>Drag queens banned from performing at Free Pride Glasgow event over fears acts will offend trans people
[...]
>The organisation said in a statement that it hopes to create a safe space for all members of the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual) community, and that while the decision may "disappoint" some people "the needs of the most marginalised groups within our community come first."
[...]
>Free Pride Glasgow said: “It was felt that it [drag performance] would make some of those who were transgender or questioning their gender uncomfortable. It was felt by the group within the Trans/Non Binary Caucus that some drag performance, particularly cis drag, hinges on the social view of gender and making it into a joke, however transgender individuals do not feel as though their gender identity is a joke.”
Life rarely takes the piss out of itself like this. It almost sounds like the plot of a South Park episode.
Virginia Woolfe still gets hours of programming dedicated to her on Radio 4 yet she was a proper screaming racist, like an actual undeniably textbook one, as well as vicious class snob. If she can still be a cornerstone of literature than I don't understand why we have to have this level of meltdown over Rol'd Daal.
It would be my pleasure to point out that, like a lot of the stuff people fly into a blind rage about me posting, I thought saying "children's author and derranged racist" was funny. Because it's a shocking juxtaposition. It is also true, which is why I posted >>42644 , but I only had to do that because Twitterlad had a teary. However, not everything you find disagreeable requires DEFCON 1-level reaction, or renders someone as the very essence of your most loathed social archetype. Do you watch films and fly off the handle when a protagonist does something you don't like? Or listen to stand-ups crack jokes that you can't relate to and start throwing shit at your telly? I properly don't understand why half the posters on .gs are so highly strung. Perhaps it's the heat.
> Do you watch films and fly off the handle when a protagonist does something you don't like? Or listen to stand-ups crack jokes that you can't relate to and start throwing shit at your telly? I properly don't understand why half the posters on .gs are so highly strung. Perhaps it's the heat.
How long have you been posting here? It's one of the trademarks of .gs. Come for the quibbling, stay for the full blown cunt off.
Just saying, old timey writers generally get to be racist and shit. If even the snobby middle class hummus eaters at the BBC are alright with it then I defer to my betters and shrug my shoulders. Role Darl has to be one of the least egregious cases where he was probably a very nice and pleasant person all around despite some backward attitudes, but I doubt the same can be said of a great many authors. So why are we bothering with a cunt off about him?
>>42652 I've heard "grimdark" without any reference to the Black Library (it was in reference to The Black Company). Culture permeates, but I think this is one that persists.
https://www.11kbw.com/knowledge-events/case/police-participation-in-pride-held-unlawful/ >In a claim raising issues described by the Judge as “important, current, controversial and of public interest”, the High Court has ruled that participation by police officers in a Pride event was unlawful, on the basis that it breached duties of impartiality.
>The claim for judicial review was brought by Lindsey Smith, a gender-critical lesbian, who objected to the participation of officers in Newcastle’s Pride in the City 2024. The officers marched in the parade, and staffed a stall displaying the colours of the Progress flag, at which a police van painted in the Progress colours was stationed.
>In a judgment handed down today, Mr Justice Linden held that by authorising officers to participate in Pride in the ways they did, the Chief Constable of the force, Vanessa Jardine, made a decision which was not legally open to her, since “on any view” the activities authorised “would be likely to give rise to the impression amongst members of the public that they may” interfere with the officers’ impartial discharge of their policing duties. The decision was therefore irrational. The Court held further that it was irrational on further bases, including that the Chief Constable had misunderstood the nature of the public sector equality duty.
Having read the judgement, I feel quite sorry for the Chief Constable. There's such a tangled mess of legislation that it seems like they would have ended up in court no matter what.
I've just remembered that back in the late 90s there was a Coronation Street episode where they dealt with the whole "should a evangelist christian korean youtuber woman use the women's loo at work" thing and the writers somehow reached a more progressive conclusion (at a time with no gender recognition law whatsoever - and where David Lammy (hi!) as a minister in the Blair government would go to human rights court to argue against introducing one, where section 28 was still on the books, and where the age of consent was different for gay and straight people) than the EHRC or the supreme court.
>>42664 I feel like there's a lot of scapegoating going on here from a company that is circling the drain. The problem isn't that the ad makes no sense or that it's full more wokies than the usual bollocks I have to walk passed on the tube - and it's not like the kind of people who get incensed by this are really buying Jags anyway.
It's just a bad car from a company that hasn't had a hit in a long time. This was make-or-break for them so Jaguar is in real trouble and throwing the ad company under the bus isn't going to turn around their fortunes. Whoever signed off on the ad should at minimum have asked that they copied something out of the Batman cartoon that it's drawing from but more realistically they should have sat down and reversed OBVIOUSLY STUPID ideas like removing the rear window, making it ultra-low like you need to cross the Fulda-Gap and can't change the tires or forgetting the bloody indicators.
To me, where they went wrong was that they aimed to practically create an entirely new brand that only has the name in common with your dad's or older brother's Jag. It's more than a relaunch, it's a complete reimagining of a brand. And if done wrong or too radically, that often has a lot of potential to anger fans of what that brand used to stand for.
There are EV brands that have cropped up in the last ten years out of nowhere. Some of them trying to appear equally hip and "with it", some of them actually quite successful with that approach. But they didn't have any brand heritage, and therefore no old fans complaining. That's what caused most of the noise. And it's going to continue to be damaging to the new Jaguar. Because whether or not Jaguar have been making shit cars for the last ten to fifteen years, you've still got many people who own or used to own a Jag who would honestly love to see a new Jaguar come out that's well thought out and just an all around good car, but crucially doesn't abandon its old roots. What Jaguar's relaunch has been promising isn't it, or at least it's not it as far as those old brand loyalists are concerned. You may then say that yes, but that new car just isn't for them. But that can then lead to even more public rejection.
The timing of the ad campaign was also unfortunate in a way that maybe the ad execs weren't able to foresee, in terms of the backlash against wokeness that had been brewing for some time at that point but really became completely unleashed after Trump won the election. That's why I think it's not generally wrong to pinpoint the ad as the moment when wokeness reached its peak. Because many consumer brands are now reverting their DEI brand philosophies and company policies as they see the pendulum swing the other way, for fear of being hit in the face by it.
>why even keep the name jaguar in the first place?
To stick it to the old white man patriarchy.
If they'd just shut down Jaguar in its entirety, retooled all their production assets and started under a new name where you would have had a whole new brand rolling off the former Jaguar assembly lines but with no allusion to the past or mention of Jaguar in the new name at all, then most people just would have accepted it shruggingly. A few would have lamented the disappearance of a British icon, but it would have been a much more quiet affair.
But here, somebody wanted to make a point of taking a brand that was admittedly a symbol of white male conservative stuffiness and deliberately crapping a big steaming, pink, gender neutral, inclusive turd all over it. And we saw how it ended.
Thing is ultimately, that's what it's all about for That Sort Of Person. It's never about actually wanting to be included in a group that they claim to be excluded from, they don't actually give a shit about that. They don't want to drive a Jaguar, they don't like Jaguars. That's always just a motte and bailey defence they can trot out when they need to.
The truth is it's just about the symbolic statement, the act of giving a middle finger to the crowd who already enjoy whatever it is, planting their flag and going "ha ha, look what we're doing, we're fucking up the thing you like, and you can't do a thing about it." I've seen it happen in several communities already. Even in the cases where people are perfectly accommodating, and bend over backwards to be tolerant and accepting, these people will just shit things up for a while, before they get bored and move on, like locusts.
That's why I remain convinced that the "woke" crowd have never really even cared about the LGBT cause or women's rights or any of it. They're just using that identity and demographic for the cover of being a "victim" minority. Really these people are just a flock of narcissists who seek their validation by having people indulge their demands, who get off on manipulating people through the conceit of being oppressed.
>>42693 >>42692 You are both retarded. The Jaguar executives making a bad bet with their branding isn't evidence, or the result of any of that. They are not seeking to be seen as victims, they are not trying to stick it to the patriarchy, they are trying to generate value for their shareholders. That is what corporations do. Again, you are retarded, seek therapy.
>>42692 >If they'd just shut down Jaguar in its entirety, retooled all their production assets and started under a new name
I assume you're being glib, because that's completely insane otherwise.
The point they wanted to make was "well-off millenials, please buy our sodding cars, PLEASE!". Everyone here is wizened and wise enough to knwo that corporations don't give a gnat's chuff about anything but the bottom line, so I shouldn't really have to point that out. The reason Jaguar had a car that looked like a Hotwheels toy driving around in a Mark Rothko painting was because there are no "stuffy, white, male conservatives" anymore. When was the last time you met a "stuffy" Brit? That bloke's fucking dead, or so old his kids have pinched his licence so he doesn't accidentally ram raid a dentist's surgery. Jaguar wanted to impress the kind of person who could afford a high-end Tesla, but thinks Musk is a dickhead. It's not terribly deep.
However, I need to be clear about this: a large part of the backlash to those ads was barely disguised racism and anti-LGBT sentiment. There is no reason to give two fucks about an advert featuring a concept car, other than as an excuse to fart bile all over the web. It's all part of the victim mentality of the modern right. Nothing can pass them by, it's all an assault on them. So what if Jaguar wants to sell cars to 42-year-old profressionals who had a bisexual experience in uni, and still vote LidDem to this day? That isn't actually a violation of anyone's rights, no more than Jacamo catering for our longest and widest lads, or NVIDIA requiring you to actively avoid Jensen Huang spitting in your face when you want to buy one of their video cards.
Oh dear. Try not to soak too much blue dye into your vag pads lads.
I'm not saying Jaguar themselves wanted to become oppressed disabled black trans folx. But they jobbed it out to an ad agency, and ad agencies just blindly use whatever internet based social media analytics nonsense they have access to, and come to the false positive conclusion that all this nonsense is the way to win over the older millennial market segment. But it's all artificial white noise. All of that information they have coldly and cynically chewed up and come out with the idea that people wanted a woke Jaguar was because of the internet kulturkrieg bollocks I was talking about.
It's not always a direct cause and effect, but the dominoes fall one after another, don't they. One thing leads to another.
In 2019, Jaguar sold 130,000 cars. In 2024 - before the ad campaign - they sold 30,000 cars. That's not enough to make a production line viable. The choice for JLR was to either try something radical or just close the doors forever.
They are in the process of trying something radical. All of the "go woke, go broke" takes are moronic, because Jaguar stopped production at the end of 2024 in a decision that was planned long before this rebrand. There's simply no point in keeping a loss-making production line running, especially when you need to completely reconfigure those lines for new models. Obviously you aren't going to sell any cars if you've stopped making cars.
Regardless of the merits of their recent rebrand, at least people are talking about Jaguar. It has become such a fundamentally irrelevant brand that the people who claimed to love it didn't even notice that they stopped making cars. If people wanted to prevent Good Old Fashioned Proper Jaguar from going all woke, they should have bought Jaguars. It's the most insane kind of boomer petulance to insist that a car company should continue making cars that they like the idea of but won't actually buy.
>>42699 1) I never insulted anyone, but if it's going to go that way could you at least put some effort into it. My understanding is we're not allowed the post The Daily Mail, so I think spouting it secondhand should count just the same.
2) You haven't really addressed any points I made in >>42698 . Maybe you think I didn't make any, but you haven't made that clear either. I don't really know what you want.
You speak entirely in catchphrases and memespeak, you seem unduly angry for someone having a conversation about car brand adverts and you're consistently vague on top of all that. I can't even tell to what extent you're disagreeing with me, unless you've mistakenly thought I was claiming the rebrand a success. I don't know, you seem tremendously pompous for someone trying to sound like a populist. It's all rather hard to keep track of.
>>42700 >Because you can't reasonably object to an ad campaign and product relaunch that shits rainbows where it really arguably shouldn't.
No, and people weren't "reasonably objecting". And what were all these people objecting to, exactly? And what stake did they have in it anyway? If there were that many potential Jaguar customers out there, there never would have been a rebrand. If you're objecting a "relaunch that shits rainbows", for no other reason than that, you are a homophobe. Soz, lad, I don't make the rules. However, one day I will inforce them with my very own Big Gay NKVD.
>Do you honestly think it's for that kind of person?
A little advice for future conversations you have. Don't ask close-ended questions you know full well the person you're talking to doesn't know the answer to. It stops things dead, makes you come off as unduly surly, and it's not even a good rhetorical device.
>Do you honestly think it's for that kind of person?
Yes. People seem perpetually surprised by the gulf between advertising and reality.
Example: The average buyer of a Hyundai Inster is 61 years old. That's slightly above the industry average age of a new car buyer, which is 56 - they're the people who can actually afford to buy new. The Inster is a tall hatchback, designed primarily as an easy-to-use shopping trolley for people who've got bad backs and bad knees and bad everything. It's got a nice high boot floor so you don't have to bend down when you're loading it with potting compost from the garden centre, it's got doors that are easy to open and seats that are easy to get out of. The high driving position, large mirrors and light steering make it easy to manoeuvre in car parks if you're a little bit frail.
Do you think those customers want to see that reality accurately reflected in the advertising? No. There are old people in the adverts, but they're cool old people with surfboards, juxtaposed with lots of cool young people.
Jaguar were never actually planning on selling cars to genderqueer weirdos, but they are planning on selling cars to middle-aged architects and HR consultants who think that genderqueer weirdos are cool. Maybe they've horribly mis-timed that, maybe we'll have all calmed down a bit by the time these models actually reach showrooms in late 2026, but associating your car with people who are much younger and cooler than your actual customers is the norm.
>>42699 >But it's all artificial white noise.
Sounds like what you're saying is, whoever signed off on the Jaguar thing has the exact same straw man in their head as you, and is equally wrong about it.
>>42703 >Do you think those customers want to see that reality accurately reflected in the advertising? No. There are old people in the adverts, but they're cool old people with surfboards, juxtaposed with lots of cool young people.
Sir, I have not once needed to see a 'cool' interracial couple to sell me a product.
>>42707 I'm being flippant but you can see the example of an ad agency not being a perfectly rational calculation. Some things just get added as part of institutional logic or interactions and can't be explained as anything more than the creatives doing creative things.
Now I'll also point out that we've had plenty of successful woke things and plenty of anti-woke disasters. It might just be that consumers like quality.
>I can't even tell to what extent you're disagreeing with me, unless you've mistakenly thought I was claiming the rebrand a success.
Have you thought about maybe not trying so hard to argue with somebody you're not even sure is disagreeing with you? I wasn't trying to win a debate, I was just going off on a tangent if anything honestly.
What I do find annoying about you lot sometimes is how stubbornly you refuse to talk about related concepts in anything but tight and specific focused terms like some fucking boring CITE YOUR SOURCES sperg on Rudgwick. Like, bloody hell, chill out, we're shitposting on an imageboard, we're not publishing studies in The Lancet. Maybe what I was saying was a bit of a non-sequitir from car adverts, but you can't pretend everything exists in a vacuum and nothing has influence on anything else, there's no cultural cross pollination or that social circles and values don't overlap with certain interests and political worldviews.
Maybe I don't want anything other than to make some of you think outside your safe spaces once in a while.
>>42709 The problem is the stuff you're trying to spin-off into is boring as fuck and you're a terrible communicator. Even the stuff you're saying now is sophormoric at best.
>you can't pretend everything exists in a vacuum and nothing has influence on anything else, there's no cultural cross pollination
I already pointed this out! I'm just not such a zero watt bulb that I have to spell it out like it's some profound revalation. And don't worry about my "safe space", mate, it's so far beyond anywhere you've ever been.
>>42692 >>42693 I think you're attributing malice to something better explained by incompetence.
Ultimately, I see "institutional" wokeness as a response to bottom up pressure from minority groups. A firm doesn't want to buy them off by giving them what they actually want, so you make token concessions. Lockheed Martin obviously aren't going to stop making bombs which are tested on stolen native American land before being dropped disproportionately on people of color by pilots who beat their wives. But you can do a land acknowledgement, a female empowerment fund, and some implicit bias training... That's all basically free, and yet it really will convince a lot of people that a company that makes armaments is a force for social progress. You annoy some people on the right who're upset that their murder-factory isn't manly enough, sure, but that's balanced out by assuaging the conscience of the most talented gay furry engineers just enough that they can rationalise making their life's work the creation of new and exciting ways of killing people. Who knows, maybe the next wife-beating USAF pilot will be a woman...
A company like Jaguar is just belatedly cargo-culting what successful companies did, incompetently, after the backlash set in. You can correlate the backlash fairly directly to stuff like MeToo or tech workers trying to unionise. It's all fun and games making concessions to people lower down the totem pole until someone powerful gets their fingers burned, then we need to crack down on it. Concessions became more expensive than repression.
You can even apply my model to trans* issues. The number one thing they want in this country is an NHS treatment system that actually provides treatment, rather than a 5+ year waiting list for 1970s gatekeeping in the hopes you'll give up (which is "expensive" because it's difficult to reform the NHS, even if actually treating people would save a few pence in this case), yet our public debate has focused on children (who'll be adults by the time they get to the top of the waiting list) and gender recognition laws that are irrelevant because (a) nobody can get far enough into transitioning to be eligible for a GRC under the current system, (b) you don't need a GRC for most forms of identification, and (c) in any case, the supreme court has found that a GRC isn't worth the paper it's written on. This has been a long-lasting problem, but even 'progressive' politicians went for the cheap symbolic stuff over the slightly-more-difficult meaningful changes...
I think broadly I agree with you, except that you say:
>I think you're attributing malice to something better explained by incompetence.
And then go on to articulate something more or less exactly in line with the longstanding Classlad position, that the modern incarnation and depoloyment of idpol is often a right wing corpo grift from the start.
That's hard to ascribe to incompetence rather than outright malice. The heads behind this knew exactly what they were doing. They were creating a deliberate divide and conquer wedge, because you can imagine how that will have gone on the ground- The majority of workers who are not trans say "well we still want to unionise, let's get on with it, fuck their threats", while the small minority of trans workers (but more importantly, a larger group of "allies" who would see that as a line beyond the pale to cross) will suddenly have found themselves torn between solidarity with their colleagues, or wrecking and scabbing for The Man.
And like that it goes back to class, the primary group pushing the trans friendly Starbucks was the upper middle class, the PMC, the managers and HR people and accountants who see their interests as aligned with capital. And the people who find themselves pushed into the position of being anti-trans bigots are the ordinary working class store staff.
But all of this has gone a long way from the car advert, which was in any case, only the starting point of this round of discussion.
I just think it's a great sign for the advertising industry that all these people who say they never watch adverts, and that adverts never work on them anyway, suddenly feel really, really strongly about a car that's not quite an Aston Martin being purple now.
Also, while I'm here, let's watch another video about the Jaguar Type 00:
Firstly, there's clearly no physical car to actually look at; it's just CGI. And they make it very clear that it's a concept car. But most of all, at 3:40, they say something that makes me glad it's a concept car.
"...wait till you see what lies behind the butterfly doors. Brass, travertine stone and textiles provide the main touchpoints in here."
They've built a fucking stone car! It'll weigh a ton already because it's electric, but some fucker decided it also needed a stone dashboard. Nobody's buying this. This feels like some kind of Brass Eye prank where they invite Anne Widdecombe to pontificate on the social-justice ramifications of a homosexual limousine. Perhaps the wheels should also be triangular, with three corners, to represent how there are more than two genders. And the car won't turn until you ask the steering wheel for its preferred pronouns. She would definitely fall for it, and it would be no more ridiculous than a car with a stone interior.
It's what happens when you arrive at a concept for a car not from the basic idea of making a car that also has luxurious materials (which is usually not a problem), but from the direction of wanting to create an exuberant luxury lifestyle accessory that also drives.
It's not unreasonable to assume that half the designers working on the project had never done anything to do with cars before. That, or the design brief for that concept car expressly stated that they were to take the absolute piss.
But seriously, having worked with designers, advertisers and "creative" people, their problem is often that they're freestyling it too much, with too little concern for actually creating a marketable product. Good product development is then often also the art of reining in your creatives so they're not wasting everybody's time with entirely bonkers ideas.
I think the tipping point was in 2010. She turned 50, got really into squats and got her first boob job. She was getting a little bit more glam in her late 40s, but 50 was definitely the start of her mad sexpot auntie era.
The thing is, all EVs are basically the same under the skin. That's an existential issue for car companies, because there's nothing in engineering terms to distinguish different brands. All EVs are smooth and silent and basically a blank slate in terms of driving characteristics. Everyone buys their batteries from BYD or CATL, everyone buys their motors from the same half-dozen OEMs and there isn't really anything interesting you can do with those components.
Once the market has gone fully electric, there will be literally no rational reason why anyone would ever buy a Range Rover ever again. You can buy an equally luxurious large SUV from a load of other Chinese brands for less than half the money. It'll have the same range, the same performance, better build quality and more gadgets. The only value the Land Rover/Range Rover brand has is aesthetic - the quiet dignity of British Racing Green, cream leather and walnut trim, the association with royalty etc.
Putting travertine stone in a car is mad, but at least it's something. Doing the "rational" thing of just trying to make a good car is actually totally irrational, because it means losing all your market share to the Chinese - they can build just as good a car as you can, only much cheaper. The only future for Western car companies is as fashion or luxury brands and they know it.
If you doubt me, go and test drive a Jaecoo 5 or an Xpeng G6.
It's basically similar to smartphones. The vast majority of them are just black rectangular somethings. And unless you catch the brand logo or are really up on current models, a Samsung phone will be almost indistinguishable by looks alone from a Huawei or Sony or a Motorola. And with the exception of a few quirks and idiosyncrasies, they will all roughly perform the same. The vast majority of EVs, future and present, will essentially be smartphones on wheels, and the same considerations will apply. So you're not completely wrong.
> Putting travertine stone in a car is mad, but at least it's something.
I've no doubt that if you call Rolls Royce and ask them to put travertine in your £400K car you just bought from them, they will happily oblige. They aren't known to turn down even the most extravagant customer request. But even in the luxury market, which the new Jaguar is undoubtedly supposed to be for, there is a question of practicability and selling point. Is a travertine dashboard or armrest going to set you apart from the Chinese competition, and in a way that is actually going to make people buy your car?
Even though we're living through the most fundamental changes for the global auto industry in 100 years, it's a sufficiently safe bet that certain design principles will still apply. No matter how hard you try to differentiate yourself from the competition.
For an old petrolhead like me who loves to work on petrol cars and fixing them up, it's going to be a bit sad either way. Yes, petrol cars are bad for the environment, what else is new. But even if you're tech savvy enough to work on EVs, I doubt it'll ever be as satisfying as changing the timing belt on an old VW engine. Which I did just weeks ago.
>>42714 When I said incompetence I was referring only to the case of Jaguar, with the implication most companies have been more competent. I could probably have formatted that better.
Where I differ with the standard class-first position is the idea it's grift from the start: I think that you've basically got a 'good' impulse behind the whole thing, which is women, ethnic minorities, trans people, etc, being brought together by the internet, articulating their grievances, etc. That's the organic part. Companies didn't just make that up as a clever method of breaking up unions. Instead, they offered token concessions before those people noticed that if they wanted real concessions instead of just tokens, they'd have to unionise.
In the case of Starbucks, unionisation drives pressed ahead without regard for the threats. As the article says:
>Cremin added that “trans rights are labor rights.”
>“Our fight to make this state better for evangelist christian korean youtuber people will also benefit all workers, and the current wave of unionization makes the workplace a safer place for evangelist christian korean youtuber people,” she said. “We deserve access to healthcare. We deserve to be paid enough not just to survive but also to transition, to love, to thrive. When we fight to make the workplace better for trans people, we help all workers.“
It was a competent try, sure, but Starbucks didn't succeed at splitting workers based on identity. "Progressives" have basically already reached a sufficiently class-focused conclusion: "trans rights are labor rights", that's why there's been a socially-conservative backlash over the last few years. If you can't co-opt them and you don't want to give them what they want, you've got to crush them.
On the whole I think the anti-idpol line is often fighting the last war and is now vulnerable to being co-opted to fight on the wrong side of this war. You can already see a right-wing tilt to a pro-industrial-worker aesthetic combined with the same old anti-union policies. It's easy for some to imagine that the handful of remaining coal miners are the true working class (they look like the old working class, after all), and that the Starbucks baristas whining for more money are just annoying PMC weirdos. Then they don't have to confront the uncomfortable, unaesthetic reality of living in a service economy.
Again we do largely agree. The only caveat I would put in is that I would suggest the reason it didn't work for Starbucks, is because they were late to the party- By then, workers had already got wise to all of this. But earlier on, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, this was capital's primary strategy and it worked swimmingly for a good few years.
It was only when the anti-idpol perspective gained critical mass that people actually had the ability to see through it, to realise that it was a bait and switch designed to pit them against people they had more in common with, because vitally, it required the people on both sides to stop their bickering. It required the most radical fisherpeople and militant queer activists to actually stop taking the bait and going off on one at straight white men any chance they got, every bit as much as it required the man at the steelworks who thinks he's actually a "natural conservative" to realise those people are not his enemy.
I would argue the class focus is still important going forward, because workers still need to be vigilant when the corpos try the same again from another angle, like you are describing. But if everyone is actually aware of what class is and what it means, what their shared interests are, then they can't do that- They can't just use the aesthetics of an old coal miner to appeal to a nostalgic ideal of class, if everyone is already on the same page about what class actually is in the here and now today.
>>42714 >the upper middle class, the PMC, the managers and HR people and accountants
>>42722 >annoying PMC weirdos
I assume these two posts were the same person. What's PMC? The first time, I assumed Private Military Contractor, but now I'm not so sure.
And the term stands for "professional managerial class", and although it can cause a bit of debate with the stubborn old Marxist type because they don't think anything is real or relevant if Marx didn't write about it 200 years ago, it basically refers to the university educated and largely liberal upper middle class white collar HR-accounts-marketing-etc strata of worker. They're not quite bourgeois or petite-bourgeois, they are still workers, but they are the workers entrusted with a degree of responsibility, and thus some feeling of stake in, the capitalist's affairs.
When otherlad uses it to refer to Starbucks baristas, he's not using the term dishonestly himself, he's talking about how they could be propagandised as such. Which is why I maintain that it's vital to have a strong understanding of how these class distinctions really operate.
I think Catherine Liu articulates what the PMC is and what their political motives and interests are better than anybody else I can think of.
>When otherlad uses it to refer to Starbucks baristas, he's not using the term dishonestly himself, he's talking about how they could be propagandised as such.
Starbucks baristas are promised agency within the company, but they get fuck all. As far as the actual management is concerned, the people who call the shots, baristas are just monkeys pushing buttons. It's one of the eternal big lies of capitalism. People at the lower rungs, where you just barely go to work in the morning wearing something other than a blue collar, are led to believe that they're important within a company, that what they do matters, but then the next day you get thrown to the kerb and replaced by somebody else who wants to believe that lie just the same until they get sacked.
This is what I mean, when people have no idea what class actually is and it becomes totally divorced from any meaningful material circumstance or relationship with capital (and so on and so on), then that's when you can convince people "it's those latte drinking soy boys with their macbooks!" or "it's those whiny entitled neckbeard white male gamers", and convince those people that they are enemies- When they are otherwise in an identical position as minimum wage employees of two businesses next door to each other.
Beware of anyone who tries to rehabilitate or even slightly open the door to these ideas, that the tribe people identify with is more important than their real, hard currency, meaningful positions in society. They'll always try to sneak in their corruption. They're like those kink people who get off on trying to sneak in a fetish they know you don't like.
