Sunday NY Times piece on British Snobbery, for all you little plebs and gits

Started by CountDeMoney, December 06, 2014, 11:40:30 PM

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Warspite

£15 a bottle for champagne for an institution that does a lot of hospitality and entertaining of visiting dignitaries does not sound untoward.
" SIR – I must commend you on some of your recent obituaries. I was delighted to read of the deaths of Foday Sankoh (August 9th), and Uday and Qusay Hussein (July 26th). Do you take requests? "

OVO JE SRBIJA
BUDALO, OVO JE POSTA

Brazen

Quote from: Warspite on December 09, 2014, 04:37:19 AM
£15 a bottle for champagne for an institution that does a lot of hospitality and entertaining of visiting dignitaries does not sound untoward.
Well quite. Even Lidl is charging £17.99 a bottle. I'd take a few off their hands at that price.

There's a lot of inverse snobbery happening in the media of late. And, to be fair. actual snobbery (the white van man incident for instance).

Richard Hakluyt

The peers pay for the stuff anyway. The argument is that merging the catering services for the Commons and the Lords would lead to efficiency savings. It appears that the Lords are not impressed with the champagne available at the Commons' bars and restaurants so have stymied the merger.

Malthus

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on December 09, 2014, 03:42:20 AM
Quote from: Malthus on December 08, 2014, 04:29:20 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 04:21:39 PM
Quote from: Malthus on December 08, 2014, 03:11:29 PM
Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh.  ;)

Professional big game hunter = posh hobo.

Seems reasonable enough.

  ;)

Read "King Solomon's Mines". He's not the stereotype of the "great white hunter" in a pith helmet and spats - more like a genuine backwoods type, who eked out a meagre living in poverty by hunting (which is why he agreed to go on a hair-brained rescue mission - he was being paid 500 pounds to do it, which he wanted to pay for his son's higher education - and paid in advance, so if he died it wasn't a big deal). It is funny to see him quoted as an example of "posh".

It is also, considering the time it was written, very refreshingly non-racist - almost surprisingly so.

I'm glad you think so.

Another good one from Haggard is Nada the Lily, all the leading characters in it are non-white. They are adventure stories so the non-white people are portrayed as quite different and exotic, but inferiority does not seem to come into it.

It's a good one - very violent but actually based on a certain amount of fact (the rise and fall of Shaka Zulu - a story as bizzare as any fantasy fiction).

I'm thinking of this passage from the beginning of King Solomon's Mines:

QuoteI, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and say — That's how I headed my deposition before the magistrate about poor Khiva's and Ventvögel's sad deaths; but somehow it doesn't seem quite the right way to begin a book. And, besides, am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman? I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers — no, I will scratch out that word "niggers," for I do not like it. I've known natives who are, and so you will say, Harry, my boy, before you have done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who are not.

For the time it was written, the notion that Black Africans could be as much "gentlemen" as rich Whites stuck me as pretty progressive (also note that he corrects his own language to avoid a racial slur: "I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers — no, I will scratch out that word "niggers," for I do not like it."). 

It is interesting that, as far as I know, most of the various film versions of the story were less progressive than the book - for example, they tended to introduce a White woman as the love interest.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane—Marcus Aurelius

Martinus

Quatermain always gave off a closeted vibe to me. But then it could be just his Britishness.

Capetan Mihali

I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?
"The internet's completely over. [...] The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."
-- Prince, 2010. (R.I.P.)

CountDeMoney

Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 02:47:35 PM
I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/what-is-a-white-van-man--362022467695

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/opinion/kenan-malik-a-collision-with-white-van-man.html?_r=0

Capetan Mihali

OK, so I'm with every single other American on this one. :D 

Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing. :bowler:  So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.

Thinking back, it was interesting in my neighborhood growing up, with cars parked off the street but right out in front, to see the different work vehicles people parked in front of their houses at the end of the day.  But generally it was kind of a class signifier in the upward direction, since it usually meant you managed or owned the business, didn't just work there.
"The internet's completely over. [...] The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."
-- Prince, 2010. (R.I.P.)

Sheilbh

Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 02:47:35 PM
I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?
I think the MSNBC bit CdM linked to is good. This from the Atlantic was also good:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/image-from-rochester-the-3-word-tweet-that-cost-a-politician-her-job/383036/
Especially the bit they quoted from a longer (less relevant) old NYT piece that caricatures white van man:
QuoteIn his hands he has a wheel; in his ears, rings; on his arms, tattoos; and in his heart, loathing for anyone he sees through his windshield. ...

Once in the driver's seat, he considers red lights relative and his own authority absolute. His vocabulary is the kind represented in newspapers by asterisks, and the hand signals he uses to find his way are the kind that tell everyone else to get lost.

The other point is that they're both quite common things. There's lots of white van men about - all the tradesmen for example - and it's not uncommon to see people with the English flag. But the flag especially is far, far more common outside of London.

So the problem is the person who's tweeting it. She's the MP for Islington South - Islington's actually got a particular reputation of a certain sort of metropolitan centre-leftism, it's where the Blairs lived in the nineties, so Islington has connotations of champagne socialism. The flag and the van which go together in a British mind to create a clear image of that person - basically a Sun reading builder (that image was more or less spot on once the press started covering the guy whose house it is). And the fact that she thought the image was so extraordinary that she took a photo of it and tweeted it.

Add to that the line 'image from Rochester' where Labour would lose heavily and UKIP would win and there's almost a subtext of 'well this is the sort of voter they have here'.

I felt incredibly sorry for journalists from other countries who had to cover that story though :lol:
Let's bomb Russia!

Sheilbh

Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 03:25:06 PM
Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing. :bowler:  So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.
Not far off, but if the argument with Joe wasn't about redistribution but 'clinging'.

Here's an image of Dan Ware, the white van man in question, which does match the stereotype:
Let's bomb Russia!

Syt

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Proud owner of 42 Zoupa Points.

CountDeMoney


The Brain

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Martinus

Quote from: Sheilbh on December 10, 2014, 03:29:42 PM
Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 03:25:06 PM
Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing. :bowler:  So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.
Not far off, but if the argument with Joe wasn't about redistribution but 'clinging'.

Here's an image of Dan Ware, the white van man in question, which does match the stereotype:


So, she was right? He looks like scum of the Earth. Why is this controversial?

garbon

"I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off."
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.