Coronavirus: Better Call Sol - CORONAMANIA (3 Viewers)

[sleepy]

What's interesting about Karen is it can now apply to men. I've seen some attempt to introduce a male counterpart, Kyle or something, but the tide's sort of swung around to Karen becoming genderless.

If I was overly sensitive about anything it would be about the implicit misogyny of Karen, but even that seems to be getting diluted.

Any implicit dislike of white people that might be conveyed by the use of Gammon on the other hand is fair enough, seeing as statistically speaking we're likely to be raging cunts.

I don’t think the misogyny is always implicit

 

[sleepy]

Also, I’d be in agreement with saying that basing an insult based on someone’s skin colour is a bad road to go down. Saying it’s ok to be racist to be white people because they’re pricks is not, in my mind, a million miles away from saying “Sure, you can’t trust travellers. I hear they break into houses all the time.”

Having said that, I never thought of Gammon as a skin colour insult. I always just thought of it as a catch all term for Daily Mail readers

 

[sleepy]

Anyways, back on topic. With regards being asked for my qr code. Most places I’ve been have looked for it but only one or 2 have actually gone to the trouble of actually scanning it

 

[Lili Marlene]

The whole gammon discourse reminds me of freedom of speech discourse in that all the actual evils of the world get left to the side as a massive conversation on whether it's ok or not to be offensive/ call white people gammon becomes the only thing people discuss. A great distraction from dealing with racism is talking about whether or not you can be racist to white people. I suppose on one level it's necessary, on another it's a fucking distraction, and there by design.

 

[Unicron]

There's a whole "punching up" thing wrt to racism and doing it towards white people.

Then there's the whole thing about whether it's possible to be racist to white people as depending on your definition of racism "racism" is the whole set of structures surrounding it and not just being a dick to someone based on the colour of their skin. If you go by that then being a dick to a white person isn't racism, it's prejudiced. And here we are going down the rabbit hole that LM just mentioned in the previous post.

My position is that yes, it is possible for white people to suffer from racism, but that racism is almost entirely perpetuated on them by other white people (eg shitty attitudes towards eastern european immigrants in the UK as part of the brexit discourse, the way that we treat travellers, and also attitudes towards "job stealing Poles" who may in fact be Latvians or Croatians or whatever, the same way that "Nigerian" is used as a shorthand for any African immigrant here)

 

[ann post]

Aye but ignoring all the nuance shit about intersectional slurs or whatever.

There is an every growing list of clear factual things you can say about the demographic ye's are describing.
Reducing it to the latest twitter buzz word says as much about the user of the word as it does about the target. And we can nuance all day, but it is a reductive, and it is a skin colour and @Lili Marlene it is the opposite to a distraction. If we already hold ourselves to a standard that we want to be better than those who propogated the N word, spotting shit like this upholds that. The next N wont be an N, but it will be a reductive term. Just deleting the N word is the trend method, deleting the path to reductives as part of society is progress.

 

[Unicron]

Aye but ignoring all the nuance shit about intersectional slurs or whatever.

There is an every growing list of clear factual things you can say about the demographic ye's are describing.
Reducing it to the latest twitter buzz word says as much about the user of the word as it does about the target. And we can nuance all day, but it is a reductive, and it is a skin colour and @Lili Marlene it is the opposite to a distraction. If we already hold ourselves to a standard that we want to be better than those who propogated the N word, spotting shit like this upholds that. The next N wont be an N, but it will be a reductive term. Just deleting the N word is the trend method, deleting the path to reductives as part of society is progress.

 

[sleepy]

There's a whole "punching up" thing wrt to racism and doing it towards white people.

Then there's the whole thing about whether it's possible to be racist to white people as depending on your definition of racism "racism" is the whole set of structures surrounding it and not just being a dick to someone based on the colour of their skin. If you go by that then being a dick to a white person isn't racism, it's prejudiced. And here we are going down the rabbit hole that LM just mentioned in the previous post.

My position is that yes, it is possible for white people to suffer from racism, but that racism is almost entirely perpetuated on them by other white people (eg shitty attitudes towards eastern european immigrants in the UK as part of the brexit discourse, the way that we treat travellers, and also attitudes towards "job stealing Poles" who may in fact be Latvians or Croatians or whatever, the same way that "Nigerian" is used as a shorthand for any African immigrant here)

Ah no, I’d definitely be in agreement that some white people do suffer from racism. Especially Eastern Europeans.

My point is why would you be knowingly racist towards someone? I just think it’s kind of counterproductive. If you think someone’s behaving in a shitty way, why would you perpetuate that behaviour?

That being said, I don’t see Gammon as being a racist or discriminatory term. I’d see it more as being critical of a particular attitude than a skin colour. You can avoid being called Gammon by not being a complete dickhead. If you’re black, there’s certain words you can’t avoid being called because of the colour of your skin, which can’t be changed. I think that’s the crucial difference here.

To link this in with the main thread, it’s like how people who are refusing to get vaccinated complain of discrimination because of it. But as somebody pointed out, being refused service in a restaurant because you refuse to take a vaccine is not the same as refusing someone service based on their skin colour or ethnicity

 

[Lili Marlene]

Aye but ignoring all the nuance shit about intersectional slurs or whatever.

There is an every growing list of clear factual things you can say about the demographic ye's are describing.
Reducing it to the latest twitter buzz word says as much about the user of the word as it does about the target. And we can nuance all day, but it is a reductive, and it is a skin colour and @Lili Marlene it is the opposite to a distraction. If we already hold ourselves to a standard that we want to be better than those who propogated the N word, spotting shit like this upholds that. The next N wont be an N, but it will be a reductive term. Just deleting the N word is the trend method, deleting the path to reductives as part of society is progress.

Brendan O'Neill @Spiked has a take that saying gammon is anti-working class if you want to go down that route?

Gammon: the return of class hatred

It’s time we reflected on the horror of comparing working-class voters to pig meat.

www.spiked-online.com

I couldn't give a fuck. Like you said, it's just a twitter buzz word, it'll be overused and dead in six months anyway. I won't be shedding any tears for the feelings of the wealthy, red-faced pricks on Sky News arguing that asylum seekers need to have their boats torpedo'd.

 

[taubstumm]

Brendan O'Neill @Spiked has a take that saying gammon is anti-working class if you want to go down that route?

Gammon: the return of class hatred

It’s time we reflected on the horror of comparing working-class voters to pig meat.

www.spiked-online.com

these articles are so tedious. they could really be written by a bot at a certain point. I wonder if the people writing them ever end up feeling like tin pan alley songwriters, just churning this stuff out.

I’ll only add that, at least in my own understanding, “gammon” is not a class-based term. farage is gammon. plenty of rich, aristo, well-connected types are gammon. whereas “chav” is a far more corrosively contemptuous word that is explicitly reserved for the poors. but that probably doesn’t suit the angle of the galaxy-brains over at spiked.

anyway this is all just yet again looking into the strange zoo of the sasanaigh and trying to make any sense at all of it

 

[taubstumm]

oh, also — there’s a semi-equivalent to “gammon” over here, which is “alman” (turkish/arabic word for german). and, of course, inevitably, there’s a whole manufactured-outrage industry that churns out articles saying that calling someone “alman” is the worst kind of despicable racism. it’s... unpersuasive, let’s say

 

[egg_]

If we already hold ourselves to a standard that we want to be better than those who propogated the N word, spotting shit like this upholds that

I agree with this.

The next N wont be an N, but it will be a reductive term. Just deleting the N word is the trend method, deleting the path to reductives as part of society is progress.

... but I honestly don't know if this is possible. Humans seem to naturally divide into us and them - I try hard to treat everyone as an equal, but sometimes I wonder if that's only possible because I personally don't really have an "us"*, and am just pretending that I'm part of "them"

*(or if I do it's tiny)

 

[Lili Marlene]

I think the idea that @ann post is saying there, that we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, is worth thinking about. It's that whole Obama thing of "they go high, we go low." In its current form this goes all the way back to Amber Frost's original Dirtbag Left essay from 2016 which argued the opposite:

The Necessity of Political Vulgarity | Current Affairs

www.currentaffairs.org

and I think the larger argument is that in order for your side to win, usually meaning something "left" being in charge of a country, it takes more than simply the highest of brow writing and thinking, you need to have the middle-brow stuff on your side, and you also need to have the lowbrow, tabloid, writing on your side. Educated professionals who mind their political correctness at all times don't win elections on their own.

The whole gammon thing is probably at a point of tedium now, especially if you're as terminally online as a lot of us, it's done to death and become a very lazy way of not discussing an issue (I certainly felt dismissing everything by men as "mansplaining" a few years back reached a similar point) but i'd rather make that argument than say it's just not highminded enough. It never pretended to be highminded, it's a dumb phrase that fit a lot of dumb idiots online and while very vague it was also accurate enough to enrage them, which was really its only point.

I'd also point out that many think the whole Dirtbag Left thing is also done to death, which makes sense because when the bar of entry is super low, well, any idiot can come in and make a name for themselves.

 

[Lili Marlene]

lol I MEAN "they go low, we go high"

SORRY OBAMA

literally got it backwards

 

[sleepy]

Brendan O'Neill @Spiked has a take that saying gammon is anti-working class if you want to go down that route?

Gammon: the return of class hatred

It’s time we reflected on the horror of comparing working-class voters to pig meat.

www.spiked-online.com

I couldn't give a fuck. Like you said, it's just a twitter buzz word, it'll be overused and dead in six months anyway. I won't be shedding any tears for the feelings of the wealthy, red-faced pricks on Sky News arguing that asylum seekers need to have their boats torpedo'd.

it’s the left wing equivalent of using the term ‘woke’

 

[Lili Marlene]

it’s the left wing equivalent of using the term ‘woke’

close enough, yeah!

 

[egg_]

and I think the larger argument is that in order for your side to win, usually meaning something "left" being in charge of a country, it takes more than simply the highest of brow writing and thinking, you need to have the middle-brow stuff on your side, and you also need to have the lowbrow, tabloid, writing on your side. Educated professionals who mind their political correctness at all times don't win elections on their own.

We want everyone in the world to behave like we do, but in order to win at politics we have to not behave like we do, and then change back after we've won and make everyone else change too. Isn't that the plot of Animal Farm? No wonder the Right hates us

 

[Lili Marlene]

We want everyone in the world to behave like we do, but in order to win at politics we have to not behave like we do, and then change back after we've won and make everyone else change too. Isn't that the plot of Animal Farm? No wonder the Right hates us

"We want people to behave like we do" is a pretty vague thing egg and it can be taken a lot of different ways. It's certainly not what I said.

I want people to have a financial safety net for when they are in trouble, I don't want really, really rich people to make all the decisions for how the country is run, I don't want the basic economics of how our country is run to be dependent on fossil fuels or cheap labour exploitation.

 

[rettucs]

sorry to hijack the thread and talk about covid shite again but...

that announcement today about reopening everything by Oct 22nd is pretty impressive, no?

here in Latvia they'll be announcing new restrictions tomorrow.

as a matter of interest, do people still think New Zealand's approach to handling covid was good?

 

[Lili Marlene]

here in Latvia they'll be announcing new restrictions tomorrow.

as a matter of interest, do people still think New Zealand's approach to handling covid was good?

Do you think it was bad?

They probably should have developed their own vaccine since they're a rich country at the end of the vaccine queue and every method is eventually herd immunity but otherwise, yes?