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.
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.
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.
The irony being here that a ‘working class hero’ to Bret is someone who is no longer working class
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
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
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!
Yeah I know, the old “It’s different when WE do it” routine. Same old same old.
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.
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 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.
Bret Stephens sucks.
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.
Its an editorial bro… Why are you shitting on genocide apologist of record?!
