

Denise just said the same thing as well amazingly. That women
getting supported by men is a "sacrifice".

Yeah, on the MAN'S part!

No duh. I met a woman with that attitude who couldn't figure out why
her husband wasn't supporting her in her desire to "sacrifice" and quit
her job. I explainined that people aren't motivated to work hard to be
bashed for exploiting you. :-)

[...] One of the [funniest] ironies of MadMen may be how
close it is in action and attitude to the entertainment industry.
Lessee: Lots of people smoking all the time, drinking,
cheating on their wives, mad abuses of power, getting high up
on basic charm. Yep, that's it. That's an industry BEGGING
to be paradied but ironically it won't happen from the
entertainment industry.

Yup, the entertainment industry crowd is certainly begging
to be parodied. _Studio 60_ could have been that show
but wasn't and now it's off the air. Hmmm.

It has happened from time to time, but usually in small ways.
Remember the Julie Andrews film?

I'm drawing a blank. Which one?

"S.O.B."

regards,
PolishKnight
.