to think that MN is descending into class war?

[Hullygully]

Today I have read a comment that someone's potential home looks like "a council house on a sink estate," seen a debate about "chav fashion," vile comments about "Poor Kids" etc and seen numerous threads over the past few days where people fight to gang up together against the infesting lower orders with their bad grammar, poor articulation, txt spk and poor spelling.

WTF people?

It is snobbery. Nothing else.

mumcentre - i have argued that point so many many times. My dad calls most lads "chav" because that is what young lads were called in his day.
It is strange the way the English language can so quickly alter the meaning of a word.

I do think it is less about class and more about standards of social skills, articulation and intellect.

I have just been told off for offering advice on a thread asking for advice. go figure.

Mama was you dad a south Londoner??...totally agree about standards etc.but I also think its a way to divide others and elevate yourself at the expense of other people you know very little about...

born and bred.

Oh yes, some people do like to think they are of a higher class than others.

there is a quote about those with real class will refuse to be defined by it..or something. Was trying to find it earlier but i can't.

I don't see how it's fair to blame the Tory Government for the nasty people on MN. (harking back to some comments on previous pages).

If you ask of any of the posters who call people words like "chav" and insult people from Council Estates, I suspect you would find that very few are actually Conservative.

I don't think the endless storys in the media about the benefit scroungers help .I don't blame Tory voters ,I blame the Torys for constantly banging on about benefit culture
People buy into it ,and label all council estate tenants as scroungers and druggies

Ime ( both in RL and on mn ) the only people who use words like 'chav' are chavs themselves - the legit upper/middle classes have too much style to use language like that - it's the embarrassing wannabes.

And this thread is full of them

Ok, I grant you txt spk isn't my favourite, and I think it's fine to ask people not to use it if possible as it detracts from their point, but one can do so nicely, with manners. It's the damn sneering and presumed superiority I find so upsetting.

If you prick me, do I not bleed? etc

I agree entirely, Hully. Animula's post upthread and usual's recent one hit on something I've been wondering about - it seems to me, an outsider, that since the Tories got in the culture of benefit-bashing and class sneering and whatnot on Mumsnet has got a lot greater. And I assume that's to do with the larger culture? It's become culturally acceptable to blame the disavantaged for the state of the country because that's what the government is pushing us to do, and that's playing out on Mumsnet. The sneering, class war stuff, is then a spin-off of that - because once it's ok to marginalise benefit reciepients, it's ok to be blatant about a 'them and us' attitude, and from there it's a short step to 'chav' and 'hun'.

Prick me and i bleed vodka. This would be useful in a desert island scenario for ensuring drunkeness on a friday night. dancing around the fire and mumsnetting with a the new MN app. That presumes i could phone for rescue. So this scenario doesn't quite work.

I am totally defined by class. My life has been shaped by the class which i was born into. I am proud to be working class - does that mean i don't have (the other kind of)class i think that is another discussion whether one preculdes the other.

anyway i was thinking that i would have to take my laptop to the desert island and find a plug

ah but see, the person who sees MN as educated and therefore middle class and nm as uneducated and therefore WC should explore the current governments blatent exclusion of wc people from higher education.

then there is another point - what is wc culture - and why is this considered a bad thing?

what is mc culture and why should we aspire to this?

i must say if i was trying to portray myself as MC and started going to the theatre on a friday instead of getting wankered on vodka, i would not be a very happy bunny. Even though i do heartily enjoy a theatre trip.

What do make me laugh is when new posh wanna be 'country set' people move up here (townies) they speak to B once at school gates them stand judge and jury and ignore her next few times paths cross. Then they realise oh Christ she is not poor and ignorant she is stinking rich and ignorant. All is forgiven and they start sucking up, but too late as the can kiss B's backside!

The posts on the house thread were awful,made me feel so sorry for the op. I've been on here for a few months & I see the whole class divide,however for much of the time it's tongue in cheek & without malice. There are some very spiteful people who clearly can only feel superior by poking fun at others which in rl they would like to do but have the opportunity to do on a faceless Internet site.

I have to be honest that I think blaming how sneering society has become upon the Tories over the last x months is pretty ludicrous.
If you want to start in the 80s I am with you.
But the issue is compassion, respect, education and dignity.
We have lost these things in many areas in the last decade, programmes like big brother and x factor encouraging us to point and laugh.
Being outspoken used to be a virtue, now people who call themselves outspoken are usually rude, mouthy fuckers who don't engage any empathy just the desire to spew spite.
The atmosphere of laughing at disability, sexuality, class has been growing for at least a decade.
Making it party political just seems like an attempt by a lot of people to put their hands up and say 'nothing to do with me'. Absolving yourself because you voted labour may make us feel better but it doesn't help.

and then there is this constant 'judgey' thing. We all judge, what a dull dull dull as dishwater place this would be if we didn't judge. we judge all the time. But as hully was refering to earlier, it is the way in which this message of judgetasticness is portrayed - one can do it nicely.

the inverse snobbery thing always made me chuckle - mostly becuase its true, i do tend to have a chip about people proclaiming themselves to be MC - i have met lots who proclaim it and very few who imo actually are. most think 'i have mortgage therefore i am MC' which as we all know is bollocks.

what i could do with a plug on a desert island. deep fat fryer - deffo

Pag, as I said, I'm an outsider (in Australia) so I was only speculating. But honestly, I've noticed the huge increase on MN in people who are comfortable with overt benefit-bashing and the like in the past year, and the past few months especially. So either it's just a matter of a new demographic coming into the site, or those attitudes were always here but people weren't as comfortable expressing them. Either way, it seems as if the cause must be outside the site, which is just a microcosm, surely?

I am reminded of the eighties, actually, when I did live there. I was just wondering, from those of you who live there, whether you feel like the wider culture has become more encouraging of divide-and-conquer rhetoric, or not?

What pag said. Spot on about the culture encouraged by the steady increase in reality TV - this atmosphere has been building long, long before the coalition came to power.

Yy to the social mobility thing.
I was so incredibly poor, crap school etc. But I got a foot in on a profession. The entry level position I got does not exist anymore. No one , like me and without a degree, would get that opportunity now.

but then aren't we always going to judge ourselves in relation to others - always imagining a ladder and what rung you are in relation to others. Some people genuinley don't try to judge themselves in relation to others but most of society does.

I remember a fair bit of sneering going on in the eighties, but it was about single mums rather than about families or the disabled. And before that, there was a period when gays were fair game.

To me there is a strong feeling of deja vu about some recent threads: it's the same sense of insecurity and aggression and the need to find a legitimate target (read: a sufficiently weak target).