A Florida sheriff says the reason his county’s school district has struggled to address behavioral problems among its students is because kids aren’t scared to “have the cheeks of their ass torn off” for causing trouble in class.

But Sheriff Wayne Ivey, of Brevard County, promised that with the help of the school district’s newly elected conservative leadership, which ran on the promise to end so-called “woke” policies in its schools, these students will no longer go unpunished.

“[Students are] not worried about getting in trouble,” Ivey said, announcing a new disciplinary code during a press conference held in front of the Brevard county jail Monday. “They know nothing’s gonna happen to them. They know they’re not going to be given after-school detention, they’re not going to be suspended. They’re not going to be expelled or like in the old days they’re not gonna have the cheeks of their ass torn off for not doing right in class.”

Ivey was joined by bus union representative Delores Varney, who said bus drivers and other support staff have been regularly subjected to violence on buses, including being bitten and choked. Ivey, who claimed that violence and threats of violence have prompted some teachers to quit, said that while only a few students have made these threats, they are responsible for “messing up” the institution for everyone else.

“We gotta get to these kids before they get to me here at this jail. So starting right now, it’s a brand new day folks, where school discipline is going to be put back in place,” Ivey said. “If you’re a little snot that’s coming to our classes to be disruptive, you might want to find someplace else to go to school because we’re going to be your worst nightmare starting right now.”

Ivey’s plan has the support of newly-elected members of the school board, who came into power in November after voters ousted incumbents who favored more inclusionary policies for students. Last month, the conservative majority reversed trans-inclusionary policies and voted to replace their district’s superintendent of nearly 30 years.

While none of the leaders at the press conference clarified what exactly the new disciplinary policies will entail, new school board Chairman Matt Susin said he will be part of an emergency meeting with the state attorney and the local school-related unions to determine a new disciplinary direction for the district. No media outlets were invited to ask questions at the press conference.

Brevard County has become a prime battleground in the national culture war over what’s taught and tolerated in schools, as conservative parents and activists push back against inclusive policies and curricula. After the introduction of policies that granted students the right to use the restrooms that match their gender identity, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the conservative group Moms For Liberty (known for supporting the banning of LGBT- affirming books and protesting pro-LGBTQ policies in schools nationwide) whipped up resistance to so-called “woke” education policies in the state.

The newly-elected slate of conservative school board members in Brevard County has created a rift between new leaders and long-time members of the board. Current board member Jennifer Jenkins told Florida Today that while she agreed that discipline was an issue within the district, the issue is how the current policy is implemented, not the policy as a whole. She argued that it doesn’t need to be replaced outright.

“Student discipline has always been a problem. You could have taken that press conference and inserted it into any county at any time and it would have been applicable,” she told the outlet. “This is just a show and a stunt. If you actually felt this was a problem, they could have done something about it for years.”

Florida’s Department of Education has reported that Brevard County Schools have struggled with student discipline, according to local TV news station WKMG. During the 2020-2021 school year, the district’s nearly 71,000 students were given nearly 7,000 in-school and out-of-school suspensions. At least 435 students were transferred to alternate education settings, 139 students were physically restrained, and 10 were expelled, according to the outlet.

The Brevard Federations of Teachers signaled its support for the district taking a more proactive approach to badly behaved students, but stopped short of supporting Ivey outright, adding it didn’t agree with the way the sheriff described the new approach of his choice to hold the press conference outside a jail.

“These changes must be ones that help, not harm; solve issues, not create more. These student-driven solutions should result in a safe environment where students can learn, and teachers can teach,” the union said in a statement.

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Ask your nearest film bro: Have you heard of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 crime thriller Goncharov? Chances are they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about a film once described as the greatest Mafia movie ever made. Despite a cult following, the film has never made any listicle on the greatest thrillers or gangster films. Thanks to Tumblr, though, the film is getting the recognition it deserves – and more. 

Here’s a summary for you: Based in Naples, Robert de Niro stars as a Russian Mafia hitman, caught in the middle of a love triangle with Andrey (Al Pacino) and Katya (Cybill Shepherd). Their performances? Spectacular. The storyline? Layered and deliciously unpredictable. 

Unsurprisingly, Tumblr is home to a cult-like Goncharov fanbase. Memes, fan fiction analysing the characters’ love triangle, gif sets and fanart have proliferated across the site and painstakingly unearthed the film’s homoerotic undertones. 

The only thing is, the movie doesn’t exist. There is no Goncharov. The only critics who called it the greatest Mafia movie ever are Tumblr users meme-ing fan culture by creating a feverish reception worthy of an actual Scorsese film. As author Hailey Piper points out, there is now more Goncharov fanfiction on fanfic hub A03 than there are for James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the highest grossing films of all time. Welcome to Gonchposting. 

Goncharov’s origin story begins with a pair of boots and a Tumblr user called zootycon, who originally posted an image of what looks like walking boots with a baffling label attached two years ago. It’s unclear where the shoes came from, but the label reads: “The greatest mafia movie ever made; Martin Scorsese presents GONCHAROV.” Printed underneath is the name of an Italian production company and the tagline that Goncharov is “about the Naples mafia”.

The image had the precise ingredients for a viral Tumblr meme, and has blown up over the past week with fake movie posters, fake academic papers and film reactions all over the site. Former Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter even joined in and posted an old black and white image of herself and Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli on Monday, claiming they were at the Goncharov premiere. Her post now has more than 128,000 notes. 

LA artist Truffles, self-proclaimed professional shitposter and trufflesmushroom on the site, first saw the Goncharov image in 2020 and reposted a few jokes pretending it was real at the time. Why a two-year-old joke has now gone viral, they have no idea – but they’ve gladly helped spread the newer posts regardless. 

Twenty-seven-year-old Sam (AKA thefiresontheheight) first realised Goncharov’s power after they made a personality quiz when they were bored titled “what Goncharov character are you”. Within hours, it had 25,000 notes on Tumblr. The aspiring Pennsylvania-based writer has a theory: They reckon lots of people have restarted their Tumblr accounts “as Elon Musk makes Twitter increasingly hateful and unusable”, seen Goncharov and doubled down on the joke. 

The joke is a surprise even for users who’ve been on the site for years. Freelance writer Sylvie, who goes by lesbianmarrow on Tumblr, says nothing like this has ever happened on this scale before. “The closest thing I can think of is two years ago during US election time when Castiel confessed his love for Dean on Supernatural and Tumblr users went wild,” she said. Even then, that proliferation of posts was based on something that actually existed IRL. Sylvie also stresses that there is absolutely nothing serious about Goncharov posting. It’s proof of the fandom impulse to create content, “regardless of the quality or substance of the original text”, she says. 

Arguably, Goncharov have never happened on any other site. Flags (AKA do-you-have-a-flag) said the platform’s “yes… and” culture allowed the joke to snowball. She knows this firsthand after sharing a mock-up Goncharov DVD case. “Reblogs allow for multiple threads building onto the previous person,” she explains. “So instead of a hierarchical main post and replies, you get a whole interaction laid out. 

“There's also the way people use images and text – you can get into longer analysis under a gif set someone created as a part of a conversation that evolves from meta into shipping into arguing about something totally unrelated.”

Users are essentially parodying Tumblr-specific fan culture, Truffles explains, mimicking the “patterns we've observed over the years of how different types of film fans will analyse, critique, wax poetic about, create transformative works about, vilify, deify, rip apart, and take hold of a popular piece of entertainment media, and then complain about the others in the same space, and then comment on that same complaint.”

Tumblr fandoms by their nature create “this insular, passionate, sometimes toxic, sometimes genius bubble that we know so well by heart,” they add, describing the takeoff of Goncharov on the site as “cathartic, hilarious [and] good-natured”. As Flags, 30, puts it succintly: “[Goncharov is the] ultimate sandbox for people who love cinematography and queer subtext and making fun of themselves.”

In the end, the real Goncharov were the friends Tumblr users made along the way – no, really. Think of Goncharov as an open invite to everyone to join the shitposting party, and a reminder that the internet can be a fun, joyous place sometimes. Maybe we should all pivot full-time to Tumblr. 

@RuchoSharma

Correction as of 30/11/22: A previous version of the article misstated Flags’s name. This has now been corrected.

The federal government’s Housing Accord, which promises to build 1 million “well-located” homes by the end of the decade, will only deliver 184 affordable homes, new analysis from the parliamentary library shows. 

The analysis, which was commissioned by the Greens, used market rents from data analysis company Corelogic and measured affordability by comparing wages data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics with the broadly accepted “30:40” definition of affordability, which suggests that if you are among the lowest 40 percent of income earners, you shouldn’t be spending more than 30 percent of your income on rent.

The results, based on the assumption that the homes built would be located in metropolitan areas and are distributed in line with current trends, shows that all of the affordable homes built under the accord would be located in Greater Darwin, in the Northern Territory. 

Greens MP and spokesperson for housing and homelessness, Max Chandler-Mather, said the analysis proves that the government’s Housing Accord is “a complete con”.

“You don’t solve the housing crisis by providing incentives and tax concessions to property developers to build the same number of luxury homes they did over the last five years, you solve it by building public and community housing,” Chandler-Mather said. 

“When you consider the fact that the Stage 3 tax cuts and negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts will cost the federal budget $411 billion over the next 10 years, while Labor has committed just $10 billion to social housing, it’s pretty clear where Labor’s priorities actually lie.”

The national housing accord was announced as part of the Albanese government’s first federal budget in late October, folding together a $350 million commitment from the federal government to fund the construction of 10,000 “affordable” homes over five years, starting in 2024, with a further 10,000 homes to be built by state and territory governments. 

On top of the funding, the government said the accord would force state and territory governments to speed up zoning, planning and land release—major speedbumps for new developments—to “improve the availability of social and affordable housing in well-located areas”. 

The theory is that rents should ease if the government can ramp up supply, and that housing stress should ease, too. But the government wouldn’t be the ones paying for it—or, at least, not all of it. 

At its core, the policy offers more to the property industry than it does the households it has been pitched to. 

To build the remaining homes unaccounted for by the various government commitments, the federal government has set up financing options through the Housing Australia Future Fund to try and get superannuation funds and other massive institutional investors to pay for the construction of these homes. 

To sweeten the deal further, the government has offered them a stream of income that covers the difference between market rents and the subsidised rents they will, at least in theory, be offering to low income families. 

In other words: it’s a handshake agreement between the market and all levels of government to get supply moving to the tune of 200,000 homes a year, without any guarantee on the amount of private investment that will come, or if it will come at all.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers hasn’t been shy about any of the uncertainty, either. Announcing the policy late last month, he said: “The Accord recognises most of this supply needs to come from the market, with government playing a key role in enabling and kick-starting investment.”  

As investors gather at a roundtable to discuss bankrolling the plan later this week, the future of much-needed public, community and affordable housing hangs in the balance—and demand for it continues to skyrocket.

Earlier this week, the UNSW City Futures Research Centre released new research commissioned by the Community Housing Industry Association that showed the 640,000 households that reported to be in housing stress in last year’s census is set to swell to 940,000 by 2041. 

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, meanwhile, the wait list for those seeking social housing grew by 8,000 households last year, up from 155,141 to 163,508, while the latest available census figures from 2016 counted more than 116,000 Australians experiencing homelessness.

After the accord was announced, Chandler-Mather said the private sector had already built just under 1 million homes over the last five years, “so Labor announcing that under their plans the private sector will build [another] 1 million homes over five years from 2024 is a complete joke.”

“The ‘housing accord’ looks like a complete con job. Planning deregulation and handouts to the private sector to build housing won’t fix the housing crisis, any more than any housing tax breaks or planning deregulation has in the past,” he said.

“In reality, the only extra thing Labor has announced is $350 million for 10,000 so-called affordable homes over five years, all the rest is smoke and mirrors.”

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