Funniest thing you read today

After 7 fascists came down to Cricklewood against 300 anti-fascists. This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Saw this at the bookstore today, it looks like a sci-fi novel starring Marx as a space-wizard on Planet Proleteniusol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipster

"Outside of Germany, the term nipster has also been used to mean different things, including Asian hipsters and fans of male breasts."
" and at least one vegan neo-Nazi cooking show exists"

Question for everyone in UK: Is the word "chav" considered offensive?

I didn't want to start a whole new thread for a pretty trivial question, and this thread seems non-serious enough that it would be ok to derail just for a moment.

I live in Canada so don't know. I heard the term used on a TV show and just assumed it was a non-derogatory description for white youth with a certain fashion style and who are generally poor. I assumed people like this in the UK refer to themselves as chav as a chosen self-descriptive. But is it actually just an insult?

https://www.facebook.com/GMIULRO

CHAV was originally a tabloid acronym and means Council House Associated Vermin. It was coined to demonise poor kids. It is an insult and I don't know of anyone who chooses to call themselves that.

Its the youth equivalent of calling poor adults benefit scroungers.

I suppose some people might use it as a self description but every time i've heard its a negative.

Boomerang - yeah it's derogatory, but at the same time quite acceptable to use in mainstream society. I find it pretty offensive, yet I hear my mates use it all the time, my family too, even though looking back ten, fifteen years, we'd be labelled a chavs too. But now we're mostly all out of that estate, it makes me sick to my stomach when my friends use that word, like, "where the fuck do you think you're from? Look at who you're calling that word, then look in the mirror". Pisses me off to no end really, but every society needs a folk devil.

From 10:15 this rapper from East London talks about it in a TED talk, I think he explains it pretty well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhtAfIw4qJY

Nah, it was originally a gyspy/Romany word to mean little child. "Chavi". The papers just adopted it as they do.

You can see for yourself how people use it https://twitter.com/search?q=chav&src=typd

That's actually a great example. Those tweets are horrible.

Boomerang, I could be taking your username at face value but when I was in Australia I heard a lot of people use the words "derro" and "bogan". I could be wrong, but I think it's the equivalent of chav.

Boomerang

I think it's pretty derogatory, whatever it's etymology. I'm from the UK and I live in Canada and I can't really think of a specific Canadian equivalent, possibly because the class system has different nuances here than in England. I suppose the nearest would be trailer trash but even that isn't quite the same. It's a pretty nasty.

Thanks everyone! It's important to know this. The show I saw that used the word was years ago, so I can't remember the exact context, but I got the impression it wasn't meant to be negative, but a subculture label like skater or goth or raver. So for years I've had it in my mind that this is an acceptable label. I've never used the word because nobody here does, but it was in my head categorized as a neutral word. I'm going to have to make my brain relearn that chav=offensive.

That's harder than you might think.... In grade 8, I went to a school for 6 months where all the white and black kids referred to the brown kids as "Pakis" -- but they didn't say it with malice, just as a way of describing someone. The brown kids mostly hung out with each other, so I didn't hear their reactions to it, but there was this one brown kid who hung out with black and white kids, and he called himself a "Paki" so I got it in my head that this was actually the appropriate term for a person of Pakistani descent, kind of like people from Britain are called Brits or people from Serbia called Serbs. So even after I got into my late teens and early 20s and started hanging out with progressive folks, I still thought it was an appropriate term. I was stunned to learn it's a racist slur! And it took a long time to retrain my brain. A few times I almost caught myself using it...

Brazilian police list Bakunin as a suspect

http://revolution-news.com/19th-century-anarchist-bakunin-investigated-by-brazils-police-as-suspect/

Lifestyle
Walmart ice cream sandwich left in sun, doesn't melt

Oh I thought this was saddest thing you read today

found at https://www.facebook.com/socialistmemecaucus/posts/599180053531710

are they now accepted into the Proletarian Milieu?

Who's the Green Goblin in that picture?

Read how this Wikipedia entry changed one man's life http://www.clickhole.com/r/695tsd

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/31/reaganbook-is-the-latest-conservative-fail.html

https://www.facebook.com/TheprovisionalLABOURPARTY

found at https://www.facebook.com/socialistmemecaucus

https://www.facebook.com/freeyorkshire/