I nominate this NYT opinion piece for shittiest take of 2024!

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

    • hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

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

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        “Just”… ? no. There’s a certain vetting process that makes sure they tell the right lies.

      • ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        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)_/¯

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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          10 days 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.

        • hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          i don’t think it’s lying, necessarily. i suspect that it’s embellishing, and it’s inarguably providing an incomplete, intentionally flattering picture.

    • makyo@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

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

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      10 days 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…

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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      10 days 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.

    • TheOubliette@lemmy.ml
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      10 days ago

      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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      10 days ago

      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.

    • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
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      10 days ago

      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.

    • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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!

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            10 days ago

            Yes, because betraying the bourgeoisie is good for workers, whereas betraying the workers is bad for workers. Duh?

            • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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              9 days ago

              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?

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                9 days ago

                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!

                • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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                  9 days ago

                  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.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    9 days ago

                    Don’t talk down to me. Sure, I remember, partly why I’m a communist today. But! Normal people don’t care about that nerd shit. What people care about is blood on the streets, that’s what grabs their attention.