[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by milo

Yes, i try not to randomly quote passages. I can't speak for ireland, but in britain the words chav, rudeboy et al aren't synonyms for the 'white working class'. The author seems to believe we're characterising an entire racial-socio-economic class, whereas we're calling certain people dickheads by another name.

I'm not sure you can speak for everyone who uses such terms though. You may mean one thing, someone else may mean another. Same with racist terms. I made some jokey racist comment the other day to a girl and she turned and said "Yeah, I was taught that being black was God's curse." I kind of lol'd but then realised she was serious.

So if you (or I, or whomever) says "chav" we may be just using it as one of an array of words to call people shit. Others may be referring to a specific subset of people.

I remember seeing graffiti recently which said "Chavs should be sterilised". The word sterilised had been crossed off by another colour pen and someone had written below "No, no - castrated and then shot" or something like that. A quick glance at most UK forums (or Google) will reveal this is hardly a unique sentiment. There's a Yahoo Answers topic on "Should chavs be sterilised" and while I didn't reall the answers, in the first 8 or 9 there's at least two responses saying "No, they should be killed". And from our own liberal forum :

Then they [chavs] need to be educated, or sterilised, whichever would be cheaper.

Their parents should be sterilised to prevent more of the little f'kers.

I've never seen violent crime that wasn't perpitrated by someone like this.
I've never seen a stolen car being driven by anyone other than someone who's a ****ing scumbag/chav.

they should make it law: all chavs to be shot on sight

OK, a lot of that is out of context. Some of it is probably just using the word chav as a synonym for prick, but in other cases, it's no so clear.

And of course, people don't necessarily mean these things, they're often sounding off and such remarks often follow someone being beaten or attacked, so it's understandable they'd be peeved. But I don't think you can necessarily dismiss the potential dangers of such thinking. Before eugenics became unpopular thanks to those wacky Germans more than one country had schemes for "cleaning up" their gene pool. Yes, these measures were usually to do with ethnicity or disabilities, but it's fair to say that undesirables of any colour could end up in such schemes, should the political climate change.

I personally find it depressing but if you mention William Shockley's idea of paying people with IQ's under a 100 to undergo sterilisation you'll find there's a considerable number of people in agreement.