I know this is a Lou hate thread but I don't think he's that pathetic. I think he genuinely doesn't care what people think of him, but in a way that's insufferable. He has a lot of confidence that at a surface level appears to be unearned.

Oh man, I hate defending shitty characters but I don't think he was thin-skinned about Scout's Honor necessarily, his team was semi-openly mocking him and in his view he was putting his foot down in regards to his tolerance for insubordination and shenanigans.

I don't really see how him calling Don to rub his success in his face has to do with his confidence. It was spiteful. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

I think because we have such an individualistic society, confidence is considered an inherent virtue, often conflated with self-actualization. But in my opinion, confidence is a state of emotion that fluctuates based on our environment and situation we are in. A highly skilled professional can feel confident in their assessment of a problem within their expertise and a Info Wars loving victim of the Dunning-Kreuger affect can feel equally confident that chemtrails are turning the frogs gay. It has nothing to do with how correct or self-actualized the individual is, and it's not going to be an immutable quality of the individual- the presentation of confidence, and the degree to which a person is confident, is going to wildly vary.

Oh man, I hate defending shitty characters but I don't think he was thin-skinned about Scout's Honor necessarily, his team was semi-openly mocking him and in his view he was putting his foot down in regards to his tolerance for insubordination and shenanigans.

I don't really see how him calling Don to rub his success in his face has to do with his confidence. It was spiteful. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

I think because we have such an individualistic society, confidence is considered an inherent virtue, often conflated with self-actualization. But in my opinion, confidence is a state of emotion that fluctuates based on our environment and situation we are in. A highly skilled professional can feel confident in their assessment of a problem within their expertise and a Info Wars loving victim of the Dunning-Kreuger affect can feel equally confident that chemtrails are turning the frogs gay. It has nothing to do with how correct or self-actualized the individual is, and it's not going to be an immutable quality of the individual- the presentation of confidence, and the degree to which a person is confident, is going to wildly vary.

He does have a management style though, which is more than I can say for Don, who basically let his staff do whatever without any direction, bring it to him and let him workshop it/criticize it. We get almost 0 notion that he invests in employee/management relations, professional development for the team, or particularly values their input, apart from Peggy, sometimes.

Not saying Lou is better but in some ways he was a marginal improvement over Don.

Fair enough! There's so much subtlety in the show, it leads to multiple readings and I think our personal biases (mostly referring to mine!) seep into our perceptions.

For me personally, I have very few issues working for people like Lou. They're some of the easiest to navigate. They just want to hear 'sir yes sir' and don't really care about your output either way as long as it's consistent. Takes a lot of the pressure off. So I don't mind him as much as some people, even though he's a graceless chode who failed upward.