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Taylor Swift threatens legal action against student tracking her private jet
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
221 points (93.7% liked)
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She's rich enough to be able to easily afford ANY travel type possible, without having to even ask the cost, and she chooses the dirtiest and most expensive one.
If she cared about climate change, she would just intrinsically understand that paying someone else to be a good person doesn't morally justify her being a bad person (aka, how carbon credits are marketed and sold).
Instead of taking a trans-oceanic flight, she could go on a container ship or sailboat. She's a musician and I bet these experiences would be vastly more inspiring than harassing college kids through lawyers.
For domestic travel she could use a vehicle powered by restaurant waste vegetable oil (WVO) instead of fossil fuel. Or she could take an EV charged by renewable sources. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman did a 13000 mile (21000km) electric motorcycle trip in 2019 from the southern tip of Argentina to Los Angeles called The Long Way Up, their 3rd such superlong trip, and their first on electric vehicles. They loved it and called it the future, and they had support from a prototype Rivian truck, which therefore advanced the space of electric cars as well. MANY people are doing this, some rich, some poor. For our climate emissions, there's no time left for excuses either for Taylor Swift or for ourselves.
Imagining her bursting out of a container at her next gig
You realize that the vast majority of her travel is for work right? And that large corporations, even the ones that employ famous musicians, tend to expect their staff to not spend a month crossing the ocean in between gigs. It’s also kind of difficult to provide consistent security for road trips to keep from getting shot like John Lennon. pool
She's big enough that she could easily include it in her contract.
Ya, I know we did sixty shows last year and grossed over a billion dollars from it, but how about we quadruple the number of staff we have to pay to only do ten shows this year. It would be really nice if we paid hundreds of employees to live on a sailboat for three months out of the year. Not like the largest music company in the world is going to expect an increase in profits.
The problem isn't her using a plane, it's her using a private jet. Lots of those other employees are also from the area where the concerts are being held at. Very few in the grander scheme of things are also touring with the artist and the ones that are fly normal plane.
While a lot of the thousand or so staff come with the venue, a decent number tend to be part of the tour. If your going to put one part of the tour on a sailboat to minimize emissions, it seems odd to say that only the famous employees count.
Also, the problem with her flying commercial is again, in a world where a wording number of famous musicians have been shot purely by nutcases out for fame, see the likes of John Lennon, it is very difficult for celebrities to fly commercial if people can guess their itinerary, and you do need to publish that for a tour.
Yeah… add to this that she is literally being touted as a democratic psyop agent, and the numerous death threats she likely gets a day… I don’t understand how anyone could think commercial flights would ever be an option for her.
Ya, this is Taylor fuckin swift. Probably the most famous and influential person in the world, at the moment. She can do whatever the fuck she wants, essentially.
Now, I’m not saying sailing transatlantic would be feasible, but there are public planes for overseas trips, and she could travel by bus for interstate/continental shows. I don’t know anything nor do I care about Taylor swift, but I would bet that her tour gear travels by bus/truck when they’re not crossing an ocean.
We all know carbon credits are this decade’s promise to stop using child and slave labor. They shell out responsibility to a sub-sub contractor and basically absolve themselves of blame. When they got caught having clothes made by children in sweatshops in developing nations again, GAP would say, “we’ve severed ties with the company that hired that company.” But they just kept on doing the same shit. Removing yourself from the blame of your actions for comfort, in Taylor swifts case, or profit, in those retailers’ case, does not change the facts. She’s exploiting a loophole and calling a solution. Carbon credits are horseshit. They’re sub-contractors for offsetting emissions. Are those private companies that are selling these credits doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? No. It’s a business like any other. And no business cares more about the environment than they do about profits.
Of course carbon credits are bullshit, and there’s am definitely a lot more someone with a billion dollars to burn can do to actually cut their emissions, but let’s not pretend that the media paid all that much attention to her flying a lot until she started to acutely use her influence to push for things like voting for candidates that support stricter emissions laws and systematic change. Then it was suddenly very important to broadcast that she’s a big hypocrite so you shouldn’t care when she says people should do something like get out and vote.
I can also think of a lot of people with more infuance on world events than a musician, even a very famous one. Plenty of world leaders come to mind, as do the leaders of dozens of major corporations and religions.
Um….thats some crazy conspiracy bullshit.
See, as a logical person, I can get on board with bashing “the media” for being corporatist, for having profit in mind when they hype up stories and sensationalize news, for pounding the drums of war for profit, for being biased towards fairness, for being unable to give stories in context that show a crackpot for a crackpot, upholding the poisonous status quo, a lack of critical thinking, and a pretty good host of other shortcomings. But anytime someone starts talking about a unified “plot” or cohesive “media agenda,” you’re crossing way over the Liffey into crackpot world.
Why wouldn’t “the media” want people to vote? If she were making radical politics popular, if she were talking about dismantling media conglomerates or upending capitalism, then, yes, I could see a lot of outlets desperate to turn the public against her, but…”vote for Biden”—or, honestly, even just “vote” is not threatening the status quo. It’s upholding it.
“The media” would not give her endless hype and airtime and they wouldn’t lionize her for being a pop star if they were trying to “take her down.”
And by the way, “the media” still isn’t covering climate change properly, with nearly enough urgency—if they cover it at all. All these records being broken and they barely mention climate change. You think now they’re talking about climate change to distract from Taylor swift telling people to vote? Gtfoh
Really? It’s a crazy conspiracy that Rupert Murdoch, a right wing political activist, owns a critical mass of media outlets from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to Fox News and and associated outlets? That once a few of the more ‘respectable’ of his outlets run a story it’s far more likely to be picked up by other unrelated outlets doing their own take on said story because it’s now part of the conversation and represents a low effort high engagement story? There’s a reason that aggregators like Ground News can show you the same story in nearly every major outlet, and it’s not just that a lot of them come from the AP and Routers.
Or is it that someone like Murdoch would possibly think beyond one of his enterprise’s short term profits, when he personally sits on the charman’s advisory board of the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank he helps fund with the explicit goal of shaping political policy and discussion among both the US left and right?
Note, 44% of eligible US adults did not vote in the 2020 elections, and that election saw the highest voter turnout since 1900. When polled, about 44% of US adults identified as ’Swifties’, and of those 78% identified as Democratic or Independent. If we assume that Swifies are on average about as likely to stay home in november as any other, and that only the third of thouse who identified as her ‘rabid’ fans, and of those only the ones who identify as Democratic or Independent, were more likely to vote than before, that is still nearly thirty million new Democratic voters.
Do I think the actual effect is likely to be that dermatic? No. Do I think that a think tank which is funded by donations on the promise that they study such demographics and propose campaigns to aid the neoconservative cause would suggest the gobal community of networks they work with amplify an otherwise minor personal impact study on carbon emissions by giving it more airtime in the hopes that it has an effect on the fan base of someone who was otherwise getting more involved in politics, yes.
And the media does talk about Climate Change a lot. They don’t cover it well and tend to downplay its effects as well as the records we keep speeding through, but I would be hard pressed to find a single major daily newspaper that dodnt mention something to do with Climate Change or related policy at least once a day. And so and so is a hypocrite because they fly a lot is fundamentally the same exact argument as BP’s famous and highly successful 2003 advertising campaign to create the term Carbon Footprint.
Who is "we" - are you employed by Taylor Swift or an affiliated company?
No, I have nothing to do with the entertainment industry beyond a passing curiosity. I was sarcastically phrasing what any contract negotiation with the largest record label in the world to highlight just how unlikely said company is going to be ok with vastly increasing costs and number of employees in order to simultaneously massively reduce income, even if one of the employees really wants to.
There is eccentric, and then there is the point where the corporation would make more money paying an artist to not work for them becuse they cost far more to deal with then their shows could bring in.