this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago

So, two things: I never said people should be billionaires, I said there's a difference between her and Bezos. You can't pretend that a $12 album, or Spotify streaming costs are the same as making people pee in jugs for minimum wage. One of them is actually doing things that people like in exchange for money, and people are saying "yes, I would like to spend my disposable income on this luxury good" often enough that she has more wealth than she can ever spend. Extracting wealth isn't the same as exploitation.

Second, if you exclude the value of her music catalog, she's not a billionaire. If she sold every piece of real property she owned, and gave away every last penny, he net worth would still be in excess of $500M on account of that. It doesn't seem quite fair to say that someone is terrible because the things they made are worth more than an arbitrary line of "a few million". Saying that someone is hoarding by just owning something they made that people say is worth a lot of money is judging someone for something largely out of their control.

None of this has anything to do with someone being "left leaning" in any case. Left leaning isn't some short hand for ethical purity of being a member of the proletariat or even the working class. Saying that someone who publicly and materially supports progressive causes is "left leaning" seems pretty fair and reasonable.

I don't particularly care about swift being some bastion of goodness. I also don't actually care if someone has a billion dollars. I do care if they exploited people to get it. I care if they exploited people to get less than a billion. So lumping people together by the number without focusing on the conduct misses the point.