In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

"So what if we went to Oxford, or if our parents were solicitors?", the line of defence went. "Our hearts are in the right place. We fight for the many, not the few."
Ten years on, seeing where PMC domination of the left has taken the movement, we can revisit those criticisms and see the importance of the original pushback.
What a PMC parental background and a prep-school and Oxbridge education tend to provide their beneficiaries with is a high degree of entitlement, verbal polish and presentation, and an often unshakeable personal confidence.
Combined with the utopian and improvement- and uplift-focused aspects of left thought, this prior socialisation tends to produce a highly authoritarian form of left-managerialism, one in which the PMC left appoint themselves both moral spokespeople and moral technicians.
It's not so much that these left representatives are "out of touch with the working class" (though they certainly are), it's that they are "in touch" with others of their class, producing an intense degree of PMC class solidarity within the erstwhile left.
Ideas spread easily from Stanford and Harvard to Oxford, Cambridge and Copenhagen because members of the international PMC are primed to pick them up and assimilate them, regardless of nationality. https://t.co/iTJapCPTAZ
Graduates of the same universities, in managerial positions in the educational and GLAM sectors, assume the same ideological positions and impose uniform blanket policies as though all acting in unison.
PMC socialisation in elite schools and universities expresses itself in other ways as well. Social media mobbing and ostracism among the LARPing left reflect the networking and social skills learned in elite school and university common rooms.
The aim of the PMC left isn't the creation of a broad and successful political movement. Instead, it is to imbue the PMC with a new sense of moral authority (and moral mission) and to create career opportunities for highly educated moral technicians in institutions.

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Last month I presented seven sentences in seven different languages, all written in a form of the Chinese-character script. The challenge was to identify the languages and, if possible, provide a


Here again are those seven sentences:

1) 他的剑从船上掉到河里去
2) 於世𡗉番𧡊哭唭𢆥尼歲㐌外四𨑮
3) 入良沙寢矣見昆腳烏伊四是良羅
4) 佢而家喺邊喥呀
5) 夜久毛多都伊豆毛夜幣賀岐都麻碁微爾夜幣賀岐都久流曾能夜幣賀岐袁
6) 其劍自舟中墜於水
7) 今天愛晚特語兔吃二魚佛午飯

Six of those seven sentences are historically attested. One is not: I invented #7. I’m going to dive into an exploration of that seventh sentence in today’s thread.

Sentence #7 is an English-language sentence written sinographically — that is, using graphs that originate in the Chinese script. I didn’t do this for fun (even though it is fun), or as a proposal for a new way to write


I did it as a thought experiment. Why? Because thinking about how the modern Chinese script might be adapted to write modern English can give us valuable insights into historical instances of script borrowing, like those that took place centuries ago in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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