I nominate this NYT opinion piece for shittiest take of 2024!
Bret Stephens sucks.
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.
Does print media have the equivalent of the Razzies?
If they do, this article will be in the running.
Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa”
A class traitor, then.
Pretty weird to see this furor over which one of the two is the goliath and the david, corporate media running interference for the owners club as usual smh.
Someone needs to get Bret Stephens a stepladder so he can climb down from being so far up his own asshole
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.
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.
Why post this at all?
Just when you thought the NY Times’ reputation couldn’t get any worse this year …
All that mental acrobatics. If only people would put that mental capacity to actual good use rather than for asswiping
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Arnold 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.
TIL betraying your fellow man makes you a hero. /s
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
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.
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…
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?
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
