I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class.

Monster-drinking, giant truck-driving redneck here for some perspective:

We have no class. It’s kind of the brand.

You may not have class but you are a member of a class and regardless don't deserve shovelware and ads in your start menu.

Deserve? Perhaps not.

But respond favourably to, in sufficient numbers, that it remains profitable for the shovelling class? You betcha.

"I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class."

This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?

I think if you empathized more with the scolder, you would see that they DID empathize with the shovel-eating-class-hater, and realized, via empathy-bond, that person was not empathizing downstream enough.

But... I totally empathize with you.

Interesting mental gymnastics. Calling for more empathy is... the same as not having empathy?

Calling for more empathy has nothing to do with empathy. It has to do with status.

Ouch! But yes I suppose you're right that it comes across more as virtue signaling.

You can have your own opinions, but at this point you're just inventing your own definitions for these terms and unfortunately no useful discussion is possible.

I think the comment is bad because it does not lead to an interesting discussion – ‘that’s just the way such people are’. I think it could have been made in a way which is more curious about why the mentioned group might behave in the way described.

That's because we've lived in an advertising-saturated environment our whole lives. TV (where all pre-streaming shows were designed around ad breaks), radio, newspapers, magazines, and finally online. Americans are used to it, there's a certain comfort-level in it. My primary reason for blocking internet ads is that they physically get in the way of reading; the security/performance concerns are genuine but secondary in my quest to get those damn ads out of my way.

My kid likes monster trucks. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of Long Island. Tastes vary; thus the only thing IMHO that is defensibly low-class is something objectively a bad or unethical choice, like dishonesty. You're going to get into hot water ascribing specific tastes to class; I just read the other day that some of the most exclusive residences in Vegas have clientele with bizarrely specific yet very basic food preferences.

I would advise not normalizing the sort of narrative pushed by the person you are replying to by ceding ground with relation to bad behavior. A lack of class, as pengaru uses it, doesn't seem to be a useful concept, and muddies the water of what people mean when talking about class based hierarchies.

The reason I would argue it's not a useful concept is that class in this context refers to one's social signaling outputs in a national monoculture that hasn't been the predominate way people in the US have interacted with culture for decades.

Great observation and thank you for making that point