GRcade

Go to bed.

FWIW as a renter, I really didn’t find the thread title as anything beyond a harmless - if a little gooseberry fool - joke. I’m not sure anyone has ever used the term prole and meant it seriously.

Decided to take the plunge and go with Purple Bricks for selling our house - the guy is coming round this week to do the valuation and what not. And thus begins the journey into hell that is the process of selling and buying a house in the UK!

Not wanting to kick the hornets nest that is the renting vs. owning debate that has been bubbling around - but one of the things I do miss about being a renter was how much easier the general process of moving between places was. Find somewhere you like, stump up a deposit and sign a tenancy agreement - Bob's you Uncle! Selling and Buying just seems to involve so many layers of confusion and expense with solicitors, estate agents, surveyors and goodness knows who else just seeming to exist to make the whole thing a living nightmare!

I find "povvo" rolls off the tongue better than "prole".

Green Gecko wrote:Landlord was supposed to send a painter around, which was arranged with the painter, but instead we got his son for some reason. Now the landlord is a popular science author, a doctorate, with many books on global warming, and the landlady is a chemist. So you might assume this is a skeptical, science thinking family. Turns out this guy who I probably shouldn't have gotten into a conversation with is the total opposite (like father like son, erm nope). He calls Trump (he proudly owns a MAGA hat, it's one of his favourite possessions) "God Emporer Trump" and believes he should be cast in gold, and is a bonafide genius, one of the greatest people ever. He hangs a Kekistan flag in his house, believes global warming is made up to charge people more money for green fuel and doesn't like the diverse characters in Destiny (which he's played for 3000 hours) because they are "just ugly"; he's very unhappy about identity politics in games. He claimed to be a white nationalist (I'm not sure what prompted this) but quickly backtracked to nationalist. And his home and his friends are on 4ch*n (he doesn't like the weekends and laments the fact it's Friday because his friends are going to ask him to go out). Before leaving he stated that "when the revolution comes I'll be the first to shoot" and then something about how the world will be better etc. on the way out.

Classic failson. https://www.sanspoint.com/archives/2016 ... alt-right/

Winckle wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Landlord was supposed to send a painter around, which was arranged with the painter, but instead we got his son for some reason. Now the landlord is a popular science author, a doctorate, with many books on global warming, and the landlady is a chemist. So you might assume this is a skeptical, science thinking family. Turns out this guy who I probably shouldn't have gotten into a conversation with is the total opposite (like father like son, erm nope). He calls Trump (he proudly owns a MAGA hat, it's one of his favourite possessions) "God Emporer Trump" and believes he should be cast in gold, and is a bonafide genius, one of the greatest people ever. He hangs a Kekistan flag in his house, believes global warming is made up to charge people more money for green fuel and doesn't like the diverse characters in Destiny (which he's played for 3000 hours) because they are "just ugly"; he's very unhappy about identity politics in games. He claimed to be a white nationalist (I'm not sure what prompted this) but quickly backtracked to nationalist. And his home and his friends are on 4ch*n (he doesn't like the weekends and laments the fact it's Friday because his friends are going to ask him to go out). Before leaving he stated that "when the revolution comes I'll be the first to shoot" and then something about how the world will be better etc. on the way out.

Classic failson. https://www.sanspoint.com/archives/2016 ... alt-right/

Yes, and that wasn't even half of it. He also ranted about how we hated progressives and hippies, how they are ruining the world etc. He ranted on about "femanons" revealing they are women on 4ch*n. Apparently you can tell who are women by whether they write things in quote marks. The default response of course is, "go make me a sandwich". And he readily admitted he frequently trolls politicians on social media including his labour member neighbor and has "gotten into trouble" about it.

Proper whacked out stuff. It was very easy to play along; that blog about facism providing easy answers rings very true. I've been in vulnerable situations in the past.. Somehow or another I seem to have an installed morality about fairness, equality and justice. It could have been, but I doubt it was as a kind of oxymoron itself, Church of England school. I suppose that isn't important anymore.

If there is hope, it lies with the proles.

Oh yeah, by the way, the thread title was a joke by me years ago now. There was nowhere to talk about renting, and everyone was talking about buying, which is only relevant to a relatively small subset of fortunate people. So I changed the thread title and started to post in sort of protest, as I felt left out of the discussion about housing in general.

It's funny it's turned out to be another "thread title" moderation issue.

So yeah, my mod got modded. By Karl. In response to complaint about classism. When both of us rent and are generally left wing. And I edited the thread title in protest of the same thing, using self deprecating humour that evidently has been transcended. Amazing really.

I think if the title genuinely upsets people then it is reasonable to get rid of it. It provides no actual value to the people it doesn't upset, other than perhaps an initial chuckle, which is surely less impactful than the offence taken by those upset by it.

It's a similar if different shade to the argument regarding football thread title changes. The negative impact is much greater than the positive value, so even if a popular vote decides in favour of the positive value surely it makes sense to cater in mitigation of the negative impact?

I don't believe anyone is arguing about that. I just find it funny a whole next level of irony is at play here and I'm the only one aware of it since it was me that changed the thread title to include renting in the first place.

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:I think if the title genuinely upsets people then it is reasonable to get rid of it. It provides no actual value to the people it doesn't upset, other than perhaps an initial chuckle, which is surely less impactful than the offence taken by those upset by it.

It's a similar if different shade to the argument regarding football thread title changes. The negative impact is much greater than the positive value, so even if a popular vote decides in favour of the positive value surely it makes sense to cater in mitigation of the negative impact?

I think TM was drinking last night and was in angry drunk mode. Possibly felt a little embarrassed by not having come across the terms bourgeoisie and proletariat.

It's quite a harmless joke because it's so obviously tongue in cheek and not sincere that it's nothing to get upset by. If there actually was a snobbery about it in here, I'd certainly agree that the title should change but it doesn't and didn't seek to upset anyone.

Grumpy David wrote:It's quite a harmless joke because it's so obviously tongue in cheek and not sincere that it's nothing to get upset by.

I have been pretty upset by it - regardless of intent - since I first noticed it. I just don't think it's funny to make fun of poor people. Basically, it makes me think: Don't we have enough problems without laying on the smug piss-taking? Leave us alone, already.

It's in a sense interesting that the original edit was intended to be a kind of ironic reclaiming of the word 'povvo' (EDIT: my mistake, it was actually 'prole' wasn't it), but that context wasn't evident in the phrase itself, which means it wasn't readily interpretable as satire.

Has Karl left the renting part in parenthesis as his own sick little joke?

I think the prole joke was not meant in malice, especially because it was GG writing about himself. It wasn't clear from the thread title what the intent was though, a lurker or new member might not have understood the joke and just thought we were a forum of arsehole. We are a forum of arseholes of course, but we at least try and pretend not to be....

Basically this whole mess is Gecko's fault for being too damn lazy to create a new thread to discuss renting or to use one of the existing ones ( search.php?keywords=renting&terms=all&author=&fid%5B%5D=7&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sr=posts&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search ).

Nobody on this forum is rich (well, you know, proper rich like gold rocket car rich) and I very much doubt anyone thinks anyone being less than well off is in any way funny. This time last year (where has that gone? ) I lost my job and the 3 weeks it took me to get another onemcost me nearly 6 grand in lost wages and mortgage bills etc. It wiped out my savings and i was strawberry floating shitting myself. Being 'poor' is unfortunatley something we all experience on here at various points and nobody is genuinely finding it funny or poking actual fun.

I've never heard the term prole before either, I thought it was someone on perole

Karl wrote:

Grumpy David wrote:It's quite a harmless joke because it's so obviously tongue in cheek and not sincere that it's nothing to get upset by.

I have been pretty upset by it - regardless of intent - since I first noticed it. I just don't think it's funny to make fun of poor people. Basically, it makes me think: Don't we have enough problems without laying on the smug piss-taking? Leave us alone, already.

It's in a sense interesting that the original edit was intended to be a kind of ironic reclaiming of the word 'povvo' (EDIT: my mistake, it was actually 'prole' wasn't it), but that context wasn't evident in the phrase itself, which means it wasn't readily interpretable as satire.

There’s never really been an ironic reclamation of the word prole/proletariat because it was not originally used to denigrate the lower income brackets, it was supposed to be a term to rally them into class revolution - the proletariat crushing the bourgeoisie etc. I think it may have been Karl's namesake, Marx, who first popularised it.

Since 1948 it’s been a point of satire in the west as it was used in Orwell’s works and generally lost its relevance as an inciting term without picking up a wider significance beyond parodying communism/class based society, at least in my view. I’m sorry if this comes across as critical but I really didn’t see anything to be offended by in the thread title.

As others have said though, perhaps it’s the right thing to change the thread title if the “joke” is being misinterpreted by a lot of people. There's not much else to say other than that the title was never meant to cause offence and I'm sure Gecko would've been mortified if he'd realised before it was changed.

Ad7 wrote:I've never heard the term prole before either, I thought it was someone on perole

What?

Moggy wrote:

Ad7 wrote:I've never heard the term prole before either, I thought it was someone on perole

What?

That's amazing.

Corazon de Leon wrote:

Moggy wrote:

Ad7 wrote:I've never heard the term prole before either, I thought it was someone on perole

What?

That's amazing.

I can understand somebody not knowing the word “prole” but to link that to “perole”? That’s such a pleb thing to do.

I'm retroactively offended

I just thought it was like Povvo and short for something scummy, so I thought it was someone who's just got out of jail and is on benefits or something

Green Gecko wrote:So yeah, my mod got modded. By KarL In response to complaint about classism. When both of us rent and are generally left wing. And I edited the thread title in protest of the same thing, using self deprecating homour that evidently has been transcended. Amazing really.

Left wing do-gooder socialists always fail due to in fighting about who's the most virtuous