Hi, Swiftie here 🙋♀️
There are no good billionaires. Taylor Swift is not a good person due to her business practices. I have no defense of her and I would never say “she is one of the good ones.” I and most of the Swiftie circles I run in wish that she would practice equitable compensation in her tours (where she gets the vast majority of her profit), among other areas.
Taylor Swift is a capitalist, and that’s bad. There are thousands of artists and laborers being exploited by her every performance. All those laborers, stage hands, designers, arena staff, etc should have a say in how the massive revenue generated is distributed, and they do not get that say. That is bad.
As a majority male space, Lemmy has a tendency to slide a bit toward dunking on women and majority women’s spaces because you may not be aware that many leftist Swifties are just as critical of Swift as other billionaires. This post is a good example of that. (If you feel bad or called out by this, don’t stress it. I just want to gently course correct the conversation a tad 🙂)
It's not a matter of "nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy," it's a matter of "nobody should be allowed to be unacceptably poor."
If our civilization can generate wealth at an astronomical rate, then there is no morally defensible reason for anyone to be homeless, hungry, poorly educated, lacking medical care, drinking unsafe water, worked to death, or any of a number of other baseline metrics of civilization. All of those ills exist because wealth is funneled upwards at an unbelievable rate, leading to the existence of billionaires. All of that wealth should be used to raise everyone's standard of living, rather than give a handful of people more power and luxury than ever appeared in Caligula's wet dreams.
Of course the way that you accomplish that is by an exponentially progressive taxation system, and that will... probably make it impractical to be a billionaire, but frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
As a swiftie, I can say you're right. However, there's also no such thing as a purely good or purely bad person, and liking a billionaire does not make someone good or bad. People, it turns out, are complex.
I can love Taylor's music while also criticizing her for her excessive personal jet use and massive pollution problem.
I think if we stop making it a binary decision that more people will start opening up about changes need to make. In Taylor's case, most Swifties would never dare say anything negative about her for fear of others in the fandom thinking they aren't true fans, and vis versa, I'm sure people here will read this as I must support billionaires because I like her music. No, complex multifaceted opinions are valid.
I think we should abolish ICE vehicles. It doesn't mean I think I need to yell at family members who pull up in their 02 Camry because they can't afford to upgrade.
You live on a farm and one day a stray dog shows up. It looks like this: starving dog pic
You decide not to feed it because it's not your dog - it's not your problem.
But your whole house is completely stocked with food. You throw out large amounts
of table scraps and leftovers daily.How many people would consider that to be evil?
It's not about the behavior and character of one billionaire over another.
It's the DOING NOTHING while HOARDING MONEY that is the issue.No one can argue that $50 million isn't enough to live a fabulous life.
Yet, many want to argue that 1,000 million (1 billion) or more is fine
as long as that person worked hard and didn't step on people to get it.A billionaire is simply not a good person even if he or she does nothing.
If the entire human population was just 100 people stranded on an island in the Pacific, would we allow
1% (which in this case would just be 1 person ) to own 95% of all the resources? Hell No!I just think that at $1BN net worth or whatever, you start getting taxed on 99.99% of everything you earn or gain in worth after that.
This way people still get stupid rich, and if someone ever has $10bn you can easily just sound the alarm then and there and say nope, fuck this guy.
The tax curve just just be exponential and it should be basically vertical at $1bn.
Getting some Pol Pot vibes from this. Ideology can lead to some really weird conclusions.
Somone like Taylor Swift isn't destroying people's lives and she's not overworking other people to make that money.
Sure she has too much money, but that can be solved by having more sensible tax policies. Show me where she's bribing congress and donating to the GOP to keep her taxes low.
These kinds of memes only exist to prove how edgy people are but they don't accomplish anything. Saying "I'm so hardcore I even hate the billionaires people like" doesn't do anything other than push people away from whatever movement you claim to support.
But congratulations, you're the edgiest socialist edge lord on the internet. That sound you hear is the Swifties (who might otherwise care about the issues you care about) heading towards the door.
People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump divide people so they don't think about what they're doing. You're helping them.
CTRL + F thread for Rihanna = Phrase not found
No one has anything to say about Rihanna, or Jay-Z, or Paul McCartney?
Rihanna's worth more than Taylor Swift
Everyone's hyper-focused on Taylor Swift and Rihanna is in the same pic.
I'll share it again...
That time Oprah and Ellen cosplayed as poor people by going to the bank...
I wouldn't call her a good billionaire, but I think she's as benign as billionaires get. At least she does things like pay her employees a good wage and gets people involved in the political process.
And, as far as I know, she isn't responsible for anyone's deaths.
I'm sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid, but compared to a shit ton of other billionaires out there...
You could also argue there are no good millionaires by the same logic.
The existence of billionaires is a systemic problem, largely not a personal failing.
I'm not a swiftie, but the message here should be "We need better redistributive institutions" or "We need a new economic system", not "Artist being an unexceptional artist (in terms of industry behavior) is BAD because she is one of the more successful ones"
It's interesting to me that Swifties look over the fact that she entertains company with Patrick Mahomes' brother, someone that is in the midst of settling his sexual assault case and only received probation (likely b/c his connections). Or that she continues to attend events of an organization that routinely tries to stifle legitimate protests and would treat their players like garbage if the NFLPA didn't exist.
In the end, she's like everyone else. You look over the sins of those that are somehow tied to your group but make a huge stink about when it's others.
Swifties triggered.
I understand why Queen B or T Swift aren't doing it, but the only moral activity (beyond survival tasks) that a "good billionaire" can be engaged in is redistributing their wealth to marginalized workers.
You can figure out your next album / tour or how to benefit your friends and family once you get to 999M USD.
The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I'm not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.
For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:
Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.
Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.
A more useful question to address homelessness would be "why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?"
Oh jeeze, you mentioned Swift in a meme. I feel sorry for your inbox.
I know how to fix the economy!
After 1 million, you win at life so you can stop working and get a basic income with food included, housing, etc. You won, you don't get to play anymore. No w2 forms or banking or anything. If you buy something, the government just makes the funny money to pay for that which then means more jobs for those still playing the games. Big projects and big companies all public owned and only players get to work there and decide. Anyone who reaches the 1 Million mark gets kicked out into permanent retirement. Once you reach this level you get a party and you can invite anyone you want.
One benefit of winning is that you can be completely naked the entire time. Because why not. At your party you can request everyone to be naked too.
You can be married to a winner but you must keep working until you reach the 1million mark.
That's it!
I'm so so on this example specifically.
Most of Taylor's wealth is in the value of the rights to her songs. The liquid value she gets from those rights she is generally pretty generous with, she pays her employees very well and donated quite a bit of it.
That said, the bar is on the floor, and even a good billionaire is still pretty bad. She has much to improve
Billionaire: "So if they don't exist anymore, I'm good? How many do I have to kill?"
I would go so far as to say: they will never be a good billionaire, unless that means a median income in a poor country
A picture can express a thousand words, and leave out a billion others.
$500/ticket at the show in Vancouver.
How much does she need to feel like that she won ?
True now use another example to illustrate that big wealth divides exist everywhere.
I think it's kind of stupid that we're defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default "well, that's too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!" metric we're using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that's not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.
About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don't control it, there's probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.
No, my criticism isn't so much that billionaires aren't necessarily evil, because I think it's mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn't really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We've put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where's the cutoff, here? I'm sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.
My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what's actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that's the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a "not necessarily a billionaire" healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.
Are we really putting Taylor Swift on the same level as some of these other fuckers? Obviously she's not good, but if you compare her with Trump, musk, bezos, anyone from Walmart etc she's way better
You could point fingers to almost anyone, this is not specific to extra wealthy. All of us here probably have it better than 70% of humanity, yet we choose to watch a movie instead of go help others. Dedicating a large part of your life in helping others is very admirable, but it's not something you can expect everyone to do.
Yeah, Lemmy was super against Swift during the election.
Just stop all of the hypocritical bullshit already.
Ok so what, posts like this are to shame billionaires into giving their money away because if they don't you will call them pieces of shit?
I'm sure that will definitely work.
Maybe instead of that we can work on being involved and elect people from the ground up who will prioritize people, and consider a tax code with some teeth. It's not nearly as glamorous as meming though. Pointing your finger at billionaires for existing even though they will never see it is a bold strategy. Probably better to be pointing your finger at your lazy ass friends for not participating in even one day a year of contributing to society by voting.
