Laughing at the proles: C/D?

A cursory glance at the site in question reveals that these are exactly the sort of people your university-educated middle-class types fear are waiting around bus stops and street corners in order to beat them up. Ergo sites established in order to laugh at them from a safe distance.

If this were really done, in equal measure, then maybe we'd have world peace, yes. But it doesn't work like that.

I don't think this is just about laughing / joking, either, it's about using class to belittle and humiliate.

I blame Norman Ph4y.

1. The responses to JtN are [fill in blank and win a prize]

2. I have never heard of a 'Chav'.

3. When I was growing up, it was all miners from Nottingham and council estate kids. No-one would have dared laugh at working-class people. They would never have got away with it. Whether they do now, I don't know.

4. I don't think I would like Energy Flash.

I think I find it impossible to imagine how the stuff in there about the Detroit techno scene is v. interesting.

The prize still stands. Or perhaps it has fallen.

"Is Dan Perry gon' hafta choke a bitch?"

As for the proles, well...um...okay, right now I got nothing.

Today he, or she, has not offended me, perhaps because he, or she, has been surrounded by other interesting posts from people I know.

also, some might consider it to be bad behaviour to come onto a thread and belittle and dismiss something in such terms, it certainly does you a disservice, and is somewhat disappointing.

of course there is nothing to say that you should be interested in the sociocultural context of popular music either at a geographically specific or at a wider level, and theres nothing to stop you enjoying and reading about music on a much more personal rather than cultural level

after all, perhaps it is safer to dismiss from a distance than to engage with anything outside your immediate interests. still, always refreshing to have the same dismissive one liner trotted out

Jerry the Nipper and I are starting a new breakaway board soon, called I LOVE GEEZERS.

I am quite conscious of casual snobbery, I hope, I think in a weird way being into clubbing and dance music and things made me more conscious of what dickheads people who harped on about "knackers" or had iffy views about them are, particularly when a common slur of the dance scene here would be "oh that's scumbag music, where's your fiat punto" etc etc etc etc.

I did used (use?) to do that, once upon a time

I think started a thread about this grammatical confusion once.

perhaps n or jtn could copy and paste this in italics or something in one of their posts, otherwise the pinefox might not get to read it

perhaps for this to be ok there needs to be still some kind of affinity/connection/affection/identification with your background (which i guess means you havent escaped it as such, you still see yourself as being of that upbringing, but even then i think you would have to actually engage with your past actively, otherwise you have cut all ties, camped to the other side etc)

All I would really like to say is that N. and Ronan have said things which have really made me think. (Is this because they're also middle class, privately educated bastards?)

Class issues become more than just a (potentially mobile) money issue when you have two distinct and often inherently unequal cultures living side by side. In the US, this isn't as much masked by the race issue as exacerbated by it. In the UK, you have two markedly different and distinct cultures who have been living side by side (or rather one on top of another) effectively since the Norman Conquest (operatively since the Tudor era, but hey, what's 500 years between classes?).

A lot of my "classist" jokes are knee-jerk reactions of one sort or another - because I've developed a perverse reactionary "say what people would expect the toff to say becauase they're going to demonise you anyway" twitch. Because even when I say what I actually believe, people don't read what I'm saying, they just read what they would expect Someone Like Me to say. (Ronan's description struck a real chord with a younger me, even though I wasn't on drugs.)

Anyway... I've got to preserve my place in the class structure and get back to work now.

There are, then, cunts whereever you go. I think middle-class cuntishness towards the proles is getting worse though - and at the risk, I see Loaded culutre to blame, where politics got taken out of things, and anything was good for a laugh, and woe-betide the po-faced cunt who raises an objection (porn is cool and rocks, and don't fucking spoil it by reminding us of E. Europe human traffickers, you po-faced cunts). There was a quiet reserve which whilst looking down on the lower orders, wouldn't have laughed at them; it wasn't needed. The middle-class had won. The working class were for manual labour and for being repositories of all that was wrong, but not comic material; comedy is interesting as I think for most of the 20th C, most of British humour has been resolutely working-class in nature. Maybe the alternative comedy broke that back perhaps? Unintended consequence of lefty-gagmerchants being denigration of working class?

(cf debate about middle-clas left and rootedness in politics of reason, rather than empathy; vulnerable to sudden shifts (witness the Hitchens boys))

I think council estate residents, chavs, pramfaces, dole scroungers, whatever the condescending nu-media working class chooses to call them, represent a level of "acceptable poverty" that makes them fair game - I can't imagine a similar level of barbed humour being considered acceptable when talking about, say, the homeless, or pensioners living in squalour, or even asylum seekers (although the latter is becoming regrettably less so).

I could expand on this and say it possibly has something to do with the British welfare state but I am hungover and it would probably be bollocks anyway.

Most of the time I assume its invisibility is benign, then some assholish shit like this starts up.