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

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

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            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.

          • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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            There are two jobs where you can go on national TV, lie and not get fired. President and weather man.

            • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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              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.)

              • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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                10 days ago

                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…

        • hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          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.

          • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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            10 days ago

            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

      • 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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          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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      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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      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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      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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      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.

    • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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      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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      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!

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    Yeah, who gives a fuck about what his parents did for a living, he fucked over people’s health and lives for profit.

    • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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      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.

      • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        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…

  • davidagain@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • msage@programming.dev
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      8 days ago

      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.

    • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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      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.

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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      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.

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

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

    • dnick@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Absaroka@lemmy.world
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    Just when you thought the NY Times’ reputation couldn’t get any worse this year …

  • h6a@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world
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    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”.

    • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world
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        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”.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    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.

    • quixotic120@lemmy.world
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      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