Good point, I just updated the link

The whole thing is hilarious. The artists asked permission from the park service, which was granted. Then, obviously, Trump’s people got mad, and Park Police and some various unmarked vehicles showed up and tipped it over (which broke in Trump’s head among some other damage) and removed it. The artist was irritated, because her permit specifically said that it was to be given security and not removed (And also she was supposed to get notice if it was going to be removed, showing some level of awareness of the realpolitik involved I think. She did not receive the promised notice.)

Anyway, she was given back the pieces of the statue, and repaired it, and now it’s back. Some of the same unmarked vehicles were hanging around when they put it back up, and lo and behold they put it back up, undeterred, showing a certain level of commendable courage and a good value system, I think.

They are never as strong as they want you to think they are. Everything they do depends on someone else’s cooperation, and cooperation is always a slippery thing for certain types of regimes to maintain.

I mean she’s not completely wrong. Israel seems to have, at the very least, ignored some pretty clear indications that the attack was about to happen, and then once it happened they killed more than a few hostages by shooting at them on purpose, and then once they were taken back to Gaza Israel has been consistently sabotaging any attempt at a ceasefire that would enable them to get the hostages back, because their main goal is to kill Palestinians and Hamas killing Israelis and still having them hostage is a good way for them to enable that goal and hurry it along, so they don’t want to screw up that “good” thing.

I do think the way this particular tweet is framed is kind of inflammatory and nonsensical yes, even if it is vaguely in the neighborhood of factual. The author is a known crazy person. She happens to be coincidentally doing pro-Palestinian messaging right now which makes her temporarily on the right side of history but the “cuckoo bird” energy you’re getting off this tweet is pretty firmly in keeping with her usual MO.

I’m sucking my thumb and heating up some chicken soup right now as we speak.

Bird flu is still out there too, and it seems likely that by the time it figures out humans, the US public health apparatus will be basically destroyed.

Ever lived through a plague in the middle ages? Would you like to?

What’s the worst that could happen

Yeah. Issues of wealth inequality in the US aside, I think it is indicative of how well the lemmy.ml hivemind grapples with factual reality (which is, it doesn’t).

Yeah. All good.

“She didn’t get there through album sales, she got there through hoarding real estate and becoming a landlord, and investing heavily in the corporations that have ruined our lives.” was specifically what the lemmy.ml people said that I disagreed with.

The actual reality is that she made a little over 2 billion dollars in her career, almost all of it on selling tickets to live shows, and then… (lost half a billion? taxes? unclear) and now her net worth is $1.6 billion of which 10% ($150 million) is real estate. That makes sense to me. If you want to say our whole system where someone can spend $150 million on real estate is fucked (and it sounds like you do), I will completely agree with you. If you want to pretend she’s at heart a parasite and bad person because she directly physically traveled around and performed shows in front of enough people that they each bought their individual ticket and she got a cut and it all added up to billions of dollars, I will disagree.

I feel like it’s also an example of the kind of “I like to attack people as a way of indicating my displeasure with the wider system, because it’s easy and emotionally satisfying, and all issues are black and white now” Lemmy brain thinking.

My point is that you can also pick out people who are highly regarded who haven’t said anything about some particular issue, without it being any type of bad thing about them. People are just allowed to say or not say what they want. I just wanted to bring up a different particular example about it to show the principle.

Nts nts nts

Yeah, and that part is fine. More what I was talking about was insisting that she’s secretly a real estate magnate and music is just her side hustle. A more textbook example of “every bad thing is true of people I don’t like” would be hard to arrive at.

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=palestine&type=All&listingType=All&creatorId=8169&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=false

Why has Nutomic SAID NOTHING ABOUT PALESTINE FOR THE PAST 4 YEARS, or the Gaza flotilla, or the genocide by starvation that is HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, and look he doesn’t even know the difference between the “Gaza flag” and the Palestinian flag

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=lemmy&type=Comments&listingType=All&creatorId=8169&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=false

IS MONEY LEMMY ALL THAT MATTERS TO HIM

This is why I think this whole line of argument about Taylor Swift is especially stupid. People can say what they want to say, or not. I’m not in charge of badgering Nutomic to take any particular “stand” on any particular issue, or weigh in on any particular genocide. It doesn’t make him a bad person if he doesn’t. He can say what he wants about Palestine, or trans issues, or really, anything. Same for Taylor Swift.

I do kind of agree with giving people grief about particular brain-dead or evil takes (Nick Cave’s fell into that category to me.) But most of this stuff just seems like a way to try to harass any public figure into supporting exactly what someone has decided they “should” support, and I don’t think they should be obligated to do that.

Fuckin’ thank you man.

There are way too many people in this comments section who are thoroughly committed to snatching defeat from the jaws of this good development or finding a way to fit it into their totally counterfactual way of looking at US law enforcement.

I’ve interacted with US cops from a lot of different POVs, from having friends who were victimized by the old school of corrupt US policing, to having friends-of-friends who were both cops and criminals, to a little interaction with the system myself. This reductive bullshit helps no one. Here’s how I see it: Pretty much any group of people that you give power to without checking up on them is going to abuse it. That was US policing for many many years, until in the pretty recent past we actually started making serious efforts to punish bad behavior by the cops, and look at that, they got a lot more reasonable. Pretty much every instance where some cop did something heinously fucked up, in the last few years, has followed up by them not just getting fired but brought up on charges. It hasn’t stopped, because they are human and there will always be “bad people” in the world, but it’s not this wild street gang loose on the streets like it used to be.

(Well, mostly. Institutional corruption can keep some particular agencies corrupt for a long long time. NYPD and LASD are probably the worst that I’m aware of in that regard, and I’m sure there are some small town departments that are fucking horror shows. And they usually see protestors as “the enemy” which sure isn’t fuckin great, I can talk more about that too. But what I am trying to say is that they’re not the cartoon villains that almost everyone on the left seems to habitually get all unanimous about them being.)

I have no idea how far it’ll go. Historically, Chicago was a pretty corrupt department and I have no idea whether they have gotten better (and I can absolutely guarantee that there are some individual Chicago cops who would rather be ICE right now and play-act as them any time they have a chance.) But if they’re beefing with ICE, then good for them. It’s that simple, and I have no idea why people are trying to say any different.

https://www.investopedia.com/taylor-swifts-path-to-a-billion-dollar-empire-key-moves-that-built-her-wealth-11798194

She made about $1.6 billion mostly from ticket sales, and then spent $150 million of it on real estate. Where are you getting this idea that she made her money in real estate or investment?

She literally sang songs, people liked them, and each of those people individually decided to pay money for the songs, and some of it went to her. She has this large wealth because she directly created what was going to create the enjoyment on the behalf of that large a number of people. Almost every other billionaire is there because they were able to set up an empire where someone else’s hard work and talent went into their pocket instead, but hers is different.

I get it if you want to say that the system should change so that everyone involved in the physical intermediate steps of the process should also get a thriving wage, even if she gets less, and yes that is definitely accurate. But saying “she’s a bad person” as a result and in particular that you don’t see her as “any different” from Elon Musk or Larry Ellison is just living in a big virtue-signaling fantasy world.

Yeah. Like imagine if someone had made this exact same video about Roger Waters, picking out his weird public statements about Ukraine and then lumping him in with a bunch of people who said things that were much worse, saying he’s a POS, brainwashed, and fuck him, and putting him on their enemies list as a result. It’s just weird. People can say what they want to say.

I mean I generally liked Nick Cave’s music quite a lot, so finding out he is a POS in at least this one respect was definitely relevant I guess. I agree with you, I didn’t have much issue with anything Roger himself had to say. But the host is the literal personification of the right-wing “cancel culture” caricature.

Out of all the billionaires, people want to pick on the one who got there actually by her own merit instead of by taking advantage

1. Elon Musk ruining what was otherwise an absolutely groundbreaking electric car company before he got involved
2. Trump