this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I nominate this NYT opinion piece for shittiest take of 2024!

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[–] [email protected] 337 points 1 week ago (24 children)

0.0

if

Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.”

is true... then he's a class traitor; not a hero. he made his money fucking over the working class. that's not heroic.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 week ago (3 children)

you really think someone would do that? just go on a once-respected publication and tell lies?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago (5 children)

"Just".... ? no. There's a certain vetting process that makes sure they tell the right lies.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Not sure if you didn't get it, but that's a reference to an Arthur meme. altr

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago

I'm aware of the arthur reference, but it's really important to realize these aren't off-the-cuff lies.

This is a planned, coordinated effort that has been going on since before I was even alive; and the ~~journalists~~propagandists have been very carefully selected- and have indeed worked very hard to get the job of fucking over americans.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

But they're not lying. It's pretty reasonable to believe both that his parents were working class, and that him becoming a class traitor on such a level does make him a hero in capitalist eyes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

it is, though.

The implication is that Brian Thompson should be/is a hero to working class people.

he's not.

he's an asshole who made millions fucking over people just trying to get medical care. many of whom have died as a result of his fucking them over, and that is especially true of those who actually work for a living- which he has not in a very long time.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The irony being here that a 'working class hero' to Bret is someone who is no longer working class

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

he made his money fucking over the working class. that's not heroic

I mean, of course it isn't, but nobody told the NYT or their opinion writers who are currently tripping over each other trying to normalize Trump, Thompson, and other monsters..

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is one of the problems with treating class as an inherent identity, not a person's relation to the means of production. A person that begins as a direct wage laborer is working class, but if they ascend the ladder they become closer and closer to carrying out the functions of the owner class (i.e. becoming upper management) they lose proletarian character and gain bourgeois character. So the UHC CEO may have started out working class but obviously he became a bourgeois monster.

There's a similar pitfall, which is the uncritical moralization of the working class. The working class has a world historical role to play and is the class oppressed by the bourgeoisie, but it can easily have reactionary elements that should not be embraced, esoeciskky not as "working class values". The working class exists in the society shaped by the bourgeoisie, with marginalizations baked in by the bourgeoisie that can become self-perpetuating (e.g. racism), so we must not simply accept whstever the majority opinion of the working class is, let alone some random guy that ended up facilitating death and pain for profit.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They love these stories. They reinforce their delusions of libertarianism and that anyone who is truly able will be found and given their rightful position.

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[–] [email protected] 151 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, who gives a fuck about what his parents did for a living, he fucked over people's health and lives for profit.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You know the rags to riches story is the best rock of owner class narrative...

If you work hard enough, you can join the club! I'd you are not in the club, you clearly didn't work hard enough, peasant.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

I mean how many people do I have to kill with spreadsheets?? I've already taught two people vlookups and they said excel made them want to die...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Obviously other rich people, like the chucklef who penned it

[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

No industry is perfect

No....

— nor is any health care model

True, true, but this is like talking about Jeffrey Epstein and saying "we all like to have sex sometimes"

— and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.

Nope. Very very incorrect. American healthcare ranks near the top of the most expensive and most obstructive in the world.

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The earth will be fine. It’s us who will be fucked.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The NYT's true colors are showing more obviously every day.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The NYT only put the Holocaust on the front page 26 times when it was happening. Only 6 of those times were Jewish people identified as primary victims.

They have never cared about actual news, only manufacturing consent.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its an editorial bro... Why are you shitting on genocide apologist of record?!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Yeah! They employ this stooge specifically to dispense bad takes. As a joke or something idk

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thompson "grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa"

A class traitor, then.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The Onion really needs to take that headline and run with it in their special way.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago

Like just printing it as is?

Whoever said the onion's job is getting harder because reality is catching up to them on being satirical is so, so correct.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They are deluded. They still think about the American dream as if it wasn't a nightmare. Yeah, leave all your people behind, let them die or rot in poverty, as long as you make it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Imagine you can extract 100k in premiums over lifetime of the slave?

Then at year 20 he get cancer... Now if you pay, it will cost 1m aka his premium plus 9 other slaves who won't get cancer...

So why would you deny and book all that sweet cheese.

Nothing will change until parasites are removed from profit seeking positions and health care system is reformed to do this.

If more dead CEOs are needed, well we got people doing school shootings so hopefully they update targeting algos.

Boardrooms, not classrooms.

This fight will take a generation. Owners are already turning narratige. Left and right politics clowns are starting to derail discussions.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago

This is such a bad editorial it isn't just the worst one of the year, it's on the short list for worst oped of the century. Right up there with the guy who said that we should replace libraries with Amazon stores.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago

His tongue must be so sore from all that bootlicking.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 week ago

Just when you thought the NY Times' reputation couldn't get any worse this year ...

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago

These guys don't get it, maybe on purpose. What makes one "working class" is having to work to live, not being poor. Or, in this case, being just an injury away from losing it all.

The middle class is a myth.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (3 children)

81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.”

In related news, 81 percent of diners at Michelin star restaurants rated their own food security as "excellent" or "good".

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Someone needs to get Bret Stephens a stepladder so he can climb down from being so far up his own asshole

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

All this suggests that Mangione may prove to be a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel — Raskolnikov with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.

Congratulations, you just identified pretty much the only subclass of people who have led successful working-class revolutions.

That's capital for ya.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

It’s the inherent reason the ruling class wants people dumb, poor, and preoccupied. If you’re of reasonable intelligence, have free time, and the means to address concerns as they arise you are more likely to be able to educate yourself about injustices that are extremely infuriating to the point of reaching either nihilism or anger

Does the person working 2 jobs and raising 3 kids have time to read the news in depth? To read books on theory and philosophy? To read about the history of atrocities and research a conflict? No. But the upper class child of a lawyer who went to school for free and got to take a gap year when they felt stressed? They just might, if they can look past the consumerist glitter that’s constantly distracting them.

Kohlberg theorized that morality develops with life experience and there is a stage called post-conventional morality that not everyone reaches. This is where we start to move beyond maintaining social order by following externally designated rule systems (like laws) and start to define internal ethics that doesn’t inherently align with those laws. Laws themselves become social contracts rather than rules and must be changed when they no longer serve the greater good. At the highest level ones personal ethics supersede laws and it can even become necessary to break laws that are unjust intentionally

This is illustrated by responses to the Heinz dilemma, which is what the initial research was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_dilemma

Reaching post-conventional morality requires stronger abstract reasoning skills. That requires education and (to some degree) genetics. As a result only a small portion of the populace make it past stage 4 (which again, is follow the rules and obey authority to keep social order). If you give people more education and free time to develop their empathic morality outside of external moral systems (eg religion, laws) more people would get there, probably. I think it’s already happened, most of the research on how many people fall into which category is 20-40 years old at this point and a lot has changed significantly in that time. But again, a system that allows for this is a system in which people start complaining loudly and demanding change to injustices so we’ve also seen tremendous destruction to worker compensation, the education system, etc in that same timeframe so who knows

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

"Oh look, Brian Thompson has some characteristics of you poors, you should consider him your hero!"

This article is literally based on feeding class warfare. There's something people have to understand - "second class" is just the supposedly the right way of doing things so you can eventually live well and make sure your children live well. The amount of assholes in today's world who are either rich assholes and remain rich assholes who give no shits about the right way of doing things, or poor people who are like them and rise above everything else because they are assholes and embrace it, is far too high. The absolute shamelessness of this article as the second class is being dismantled because it's just better for rich assholes for everyone to remain poor except the ones willing to become as much of an asshole as them just speaks volumes about the state of American society.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does print media have the equivalent of the Razzies?

If they do, this article will be in the running.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Geez, NYT, how’s the boot taste?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Saruman, not frodo, was the true ring bearer.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

bret is nyt's go-to cryptofascist. he's always got these bootlicking propaganda pieces.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Well the headline and take are both hot garbage, but it's interesting new information to know that both parties in this case were class traitors for different sides lmao

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

All that mental acrobatics. If only people would put that mental capacity to actual good use rather than for asswiping

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Thomson hid behind company sponsored laws passed by bought politicians to legally kill tens of thousands of people despite valid insurance coverage. He is nothing more than a murderous villain, but it's not the least bit surprising that the NYT thinks he's a hero.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

It belongs here for sure. What in the world ?

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