Cartoon posted:

More like "no vax"

bell jar posted:

you've just brought up a deep seated memory that i thought i'd forgotten. so many beer slabs curbstomped like i'd want to do to fuckwit customers

i'm so glad that i don't work in hospo anymore

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” So said one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers thinly disguised as a novelist, George Orwell, in his spookily prescient work, 1984. I believe my lifelong fascination with the underclass began when I pondered that declaration of independence against a futuristic form of government oppression, which has turned out not to be so futuristic.

As a shopkeeper’s daughter, I understood poor people; they obeyed the law, worked hard, sent their kids to the same primary schools I attended and were equally ambitious for their children. But the underclass, small as it then was, behaved differently.

Like the stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, yet another English children’s book on the topic of class, they rejected the rules and lived by their own. They were to be feared and were, to use my mother’s words, not very nice. It took Orwell to turn the noble Marxist proletariat into the proles.

Since the 1950s there has been a remarkable growth in the number of proles. The welfare state is not entirely to blame, as the world of Dickens attests. Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day.

Of course, they are always seen as a deficit. Social workers, traditionally good young men and women who thought it would be nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework, neglect of their children and, notably, their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-gooder.

Oh yes, and they don’t vote often, although, as I found door-knocking, it will be issues such as refugees and threats to the national flag which will get them out the door rather than the budget deficit or how much we spend on public education.

Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak.

Despite the billions of dollars governments invest in changing the lives of proles, their number increases. Their birth rates far outstrip those of professional couples and they are now a significant potential contributor to our workforce.

Except their children languish in the growing number of behavioural support classes in general high schools where they learn little and teachers itch to send them to the local TAFE to do some form of home-schooling and get them off their books.

Essential honesty
Once graduated with a basic studies completion certificate and little else, their prospects are not great. The discipline of work and often its thanklessness, especially at the unskilled end, also have little appeal.

But Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak, the language of lies made famous in Orwell’s 1984. They know what they want and see no reason why they should take notice of some man or woman in a suit when they get in their way.

They were a significant part of the anti-vax protests because they don’t like being told what to do and even though many drew their inspiration from spurious websites, they had correctly identified the freedoms the rest of us had been only too happy to give up. State leaders might have deplored the demonstrations, but they also knew they represented the tip of a sentiment the rest of society keeps hidden from view and only reveals in the privacy of the ballot box. Freedom has gathered pace.

The underclass is not always a happy place to be and bumping into the rest of the world mostly does not go well. People with chronic mental illness, cognitive disabilities and childhoods of trauma are mixed together in a sometimes brutal way, chaos and crisis never far from their door, living in a Wild Wood in their streets and public housing blocks or caravan parks.

And yet, I like them. I like them because they call us out. They are honestly self-interested, and you always know what they think. I know many of them. So many clever, actually very clever, kids and adults, although often damaged and almost entirely lacking discipline, trust in the system, trust in anyone who represents the system.

I am convinced we can do better to harness the force that the people of the underclass represent. We need to make it a focus of social policy, not a by-product of it. We have little choice, or we will continue to import our workforce and in growing numbers, as risk management parenting forces the birth-rate lower.

So long as we keep looking at the billions of dollars they cost us, we will continue to dislike them, reject them and write them off. Yet, in an age when cultural hegemony is now as strong as it was 70 years ago, only different, never have we needed them more to challenge modern meekism. The child who cried “look at the King” in The Emperor’s New Clothes was surely a member of the underclass.

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

[b]

NTRabbit posted:

Centrelink call centres have been entirely outsourced to them plus Serco and Datacom for a few years now

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

garbage

Capt.Whorebags posted:

loving hell, can't wait to see her follow up article..

"Forced sterilisation and coerced labour got a bad rap in the last 20 years but I firmly believe..."

Animal Friend posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...dys-berejiklian

Capt.Whorebags posted:

loving hell, can't wait to see her follow up article..

"Forced sterilisation and coerced labour got a bad rap in the last 20 years but I firmly believe..."

SuddenCactus posted:

Wasn't Pru the one that got in trouble last time for advocating a new stolen generation on channel 7?

Why is icac saying these hurtful things about glady

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

[b]

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

[b]

hooman posted:

It's impressive that someone could write a post that would get you probed in cspam on a national news site.

CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:

That has to be the biggest pile of complete poo poo I've read this month. And yes I read my own posts

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

[b]

Solemn Sloth posted:

I think that was a different Prue - Prue MacSween

Senor Tron posted:

When you're meant to be doing research for your column but just watch Idiocracy instead.

Phigs posted:

I saw Idiocracy for the first time last week and oh man. I thought when people said it was a pro-eugenics movie they meant if you dug deep into the subtext it was a bit problematic. But nope, movie might as well have had the narrator turn to the camera and implore us to murder the poor before their inferior genes overwhelm and infect the gene pool.

Animal Friend posted:

tell me you haven't read 1984 without saying you haven't read 1984.

also pretend that 1984 was the philosophical underpinning of class definitions and where "proletariat" was defined.

Welcome to Tiny Train World!

dr_rat posted:

...are they really trying to "noble savages" the "underclass"?


Jesus.

Yolo Swaggins Esq posted:

My main takeaway from Idiocracy all these years later is that I am exactly the kind of idiot it warned about, because me and my idiot friends bought a case of Brawndo branded energy drinks after it came out BC the brawndo ads were funny.

Eediot Jedi posted:

I imagine he didn't have to repay the trust either?

E: lol it's ok, the guy who benefited from the trust says the managers of the trust say it's all above board, case closed.

SuddenCactus posted:

Why is icac saying these hurtful things about glady

Capt.Whorebags posted:

loving hell, can't wait to see her follow up article..

quote:

Goward told Guardian Australia she was “deeply disappointed” that her column had been “so badly misunderstood”. But, she said, opinion pieces are “meant to provoke and I hope it’s helped the readers of the AFR think differently about those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder”.

“I have applied a Marxist analysis which some might say is old fashioned but which explains to me why people judge others as unworthy,” she said.