Is apparently all about faux class warfare, and whining about everything else that’s faux while never acknowledging that bitching about posers (or poseurs) is a really crappy way to assert your own authenticity. By all means bitch about expensive rent, urban sprawl, forced displacement of poor people, but don’t hide behind this when all you’re really worried about is that your suburb is losing the “cred” that it had when it was full of working class people who you could rub up against and feel somehow authentic.

This article (along with the majority of responses) made me want to spit, so full of reverse snobbery, or even reverse-reverse-snobbery… it’s hard to even tell. Surprise surprise rents go up when more people want to live in an area– it’s hardly a conspiracy. And lo, if more people are interested in hanging around and drinking coffee then magically more cafés will appear.

I lived in Marrickville for several years, and never shed a tear for the slow but steady decline in the number of burning cars and broken bottles we saw. The council widened the paths, making them pedestrian and cafe friendly, and yes a whole bunch of upwardly mobile middle class people started moving in to the area. How dare they!

I do feel sorry for people who can’t afford the rent there anymore and have to live further away from the city (in the more “authentic” suburbs) but to blame people for choosing to live there? If they hadn’t moved then the whining shitheads (or real Australians as they probably consider themselves) from that article would probably be laughing about how stupid people are to stay in their sterile rich suburbs when there are so many cheaper places to live.

My response to the article, which fortunately got in before the mad rush of people taking the opportunity to lavish scorn on people for being relatively happy, relaxed and god-forbid maybe a little bit fashionable:

The only thing worse than posers is people who bitch about posers. I can′t believe people still use the “latte-sipping” epithet.

So what, you′re coming back from your day digging coal down the mines and a bunch of university educated ponces have replaced your chip shop? Boo-hoo-hoo, you goddamn fraud. What could be more bourgeois than writing editorials about gentrification?

Better a happy poser than a self-hating one.

It’s one thing to bitch about an artist or an actor for being fake etc, but when you start vilifying entire groups of people for wanting the freedom to choose where and how they live it’s probably time you did something about that massive chip you’re carrying around on your shoulder.

Wankers!