there's our catastrophe

Sep 27

bareyrteeth replied to your post: my parents told me a number of times as an…

What’s wrong with architects? Genuinely curious!

in addition to what I said here:

my dad is a plumber and has also done a lot of work as a builder, builder’s labourer, tiler, roofer, general odd-jobs guy, etc

he happens to have a lot of design skills: he designed and built an extension to my family home that uses the limited space of their small block really really well

he has had a lot of bad experiences with architects being ignorant dictatorial pricks who become enamoured of their designs and do not listen to the advice of the people who are actually making them present in the real world, leading to fuck-ups that are blamed on him and his co-workers

this is an experience that is near-universal among tradies who have to deal with designers

it’s also, I think, kind of painful for him to experience this lack of respect because he would have liked more opportunity to do some architectural design work, and probably would have been at least competent at it, but it was not really possible for him to enter the professions because he grew up in a working-class family in the 50s and had a shitty time at school

obviously there are some wonderful architects, but the design professions are just a particular segment of the middle class that I’ve had scorn for fed to me with my morning Weet-Bix my whole life

but I mean this is not some Authentic Class Rage thing, my dad’s life is not my life, take it or leave it, whatever

Jun 25

“Classism” is an anti-working class concept

class-struggle-anarchism:

Just reading this bollocks about something called “classism” from this links and resources post that was going around … ooft it’s a pile of shite.

The group that make it are called ‘class action’ and their logo has the subheading:

“building bridges across the class divide”

Which pretty much sums it up. They want to smooth out relations between the classes by getting rich people to befriend us, listen to our life experiences and ‘check their privileges. ‘

They want “a world without classism” which:

“treats people from every background, class status, and rank with dignity and respect;”

So, we still have to do al the work while they make all the profit, but we get treated nicely. Working class isn’t an identity, it’s a position in society - the fucking bottom. If you want us to stay at the bottom then you don’t respect us, and all the kind words in the world won’t change that. I don’t care if you feel guilty for being rich (you bloody well should) - I don’t want you to feel comfortable with my working classness because I don’t feel comfortable with it. I want to see an end to all classes, and yours fucking first, sunshine.

The only reason we should build a bridge between classes is to go drag the rich out of their homes and fuckin’ hang them on it.

Apr 12

“To some degree, Karl Marx had it partly right when he foresaw that workers would someday control the means of production. This is now beginning to happen, although not as Marx thought it would, with the proletariat rising to take over factories. Rather, more workers than ever control the means of production because it is inside their heads; they are the means of production.” Richard Florida does not understand Marx.

Mar 27

When I talk about coming from an ambiguous or complicated class background, middle and upper class people almost always assume I mean that we were middle class but didn’t have any money. like my parents were artists or sessional academics or something.

Actually I’m almost always talking about the opposite: we were financially secure while I was growing up (although my older siblings remember money troubles), but I was ashamed of my home suburb and my parent’s jobs for a really long time, had a hard time fitting in with the mostly very class-privileged kids at my uni when I went to uni, and still feel alienated from a lot of middle-class values and experiences. I wouldn’t call myself working class now at all, but working class values are a big part of my worldview and experience in a way that’s hard for me to articulate.

basically middle class people seem to think that if you read or have political opinions you must be essentially middle class or higher and that really annoys me.

Effie Trinket, Capitol fashionista, introduces the befuddled Appalachian heroine of the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen.

- So: I have a lot of thoughts about The Hunger Games and fashion. There is a lot of fashion in the series, especially in the first two books, but I never really thought about it until going to see the movie this weekend. The increased importance of fashion in a visual medium, I guess.

- Down With The Capitol and all that, but honestly, the Capitol fashions are really good. They’re so sick. I can’t get over how good they are. Effie Trinket may be birdbrained and unsympathetic as hell, but she knows shoulderpads. Politics aside, I can’t believe that most fashion editorials inspired by the series are about Katniss’s damn side braid. (One exception: the Capitol Couture tumblr.)

- Which leads me to: it’s a little annoying to me that the most vapid characters from the Capitol have the most effeminate and stylised fashion. it’s kinda crypto-homophobic, all this avant-garde gender-bending fashion presented as the height of decadence.

- I mean, yes, totally, the underclass in a dystopian society who spend all their time thinking about their next meal are going to have less time to spend on their fash than the extravagant fashionistas of the Capitol. But it’s usually the case in our own society that it’s underclass fashion that’s stereotyped as gaudy and monstrous, and the upper classes who have the resources to do classic and subtle styles. Classic is expensive, and it’s inherently expensive: good classic style is defined not by creativity or colour or anything else that’s accessible to people with no money, but by quality of materials and tailoring.

- And indeed, the more eeeeeeeevil and serious of the characters from the Capitol (President Snow and his ilk) have more sober and gender-conforming fashions, basically suit-and-tie stuff. But also see for example how Cinna — a sympathetic fashion designer who is continually presented as truly cutting-edge, the last person you’d expect to have a conservative dress sense — is coded as sympathetic the minute we are introduced to him by Katniss noticing and approving of his comparatively subdued personal style. He does have signature gold eyeliner, so it’s all relative I guess.

- On the other hand, it appears that Panem doesn’t have the kind of mass production of cheap fashion that we do, or at least it doesn’t reach District 12. They’re clearly not working within an economy of fashion that’s at all comparable to our own. Also there’s a subtle French Revolution thing going on with the exaggerated hourglass figures and the white curly wigs, which I like.

- All that aside, I think we can all agree that Cinna is the best. He’s all like, “don’t mind me, I’m just some amazingly creative and talented fashion designer with really good politics and a kind nature who’s going to devote my considerable skills to keeping terrified underclass kids alive by making sure they look so damn cute people can’t bear for them to die”. It’s one of the only truly interesting depictions of fashion and fashion design I’ve seen in recent Western pop culture.

- While we’re talking visual culture, let’s talk about the whitewashing controversy: Jennifer Lawrence is great as Katniss. But her best efforts aside, the movie is hurt by Katniss being played by an unambiguously white and also very fair-skinned (freckled, even) actress. The dynamic where she has less privilege than her mother, Peeta, and the village elite (all fair-complected) is continually reinforced in the books by reference to her darker complexion, like her father, like most coal-miners in her district, and like Gale. It’s a super-important sign of her underclass roots. Likewise, the support and solidarity offered to her with little prompting by Cinna, Rue, Thresh (all characters of colour, although I believe Cinna’s race is ambiguous in the books), and District 11 (a predominantly Black community) feels more arbitrary if she’s unambiguously white. (This more in-depth commentary at Feminist Film is good.)

Mar 12

Private schools used for cultural quarantine//Bianca Hall//The Age

PARENTS are using private schools to segregate their children from unfamiliar cultures, new research shows.

An academic paper published in The Australian Economic Review shows Australian-born parents in areas with high migrant populations are more likely to send their children to private schools than Australian-born parents in areas with lower immigrant rates.

First-generation migrants in areas where there are more migrant children of the same ethnic background are less likely to send their children to private schools.

this study is interesting and unsurprising

side note: can we just stop drawing false equivalencies between members of marginalised groups seeking community together and members of the normative majority defending the bubble against incursion. for other failures to make this distinction see also this interesting but flawed article on autistic schools in melbourne.

I really need to remove the word “diversity” from my vocabulary entirely, or at least restrict it to, like, salad bars

Dec 23

Wow. Stuff about the anti-political nature of therapy.

youneedacat:

Or, specifically, of therapy culture. I am writing a response to someone and ended up finding this old blog post of mine and quoting from one of the people quoted in it. And I got caught up reading all the old quotes again. They’re mostly from radical feminists, which is something I’m not. But the stuff they say has a lot of points that get into the way therapy culture has invaded — and perverted — activism in general. So I thought if throw it out there for people to read. Be aware the links probably don’t work, but last I checked I could find most of the articles by googling parts of the quotes. I think this shift towards therapy culture that happened ages ago (I know someone who lived through it) can explain a lot about many of the ineffectual and downright twisted parts of modern activism. And lots of people my age and younger have never known a time when it wasn’t like this, and don’t even realize the origin of some of these problems. A lot of this is discussed in terms of class but lots of other factors (race, disability, etc.) can cause similar rifts.

oh, shit yeah

I think I read some of these articles back in the day but I didn’t have the necessary organising experience to put them in context. I was just really upset that the article was (in my view) stigmatising people who need or benefit from psychological therapy. with a bit more experience under my belt, I am now totally positive that there’s a connection between an excessive faith in talk therapy and some of the toxic, narcissistic, individualistic, precious behaviours and attitudes I see in most feminist communities (& others, but this is something I particularly associate with feminism). If this upsets you too then I urge you to consider a) that lots of people with their own mental illnesses have a problem with what’s here termed “therapy culture” and b) the term “therapy” refers to a fairly specific and culturally/historically situated set of ways to deal with mental illness, and a critique of the influence of therapy on a community should not be identified with a rejection of all possible mental health treatment.

Nov 27

Anonymous asked: Re: FCPS, The Western Metropolitan Region Department of Education is not interested in creativity, merely what can be measured from NAPLAN results. That's literacy and numeracy. The Steiner Stream at FCPS was VELS compliant with mainstream learning outcomes, that's reading and writing from prep. Interestingly the Finns don't start school til the age of seven and they rank amongst the highest performing students in the world. Their teachers are well paid and have a minimum of a masters degree.

context: 1/2.

the steiner stream was only VELS compliant because of pressure from the state government to modify their curriculum. I don’t think the Finnish example is comparable or relevant and I don’t care about nebulous crap like “measuring creativity”.

Look, none of the pro-Steiner brigade have addressed my concerns about Steiner schooling, class, race, and gentrification. My primary concern with Steiner schooling is actually not the specific content of its curriculum (although it’s no secret that I’m not in love with it), but that Steiner schools are a relatively privileged enclave that suck funding from the rest of the public system and prevent the children in them from meeting a diverse range of children and understanding the real world. if you want to talk about incredibly valuable and non-measurable outcomes, diversity in the classroom would have to be number one for me.

Nov 25

Maritime Union of Australia supporting White Ribbon Day (nov 25th)

MUA members and officials mark White Ribbon Day every year.

MUA member Glenn Hawes with wife Liana and daughter Charlee

Across australia this week MUA members will acknowledge White Ribbon Day - The international day for the elimination of violence against women.

MUA ships fly our “Not Silent - Not Violent” flags, members wear shirts and ribbons and wristbands and the seafarers conference in sydney will host a swearing.

In acknowledgement of the global campaign, the MUA a male dominated union, stands up every year and says that violence against women is never okay.

MUA members will swear the oath at the seafarers conference in sydney this friday. The oath quite simply says: I swear never to commit, excuse or remain silent about violence against women.

This is a significant campaign in the union’s work and members have embraced it for many years now.

make the oath

it has its flaws but I actually really like White Ribbon Day. I’m generally against feel-good activities that require you simply to verbally support a non-controversial position without looking into the structural reasons for violence or materially supporting its amelioration. but I think White Ribbon Day organisers (in Australia at least) have done a good job of presenting alternative masculinities without a) falling into the old chivalry model or b) denigrating working-class or rural masculinity.

a lot of people don’t know that white ribbon day started as a memorial of the ecole polytechnique massacre in montreal in 1983, where a guy walked into a university and rounded up and shot dead fourteen women engineering students. he’d failed to get into the engineering course and he blamed affirmative action. so, you know, remember that.

Nov 6

re: the class position of cops

this “cops are part of the working class and should be supported” thing is ridiculous, and also I’ve only heard it from a) stone cold amoral union bureaucrat bastards and b) a certain type of self-consciously “privilege-aware” middle-class activist.

cops don’t just fail to join in solidarity efforts; they break them up. routinely. it’s their job. they cross picket lines every day. everything they do is against the ethos of trade union and working class movements.

the fact that it’s just their job and they might not want to do it is an irrelevant objection here. the trade union movement does not include business owners or lawyers, regardless of how personally left-wing they are, because their class position is such that on a mass level, they cannot be counted on to offer solidarity. because for them it’s not solidarity, it’s going against their role, it’s rebellion or maybe charity.

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to reach out to cops as individuals. I personally refuse to, but I won’t say you’re wrong. but anybody who thinks you can work with the police as a group by offering them solidarity — that if you do stuff like support their pay claims they’ll support you, the way that if you support the electricians’ pay strike they’ll stand with you at your rally or maybe wire up your HQ — is living a total fucking pipe dream. people I’ve organised with and I have tried this, multiple times, in a couple of different collectives, with the best of faith, and been miserably disappointed and betrayed.

not to go all Marxist on you but I think a lot of this is because people prioritise cultural studies analyses of class (basically I mean ones that use the term “classism”) over any material or systemic analysis. cops get pretty good wages and conditions. they are the enemies of most working-class and migrant people and people of colour, especially young people of colour. they also sometimes have people assume they’re meatheads because of their interests and the way they speak. which one of these is the most relevant, overshadowing all other considerations? if you said c), congratulations, you’re a dickhead. class is complicated and just as it’s not just about money, it can’t be reduced to cultural capital alone.

but ultimately I guess that’s not my point. some cops are working class in some lights. doesn’t mean you can work with them as part of a social movement. if you think you can you’re indulging in the worst kind of tokenism. some women are misogynist. some immigrants want to stop the boats. some working class people sell out other working class people. don’t work with these people just because of their social position. don’t fetishise their social position over what they actually do. get a grip.