See, Ide? It could be worse.
QuoteSundayReview | News Analysis
British Noses, Firmly in the Air
By STEVEN ERLANGER
DEC. 5, 2014
LONDON — DAVID MELLOR, a former Conservative Party minister who resigned over a largely forgotten scandal in 1992, forced himself back into the headlines the other day.
A taxi driver recorded an extraordinarily vicious and elaborate outburst from Mr. Mellor, so full of snobbery and self-regard as to seem a comedy skit. "Shut up! You sweaty, stupid little git!" Mr. Mellor yelled, in a dispute over the route. "I've been in the cabinet, I'm an award-winning broadcaster, I'm a Queen's Counsel! You think your experiences are anything compared to mine? You shut up for Christ's sake."
The driver said, "You want to calm down," which set Mr. Mellor, 65, off into a further extended and repetitive rant, which he later put down, as he apologized, to having something other than water to drink at lunch. This is what the magazine Private Eye, wary of British libel laws, describes with the euphemism "tired and emotional." Mr. Mellor was both, in snotty spades.
Mr. Mellor's humiliation was paired with that of Andrew Mitchell, a former Conservative Party whip, who last week was found by a judge to have insulted a policeman at the gates of 10 Downing Street, calling him "a pleb" in a harangue about what route to take to leave on his bicycle. Mr. Mitchell denies using the word, though he, too, is known to be irascible.
And all of this was combined with an ill-advised tweet late last month, by the Labour Party's shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, of a photograph of a modest, flag-draped abode of a white-van driver in Kent, which was considered to be sufficiently mocking and snobby about the working class as to force the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to ask her to resign.
Together, the three episodes of nastiness, accelerated by social media, sparked one of those very British immersions in the hot tub of the nation's own insecurities about snobbery and class. Of course all nations have their sore points and their obsessions — race, weight, accent, gender — but the persistence of class markers and the exigencies of etiquette seem ingrained here.
As for "pleb," wrote William Langley in The Telegraph, "That an arcane, one-syllable insult can be so costly goes to the heart of British notions of snobbery."
While a Roman plebeian, or citizen, would take no offense, he continued, "transported into modern times and put in the mouth of an ex-public-school prefect, apparently known around the dorms of Rugby as 'Thrasher,' and directed at a group of less socially advantaged policemen, it takes on a different meaning."
Snootiness, Mr. Langley concluded, has always been with us, "but these days there is either more of it going on, or it is a lot easier to get caught."
As Britain becomes more global, it also becomes more regional — Scottish independence, London as the great sucking black hole of talent and money — and small differences, and ancient rules and distinctions, seem to matter more in a country that, as the old cliché goes, has lost an empire and still not found a role.
The pettiness is particularly vivid in a Britain that, if it were Greece to America's Rome, as Harold Macmillan once said, is no longer even that. If Washington cares what Britain thinks, it doesn't do much to show it. The unjustly powerful and hopelessly middle-brow United States, of course, remains a British obsession, blamed for everything from "American Idol" and Black Friday to Internet porn and obesity, as if the pub, Christmas sales, soggy fries and the full British breakfast (bready sausage, bacon, baked beans, eggs and bread fried in fat) were all imports from the old colony, where every person, Britons seem convinced, packs at least a pistol, if not a submachine gun. :lol:
This is a Britain ever more unequal but uneasy about snobbery and "poshness," where to be middle class of a certain sort (actually upper class but graciously self-deprecating) seems the ideal. Just look at Prince William, marrying the graceful daughter of a couple who made a fortune selling party favors, cooing over baby George like a family in a sitcom.
Mr. Mellor, of course, with the snobbery of the striver, went to a selective state school, not one of England's elite schools, attended by Prime Minister David Cameron; the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne; and Mr. Mitchell himself. The elite, of course, do their best not to appear so, even if they dominate the country. As Toby Young warned in The Spectator magazine, "being perceived as upper class in contemporary Britain is the kiss of death, and not just in politics."
The more unequal Britain becomes, he said, "the less we want to talk about it." Britain is a nation of "inverted snobs," because to claim one cares about class "is, in itself, a low-class indicator."
All of which made Mr. Mellor even more ridiculous, reminding many of the apocryphal story of another outraged politician who demanded of a policeman, "Do you know who I am?" The policeman then radioed in, asking for an ambulance, saying, "There's some old toff here who doesn't know his name."
Of course Britons of a certain kind remain marked by the experiences and humiliations of their adolescence. It's difficult to think of another country where every time personages are in the news, let alone when they die, they are classified by the school they attended as a prepubescent youngster.
"Only in Britain," wrote Hadley Freeman in The Guardian, "is there this kind of paralyzing myopia where a person is defined eternally by where their parents sent them to school, where snobbery and inverse snobbery clash with equal force and explode into a fiery ball of angry arguments involving such seemingly random — but actually deeply significant — things like grammar schools and John Lewis," a British department store.
But of course, Ms. Freeman is, like me, an American, and so disqualified from understanding the finer shades of British social intolerance.
QuoteThe unjustly powerful and hopelessly middle-brow United States, of course, remains a British obsession, blamed for everything from "American Idol" and Black Friday to Internet porn and obesity, as if the pub, Christmas sales, soggy fries and the full British breakfast (bready sausage, bacon, baked beans, eggs and bread fried in fat) were all imports from the old colony, where every person, Britons seem convinced, packs at least a pistol, if not a submachine gun.
Fuck the Brits. Their time ended long ago.
Guys, you do realise that this is Your future?
As nation/empires grow old the joints stiffen up, relatively inflexible class divisions assert themselves.
Remember the American Dream, that anyone can make it ? We know social mobility as been a major casualties of the last 30-40 years of accumulated power and concentration of wealth seen in USA.
Good piece. I used to be much more of an anglophile in the past. I prefer Germans and Americans much more these days.
Quote from: Martinus on December 07, 2014, 04:23:16 PM
Good piece. I used to be much more of an anglophile in the past. I prefer Germans and Americans much more these days.
Ah, every cloud has a silver lining. :bowler:
:P
I agree that you should generally yell at poor people, not lower class people.
Quote from: 11B4V on December 07, 2014, 04:07:45 PM
Fuck the Brits. Their time ended long ago.
NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND
QuoteUK to establish £15m permanent Mid East military base
6 December 2014 Last updated at 09:45 ET
BBC News
Britain is to establish its first permanent military base in the Middle East since it formally withdrew from the region in 1971.
The base, at the Mina Salman Port in Bahrain, will host ships including destroyers and aircraft carriers.
The UK said it was an "expansion of the Royal Navy's footprint" and would "reinforce stability" in the Gulf.
Bahrain will pay most of the £15m ($23m) needed to build the base, with the British paying ongoing costs.
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who signed the deal at a security conference in Manama, Bahrain, said it was "just one example of our growing partnership with Gulf partners to tackle shared strategic and regional threats".
He said the move "builds upon our 30-year track record of Gulf patrols" and would allow the UK and its allies in the region to "tackle the threats we face together".
"To our partners in the Gulf my message is this: Your security concerns are our security concerns," he told the conference.
Mr Hammond said the new base showed Britain's commitment to a "sustained presence east of Suez" - referring to the wording of a 1968 decision to close bases east of Suez by 1971.
Labour's shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker said his party "supports the Royal Navy having a strong international footprint", but said the government must "clearly set out its reasons for making this particular decision at this time."
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner there was already a "rotating presence" of four British minesweepers at the Mina Salman Port, but the UK had been "piggybacking" on the US naval base there.
He said the new facility would be one of the most important Royal Navy bases in the world and would be used for a "whole host of things" including supporting UK operations in Iraq, where RAF jets have been attacking targets as part of a US-led coalition against Islamic State (IS) militants.
The base would also be used for operations against piracy and for aerial surveillance, he added.
"The deal will have its detractors. Bahrain has been heavily criticised for its human rights record in the past and despite some reforms, power remains concentrated in the hands of the ruling family," our correspondent said.
"The majority Shia population here complain of discrimination by their Sunni rulers. There will also be some who resent the prospect of western military forces being permanently based here."
He also said the threat of IS may have made Gulf monarchies "content to invite British forces to set up on their soil".
UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon added: "This new base is a permanent expansion of the Royal Navy's footprint and will enable Britain to send more and larger ships to reinforce stability in the Gulf."
Bahrain's foreign minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa said: "Bahrain looks forward to the early implementation of today's arrangement and to continuing to work with the UK and other partners to address threats to regional security."
Next order of business: an actual navy, there's a good chap.
The snobbish upper class is everywhere. It may be more pronounced in the UK, but the entitled upper class with their noses in the air live happily everywhere in Europe.
And if a taxi driver tried to tell an American plutocrat where to go, they'd never find the body. Snobs will be snobs everywhere, and little people with some success under their belts become insufferable no matter what country they live in or where they went to school.
I'm not at all sure that we British should be condemned as snobby gits for thinking that David Mellor is a badly-behaved tosspot and that his cabbie was the better man :hmm:
Quote from: mongers on December 07, 2014, 04:21:46 PM
As nation/empires grow old the joints stiffen up, relatively inflexible class divisions assert themselves.
I don't see much, if any, evidence for this assertion.
Quote from: mongers on December 07, 2014, 04:21:46 PM
Guys, you do realise that this is Your future?
As nation/empires grow old the joints stiffen up, relatively inflexible class divisions assert themselves.
Remember the American Dream, that anyone can make it ? We know social mobility as been a major casualties of the last 30-40 years of accumulated power and concentration of wealth seen in USA.
No, this is a British obsession that doesn't make much sense to Americans. We were much more stratified in the past. The American obsession is race. Class warfare gains very little traction here in the states. You see some folks try to stoke it and more people who accuse others of stoking it, but it's essentially a non-starter. The issues of race cut very deeply into the US though. That's where the bad feelings and riots come from.
Quote from: Razgovory on December 07, 2014, 06:10:18 PM
Quote from: mongers on December 07, 2014, 04:21:46 PM
Guys, you do realise that this is Your future?
As nation/empires grow old the joints stiffen up, relatively inflexible class divisions assert themselves.
Remember the American Dream, that anyone can make it ? We know social mobility as been a major casualties of the last 30-40 years of accumulated power and concentration of wealth seen in USA.
No, this is a British obsession that doesn't make much sense to Americans. We were much more stratified in the past. The American obsession is race. Class warfare gains very little traction here in the states. You see some folks try to stoke it and more people who accuse others of stoking it, but it's essentially a non-starter. The issues of race cut very deeply into the US though. That's where the bad feelings and riots come from.
So what's that underclass doing in the US?
It's not a solely a British obsession, go look at the stats for social mobility in the US and then tell me people flit up and down the economic ladder, like so many charmed butterflies.
The underclass is mostly being black and Mexican, and thus allows itself to be treated as a race thing.
Maybe over time, more and more educated white people will be unemployable except as menial labour, and so you'll see more class-consciousness in the US.
Quote from: mongers on December 07, 2014, 06:15:40 PM
So what's that underclass doing in the US?
It's not a solely a British obsession, go look at the stats for social mobility in the US and then tell me people flit up and down the economic ladder, like so many charmed butterflies.
Being poor. I'm not saying that social mobility is great, but it doesn't manifest as classism. A very large portion of those who are poor are white and often vote conservative. They are extremely resistant to the idea of social liberalism. You go to any trailer park in the Midwest and odds are they are solid Republican.
At any rate, what does that have to do with aging empires (or lack of them)? Like Yi, I'm curious to see proof of mongers's assertion.
Quote from: mongers on December 07, 2014, 04:21:46 PM
Guys, you do realise that this is Your future?
As nation/empires grow old the joints stiffen up, relatively inflexible class divisions assert themselves.
Remember the American Dream, that anyone can make it ? We know social mobility as been a major casualties of the last 30-40 years of accumulated power and concentration of wealth seen in USA.
These class divisions were even stronger in Britain a hundred years ago at the height of the Empire.
Quote from: garbon on December 07, 2014, 07:10:56 PM
Poverty is freedom? :unsure:
Poverty is a choice. In America, nobody's forcing you be poor. You just choose not to make enough money. :yeah:
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 07, 2014, 07:13:45 PM
Quote from: garbon on December 07, 2014, 07:10:56 PM
Poverty is freedom? :unsure:
Poverty is a choice. In America, nobody's forcing you be poor. You just choose not to make enough money. :yeah:
My parents chose not to be poor and look where they are now. :)
Quote from: garbon on December 07, 2014, 07:14:45 PM
My parents chose not to be poor and look where they are now. :)
They chose...wisely. My premise stands.
Quote from: Martinus on December 07, 2014, 04:23:16 PM
Good piece. I used to be much more of an anglophile in the past. I prefer Germans and Americans much more these days.
I think it's a pretty poor piece. The NYT used to have Sarah Lyall in London who was a brilliant journalist. This is just a string of cliches. It'd be like an article about the German economy that never went any deeper than Teutonic efficiency :lol:
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 07, 2014, 07:13:45 PM
Quote from: garbon on December 07, 2014, 07:10:56 PM
Poverty is freedom? :unsure:
Poverty is a choice. In America, nobody's forcing you be poor. You just choose not to make enough money. :yeah:
Just as trust is a choice. You either have your parents choose to set up a trust fund for you or not. :P
Quote from: Syt on December 08, 2014, 03:10:39 AM
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
Your freedom's not free or dumb
--M. Manson
Quote from: Razgovory on December 07, 2014, 06:10:18 PM
No, this is a British obsession that doesn't make much sense to Americans. We were much more stratified in the past. The American obsession is race. Class warfare gains very little traction here in the states. You see some folks try to stoke it and more people who accuse others of stoking it, but it's essentially a non-starter. The issues of race cut very deeply into the US though. That's where the bad feelings and riots come from.
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Says the hipster.
Quote from: Razgovory on December 07, 2014, 06:25:44 PM
Being poor. I'm not saying that social mobility is great, but it doesn't manifest as classism. A very large portion of those who are poor are white and often vote conservative. They are extremely resistant to the idea of social liberalism. You go to any trailer park in the Midwest and odds are they are solid Republican.
Do people scoff at rural white trailer trash? And conversely are there classes of people - including wealthier ones - the rural trailer trash generally have a low opinion of?
Darkies
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
It's certainly all about class, but we still revere the Self-Made Man Who Grabbed The American Dream By The Hair And Did Her Doggie Style. If you don't make it, it's simply because you didn't try hard enough. Johnny Rube still believes in that 19th century bullshit, refusing to believe the deck is already stacked. Unfortunately, you have politicians who'll tell them it's the fault of the blacks, the Hispanics, etc., and not the 1%ers that are the true cockblockers.
:lol:
I rest my case.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 08, 2014, 11:15:28 AM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
It's certainly all about class, but we still revere the Self-Made Man Who Grabbed The American Dream By The Hair And Did Her Doggie Style. If you don't make it, it's simply because you didn't try hard enough. Johnny Rube still believes in that 19th century bullshit, refusing to believe the deck is already stacked. Unfortunately, you have politicians who'll tell them it's the fault of the blacks, the Hispanics, etc., and not the 1%ers that are the true cockblockers.
So it's really no different than the UK, where the deck is also stacked but it's fault of the immigrants this time.
Here's the far superior Hadley Freeman piece he mentions:
QuoteCome on, Britain – it's the 21st century. Stop this obsession with social class
I have lived here for 25 years, but still I'm baffled by this fixation with background, schools and cutlery
Hadley Freeman
The Guardian, Wednesday 26 November 2014 18.12 GMT
The whole "fiddling while Rome burns" cliche was getting a bit old – almost 2,000 years old, to be precise – so we should all be grateful for BBC2's bafflingly pointless documentary series about Tatler magazine, Posh People: Inside Tatler, for updating the analogy. So please readjust your inner literary device, Britain: for "fiddling while Rome burns", please substitute with "worrying about which piece of cutlery to use for eating a pear while life passes by".
This was one of the concerns raised by a member of Tatler's pink-cheeked staff, and it was – thankfully – quickly resolved by a copy of Debrett's, with which each Tatlerite is equipped upon being hired. No, you have not slipped through a time-space continuum, this is the 21st century.
This TV programme has received a stonking amount of publicity and good reviews, which seems frankly incredible considering that, as yet, there was literally nothing in the "behind-the-scenes" documentary that a person could not glean from staying very much in front of the scene and simply reading the magazine. The staffers there write ridiculous articles about what the colour of your labrador says about you; these aforementioned staffers have names that sound like Craig Brown parodies, including Sophia Money-Coutts and Marchioness of Milford Haven (the latter is a woman and not, as I'd initially assumed from her name, a boat). The photographers say things like: "This is a high-stress day at the polo. You've got celebrities, you've got royalty and you've got Will Carling!" (I repeat, this is 2014.)
All of this anyone with 15 minutes to spare in a dentist's waiting room could have gleaned without subjecting themselves to this long-running advertisement for a magazine that has a readership of 160,000. And yet, as I say, it was heralded and celebrated with much fanfare, which was entirely predictable because the show was about class and Britain is obsessed with nothing the way it is obsessed with class.
You can tell a lot about a country's neuroses by what's on its television sets. In the US, TVs are clogged with endless ads for enormous amounts of food, demented diets, hilarious exercise contraptions, and medications with a seemingly endless list of side-effects to ease the effects of over-exercise and over-consumption. Britain's TV schedules, by contrast, are completely steeped in class, and have long been so. From laughing at poor people on Benefits Street to laughing at rich people in You Can't Get the Staff, this is how Britain likes to unwind in the evening: by sneering at other classes, and sneering at people for sneering about class.
It was quite a thing to watch Inside Tatler as a non-Brit in this country. I am well-versed in self-deprecation and I know when a British person says "sorry" they actually mean "Get out of my way / You just stepped on my foot / The queue starts there, mate." And yet, when Brits start talking about class I still feel like Mr Farraday, the American interloper in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, watching bemusedly as the emotionally constipated butler explains the significance of when supper is served.
I long ago accepted that I would never understand this country's class obsession, or get it right, and this was brought home to me with force earlier this year. In an article in this paper I described Kirstie Allsopp as "posh" – a term which, I thought, seemed pretty accurate, considering she is the daughter of the 6th Baron Hindlip and the cousin of Cath Kidston (even I know Cath Kidston is posh). But I was wrong. The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp was so outraged that she called me a name on Twitter not suitable for a family newspaper. Ah well, I was like Eliza Doolittle, having got it wrong at the horse races, again.
The point of the Tatler documentary was, clearly, for TV audiences to snort at these ha-ha ridiculous posh people who were all prone to shouting "my father went to Eton!" at irrelevant moments, as if they had a form of public school Tourette's. But sitting on my sofa at home, the show didn't feel like an exposé of what one person in the programme lovingly described as "the Tatler world": it felt like a microcosm of Britain itself.
If you think it's only the polo playing upper classes who have the time to fret about mind-boggling invisible codes involving how a person eats a pear, look to the newspapers. How the media huffed in disapproval at David Mellor's repulsively snobby rant at a London taxi driver, and quite right too. But their indignation was somewhat undermined by their insistence on recording what school and university Mellor attended half a century ago.
Ask yourself, Britain, if there is another country on this earth that insists on noting what school a 65-year-old man attended in any news story about him; and then tell yourself, there is none. All countries are interested in status – in the US this is usually expressed by a fascination with money and, increasingly, fame. But only in Britain is there this kind of paralysing myopia where a person is defined eternally by where their parents sent them to school, where snobbery and inverse snobbery clash with equal force and explode into a fiery ball of angry arguments involving such seemingly random – but actually deeply significant – things like grammar schools and John Lewis.
This kind of double-edged class-obsessed snobbery underpinned the – to an outsider – bewildering furore last week about Labour MP Emily Thornberry's now infamous photograph of a house in Rochester. Twenty-five years I've lived in this country and yet I am still at a loss to explain how a text-less photo of a house led to an MP being sacked. But I am alone in the corner, eating my pear with the wrong knife: the rest of the country spotted the invisible code embedded in that photo and reeled in horror.
Perhaps Britain's class obsession is a way of consoling itself that old rules still exist, even if the empire doesn't. Heck, you guys can barely hang on to Scotland – no wonder you try to distract yourselves by talking obsessively about schools and cutlery. Oh, and because I know you're still wondering, the answer to the question of how you eat a pear is with a spoon. Happy to have cleared that up for you, Britain.
The obsession with Eton seems to be pervasive enough to warrant a whole section of "Fictional Old Etonians" in their wiki page (of course, James Bond went to Eton, as well as Bertie Wooster, Alan Quatermain, Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey and many other pompous stiff characters). It appears to the foreign eye that labeling somebody as having studied at Eton is more than enough to get the brand of stick up toff for life, both in real life and in fiction.
Come to think of it, the whole Harry Potter universe revolves around the fact of a bunch of kids who are super special enough to warrant to attend a super special school that will forever brand them as being super special themselves for life and different from the rest of the world. :hmm:
Hogwash.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/07/champagne-house-of-lords-reform-taxpayer
QuoteChampagne wars in the Lords as peers say no to a cheaper vintage
The British public has endured the expenses scandal, a cabinet minister describing police officers as plebs and a Labour MP sending an allegedly snobby tweet about "white van men". But for sheer chutzpah, the peers of the realm have potentially topped the lot.
It has emerged that a proposal to save taxpayers some money by making peers and MPs share a catering department has been rejected "because the Lords feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service".
The disclosure, made last week by Sir Malcolm Jack, clerk of the Commons between 2006 and 2011, as he gave evidence to a governance committee examining how the palace of Westminster should be run, was met with gasps and open laughter. The astonished chair of the committee, former home secretary Jack Straw, asked: "Did you make that up? Is that true?" Jack responded: "Yes, it is true."
Were the Lords right to be so sniffy, asked another committee member, Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley?
Jack, who had responsibility for catering procurement in the Commons, responded: "I don't think they were; we were very careful in our selection."
Evidence given the next day by the recently retired clerk of the house, Sir Robert Rogers, only served to confirm the peers' continued protectiveness over their choice of bubbly. When he was asked why there was not a joint catering service, Rogers responded: "It would be very difficult to get a joint catering service. I must be very careful for a number of reasons what I say here." Paisley then asked: "The champagne?" Straw added: "We heard a few things yesterday." Rogers replied: "No, I am not going into the quality of the champagne. People are very possessive about some services. Catering is an absolute classic."
The House of Lords – which has a £1.3m annual catering budget – has bought in more than 17,000 bottles of champagne since the coalition took office, enough to give each peer just over five bottles each year, at a cost of £265,770. As of 31 March this year, the House of Lords, which currently has 780 peers, had 380 bottles of champagne in stock, worth £5,713, held in its main cellar and at individual stores on site.
A former leader of the Commons, Peter Hain, said the revelation only went to make the case more compelling for reform of the way the palace of Westminster was run. "Parliament can sometimes be a complete pantomime of itself and I am afraid this is a case in point. The case for continued reform is now overwhelming," he said.
The governance committee is taking evidence as part of a consultation over whether the palace of Westminster should be run by a clerk who also has duties to advise on constitutional and legislative matters, or should be split up, with a corporate-style chief executive taking over responsibility for the £200m-a-year budget. Yet the committee's work is in danger of spilling a series of uncomfortable secrets about the way the parliamentary estate, on which 1,800 people are employed, has been managed.
The committee taking evidence from MPs, peers and former clerks of the Commons has heard tales of mice running through the MPs' tearooms, perennially overflowing urinals, a visitors' centre with a permanently leaking roof, and an account of how even the clerk of the Commons' jaw dropped when he first heard what MPs had been able to claim on expenses.
The question of future governance has pitched three key reformers – Hain, former home secretary David Blunkett, and the chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge – against three former clerks who served consecutively between 1998 and 2011. The clerks told the committee: "The history of the administrative modernisation has, in our view, resulted in a house service fit for purpose, with one point of accountability in the office of the clerk and chief executive."
The three senior MPs told the committee in a submission: "We fundamentally disagree ... From the presence of mice all over the house, including in the members' dining room and other venues where food is consumed, to long visitor queues and bungled pay negotiations, we do not consider the house service is at all 'fit for purpose'."
Tory MP Andrew Tyrie also told the governance committee about his frustration at the ambivalence among management towards keeping the palace in good order. "Someone very senior came into my office and said, 'You know, Andrew, the management of this place is not all that bad. It all functions pretty well'," said Tyrie. "He made to move to the door and part of the door handle came off in his hand. I said, 'That has been coming off every few months since I got the office four years ago.'"
Quote from: The Larch on December 08, 2014, 02:25:31 PM
The obsession with Eton seems to be pervasive enough to warrant a whole section of "Fictional Old Etonians" in their wiki page (of course, James Bond went to Eton, as well as Bertie Wooster, Alan Quatermain, Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey and many other pompous stiff characters). It appears to the foreign eye that labeling somebody as having studied at Eton is more than enough to get the brand of stick up toff for life, both in real life and in fiction.
Come to think of it, the whole Harry Potter universe revolves around the fact of a bunch of kids who are super special enough to warrant to attend a super special school that will forever brand them as being super special themselves for life and different from the rest of the world. :hmm:
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. ;)
lol hunter
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.
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.
Stroller thinks it's terribly important that people know their place.
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.
£15 a bottle for champagne for an institution that does a lot of hospitality and entertaining of visiting dignitaries does not sound untoward.
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).
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.
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.
Quatermain always gave off a closeted vibe to me. But then it could be just his Britishness.
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?
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
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.
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:
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:
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FB2-_LtHCQAAh0yN.jpg&hash=f6e5d7fdc9991670779bd12d572b72004c78e01a)
Is he a friend of this dude?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zeit.de%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2F2014-12%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa-940x400.jpg&hash=3ea01c8d9ed3e8517a91512dfb1fe316bb3fb139)
OK, so straight out of Central Casting, London Branch Office.
Quote from: Syt on December 10, 2014, 03:43:57 PM
Is he a friend of this dude?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zeit.de%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2F2014-12%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa-940x400.jpg&hash=3ea01c8d9ed3e8517a91512dfb1fe316bb3fb139)
No, they have a "special" relationship.
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:
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FB2-_LtHCQAAh0yN.jpg&hash=f6e5d7fdc9991670779bd12d572b72004c78e01a)
So, she was right? He looks like scum of the Earth. Why is this controversial?
Quote from: Syt on December 10, 2014, 03:43:57 PM
Is he a friend of this dude?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zeit.de%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2F2014-12%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa%2Fcia-folter-gefaengnisse-usa-940x400.jpg&hash=3ea01c8d9ed3e8517a91512dfb1fe316bb3fb139)
Well that guy is holding flag upside because he is angry at America. :hmm:
Oh, good point, overlooked that. :blush:
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 10, 2014, 03:44:43 PM
OK, so straight out of Central Casting, London Branch Office.
Yep. And the MP who posted the tweet:
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fpix%2F2014%2F11%2F21%2F1416574085112_Image_galleryImage_National_News_and_Picture.JPG&hash=b3126d946a34e879c04205282dbeb823fa276a1a)
Quote from: Martinus on December 08, 2014, 11:58:07 AM
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 08, 2014, 11:15:28 AM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
It's certainly all about class, but we still revere the Self-Made Man Who Grabbed The American Dream By The Hair And Did Her Doggie Style. If you don't make it, it's simply because you didn't try hard enough. Johnny Rube still believes in that 19th century bullshit, refusing to believe the deck is already stacked. Unfortunately, you have politicians who'll tell them it's the fault of the blacks, the Hispanics, etc., and not the 1%ers that are the true cockblockers.
So it's really no different than the UK, where the deck is also stacked but it's fault of the immigrants this time.
Yeah, but that one's true.
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Glad I don't live in that America! Where in America did you live to encounter such things, Jacob?
Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2014, 04:13:59 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Glad I don't live in that America! Where in America did you live to encounter such things, Jacob?
Yeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 10, 2014, 03:56:19 PM
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 10, 2014, 03:44:43 PM
OK, so straight out of Central Casting, London Branch Office.
Yep. And the MP who posted the tweet:
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fpix%2F2014%2F11%2F21%2F1416574085112_Image_galleryImage_National_News_and_Picture.JPG&hash=b3126d946a34e879c04205282dbeb823fa276a1a)
She has a bit of that good old English "Jabba the Hut" face happening. :P
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PM
Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2014, 04:13:59 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Glad I don't live in that America! Where in America did you live to encounter such things, Jacob?
Yeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
Yeah, sure they don't.
Maybe not the music thing, so much.
Car: absolutely.
Neighborhood: also true.
College: c'mon. Get real. Of course they do.
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
Car: absolutely.
Maybe among suburban housewives. Or maybe people were secretly judging me on my car choice but didn't tell me. :(
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PMNeighborhood: also true.
I mean while most places have good / bad parts of town, I don't know that most people look negatively upon someone who is from a bad place. Particularly not so when they are you co-workers.
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
College: c'mon. Get real. Of course they do.
No. Apart from perhaps the college sport enthusiast, I don't think this matters much. I suppose there is a divide between elite school and not, but that's probably it.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PM
Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2014, 04:13:59 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Glad I don't live in that America! Where in America did you live to encounter such things, Jacob?
Yeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
Why, none of use even know you went to Stamford. :D
Harald "garbon" Hardrada?
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
Yeah, sure they don't.
Maybe not the music thing, so much.
Car: absolutely.
Neighborhood: also true.
College: c'mon. Get real. Of course they do.
People don't make assumptions about the political values, backgrounds, level of education etc of people who listen to, say, "New Country", who are really into obscure bands you've never heard about, or who are self-identified juggalos?
I mean, I'm not suggesting that every single music style corresponds to a clearly defined class on a one-to-one basis. Perhaps I should have expressed it in slightly broader terms - that media consumption patterns are a class marker. And yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff that just ends up as fairly undifferentiated "middle class", "mass consumption" type stuff (which in itself means something if that's all you consume), but once you get outside of that then I think there are class markers in play.
So, I absolutely think that people make assumptions about other people based on their media consumption, and that those assumptions feed into a larger set of markers that make up class in North America.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PMYeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
That's funny, because the way you post you come across as one of the American posters most concerned about class.
Do you spend a fair bit of time of your time around people who are not comfortable, well educated, and cosmopolitan? Discounting, of course, times where it's unavoidable?
Quote from: Malthus on December 10, 2014, 04:26:32 PM
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PM
Quote from: grumbler on December 10, 2014, 04:13:59 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
Glad I don't live in that America! Where in America did you live to encounter such things, Jacob?
Yeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
Why, none of use even know you went to Stamford. :D
Definitely isn't something I note on a general basis. I'm more likely to say "Oh I went to school in California" if pressed "Oh in the bay area. Just a small liberal arts college." When pressed to reveal "Oh but really it isn't that hard to get in. I mean I never thought I was going to get in but just like smart people from California went there so I had to apply."
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:41:00 PM
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PMYeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
That's funny, because the way you post you come across as one of the American posters most concerned about class.
Do you spend a fair bit of time of your time around people who are not comfortable, well educated, and cosmopolitan? Discounting, of course, times where it's unavoidable?
Well it is fun to play up on here - and while I will say that for a partner, I do think differences in money/background can cause a lot of problems, I don't care about those things in daily living.
I'd say it is a toss up. For sure, very few people I deal with have the same academic level. People I socialize with come from a variety of socio-economic background. I mean I guess most of them have managed to land office work, so they mostly have been to college of some sort but that isn't true for many of the people in my extended family that I am very close with - nor most of the people that I've dated for any meaningful period of time.
Of course, it is hard to take your question seriously given that I could hear you sneering as you asked that rhetorical one.
Note, J, I suppose it is true (outside of family) that I don't have many friends who are broke and can't afford to do anything ever - but that wouldn't be a function of looking down on them but more that it would be hard to go about doing things as a great many cost money.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:25:18 PM
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
Car: absolutely.
Maybe among suburban housewives. Or maybe people were secretly judging me on my car choice but didn't tell me. :(
So you wouldn't make assumptions about people drive a chromed up hummer with extra lighting vs a rusty K car vs a V8 pickup truck of American manufacture vs a Japanese hybrid vs a Porshe SUV?
Quote from: garbonQuote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PMNeighborhood: also true.
I mean while most places have good / bad parts of town, I don't know that most people look negatively upon someone who is from a bad place. Particularly not so when they are you co-workers.
What does whether they're co-workers have to do with anything?
Anyhow, as far as I know "coming from the wrong side of the tracks" is an American expression, which seems pretty damn class conscious at the very core. Gentrification is a big thing in several America cities and the class-conflict is called out in the very word. American magazines and discussion (not that this is limited to the US by any means) are full of classification of people based on neighbourhood stands serves as a characterization of the type of person they are and their values (Brooklyn Hipsters, suburbia, inside the Beltway, the Hamptons).
Quote from: garbonQuote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
College: c'mon. Get real. Of course they do.
No. Apart from perhaps the college sport enthusiast, I don't think this matters much. I suppose there is a divide between elite school and not, but that's probably it.
:lol:
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:53:06 PM
So you wouldn't make assumptions about people drive a chromed up hummer with extra lighting vs a rusty K car vs a V8 pickup truck of American manufacture vs a Japanese hybrid vs a Porshe SUV?
Sure, if that is the only thing I know about a person than yes. Pretty rare though for that to be the case.
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:53:06 PM
What does whether they're co-workers have to do with anything?
I was just thinking that a person would see them regularly and initial snap judgments might matter less.
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:53:06 PM
Anyhow, as far as I know "coming from the wrong side of the tracks" is an American expression, which seems pretty damn class conscious at the very core. Gentrification is a big thing in several America cities and the class-conflict is called out in the very word. American magazines and discussion (not that this is limited to the US by any means) are full of classification of people based on neighbourhood stands serves as a characterization of the type of person they are and their values (Brooklyn Hipsters, suburbia, inside the Beltway, the Hamptons).
I don't know what to tell you on that as there are definitely neighborhoods that are less safe than others. Those tend to be poorer, less educated areas.
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:53:06 PM
:lol:
I suppose I could have added - with regards to employment. I don't know that any of that matters on a regular basis, but like I said, I don't generally spend time on that subject.
Quote from: Jacob on December 08, 2014, 10:59:51 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on December 07, 2014, 06:10:18 PM
No, this is a British obsession that doesn't make much sense to Americans. We were much more stratified in the past. The American obsession is race. Class warfare gains very little traction here in the states. You see some folks try to stoke it and more people who accuse others of stoking it, but it's essentially a non-starter. The issues of race cut very deeply into the US though. That's where the bad feelings and riots come from.
Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.
I don't know if anyone uses "poors" outside of Languish. And while there is some contempt for poverty in the US it doesn't go both ways. The poor don't despise the rich in the same way you see in Britain. I'd also say that terms like "rednecks", "white trash", and "welfare queens", usually have a strong racial component. "Single Mothers" has as strong misogynist element. I'd say these terms refer more to subcultures, race and the like rather then economic standing. Someone might claim to be a "Proud redneck" and a be as rich as Croesus. On the other hand President Obama, who is now quite wealthy is often described by conservatives as a "thug", a term used for criminals in the ghetto. I haven't seen a big obsession with where people go to college. People know about the Ivy League schools because they are famous (and are often expensive). There certainly was economic elitism there, but that has sort of declined over the last hundred years. The days of the Boston Brahmins are over.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:59:09 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 04:53:06 PM
:lol:
I suppose I could have added - with regards to employment. I don't know that any of that matters on a regular basis, but like I said, I don't generally spend time on that subject.
You don't have to, Leland.
Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2014, 05:02:35 PM
On the other hand President Obama, who is now quite wealthy is often described by conservatives as a "thug", a term used for criminals in the ghetto.
I believe we can thank Bill Clinton for originating that remark back in 2008. But agree with you on most of the other stuff.
Quote from: derspiess on December 10, 2014, 05:08:27 PM
Quote from: Razgovory on December 10, 2014, 05:02:35 PM
On the other hand President Obama, who is now quite wealthy is often described by conservatives as a "thug", a term used for criminals in the ghetto.
I believe we can thank Bill Clinton for originating that remark back in 2008. But agree with you on most of the other stuff.
You believe all sorts of strange things. "Thug" is what I see on Breitbart to describe the President.
Oh we can just go with "Liar" in the middle of an address before an assembled Congress.
Alright I concede the field to the Americans :)
Your media and your discourse is full of stuff that elsewhere would is classified as being about class, and your social organization has fairly discernible social classes. However, you are absolutely right that class-war stuff gets little traction.
IMO, it's not because those bits that get classified as being about class elsewhere do not exist, but because you like to call them something else and look at them in other frameworks.
Which I guess is fair enough.
Quote from: CountDeMoney on December 10, 2014, 05:13:00 PM
Oh we can just go with "Liar" in the middle of an address before an assembled Congress.
YOU LIE
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 05:14:54 PM
Alright I concede the field to the Americans :)
Your media and your discourse is full of stuff that elsewhere would is classified as being about class, and your social organization has fairly discernible social classes. However, you are absolutely right that class-war stuff gets little traction.
IMO, it's not because those bits that get classified as being about class elsewhere do not exist, but because you like to call them something else and look at them in other frameworks.
Which I guess is fair enough.
The real problem--and it's been highlighted by Ferguson, Occupy Wall Street, to the Civil Rights and Culture Wars of the '60s, all the way back beyond the Depression to the Pullman strikes--is that if there's one thing the American people dislike more than social injustice, it's demonstrators, strikes and protests about social injustice. It simply rubs the Average American the wrong way.
Americans may dislike social injustice, but they dislike disruption of peace and quiet even more.
Sound familiar? :lol:
Those protesters should get a job.
What are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 06:13:14 PM
What are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
No idea, I think it's only ever bought by widowed grannies.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:25:18 PM
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 04:20:39 PM
Car: absolutely.
Maybe among suburban housewives. Or maybe people were secretly judging me on my car choice but didn't tell me. :(
Possibly not a NYC thing--if you can afford to park a car, even if it sucks, you've made it. Also, by society, I mean chicks.
QuoteI mean while most places have good / bad parts of town, I don't know that most people look negatively upon someone who is from a bad place. Particularly not so when they are you co-workers.
I may have misinterpreted this as "home ownership" and its even more discerning cousin, "size, opulence, and cost/exclusivity of home and housing development."
QuoteNo. Apart from perhaps the college sport enthusiast, I don't think this matters much. I suppose there is a divide between elite school and not, but that's probably it.
How many people from Harvard do you think I hang out with? I know one person from Dartmouth, and I recognize her as hilariously downwardly mobile. (I don't like her very much.)
One Charlotte judge insisted on calling me "Harvard" to my face in open court while I was practicing as an intern for a summer. That was excruciating.
When I first got there and we had an intro chat at the bench, he told several anecdotes about his law school days that differed a lot in content, but each having the theme that the U of S.C. Law School (where he went) was always known as the Harvard of the South; or rather, that Harvard was the USC of the North, aha.
Your judge was some kind of fucking retard. Namely, the kind they let into USC.
You could always tell which doctors at Hopkins went to Harvard. Mainly because they had no problem telling you.
Or, more obnoxiously, they'd wear their MGH scrubs around, like gang colors. So fuck Harvard in the ass.
Best rout we ever had in rugby, though. Poured in on those fuckers until the final whistle. Pompous little assholes with their crests on their shirts.
But I suppose you're OK, CM. :hug:
CM's giving back to the community. I guess. In the sense he helps people like me do more harm to society.
Dude if you went to Harvard we would never hear the end of it.
Quote from: Valmy on December 10, 2014, 07:02:12 PM
Dude if you went to Harvard we would never hear the end of it.
:lol:
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 07:01:41 PM
In the sense he helps people like me do more harm to society.
Yeah, a solid six month bid in the Spartanburg County Jail back in '02 would've straightened you right out.
Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 06:50:39 PM
One Charlotte judge insisted on calling me "Harvard" to my face in open court while I was practicing as an intern for a summer. That was excruciating.
When I first got there and we had an intro chat at the bench, he told several anecdotes about his law school days that differed a lot in content, but each having the theme that the U of S.C. Law School (where he went) was always known as the Harvard of the South; or rather, that Harvard was the USC of the North, aha.
I had an idea for a Tshirt. "Harvard: the Harvard of the Whole World."
Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 07:08:41 PM
Quote from: Ideologue on December 10, 2014, 07:01:41 PM
In the sense he helps people like me do more harm to society.
Yeah, a solid six month bid in the Spartanburg County Jail back in '02 would've straightened you right out.
Put some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in his commissary account, his dance card would've been full real quick.
Quote from: Jacob on December 10, 2014, 05:14:54 PM
Alright I concede the field to the Americans :)
Your media and your discourse is full of stuff that elsewhere would is classified as being about class, and your social organization has fairly discernible social classes. However, you are absolutely right that class-war stuff gets little traction.
IMO, it's not because those bits that get classified as being about class elsewhere do not exist, but because you like to call them something else and look at them in other frameworks.
Which I guess is fair enough.
It does lead to some oddities in the US. Poor rural whites will vote for the interests of the wealthy because they don't like any social program that will help urban blacks. Often the poor rural whites are actually poorer then the urban blacks, but they'd cut their own nose off before they'd help a "gangbanger". The issue of race is at the heart of the US. It permeates almost everything we do. I don't think we'll ever get over it. It's not just white and black but nativitist and immigrant. The Irish were despised for a long time as were the Italians, though they have mostly been accepted and Hispanics have taken their place. Anti-catholic sentiment has decreased but has been replaced by Islmaophobia. In fact the arguments made against Catholics mirror the ones made about Muslims today. Disloyal, Radical, and fundamentally incompatible with American democracy.
garbage. Speak for yourself poor rural white boy.
Yeah, it's my perception as well - while America definitely has social classes, it has a distinct lack of class-wide solidarity, so to speak (at least compared to many European nations). It seems to be much more about race - as Raz says, the white poor and the black poor are on the same boat, but they do not seem to think they share a common interest.
Quote from: garbon on December 10, 2014, 04:16:08 PM
Yeah maybe from an outsider looking in, but I wouldn't say that most people I know care much about any of those "cultural markers."
Class is a language you can read basically. You can look at someone's car, home, CD collection, TV choices and make a reasonable guess at that person's demographic.
I'm not sure how British people particularly 'care much about' that. It's not knowledge we do much with, it's just something that we're aware of.
It may not be described as class in the US but I can't think of another reason the 'clinging' remark was so controversial, or the Democrats made so much of Romney's car-lifts, or the Republicans hit the jackpot of footage of John Kerry windsurfing to illustrate his flip-flopping.
QuoteI'd say these terms refer more to subcultures, race and the like rather then economic standing.
But in Britain class extends way beyond economic standing. It is about subculture. You can be very poor and still be solidly upper class or upper-middle, similarly you can be very rich and still very proud of the fact you're working class. In fact both are pretty common.
QuoteAnd while there is some contempt for poverty in the US it doesn't go both ways. The poor don't despise the rich in the same way you see in Britain.
Do you have any examples of this in Britain? Because I'm not sure what you mean.
QuoteWhat are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
You're an elderly woman.
I was in the supermarket yesterday getting some shopping and there was an old lady in front of me doing her weekly shop: some microwave meals, some frozen goods and three bottles of gin :lol:
The communists tried to destroy classes in Poland but the attitude Sheilbh describes used to be very common and is reemerging again.
My grandmother used to tell me that before the war, her own mother could easily distinguish class in a poor Masovian village they lived in - noone had any money whatsoever, but the households that had a piano and the women going out to do gardening in white gloves (that they kept washing religiously despite it being quite futile) were considered upper class, unlike the rest - despite this (and a collection of old books) being pretty much the only difference.
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
QuoteWhat are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
You're an elderly woman.
With terrible taste in sherry.
If I buy wine, coffee and canned food (but not clothes) at M&S, am I working class or middle class?
Quote from: mongers on December 10, 2014, 06:26:22 PM
Quote from: Capetan Mihali on December 10, 2014, 06:13:14 PM
What are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
No idea, I think it's only ever bought by widowed grannies.
My working class mother (widow and grandma aged 79) will no doubt be ordering her traditional two bottles for this Christmas :P
It is regarded as a huge luxury treat by certain sections of the working class. The fact they they could afford it every week is ignored, instead "British sherry" ( :( ) , an almost gratuitously unpleasant drink, is bought.
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 03:00:33 AM
If I buy wine, coffee and canned food (but not clothes) at M&S, am I working class or middle class?
M&S. Solidly middle class.
Though I always find their food disappointing <_<
I'd say that it is only lower-middle and middle-middle :hmm:
Meh, lots of different people buy food at M&S but very few do their weekly shop there. The nearest one to my work, attracts secretaries, shop workers, bankers, lawyers...
I don't think it says anything other than that you aren't on the breadline.
Everyone can shop in Waitrose, but it is middle class to speculate about the value of a store on nearby house prices.
Quote from: Gups on December 11, 2014, 02:46:06 AM
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
QuoteWhat are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
You're an elderly woman.
With terrible taste in sherry.
Sherry = Jérez so British sherry is a contradiction in terms (think of it as Garbon mistaking any sparkling wine for champagne). I'm not even a fan of sherry, since it's Port(o) über alles for me.
I don't know. Obviously, sherry is made in Andalucia, but Harvey's Bristol Cream is blended and bottled in Bristol.
"British sherry" is fortified wine blended in the UK or even fermented from imported grape must in the UK.
In this case British = Not Really
Quote from: Duque de Bragança on December 11, 2014, 06:03:18 AM
Quote from: Gups on December 11, 2014, 02:46:06 AM
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
QuoteWhat are the British cultural implications of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry? I just bought a bottle ($8.00) on a whim and am not sure what to do with it, or whose ranks I'll join once I start drinking it... :bowler: :ph34r:
You're an elderly woman.
With terrible taste in sherry.
Sherry = Jérez so British sherry is a contradiction in terms (think of it as Garbon mistaking any sparkling wine for champagne). I'm not even a fan of sherry, since it's Port(o) über alles for me.
There is no mistake. <_<
I've thought God broke the model for pensioners after creating British pensioners. So along with my hypochondria, continual "moaning," and misty nostalgia for an imagined past, I'm sure I'll fit right in with my fellow Bristol Cream drinkers. :bowler:
Actually, my favorite memory from visiting London in 2006, other than a night on the town with Sheilbh, was spending a couple of hours at a cafe that appeared to have a 65+ admittance policy and house rules forbade conversation, smiling, and reading material other than tabloids. But I was tolerantly allowed to sit ans stare at the frosted over windows for a couple hours drinking weak tea and smoking Mayfairs.
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 02:13:27 AM
The communists tried to destroy classes in Poland but the attitude Sheilbh describes used to be very common and is reemerging again.
My grandmother used to tell me that before the war, her own mother could easily distinguish class in a poor Masovian village they lived in - noone had any money whatsoever, but the households that had a piano and the women going out to do gardening in white gloves (that they kept washing religiously despite it being quite futile) were considered upper class, unlike the rest - despite this (and a collection of old books) being pretty much the only difference.
So the people with more possessions were in the upper class? What an alien way of seeing things.
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
But in Britain class extends way beyond economic standing. It is about subculture. You can be very poor and still be solidly upper class or upper-middle, similarly you can be very rich and still very proud of the fact you're working class. In fact both are pretty common.
Which is totally alien here. Closest, would be old money vs. new money but that isn't a distinction that has any bearing except on the elite.
I remember reading in The Proud Tower that the British elite prided themselves on their long pedigrees while the exact opposite was happening in America, that the elite were priding themselves on being self made men.
Quote from: Ideologue on December 11, 2014, 10:18:16 AM
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 02:13:27 AM
The communists tried to destroy classes in Poland but the attitude Sheilbh describes used to be very common and is reemerging again.
My grandmother used to tell me that before the war, her own mother could easily distinguish class in a poor Masovian village they lived in - noone had any money whatsoever, but the households that had a piano and the women going out to do gardening in white gloves (that they kept washing religiously despite it being quite futile) were considered upper class, unlike the rest - despite this (and a collection of old books) being pretty much the only difference.
So the people with more possessions were in the upper class? What an alien way of seeing things.
Everybody could afford piano or gloves. And they were all equally poor.
Quote from: garbon on December 11, 2014, 10:55:48 AM
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
But in Britain class extends way beyond economic standing. It is about subculture. You can be very poor and still be solidly upper class or upper-middle, similarly you can be very rich and still very proud of the fact you're working class. In fact both are pretty common.
Which is totally alien here. Closest, would be old money vs. new money but that isn't a distinction that has any bearing except on the elite.
To me it is perfectly familiar. Even during communism we had the term "intelligentsia" which pretty much served to capture the upper class in a supposedly classless society.
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 05:26:48 PM
Quote from: garbon on December 11, 2014, 10:55:48 AM
Quote from: Sheilbh on December 11, 2014, 02:02:05 AM
But in Britain class extends way beyond economic standing. It is about subculture. You can be very poor and still be solidly upper class or upper-middle, similarly you can be very rich and still very proud of the fact you're working class. In fact both are pretty common.
Which is totally alien here. Closest, would be old money vs. new money but that isn't a distinction that has any bearing except on the elite.
To me it is perfectly familiar. Even during communism we had the term "intelligentsia" which pretty much served to capture the upper class in a supposedly classless society.
So yet another way that America is actually unique on the class issue and not just hiding it as many have suggested. ;)
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 05:25:36 PM
Everybody could afford piano or gloves. And they were all equally poor.
Gloves sure, but a piano? Did Communist Poland manage to produce remarkably cheap pianos? :huh:
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 11, 2014, 05:32:53 PM
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2014, 05:25:36 PM
Everybody could afford piano or gloves. And they were all equally poor.
Gloves sure, but a piano? Did Communist Poland manage to produce remarkably cheap pianos? :huh:
That's what I'm saying. Pianos are pretty expensive.