Brian Thompson pleaded guilty to drunk driving in 2017, spent a few days in jail, and then became CEO in the same month so he could kill more people.
Brian Thompson pleaded guilty to drunk driving in 2017, spent a few days in jail, and then became CEO in the same month so he could kill more people.
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This is an important point and takeaway.
These people truly are no different than us. They are not special in any way shape or form.
Part of the reason society is organized this way is based on the premise of the lie that the wealthy really are different: smarter, more capable, talented, and so on.
The reality is they're likely far dumber than most of us. There's actually a decent amount of evidence for this, too.
When I was first in college back in the early 2000's, I had a friend who was struggling to make ends meet so he could finish his Masters Thesis. So he found work writing original research papers for more wealthy students at more prestigious schools. He got to fund his education, and some rich twat got to put their name on an all-original research paper that can't be proven to actually be plagiarism.
Not only do the wealthy's children get special accommodation if they aren't actually all that smart, but there's a whole cottage industry around them exploiting their poorer peers to inflate their credentials.
I think credential inflation is a massive reason the whole shitshow feels like it's about to fall apart, because we're about 20 years deep into world leaders not actually knowing how anything they're in charge of works because they actually genuinely lack the education to understand it even though they've faked the credentials.
It just gets worse with each successive generation of the wealthy. They insulate their children from failure and fake them being smarter than they are until the parents are too stupid to even know if the kids are faking it properly.
It's like that idea that the poor are bad long-term planners because they have so much more mental load to survive than the wealthy do. However, the wealthy are literally burning down our planet as fast as they can, which will kill our entire species. Doesn't sound like healthy long-term planning to me. Sounds like a fucking lie to justify the idea that the wealthy are somehow special and different when they are not.
I'm pretty sure that everyone used to understand that wealthy people were wealthy because they were born into it, and poor people the same, and that that had nothing to do with someone's value as a person. Whether you were rich or poor was just your lot in life, completely unrelated to whether you were smart or kind or clever or loyal or anything else.
At some point, that changed. Now, conventional wisdom is that "rich people have a lot of money because they are or did something to deserve it, and poor people are poor because they are or did something to deserve it." Wealth or lack thereof has become a shorthand for a person's value, even though it's still as true as ever that your economic position has everything to do with your parents and little to do with anything else.
The just world fallacy is a lot older than that though. You can blame good ol' religion for that one (which has always been in cahoots with capital for the entirety of its existence).
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Is that why Jesus the Capitalist said to give all your possessions away to the poor?
It's large organized religion that does that, not personal faith. Pretty much everyone here would agree Jesus was a great guy, but would also agree that his church has done a lot of bad shit.
This is coming from me as a Christian, just so you know.
That changed with the rise of right wing radio and a concerted propaganda campaign funded directly by these rich assholes.
You look at the Kochs or the Mercers or Thiel and you'll find they spent ungodly amounts of money funding rightwing shills. There may have been 1 or 2 rightwing broadcasters that are actually somewhat supported by ads and products. However, now-a-days in particular it's all just some rich assholes dumping a few million on these grifters to keep them in business lying to their audience.
The rise of cable news as the primary source of news has also had a big effect. Turns out billionaires aren't likely to want their newscasters talking about raising their own taxes.
It's all those bootstraps, don't you know? The rich have been pulling them up harder than you, that's all.
The Thompson life story the media is trying to portray is all about this. He deserved to be there because he was born in Iowa and went to a state university and worked at a meat packing plant (I can’t find a source for that one but I swear I read it somewhere).
He was a rich farm kid. Almost as rich as it gets in rural Iowa.
He was crowned homecoming king in 1992 and graduated as class valedictorian, a State of Iowa Scholar and an All-State trombonist in band.
He attended the University of Iowa (UI) in Iowa City, where he met his future wife. He received a bachelor's degree in business administration with a major in accounting in 1997. He was also valedictorian of his UI graduating class, and UI later said that he "graduated with special honors and with highest distinction, meaning his GPA was 3.95 or above." [source]
His family was petite bourgeoisie, living in an economic boom for farmers, and the upper middle class in a low cost of income state and time, and this man is the definition of class traitor. He could have been doing something good and he straight up decided to kill people with bureaucracy for money. He could have been a fucking politician and fought for people’s rights to have health care but he chose this. He chose money over people and urged his company to do that too.
If there is a devine bad place, by many views of many religions, he would be there. And clearly many of us have judged him, by our own ethics and beliefs, to be guilty as well. I don’t understand the pacifists that say, “killing is just wrong” and don’t care about those that were killed by his actions. It just astounds me that they can know that, and still say “but, thou shalt not kill”.