Hating both is the only based take. All billionaires are evil, even if you really really like their music.
You’re fuckin dreaming if you think this silly airplane meme is equivalent to the hate we send Musk’s way all the time, constantly
I didn’t see many memes about Swift’s plane usage till she threatened the kid tracking her flights. If that’s not just me, then she deserves it for making a stink about publicly available information.
they did exist before, but not nearly as prevalent
She only threatened legal action after those memes started and when her flight movements got the attention of the right in an attempt to make her less credible of a voice speaking out against trump.
And knowing how batshit insane trump cultists can be and how she’s basically the single most hated person of his base I’m not surprised that she feared for her security.
Those records were public for years but the legal action only happened after someone created those memes and even fox news suddenly cared about plane emissions…
this is the most accurate narrative interpretation of the situation. thank you.
I think hating equally based on a single metric is never a based take. If being a billionaire makes you evil then surely having 205.2B makes you a whole lot worse (185 times worse) than having 1.1B.
Also you can like things people do while disagreeing with their ways. Sounds like Swift donates a decent sum while being shitty for having a private jet.
Not trying to stick up for Swift, just trying to add nuance to the conversation.
Sure, and I would say we send at least 185 times more hate towards musk. This is a meme about airplanes, nobody has been calling her a nazi or an apartheid nepo baby or anything.
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What if I hate both?
You… you cant… you just can’t do that.
I hate Elon because he is a capitalist crushing the working class, an alt-right con artist and takes credit for things he didn’t do.
I hate Taylor because she is a performative liberal who espouses progressive politics but doesn’t follow through making her a hypocrite.
I hate both because they are billionaires and neither should have been able to accumulate as much wealth as they have.
The fact that Musk is shit doesn’t make Swift not-shit. But it’s like comparing her cup of shit with Musk’s olympic swimming pool of shit on a warm summer day.
Good analogy there bud
I hate Taylor because she is a performative liberal who espouses progressive politics but doesn’t follow through making her a hypocrite.
I’m curious, I thought she wasn’t very political (just basic human decency stuff). What does she espouse and doesn’t follow through with?
IMHO that critique is fundamentally flawed. She’s selling a service (concerts) and for that she needs to fly. So all that CO2 is caused by the concert goers. Without the concert goers she wouldn’t need a jet. Of course, then it’s also a negligible amount. And presumably she isn’t flying to jets like side by side, but only uses(used) one at a time.
About the other suggestion in that article, I do not want billionaires to use their money for political purposes. This is responsibility of the voters and the government. Ideally billionaires shouldn’t exist but at the very least they should not control our politics with money.
But the real fundamental flaw is that this is a distraction. We need sweeping systematic change and focusing on individuals works against discussing that. Where is the manhattan project to R&D our industrial processes and services to not require carbon? Instead we get this kind of propaganda and “let the free market solve it”. Well what Swift does is the best the market offers. Well maybe she could switch to a Celera 500L. But maybe the concert goers should just go to concerts of local artists instead, or superstars that fly low energy jets. Lol.
I honestly have to give props to FOX news. Or the think tank that came up with this strategy to focus on Swift.
She needs to pollute so she can keep singing isn’t the defense you think it is. If anything it’s evidence of her own selfish belief that the environment shouldn’t affect her money train.
I’m sure streaming residuals and the metric tons of marketing deal money are more than enough for her to slow down and find an ethical way to travel.
She needs to pollute so she can keep singing isn’t the defense you think it is.
No, concert goers are doing the polluting. If Swift retires then you’d get other superstars using Jets instead.
It’s a systemic problem, so the strategy is to distract from the immensity of change needed. We’re not even remotely talking about what would need to be done. Basically focusing on taylor swift isn’t much different from greenwashing or outright climate change denial. Criticizing swift helps PREVENTS action on climate change.
It’s not the person organizing the event and flying people out. It’s those poor peasants that dared attend. What an argument to make.
Someone else would fly the jet is also, not a coherent defense because someone else isn’t doing that. She’s flying her own private jet right now.
It’s a systemic problem, yes. So criticize all aspects of the system to show how inherently flawed it is. All private jet travel by all celebrities should be criticized. Suddenly when it’s not Elon tons of defenders need to tell us how we should look the other way and how there’s nothing important here in this identical situation.
If anyone is trying to prevent anything, it’s Taylor sycophants throwing themselves to defend her from valid criticism.
She’s a billionaire. She could fly first class, rent out an entire train, purchase a fleet of evs or go by bus like a normal touring musician. She has plenty of options and chooses the worst one
Bro, she flies home after almost every concert instead of staying in a hotel.
She needs to fly? Sure. She needs to fly this much? Nope.
Sure, I don’t give a shit about Swift or her music either. My problem is the overly (hypocritical) focus on her, the strong language (“hate her”), the reason why this critique works so well (misogyny) and that it distract from climate action, and that it’s propaganda started on fox news.
This is an example of why we won’t do shit about climate change. We’ll burn every last bit of fossil fuel and do nothing about adaptation and then have a bunch of wars and genocides. These are the mechanisms why. That’s what’s pissing me off.
But how is making money off the music she created unethical?
It isn’t inherently unethical to make money off of music.
If you’re implying that she is an ethical billionaire though then I have bad news for you.
I thought the saying "there are no good billionaires"was because of the wage theft, unethical labour practices and tax evasion almost all billionaires commit to become a billionaire. AFAIK she didn’t do any of that. I think she is the first ethical billionaire.
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While I believe that nobody should be able to wield that much wealth in the first place, arguably being a world-famous artist is among the least unethical ways to become rich as long as the artistic work isn’t bought from ghostwriters. It takes $10 in net profit from 100m fans to make a billion, and I could easily imagine a sizable crowd of her followers genuinely wanting to give her money like that (whereas, for example, I never would have willingly agreed to give Nestlé’s leadership money, even when I used to buy their brands still).
I don’t care about her specifically, but from a “owning the fruits of your own labor” perspective, I think it makes sense for the art itself to be a big part of that.
Can’t I be upset with both of them for different reasons
mf no. no u cannot. Pick one.
Those carbon credits won’t do shit to save the planet, but at least flying less is a step in the right direction
Interesting how it worked before the whole shitstorm with all the memes started.
I wonder if those were not really about her flying but somehow related to her speaking out against trump and that was just the angle of the smear campaign to make her less credible for left people…
Man, do carbon credits work?
Very murky. Problems with even the best carbon credit companies.
Carbon recapture seems promising.
Carbon capture is promising only when we no longer rely on fossil fuels for energy generation.
That’s called planting trees. We need a huge reforestation effort to go along with eliminating co2 emissions.
In my area, drought and heat have been so bad the last few years, a lot of native trees are dying. You could try reforesting with trees native to a dryer, nearby area, but that’s generally thought of as bad practice, and there’s no guarantee they would do well in that particular soil. It seems like the climate in my area is changing to be incapable of supporting forests.
Luckily, we live in a global biosphere.
as much as I hate billionaires, it is kinda sus how disproportionately online goobers seem to hate swift. Its even worse when you consider she’s probably the only billionaire that works for a living
Yup. Tom Cruise, Jim Carrey, and Steven Spielberg have private jets too. Many more lease them.
Sure let’s talk about how it’s not cool to use a private jet, but maybe let’s not be hyper fixated on a woman that owns a private jet. Kinda makes it very suspicious that people actually just have an issue with a woman being successful.
None of them sent a cease and desist to a 19 year old kid, because he was broadcasting publicly available data about their private jets. Taylor and Elon did.
Just in the last week or so Swift sent a cease and desist to the kid tracking her and other celebrities jets, aka already publicly available information. Just like when Elon tried to stop him, by trying to stop him she has Streisand effected the situation.
If and when Tom Cruise, Jim Carrey, or Steven Spielberg send their own cease and desist, then we can start making jet memes about them, too. Until then, they’ve got other shitty things we can bring up. Cruise is a cultist, Jim Carrey is/was an anti-vaxxer, and Spielberg… actually, I can’t think of anything else for him, let the Spielberg jet memes commence I guess.
Even billionaires can’t escape sexism
Please don’t bring misogyny into this
We shame her because unlike all the other billionaires, she actually cares about her image, and shaming her actually works
She recently tried to sue someone for tracking her jet, that’s why she’s catching a lot of heat right now. It isn’t sus, its the same reaction musk got when he tried to do the same thing to the same person in 2022/23
And isn’t most of her plane pollution due to renting it? I mean still her fault but not uh physically?
She only sold her second jet on the 14th of this month.
And we can hate both, shit we hate Musk far far more than Swift but both are capitalist billionaire shitheaps.
I’m not even a Swift fan, and yeah I get that she is ultimately still a billionaire. But she played on Friday in my home city of Melbourne, and that day she donated $100k to a local food bank system. I know that’s still a drop in the bucket for her, but that’s not chump change.
However, if you do some searching, there’s a stream of news stories of her donating large amount like that or more. The day before her first Melbourne concert, she donated $100k to the family of the woman killed at the super bowl parade. Two months ago she donated $1 million to a relief fund for tennessee tornado victims. Heaps more food bank donations.
Like, can we seriously just leave her the fuck alone? Musk is an alt-right piece of shit, she’s just a talented musician that actually works for a living. And yeah, I know she doesn’t work as much as some of the rest of us, but stadium touring is still brutal. Musk just sits on his arse all day tweeting and committing labour violations.
She’s also not the child of an emerald mine owner so there’s that too.
100k to a billionaire is no more than a tip. Billionaires are a symptom of an unjust system of wealth distribution, regardless of the person. Musk also happens to be a racist numbfuck, but they’re a dime a dozen. The problem is that he’s part of a digital feudalism and wields enormous power.
100k to a billionaire is no more than a tip.
Yeah, like I already said in my comment, it’s a drop in the bucket for her. But she’s doing it over and over again. Twice this week she donated $100k. It adds up over time. Dolly Parton is worth $650 million, and she also donates significant sums of that to her book charity. They’re both trying reasonably hard to make the world suck less. Musk is actively creating more suffering. Can we not talk about them like they’re the same level of evil? What good does that bring?
Many rich people are “donating” to avoid paying taxes and it another way for marketing. You are the proof of that, you are defending and promoting her.
Billionaires like her are the reason we have poverty and charity associations
You are 100% correct that many billionaires do that. As cogman mentioned above, having a “charity” that you run yourself as a billionaire is absolutely a common tax scam. That’s not what she’s doing though. She’s actually spending the money.
Also in terms of marketing, like, are you serious? Her music speaks for itself to her fans, they don’t care about any of this. My words here aren’t going to influence someone to go listen to her music or buy a concert ticket. To believe that they could is simply ludicrous.
It’s not a literal tax scam, it’s just free PR due to tax reasons. You donate and you pay less tax
You donate and you pay less tax
As a US citizen, she is only allowed to claim donations to charities registered in the US. The $100k she just dropped in Melbourne, Australia wouldn’t be eligible for example. Therefore it’s not free PR, she actually paid about $100k for it.
Have you ever read Andrew Carnegie’s book The Gospel of Wealth? Even if Taylor hasn’t, someone close to her has. Carnegie and Rockefeller needed bodyguards to feel safe in public. All billionaires should feel the same. We forgot to call them what they are. Robber Barons.
It’s, frankly, more than most billionaires and 100 millionaires do.
Most billionaires are setting up fake charities as tax shelters so they can publicize “Elon musk gave money to the Elon musk charity for fueling billionaire private jets foundation”.
You can pretty much pick a billionaire and find that billionaire’s charity that does dog shit.
Except for Dolly Parton who apparently didn’t get the memo that she’s supposed to be scamming :D
More than most billionaires is a pathetically low bar to clear. Charities are less efficient than paying taxes to fund proper centralized systems but this way they get to hold on to the majority of their dragon hoard, not meaningfully address most of the cause they donate too, and launder their reputation to people like you that can’t see past the hollow optics.
to people like you that can’t see past the hollow optics.
Umm, ok, Like I agree with you that charities in general tend to be a bad way to solve public problems. But I’m also pointing out that charities rich people tend to contribute to are often even worse than ineffective for addressing public needs.
They both billionares. Feed them to the orphan crushing machine.
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You see, this is what I was telling some other lemmyer. All this T Swift jet stuff is distracting from the fact that private airplanes are not a major cause of green house emissions. It’s industry. They love all these memes pulling the heat off of them.
All billionaires are bad.
Elon Musk is invulnerable to cricitism because he cares about nothing and listens to nothing.
Taylor Swift can have her mind changed, it has already happened in the past, and she cares about her image. Criticism of her has a chance to land.
Also, it has nothing to do with the teenage girls. We hate the jet. The jet isn’t even in the top 10 of things we hate about Elon.
Both of 'em
Literally all of this started with people hating Elon Musk. It’s only focused on her now because she is currently harassing the guy tracking her jet.
If you went back a year or so ago, when Elon was the focus of this instead of her, would you be complaining about how a man is getting more flak than a woman?
Fuck people who hate on Swift for misogynistic reasons, but also fuck swifties who brush valid criticism off as misogyny.
And to this blatant whataboutism I can just say: humans are able to criticize more than one person. Yes, fuck Elon Musk, he is worse in uncountable more ways than her, but this fact doesn’t protect Taylor from also being criticized.
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