Here’s the article summary:
“One time, Brian worked in a field. Luigi on the other hand, had rich parents, just like Osama Bin Laden.”
I fucking wish I was joking.
I laughed out loud at this.
An alternate opinion column could be: “One time, Adolf was an aspiring artist. Winston on the other hand, had rich parents, just like Osama Bin Laden.”
Winston Churchill was a genuinely awful human being and a war criminal prior to WWII.
He lucked out by also being a moderately competent wartime leader, who gets to be juxtaposed against Hitler for eternity.
Also, Brett Stephens is a bed bug and has a terrible track record of properly handling public backlash to his writing. I hope dark days are ahead for him.
Yeah I know he’s not an angel and is in the example specifically due to the juxtaposition.
I understand someone brings this up everytime Churchill is mentioned in a good light, so out of curiosity: who would be a better comparable figurehead? Joseph? Franklin? Neville? Albert?
Churchill is fine to use. People keep trying to go back and just shit on everything, at some point you have to just move on. He literarily helped defeat Hitler, that has to count for something.
Spoken like someone who has no historical understanding of Churchill’s pre-WWII legacy. He’s not retroactively awful, he was awful by the standards of his own era.
https://jacobin.com/2022/09/winston-churchill-british-empire-racism-wwii
I’m still waiting for you to help me find an appropriate alternative. Which ww2-era leader was not racist?
Churchill wasn’t bad simply because he was a racist… I think retrograde views on race are one of the areas where it’s reasonable make allowances when judging historical figures.
Churchill was an aristocrat and an imperialist responsible for numerous atrocities within Britain’s colonial holdings, and that’s not even going into his anti-labor beliefs and practices.
The reason why I didn’t provide you an alternative was because your original comment never required you to mention Churchill. That was an unforced error on your part, as the comment you were responding to wasn’t an analogy to begin with.
But if you’re deadset on needing an alternative for your unnecessary analogy, FDR is easily the best of a bad bunch.
Also, Brett Stephens is a bed bug
Wow we’re just going to allow blatant antisemitism on here /s
Holy fucking shit. Imagine writing this out and thinking it’s a good thing to publish. What an idiot. What a buffoon. What an absolute bitch boy cuck ass moron.
Came to comment on the columnist being a corporate shill piece of shit, but you found more flowery words :)
I’d call him a buttchugging fuck dandy, but that’s just me.
You could all be right. He could be an absolute piece of shit buttchugging bitch boy cuck ass moron dandy corporate shill.
“Oh God, the poor are uniting! Quick, we need to stir up some division”
“He ate steaks like Trump, not like that despicable vegetarian, Hitler”
You do realize this is an opinion column? You can tell by the big letters at the top that spell out OPINION
EDIT: here’s my “both sides” take on this, you all are as dumb as Fox News viewers. IMO (notice the O stands for opinion, please do not hold Lemmy accountable for what I say) schools need to implement a class on the media. Kids need to learn the difference between news and opinion. Also learn how to identify the source of the news. Also don’t post your nudes on the internet. Things are about to get a lot worse with AI and deep fakes
NYT still saw fit to publish it. Most would consider that a tacit endorsement.
That, and the author is a regular writer for the opinion section there, with consistently terrible takes.
Somebody paid NYT and this parasite to do this job.
Plebs need to understand that these shill ops ain’t free…
Yeah and? Doesn’t make his opinion any less garbage
You do realize, even for an opinion piece, this is astoundingly poor quality and taste? You can tell by having two brain cells to rub together.
I expect this sort of shit from a tabloid, not from any organization claiming journalistic integrity. A shitty piece is still a shitty piece, even if it’s hiding behind the opinion column banner.
Do you see NYT publishing any opinion pieces to the effect of “The healthcare CEO socially murdered thousands every year and the fact that we don’t have a legal mechanism to deal with them is infinitely more important than a guy who only killed one person”
I have an opinion, you’re an ignorant bootlicker! Should that get posted to the frontpage of the times too?
That commeneter is a classic neo lib call for “reasonableness”
Daddy is raping you but you need to hear about both sides, boy:
It is for your own good
An opinion The NY Times chose to share with their readers.
The great thing about opinions? They typically spur opinions from other people. And those opinions spur more opinions.
What I’m trying to say is that the article being an opinion does not in any way negate the comment you’re being dismissive of, which in itself is an opinion too. That’s kind of how conversations happen.
Your point? The Editor still has control over what is allowed to be printed/released and associated with their name.
Nobody responding to you was unaware this was an opinion piece.
Reread the responses and try again.
Opinions should be here to stay!
I liked the preprint of their opinion column publishing tomorrow, headline:
Some of those kids in Palestine were asking for it
NYT doesn’t decide if its news or opinion alone, so does their audience.
Therefore they are responsible for the ideas they give a platform too.
Do you remember why are they avoiding face shots of Luigi?
In a comment full of shit takes, i just wanna point out that you think the government teaching media literacy in school is the solution?
I hope you wear a helmet regularly.
So edgey, dear
Here’s the article, for anyone interested.
It basically boils down to: Brian Thompson grew up in a working class family in Iowa, while Luigi Mangione came from wealth and went to private schools. He compares Mangione to Osama bin Laden, and other “Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies,” who “cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.”
The author then mentions some polling that says people like their health insurance provider, actually. And then finally he says this:
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.
Without a stitch of irony. Thompson may have come from working class roots, but that ain’t where he ended up. So if it’s ok to become rich, but it’s not ok to be born rich, then I guess this author supports a 100% inherence tax? Yeah, somehow I doubt it.
The fact that he came from working class roots and chose to become a massive piece of shit makes him even worse than someone who was born into privilege.
Likewise, Luigi Mangione came from a background of privilege, yet gave it all up in the fight for the rights of all Americans.
Turns out you can be born into the working class and still be a piece of shit, and you can be born well off and still be a decent person.
The people writing these opinion pieces should be thrilled to hear that there is still hope for their children.
Likewise, Luigi Mangione came from a background of privilege, yet gave it all up in the fight for the rights of all Americans.
That’s very true. Mangione sacrificed his upper class life to fight back against the system, whereas Thompson used the opportunities afforded him by the system to enrich himself at the expense of others.
to enrich himself at the expense of others.
You didn’t finish your sentence properly.
to enrich himself at the expense of others lives.
And THIS is one of the many reasons we love him.
I don’t remember the dead class traitor’s name and I don’t care to.
Yes! Brian Thompson and Luigi were both class traitors for completely different reasons. Thompson betrayed the working class for his own selfishess while Luigi was like Engels in that he walked away from extreme privilege because he was disgusted by what his class was doing to us.
People aren’t responsible for how they’re born. Being born into a family that’s benefitted from human suffering is out of their control.
Choosing to harm people in order to join a class of societal leeches is different.
Staying in that position of privilege you were born into is also a choice.
(I agree with you while people are young though)
Staying in that position of privilege you were born into is also a choice.
is it? You can just undo like 15 years of child rearing in that privileged position? Seems factually incorrect to me.
Undo? No?
But it doesn’t take that much effort to do some minimal self-education about power structures and injustice and see the patterns. I’d say given how mainstream those discussions are on much of social media these days, it probably takes active work to avoid a basic understanding…
But it doesn’t take that much effort to do some minimal self-education about power structures and injustice and see the patterns.
yeah, and my point is, that it doesn’t change anything, it just makes you aware of it.
The human ability to be conscious of it’s own existence brought us untold intelligent never before seen. And an unparalleled fear of death, that will never be sated. Neither of these things will ever change in human history, i don’t see why this matters in this context either.
At the end of the day, it is what it is, what really matters is whether people are objectively bad people or not.
Came from working class roots…and then decided that those same people get to die so he can make a buck.
Insurance companies are run by sociopaths
I don’t give a fuck where someone came from, only where they CHOSE to end up.
Siddartha Gautama (better know as the Buddha) was literally born a prince and gave up his life of privilege in order to live as a beggar. Sure, he never killed anyone (except his own future life as a king), but he still became a saint. Meanwhile, Jesus may have come from more humble roots but he could have become a king had he chosen to do so.
All I’m saying is Reuters clearly knows where their bread is buttered.
As a side note, I recommend reading a lot of Buddhist writings for everyone!
It’s cool how something so old has found its way to being useful in modern clinical psychology.
I certainly can’t disagree there.
Everything changes except people (ok we do but we haven’t had much evolutionary time given our reproductive rates since we developed permanent settlements)
The article in question was an opinion piece published by the New York Times. Why are you bringing Reuters into this?
My bad. New York Times, then.
No worries! I was actually wondering if they were connected somehow that I want aware of.
Nah, probably just a carryover from some other thread (I’ve been seeing a LOT of them on this topic obvs).
Also I might be slightly drunk if that helps.
Also I might be slightly drunk if that helps.
Always helps me! I’m getting into some vodka after I get home from work in a few hours. Cheers!
I feel like these ghouls at the NYTrash are far more “nihilistic” than Luigi.
Just cancelled my subscription, absolutely disgusting seeing this on the front page. Is there any publication left not bought and paid for by our corporate overlords?
The Onion?
At least the onion has some journalistic integrity
The onion can point to fascism and call it such and consistently oppose it. Might be the only news source that can sadly enough. So yeah I’m willing to put up with learning about mass shootings like this
I can’t vouch for their opinions, because I haven’t read it enough, but The Guardian doesn’t have shareholders and has editorial freedom
The Guardian is decent. Articles can definitely be opinionated and not all columnists are equally good, but I haven’t read anything particularly egregious yet. And their investigative journalism is quite good compared to other media outlets imo.
They also clearly mark articles that are old as being old (warning you to check more recent sources), which I quite like.
It’s one of the few outlets that seems to have an opinion rather than an agenda, if that makes sense. Their viewpoint is left of center, but they make this fairly clear and they’re pretty factual and offer nuanced alternative viewpoints most of the time. They don’t seem like they’re sneakily trying to convince you of stuff, it’s just a “Here’s what we think about what happened”.
I subscribe to the Guardian. They’re not always perfect - nothing is. But they’re good.
First ones I saw to give an actual explanation of what happened in Amsterdam, for example.
As a person who actually lived in the UK and read The Guardian for maybe a decade, in my opinion it’s a neoliberal propaganda outlet and it’s definitely (not just opinion, actual fact) pretty much just maned (last I checked all journalists but 2) by people from a high upper middle class and upper class background (what in the UK is called “Public School Educated”, which curiously doesn’t mean a State School, it means an expensive private school).
All you have to do is look back at the Snowden Leaks - The Guardian did leak the Snowden information but not soon after the Newspaper Editor there who was part of it got kicked out and the coverage of it changed 180 degrees, to the point that whilst the UK Government was busy retroactively making legal all that eavesdropping (unlike the US, were some of it was rolled back) The Guardian was mute about it.
(Whilst I believe The Guardian had genuine Leftwing and pro-Democracy journalists - and last I checked, it still has two of them - they’re the exception rather than the rule as the natural tendency of both its Board and most of its staff is Neoliberalism in very much the same vein as the NYT as well as massivelly pro-System - with their coverage of The Royals being fawning to the point of servilism - which is why the Editor who published Snowden got kicked out as soon as the focus on it moved out)
It also has had some real extreme Fashion-following Upper Class Identity Warrior articles over the years, like the one from a self-proclaimed Feminist criticizing men who use sex dolls (I! Kid! You! Not!) totally oblivious to how her article was in exactly the same pattern as used a decade or two earlier to criticize homosexuality.
Last but not least (I have material here to go all day, but lets not) don’t get me started on how they were a massive part of the campaign to slander Corbyn (a leftwinger who some years ago got elected leader of the Labour party, taking it of the hands of the Neoliberals who led it for 2 decades), a campaign which overwhelmingly relied on anti-semitism accusations, done together with UK based Israeli-linked Jewish groups and which was so ridiculous that they literally accused a Jewish Holocaust Survivor of being anti-semite for comparing some of the actions of Israel with those of the Nazis (this was some years ago) and thus taint Corbyn by association as they were both on the same panel in a conference.
(The present day Zionist Genocide and the use of such anti-semitism accusations to slander critics of their mass murder, really gives us some perspective on the true nature of such slander and those who use it. The anti-Corbyn campaign on which The Guardian so eagerly participated was very much an early trial run of the use by Israel - with again The Guardian eagerly participating, though they’ve stopped it after a while - of such Identity Politics to shore up support for and deflect criticism of their Genocide)
They’re slippery posh twats at The Guardian who don’t just straightforward lie like populists do and instead use cherry-picking, half-truths and other deceit techniques in their “opinion making” (some of their journalists have openly admitted that their work is making opinion), basically like the New York Times but with the benefits of a more elegant style of dialectics, argument building and word usage that comes for having had a posh education at so-called Public Schools.
They still shill be neo lib shite?
They’re “posh” neoliberal shit, so people who never lived in Britain can’t really identify it as just a variant of the same of swindle as the NYT done in the service of a similar kind of elites.
Is there any publication left not bought and paid for by our corporate overlords?
Really good question. I think the answer, at least in terms of newspapers, is a big NO. I had realized years ago that the “newspapers of record”, i.e., New York Times and Washington Post, were compromised after seeing how they covered Bernie Sanders’ campaign. In reality, they likely always were compromised. Don’t forget that NYT had a large role in pushing the Iraq invasion that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. I’ve heard that they were also involved in the US getting into Vietnam too, but don’t have much detail of that.
I have decided to subscribe to my local metro area newspaper instead, just to get some coverage of local news and events in addition to basic national and international coverage.
Now, magazines should be a different story, if you look at leftist ones like Jacobin, Monthly Review, etc.
What about ProPublica? They still do pretty hard hitting investigative journalism. They’re the ones that wrote some of the more recent in depth articles about an insurer’s (might have been UHC’s) automated denial system.
I tried last op-ed and they sucked me in with like ten years for thirty cents.
Bret Stephens, the author, is not telling the whole story and using the omissions to spin a story of ‘most Americans are happy with the system.’ This [expletive] says the below to defend against the united anger at the health insurance industry
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.
This [expletive] looked at the report’s top and only positive point and ignored the rest. The next very next point is
- Despite rating their insurance positively, most insured adults report experiencing problems using their health coverage; people in poorer health are more likely to report problems. A majority of insured adults (58%) say they have experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past 12 months – such as denied claims, provider network problems, and pre-authorization problems.
Here are the other points on the report:
- Nearly half of insured adults who had insurance problems were unable to satisfactorily resolve them, with some reporting serious consequences. Half of consumers with insurance problems say their problem was resolved to their satisfaction.
- Affordability of premiums and out-of-pocket costs are a concern, particularly for those with private health coverage, and for some, contributed to not getting care. About half of adults with Marketplace plans (55%) or ESI (46%) rate their insurance negatively when it comes to premiums, compared to 27% of people with Medicare and 10% of Medicaid enrollees. Four-in-ten insured adults say they skipped or delayed some type of care in the past year due to cost. One in six insured adults (16%), including larger shares of those at lower income levels, say they had problems paying medical bills in the past year.
- Insured adults overwhelmingly support public policies to make insurance simpler to understand and to help them avoid or resolve insurance problems. About nine in ten say they support requirements on insurers to maintain accurate and up-to-date provider directories, provide simpler, easier-to read EOBs, disclose their claims denial rates to regulators and the public, and provide in advance, upon request, information about whether care is covered and their out-of-pocket cost liability.
[Expletive] this disingenuously written story, [expletive] Bret Stephen for not telling the whole story, and [expletive] the New York Times for time after time publishing BS and propaganda that sets us all back.
Your nanny state instance admins redact naughty words to “[expletive]” before it federates out. It’s pretty funny when you use it a bunch of times to help get your anger across.
It does? Hahahaha, that’s great, I’m trying to swear less in general, but good to know I didn’t have to redact myself on here. I’m curious to see what happens.
Shit fuck.
Edit: did the instance filter it? It’s still showing up for me.
Shows in this post. I guess it censores it when used to describe people, like “these fucking healthcare CEOs and their piece of shit allies”.
No, those came through fine.
SCP wiki be like
I wanted to vomit, this morning when I read that piece of tp.
I’m sure many are happy with their plans given that they have no real choice.
I’d be happier with a plan that punches me in the face twice a year rather than one that punches me monthly.
Yeah, people rating their insurance as “excellent” obviously comes with the implied “compared to other US healthcare insurance options,” if you read the rest of it or spend even 5 seconds thinking about it.
I assure you this poll was biased against the dead.
Luigi murdered one person.
Brian murdered thousands.
That’s all you need to know to compare the two.
Luigi murdered one
person.mass murderer.
So what you’re saying is that we need a CEO hunter who gets a higher score?
I would LOVE to hear what bootlicking bullshit argument this dude crafted.
Don’t give them the clicks.
Someone made a synopsis: https://lemmy.world/comment/13939443
AI
The author, Bret Stephens, inherited his fortune from a chemical company his parents built. Just for context as to why he defends a sleezy multi-millionaire
Even his name exudes privilege. Who names their kid Bret anymore? Seriously…
I read that as “Brat”, lol.
I mean might as well
“Luigi had never heard such bullshit before.”
If he’s such a hero, why is everyone happy he’s dead?
you should feel bad because he’s a dead hero.
/S
Because he’s the hero we deserve, but not the one we need right now.
So, we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero: He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector.
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.
Or angry, greedy rich people jacked up on conservatism.
I was hoping it was going to be a satire OpEd, but nope. Mangione is just a disaffected radical rich kid he compares to Bin Laden and other terrorists who came from well-off families. The writer stops at Thompson’s early normal life and completely disregards the health insurance industry’s problems, which Thompson’s company was a major contributor, claims people are mostly happy with their insurance while the study has no “would you prefer to pay less and get the same service for single-payer care” option. It’s basically “do you like your expensive care you have little/no choice about?”
Dude wrote an anti-populist article to be inflammatory and told people to shut up because they like their insurance overlords.
told people to shut up because they like their insurance overlords.
Idiots keep answering these surveys like bootlickers than wonder why owners change nothing.
So they are able to use sample 20k to justify police for 300m people.
If you ever answer surveys like these, don’t be a dumb ass. This is a class war, act like it.
When the only questions to surveys are:
Do you prefer:
-
A horse kick to the nuts
-
Stabbed in the eye with a hot poker
You can say: 72% of people prefer being kicked in the nuts by a horse.
There is no “I’d rather have chicken” option.
So a few answering or not will make no difference when the options are restricted to funneling the answer they want to the top.
I remember there used to be an internet joke site that included “the most accurate web poll ever” in which a significant majority votes that they wanted a car that burst into flames when you signal left more than anything in the world. In second place was a goiter.
When you click the link to take the poll, those were easily the best presented options as answers to the question “What do you want most in the world?”
-
Why does he speak so quietly.
Never going to happen.
If both are class traitors than I support the one who didn’t betray my class. But also engineers and tech workers are still working class and nowhere near CEO level.
I’m an engineer who went to private schools and came from a family of engineers. Doesn’t mean I’ve never been homeless, doesn’t mean my family wasn’t financially fucked by health insurance. The middle class aren’t ceo level even when we’re a shrinking class
Apologies in advance, I may have just discovered my personal inner schizo.
Don’t forget that there is a massive, coordinated campaign to get us to eat our own by overemphasizing life differences in the range of poverty to upper middle class while shrouding the realities of life in the 1% amd underemphasizing the difference between “can send my kid to private school” and “could build a private school for my kid”.
On its face it sounds absolutely absurd to lump in Ivy League Greg with Trailer Park Steve, but they both have far more in common with each other than they do with multi-millionaires. The knee jerk almost primal rejection of that idea that comes quickly to most people is fucking intentionally taught into us.
Congratulations on taking the red pill, that’s what the concept of the middle class always has been. And it’s a tactic the powerful have always used. They want the middle class thinking of ourselves as fundamentally different from and better than the poor and they want the poor resenting us for it
It seems that narrative that has been fed to us about wealth classes is breaking down.
Their worst fear is the day all the classes below the wealthy elites team up and work together. They’ll do and say anything to stop it, including trying the fuel envy or jealousy from the poor people towards the upper middle class.
The New York Times has been pure shit since the W years when they pushed Iraq war propaganda.
Trump is an evil moron, but he’s right about one thing, our media is full of shills and liars.
The crazy part is they are lying and shilling for the right, while being called “leftist”, it’s a fantastic lie that has been propagated.
The newspapers used to publish whatever the government said was true when it came to war and foreign policy. That changed slightly when news reporters in Vietnam repeatedly witnessed the reality and reported it back regardless of what their editors and government officials wanted to be published.
It was why Vietnam vets returning home were called baby killers. Because they were killing babies. Now the press have realigned themselves to return to being under the hegemony of the government in hopes of staying in business.
It’s been shit for longer than that.
If they call it Leftist, they can pretend to be the lovable underdog
