Tacherus
23d ago
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
- a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
- a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
- we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
- a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
Tacherus
26d ago
Most progress for women's causes came from what one would broadly call the left.
I think there might be some revision in this statement. My understanding is that as late as the 60s the feminist vote was kinda up for grabs between republicans and democrats.
Tacherus
26d ago
I think this is a new definition and as you point out a bit of a futile goal. I thought most people learned as teenagers they can’t control how they’re perceived and develop an internal sense of self but this fallacy seems to run rampant these days.
Tacherus
26d ago
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse.
I was thinking the other day about how it might feel very similar to being the heir of a big company or empire or something where you’re forever living in the shadow of something you didn’t do or earn. Your so-and-so’s heir is the most important thing about you no matter what you do.
This obviously could be nice but also feel like a prison.
Then contrast with a street urchin analogy for guys where there is only what you do.
They both have their own kinda of freedom and own kinds of stifling. It makes sense for there to be some degree of envying the other.
Tacherus
30d ago
I’m surprised there haven’t been climate change or other environmental lawsuits citing descendants as part of the class. Or maybe there have been?
Tacherus
2mo ago
Just this past week my wife and I have been discussing replacing a ten year old ICE car with an EV. The main motivations are simpler maintenance and charging from our solar panels.
Tacherus
3mo ago
Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.
I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.
If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.
Tacherus
3mo ago
DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.
I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?
Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:
- dividing the world into oppressor and oppressed
- some sort of natural outgrowth of Marx from the Frankfurt school
- Marxist analysis somehow applied to culture?
- centered on critique of capitalism
- use race or sex instead of class
Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.
So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.
Tacherus
3mo ago
My impulse is that the urge to flee is tied into the idea that “their side winning” is equivalent to the system functioning properly. A loss of popular support of this scale can only be interpreted in terms of the whole thing falling apart.
That being said I’m sympathetic to being freaked out. I don’t go looking for it yet pretty consistently find myself sucked down “leave before it’s too late” rabbit holes that are pretty effective at freaking me out when I’m doomscrolling at night.
Tacherus
4mo ago
I’m inclined to give him a little more slack than that. Just the other day I had the experience of reminiscing about a friend I had 10+ years ago who I knew for a fact was an incurable bullshitter. He lied about the most inane things and I knew this at the time.
He ran a store when I met him and it closed after a year or so and it only occurred to me now, more than a decade later, that he probably lied to me about why he had to close.
I think there are two pieces here that I’ve experienced firsthand: one is it’s very difficult to retro-actively scrub for lies. I also experienced this after leaving Mormonism in college. For years after I was uncovering random new things I’d been taught that were easily seen to not be true.
The second is it’s difficult to spot a lie if it is about something it would never occur to you to lie about. It’s like if someone always lies to you about what he had for lunch that day. Then over time lies get built on that. It can be very hard when a major lie is uncovered to realize it goes back to what was for lunch.
Tacherus
6mo ago
I’ve noticed this before too. I’d go further and say it’s not just the dinner party metaphor but a fixation on formal power.
This mainly manifests in my experience when discussing power dynamics between men and women. The idea that a pretty intern could have “power” over her boss simply does not compute. It’s a form of mistaking the map for the territory I think.
I agree with your definition as the ability to get things done, but that doesn’t yield as readily to systematic analyses and also I suspect doesn’t quite align with the story they want to tell.
I think there’s a category of error of reading too much into how things look on paper. Like another example I use is to ask whether or not an infant has power over her parents. To me the answer is obviously yes, but if you’re caught up in systemic analyses and legalism and dealing with formal “power structures” you will struggle to explain why or might even deny it outright.
Tacherus
6mo ago
It's probably not the best way to do it, but it's fun and it's been a learning experience.
Story of my life. Sounds fun!
Tacherus
9mo ago
Right, exactly. I watched a talk from Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor about this years ago. She encouraged people to splurge on things like restaurants and vacations rather than cars and houses because if things go south you can easily just not go out to eat versus having to unwind an expensive car or house payment.
Similar logic applies here I think.
Also it seems like in most cases the lifetime spend for renting dwarfs the cost of ownership.
Tacherus
9mo ago
It’s related but not quite the same. If my savings are in the market for instance and I’m let go because of a recession, suddenly my obligatory expenses could mean I have to sell at the worst possible time.
I’m not saying renting is never a good idea but racking up fixed expenses poses risks.
Tacherus
9mo ago
I mean a network of people who know you and your work. Preferably from having worked with you. I checked in with school acquaintances for instance, many of whom were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.
The more you can be a “known quantity” the better I think during job searches. Someone who knows you and can say good things about you can be a major leg up.
As for how, I know there are often local tech meetups where you can meet people. My personal approach has been to make sure when someone works with me they like my work and they like working with me. It’s opened a lot of doors.
Tacherus
9mo ago
For me it all comes back to what kind of cash flow you need. Depreciation notwithstanding, if I lose my job I’d much rather have a car that’s losing value on paper than have a monthly payment I need to make.
Tacherus
9mo ago
Imho it’s a numbers game until you build out a network. My first job was the result of months of cold applying to things. Every job since has been joining someone I’ve already worked with which is so much easier.
Does your school have alumni job placement help? That can help bootstrap a network, along with talking to former classmates.
Are you getting interviews but not offers? Or just not hearing back after applying?
I totally believe the gallows humor aspect. What struck me was which topics didn’t get joked about. Being “unhoused” is Very Serious but not being a crack addict whose name sounds like crack.
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