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.
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.
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.)
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.