I nominate this NYT opinion piece for shittiest take of 2024!
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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.
you really think someone would do that? just go on a once-respected publication and tell lies?
“Just”… ? no. There’s a certain vetting process that makes sure they tell the right lies.
Not sure if you didn’t get it, but that’s a reference to an Arthur meme.
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
journalistspropagandists have been very carefully selected- and have indeed worked very hard to get the job of fucking over americans.*Arthur
There are two jobs where you can go on national TV, lie and not get fired. President and weather man.
Fox News personality.
Plot twist: the Fox News weatherman tells the truth
The one thing their audience are experts in is what’s going on directly outside their window
Press secretary, too.
Also, weathermen aren’t necessarily lying. lying requires an intent to deceive, and most times, weathermen don’t mean to deceive, they’re just factually wrong. (FWIW, predicting the weather more than a few days in advance is a crap shoot.)
Press secretare is just a modern herald or crier, they are the voice of the king.
As for the weatherman bit, your right, but thats also the joke…
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the precipitous fall of print media over the past couple decades is something that would one day be written about in the history books if they weren’t also full of shit.
Decentralized media like fedi is the only hope of the working class.
Owners either own or control everything else government, fake news, TV, Hollywood, publishing, corporate socials.
Wikipedia will be deposed in time, they are already mawing at the foundation
Thank you for your service…
More people need to understand how media whores for the regime
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)_/¯
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.
i don’t think it’s lying, necessarily. i suspect that it’s embellishing, and it’s inarguably providing an incomplete, intentionally flattering picture.
Keep in mind it’s an opinion piece, not official reporting
The irony being here that a ‘working class hero’ to Bret is someone who is no longer working class
Especially if they fuck over the working class.
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…
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.
Y’all really need modernize the delivery lol
Solid msg tho
Bootlickers are the biggest obstacle to basic reforms happening.
Education of the working class should be the priority and that’s exactly what divisive politcs is doing.
Luigi surely did a thing… People at least in US across left/right divide are talking and noticing how media and government is behaving.
Beautiful
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.
Yeah, I’m going to need some citations for the claims of those people.
absolutely.
Like. This sounds like the kind of shit Musk used to spew everywhich way.
Yup. If any part of that bio is true, then that’s even more unforgivable. It means that unlike someone who was born into wealth and had asshole-ishness thrust upon them, he deliberately chose to be an asshole.
Corporate offices are filled with bootlickers who are ready to join the club. They waste their entire life for a chance to be Brian Thompson the parasite.
This is what success looks like to them, they will do anything for it crime, corruption, toxic work enviroment… It is unpleasant to be around them.
Careers is a cancer of the working class. It ruins solidarity
Then he went on to get a job making it more difficult for everyone in his tiny farming community north of Des Moines to get health care.
Weird how they forgot that part.
TIL betraying your fellow man makes you a hero. /s
When I went to IA State, I used to drive through Jewell on the way to see this girl I was dating. The only notable thing about the town was the fact that it harbored a puppy mill.
Yeah, it’s super smart to make a class hero out of a prep school valedictorian and Ivy League grad, grandson of a wealthy real estate developer - definitely a class traitor himself but in a Good Way - and hey, he did suffer from back pain while doing his tech job remotely from Waikiki. So his struggle was real. Power to the people!
Bourgeois class traitors should be celebrated.
Yeah I know, the old “It’s different when WE do it” routine. Same old same old.
Yes, because betraying the bourgeoisie is good for workers, whereas betraying the workers is bad for workers. Duh?
Rich people got a union and that’s beautiful…
Peasants got a union that’s bad, mmmkay
Spoiled rich kid with back pain kills insurance CEO, some industry-wide practices abruptly change.
Public: “Yay, justice at last! Spoiled Rick Kid is a god!!!”
Insurance practices slowly go back to the way they were. New CEO is just as bad.
Public: “The system betrayed us again!”
Duh?
And now the public knows that killing a CEO had a direct impact. Regardless of the perpetrator, that has an effect on the public imagination!
Not sure you read my whole comment but yeah, it has an impact on Tuesday that will last until next Wednesday, or whenever the usual distractions bump this down to the bottom of people’s feeds.
Remember the Panama Papers, which exposed the offshore finance links of the wealthy? Didn’t think so.
Or the Paradise Papers, which also exposed the offshore finance links of the wealthy? Didn’t think so.
Yeah, who gives a fuck about what his parents did for a living, he fucked over people’s health and lives for profit.
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.
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…
Obviously other rich people, like the chucklef who penned it
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.
I agree.
And most would be 50.1%.
Why would we give them a passing grade for getting a 50% ?
Are we just supposed to forget the rest because of “most” ?
Seems that when we let most CEOs live they still cry foul.
I love this comment so much, that I upvoted, saved, and commented on it.
Bravo, good human, you helped to restore a bit of faith in humanity in me.
Thank you very much. Have a great rest of the weekend.
Bret Stephens sucks.
The earth will be fine. It’s us who will be fucked.
Bro you were my earth…
bro
The NYT’s true colors are showing more obviously every day.
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.
It’s almost as if for-profit journalism is, in fact, for profit, not for the truth.
North Korea, without hyperbole, is jealous of the NYT.
Its an editorial bro… Why are you shitting on genocide apologist of record?!
Yeah! They employ this stooge specifically to dispense bad takes. As a joke or something idk
Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa”
A class traitor, then.
Every single gang banger who raps about making money, society be screwed, is this guy. It is the very manifestation of the status quo, not working as a society but as someone who milks it and feeds the infighting. Much like the writer of this New York Times opinion piece.
The Onion really needs to take that headline and run with it in their special way.
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.
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.
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.
It’s even worse than that, really.
They take those premiums, and what employers pay, and all the co-fees like when you pay a $30 copay on a drug that would cost $5 out of pocket (there are many! but you have to research) and invest them.
They make tons and tons of money on all the premiums. So it isn’t even $100k in, $1mil out. It’s 100k times a thousand in, and that $1mil is peanuts by comparison out.
Coupled with the fact that the $1mil in treatment is all fake cost values made up by the industry, when in reality, it probably would cost 1/10th that, to still turn an operational profit.
Not disagreeing with you either, just pointing out the monetary disparity is insanely worse.
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.
His tongue must be so sore from all that bootlicking.
Just when you thought the NY Times’ reputation couldn’t get any worse this year …
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.
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”.
I think if you sat people down and showed them how much they pay for health insurance, showed what they got out of their medical insurance, and the actual cost of those procedures, that very few people would rate it highly.
For a system like capitalism that prides itself on market forces, no one has a clue about how and why insurance operates the way it does.
Well, pointedly, the question was not: “Does your current health insurance provide good value?”
I’m betting a hell of a lot less than 81% of people would rate value as “excellent” or “good”.
Also kind of ignoring the fact that the point of insurance is that most people, maybe around 81% for instance, don’t need to use it to its full extreme. And obviously those people are going to be more likely to have a generally positive view of it.
Someone needs to get Bret Stephens a stepladder so he can climb down from being so far up his own asshole
nah, he’s far enough in just give him a light nudge and he’ll come out his own mouth
