#billionaire culture

[fangirlingintellectual]

I just saw this reel where the billionaire of starbucks when put in front of the courts or something for unfair employee practices was asked, you have billions of dollars and these are your employees and he went:

I grew up in subsidized housing I came from nothing. I have worked hard for everything I have no one GAVE my money to me

And I empathise. I really really do.

I don't think its fair either how many things are harder for me then they are for the avg person

But like

Just because you grew up in a shit situation, rose from rags or some equivalent of it.

Does it mean that it gives you the right to add to the system that allows 60-75% of its people to live in sub human levels?

Roti, kapda, Makaan, aur education toh sabka birthright hai na?

And even more importantly, isn't it your duty that when you have fought the system that works against you tooth and nail and found yourself in a position of power and influence the you use said power and influence to dismantle or atleast weaken the system?

[khruschevshoe]

You know, it's rather interesting to me that Taylor Swift's parasocial relationship with her fans is honestly more akin to a YouTuber than a writer's. When I scroll through her tag on tumblr/Twitter, it's far more regarding the connection to her personal life/relationship developments than the actual metaphors/fictional story she might be telling. Everything comes back to how her songs reflect back on her relationships with Joe/Matty/Travis/Jake/insert ex-boyfriend here. And what fascinates me about it is that even though she complains about it, she leans into that very perception because it strengthens the parasocial bond.

The marketing for TTPD so clearly being about Joe Alwyn and the songs to Matty Healy. The marketing/video for Red TV so CLEARLY being about Jake Gyllenhaal, with so many of the new lines in All Too Well specifically being digs at him (I'll get older but your lovers stay my age, casting an actor that looks like him for the video, specific lines in I Bet You Think About Me). The fact that songs like Getaway Car and Bejeweled and Gorgeous and London Boy and Lavender Haze being picked apart at time of release and long after for signs of relationships crumbling. The way she uses surprise songs in relation to her relationship development with Joe/Matty/Travis. The damn TTPD "stages of grief" playlists where she deliberately undid/changed the meanings of old songs just to keep her audience speculating on her love life.

It's not sexist to point out that her wielding her love life is a marketing tool and that the strongest connection to her audience isn't the strength of her writing/the composition of her music- it's her deliberate crafting of a connection between her music and her personal life, leaving the audience invested in her music as an extension of Taylor the Person/Girlfriend rather than Taylor the Artist.

[culthermag]

A very wavy 16 Year Old Teyana Taylor shoe shopping in Harlem [ 2007 ] — [ x ]

[rebelsouljah]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[rejectingrepublicans]

They are actually less than 1% of the population. Yet Republicans have gone to war against them. Marjorie Trailer Grease bashes them daily and often with dubious pictures that are graphic. Most other Republican propagandists do the same. Republicans are bullies and cowards that pick on marginalized people. The only way to stop Nazis is to crush them before they “eradicate” you. You can not take the high road or you will be defeated and eliminated. You must rise up and destroy them with overwhelming force and conviction. Just like in World War II.

[silvermoon424]

I think we really need to acknowledge and understand how ignorant the average American is, and how the powers that be actively reinforce and feed into that ignorance because it benefits them.

Americans aren’t inherently less intelligent or empathetic than other people. It’s that American culture continually beats American exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism, hyper-individualism, apathy, etc into the minds of children until they start to believe in it because they don’t really have any other frame of reference.

It’s all to stamp out empathy and install a sense of superiority because otherwise more American citizens would be like “hey, it’s pretty fucked up that we spend so much money killing and oppressing people in other countries when our own citizens are suffering because they can’t afford healthcare. We should do something about that.” And if more Americans were actively oppressed to imperialism and protested against it, that would cause a lot of trouble for the people in power who benefit from it.

Idk man it’s just exhausting and despair-inducing when you realize how omnipresent and effective this social conditioning is in the States. Like our whole culture revolves around keeping people apathetic and complacent while a handful of insanely rich people destroy our societies and the very planet we live on because they care more about hoarding wealth than the future of our entire species.

[juniperhillpatient]

the way some of y'all speak so condescendingly to & about vegans & vegetarians or just people trying to recycle or do a little better for the world is sick actually. sorry corporations are the real problem & everything is hopeless but I'm a receptionist lmao I won't fix that in my lifetime but I can minimize the animal products I buy & recyle & try not to buy aersol products & be nice to people. sorry the idea of doing the bare minimum infuriates some of u guys to ur cores but like. get fucked

[artemis-pendragon]

The USA's billionaire oligarchs watching the working class achieve class consciousness post-Luigi

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Just another example that all the diversity and inclusion capitalism engages in is merely pageantry and performance meant to fit in with baseline social norms, this is why capitalism is perfectly compatible with likes of the KKK and Nazis.

[wendig1rl]

While swifties are coming for my ass about taylors' carbon emissions no longer being as bad as some other celebrities, let's list some other horrible things she's done:

1. Refusal to so much as speak out about Palestine (to her billions of fans), let alone donate even a penny.

2. Blatant disrespect to music icon Celine dion.

3. Dragging lana del rey on stage as a means of asserting dominance, disguised as an honorary gesture.

4. Threatening to sue a collage student for "stalking and harassment" after he used public information to track her private jet usage.

5. Capitalising on feminism, despite never actually supporting feminist organisations.

6. Appropriation of black culture and romaticisation of colonialism.

And to answer the age-old question of "well why drag Taylor swift when alot of other artist are doing the same things she does?"

I do drag other artists. And them coincidentally also being horrible people does not make taylors actions any better, and the difference between her and other artists is that she is a fucking billionaire. There is no ethical way on this entire earth to become a billionaire. She is not a feminist. She does not care about you or your rights.

[whywoulditho]

last week my friend sent me a screenshot of her top spotify artists and was like "how tf is taylor swift my number one artist i literally just listened to one of her songs yesterday ONCE." since we're control freaks we like to stalk our own consumption so we go on this website called statsforspotify like every week to check our top lists and send each other etc. so upon hearing this and laughing at her a bit i went to see my own list and miss taylor was on my top 10 too.

but here's the thing, i literally have her BLOCKED on my spotify. like i could not have listened to any of her songs even accidentally. but somehow she seemed to make it all the way to the sixth place on my list. the website gives you a listening history graph for each artist and when i looked at hers it showed a huge jump in the last four days. here's the graph and her profile on my spotify that literally shows the blocked icon (🚫)

but i would remember if i had listened to her that much in the last four freaking days.

so my theory is that either there's a bug in the website... or miss taylor swift is quite humiliatingly buying streams. and that's the funniest fucking thing i've seen in a long time so i had to share it. she's so desperate. this isn't even a hate post, i genuinely don't care if you enjoy her music. i just hate her as a person and i blocked her on every platform and stopped streaming her music a few months ago with the #BlockOut2024 movement. i'm not trying to catch beef with swifties here, literally stay away from me. but you have to admit this is fucking hilarious. america's sweetheart is so desperate to be the number one in every single chart on the planet that she released dozens of different versions of the same lame ass songs and released dozens of different vinyls of the album with slightly different shades just to recover from what she lost in the blockout, and now she's so pissed she's no longer number one on spotify that she's BUYING STREAMS 😭😭

she's like a spoiled little rich kid stomping her feet crying that not everyone is paying attention to her

[astromechs]

tbh i find the swifties and the taylor swift haters equally annoying at this point

[cubikzoa]

Feeling like someone should run a similar sort of spambot generator that we get on Tumblr on Twitter. But it’s all Elon Musk bots with bootleg Elon profile pics and their posts and comments still sound like Elon, because let’s be fair, that’s easy bc he’s stupid and predictable.

Just, like, a billion different fake Elons and one real Elon like one giant game of spambot Among Us. Absolute chaos and desolation. The final squeaky rubber nail in the Twitter Clown Coffin.

I think he would be so absolutely infuriated he’d turn red and explode like a Looney Tunes character

[evilkaeya]

oh they're primo baiting people to explore natlan now huh

[corncaub]

Lower- and middle-class conservatives really need to stop defending the billionaires and mega-corporations just in case their fantasies about joining the 1% come true, and instead start defending the poor, homeless, and disabled, because there's a much more real possibility they might end up in one of those groups themselves. Or they could do it because they care about the well-being of their fellow human beings. Either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯