[gorgoiler]

I think there are two things that weaken Swift’s message here:

1/ There’s no need to call out gender — “be a good little girl and shut up”, referring to “these men”, etc. Not during 2019’s entertainment industry harassment crisis. This is an intellectual property rights issue but it feels like Swift is trying to nudge it in another direction, unfairly.

2/ When your net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars it seems calculating and disingenuous to try to have your way in the court of public opinion. Asking your fans to directly contact the other party in the legal dispute feels like straight up bullying.

[koonsolo]

1) You are reading something that isn't there. In the same sense "be a good boy" could be used if she was male. Maybe I'm too old for this bullshit, but what is the problem of men being men, and women being women? Do we need to avoid genders everywhere now? Give me a break.

2) What does her net worth have to do with this? She is an artist that wants to perform the songs that she wrote. Was she allowed to complain if she wasn't rich or what?

Everybody knows social media is a fast way of resolving issues with big companies. And the more famous you are, the better and faster it works.

Disallowing an artist to perform her own music also feels like legal bullying to me, she is just fighting back. Let's see if it works.

[gorgoiler]

It will be a while yet before two tyrannical men telling a little girl to shut up will fail to engender an emotive response.

I’m not a fan of identity politics, and I’m tired of the bullshit as well, which is precisely why I called it out for being weaponized in what seems like an otherwise perfectly banal bun fight between two groups of corporate intellectual property lawyers.

[whoopdedo]

> When your net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars it seems calculating and disingenuous to try to have your way in the court of public opinion.

There is precedent for it.[1] And if you consider the collective wealth of a labor union, calling a strike is a form of a "millionaire" (for a sufficiently large union) trying to have their way in the court of public opinion.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/10/history-prince...

[solipsism]

I think there are two things that weaken Swift’s message here

1/ There’s no need to call out gender

If you think that'll weaken her message, you haven't been paying attention to society lately. This will resonate strongly with the people she intends it to resonate with.

Maybe you mean it makes the message less compelling to you personally. I'm not sure Taylor cares about that though...

2/ When your net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars it seems calculating and disingenuous to try to have your way in the court of public opinion.

Again, I don't think you're thinking things through. Taylor's fans are incredibly loyal. The only people who are likely to think of this as bullying are already not her fans.

If anything, this tells me Taylor should consider politics. It seems like she knows how the game is played these days.

[gorgoiler]

Thanks for responding to my comment. I should be clearer that I think her message is weak specifically on a moral basis. That’s a bad thing because it is pretty damaging behavior to see coming from someone with so much influence over young people.

As a piece of PR though, you are absolutely right. There’s nothing weak at all in this message.

Attempting to mobilize millions of fans like this is a nuclear option not only because it is a huge expression of power, but also an apt analogy in terms of the morality of whether such power should be used at all. (Said with all due respect to the victims of actual nuclear weapons.)

[solipsism]

also an apt analogy in terms of the morality of whether such power should be used at all. (Said with all due respect to the victims of actual nuclear weapons.)

Ignoring the respect part, I don't see the analogy. No civilians are going to suffer here. She's attacking record execs. Bloodsuckers. No one's going to shed a tear.

[gorgoiler]

Society as a whole suffers when our leading society members, particularly our children’s cultural leaders, act like ass hats.

There’s potentially a moral justification for rousing up mob justice if you are marginalized to the point of having no other way of making your voice heard, but Taylor Swift is literally the opposite of someone whose voice isn’t heard.

She should go fight it in court. Leave the teenage fan club out of it.

[mathieuh]

We don’t know any context, she may have been on the receiving end of sexism and she hardly said anything egregious

[gorgoiler]

That’s true. This could be Swift’s first steps in revealing sexism’s impact on her career.

If that’s the case though, alluding to it as part of an IP rights battle seems an odd way to go about it. One would think that 2019 is the most receptive time in history for figures like Taylor Swift to come forward with explicit allegations of sexism.

[unreal37]

I'm sure Scooter Braun, who's likely got a net worth more than Taylor Swift, is going to be OK. He can take care of himself and doesn't need you to defend him.

Nobody is bullying anybody here.

[gorgoiler]

I honestly don’t particularly care for either party — neither Swift nor her former managers.

I just don’t want to find my niece writing hate mail because Taylor Swift asked her to. To that extent, it’s not the bullying or the bullied that I worry about, it’s the normalization of bullying as a behavior.

[sintaxi]

Swift has a contractual agreement in which she doesn't like one of the terms of the agreement. Rather than offering Scooter Braun something he wants in exchange for an exception she is calling on her fans to publicly apply pressure on him. This does come across as good-faith negotiation tactics to me.

[daenz]

Your argument is essentially "It's ok to use dirty and deceptive tactics against people with more net worth than you." Why is that acceptable to you?

[unreal37]

The words "dirty and deceptive tactics" are yours.

I just don't worry about people with 9 figure net worths arguing over inconsequential things.

[austhrow743]

1. I don't understand how you can both point out the existence of the 2019 entertainment industry harassment crisis and think that mentioning gender will weaken her message. People are chomping at the bit to stomp on any man that wrongs a woman at the moment. Drawing attention to her and their genders is a terrific move.

2. It feels like straight up bullying because that's what this is.

[daenz]

>but it feels like Swift is trying to nudge it in another direction unfairly

People using social issues to manipulate situations in their favor? Say it isn't so! It's the unintended consequence (intended, to some) that people have been trying to warn the ultra-identity-politics movement about. I had a disagreement with a project collaborator recently, and when I referred to them in the third person, they demanded I use different pronouns for them...different than what they advertise to everyone else publicly. What can you say to that? People are using these social talking points as unassailable offense tactics, because it's cheap and easy power. Nothing new here.