Maybe inmates should take over asylums?

Nice observation in Jaymo's 301-second podcast (with transcript for those can't be dealing with podcasts) that the term the inmates have taken over the asylum assumes that this would be a bad thing and that the people previously running the asylum were doing a good job. It usually crops up when there's some kind of regime change where people usually found at the bottom of the organisational chart find themselves at the top, and those with a vested interest in the old status quo can't quite get their heads around it.

What the phrase doesn't allow for is the notion that the people who usually end up running things, at least a middle-management level, might not be very good at it. Anyone who's worked for some kind of big org will have experienced the soul-crushing realisation that someone up the hierarchy from them is at best incompetent and at worst a raging sociopath, and there's nothing you can do about it except leave.

Plenty more observations and links at the link.