The difference is, Elon Musk sometimes thinks that it would be pretty neat if his private jets were electric. When has Taylor Swift ever done that??
Yeah, but for every one time he thinks about making his private jet electric, he thinks 500 times about getting random women pregnant with his DNA.
That’s the difference?
I’m fine with all the billionaire hate, although I’m getting a little tired of people beating the now unrecognizable, gooey pile of horse vicera that is photoshopping airplanes into pictures (or just having ai generate a picture) and posting it as “Taylor Swift doing x”
It’s like half my feed these days.
doing both
Swift is evil, one of the most vile humans to ever exist. So is musk, buffet, bezos, rheinheart, Norman, whatever.
you have to be pure fucking filth, degenerate scum, hateful selfishness given ghoulish form to be a billionaire.
I mean we don’t need any more convincing to hate Elon. I don’t dislike Taylor, I just think the memes are funny lol
What if I hate both?
You… you cant… you just can’t do that.
Both of 'em
Can’t I be upset with both of them for different reasons
mf no. no u cannot. Pick one.
They are both bad people for different reasons. Taylor is just a corporation in human form. She regularly fucks people.
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.
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.
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.
If people don’t notice how much more society hates women for doing the same things men get away with everyday, they simply haven’t been paying attention.
If they’re only just now having it pointed out to them, after participating in the latest hate campaign, they’re motivated not to understand because they don’t want to recognise their own behaviour as misogynistic.
Talking about how they “hate both” might be true for any one person, but that doesn’t change the wider trend.
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.
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.
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’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
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.
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.
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.
of all the places, you posted this on the fediverse?
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.
