Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero
Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero
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?
Keep in mind it's an opinion piece, not official reporting
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TIL betraying your fellow man makes you a hero. /s
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, who gives a fuck about what his parents did for a living, he fucked over people's health and lives for profit.
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 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.
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.
Thank you very much. Have a great rest of the weekend.
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.
North Korea, without hyperbole, is jealous of the NYT.
Thompson "grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa"
A class traitor, then.
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.
They are deluded. They still think about the American dream as if it wasn't a nightmare. Yeah, leave all your people behind, let them die or rot in poverty, as long as you make it.
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.
His tongue must be so sore from all that bootlicking.
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.
Just when you thought the NY Times' reputation couldn't get any worse this year ...
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.
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".
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.
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".
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.
Someone needs to get Bret Stephens a stepladder so he can climb down from being so far up his own asshole
nah, he's far enough in just give him a light nudge and he'll come out his own mouth
"Oh look, Brian Thompson has some characteristics of you poors, you should consider him your hero!"
This article is literally based on feeding class warfare. There's something people have to understand - "second class" is just the supposedly the right way of doing things so you can eventually live well and make sure your children live well. The amount of assholes in today's world who are either rich assholes and remain rich assholes who give no shits about the right way of doing things, or poor people who are like them and rise above everything else because they are assholes and embrace it, is far too high. The absolute shamelessness of this article as the second class is being dismantled because it's just better for rich assholes for everyone to remain poor except the ones willing to become as much of an asshole as them just speaks volumes about the state of American society.
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.
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
Does print media have the equivalent of the Razzies?
If they do, this article will be in the running.
The shit take award, shaped like a polished turd
Geez, NYT, how’s the boot taste?
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
Saruman, not frodo, was the true ring bearer.
bret is nyt's go-to cryptofascist. he's always got these bootlicking propaganda pieces.
Thomson hid behind company sponsored laws passed by bought politicians to legally kill tens of thousands of people despite valid insurance coverage. He is nothing more than a murderous villain, but it's not the least bit surprising that the NYT thinks he's a hero.
All that mental acrobatics. If only people would put that mental capacity to actual good use rather than for asswiping
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.
I had to look up who Brian Thompson was.
There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
As soon as you're born, they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home, and they hit you at school They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool Till you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years Then they expect you to pick a career When you can't really function, you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
Another rich conservative asshole writing about the working class as if he has any idea wtf he's talking about. He doesn't, of course, but it's the NYT so that doesn't matter.
Paywall removed https://archive.is/DxLk8
I don't care to read any article with THAT headline! Even with the paywall removed. I appriciate your efforts to fuck over the concept of paywalls, but this is one article I won't care to read.
Fuck you, NYT!
Fixed the post link right before seeing your comment, but thanks 🙂
People paid to read this crap? Lol
The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Brett Stephens is here!
Brett Stephens moment
Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero One of the more moving stories in The Times this week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside of a Midtown Manhattan hotel. 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.” Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed. One ex-Times reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt “joy” at the killing. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offered that “violence is never the answer” but “people can only be pushed so far.” Pictures of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Thompson, have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and ahhing on social media over his toned physique and bright smile. But if Mangione’s personal story (at least what we know of it so far) is supposed to serve as some sort of parable, it isn’t one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school and the University of Pennsylvania and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione, like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth. 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. As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who say their health is “fair” or “poor” still broadly like their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — 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. Thompson’s life may have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree. As for the killer, John Fetterman had the choicest words: He’s “going to die in prison,” the peerless Pennsylvania senator told HuffPost. “Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”
Oh man, working class.
"Kill weeds with a knife"
... so like sneaking up to unsuspecting plants and slitting their that's throats? Fucking monster
Stephens is known for his neoconservative foreign policy opinions and for being part of the right-of-center opposition to Donald Trump.
You guys, this is "The Point", it's supposed to be polemic. I'm not saying the opinion's not dumb, but it's literally the column's job to incite a ton of debate by publishing like journals on quantum gravity.
When Mom doesn't understand the vibe. "No, we have working class hero at home."
Why post this at all?
It won't work, so money?
It's an opinion piece, burn it for warmth. That's the only use for it.
lol, y'all really letting Bret Stephens rile you up again? He does know how to push buttons.
