Worm

I think this is a thorny question. The difficulty is that most celebrities are not just selling you a product, they're selling you a parasocial bond. When you enjoy an artist's music, films or tv shows, it's not the same emotional experience as enjoying a new toothbrush you bought from Oral B. With the toothbrush, you don't start feeling warm fuzzies for the guy who designed it or the team who made the marketing campaign, but with a public facing celebrity and their artistic output, you begin to feel like you are enjoying something about the person that made the music as well as the music itself, like your ability to relate to it and be moved by it speaks to something alike within you and within the celebrity, a bond of sameness that could be conceptualised as 'friendship but for the fact that we haven't actually met yet'. Cultivating this bond is extremely beneficial for the artist, because economic decisions you make to support them are now motivated by underlying feelings of loyalty and parasocial friendship rather than a pure value assessment of whatever product they're selling (see: buying 5 variants of the same album). But the parasocial bond is built on one thing above all else - identification with the artist. Whether that's seeing yourself reflected in their music, their race/cultural heritage, their fashion/style, and yes, their stance on important social and political issues. I think that's ultimately at the root of why people are so invested in the minutiae of the political views of people who are, by most accounts, extremely unqualified to weigh in on difficult and controversial matters of policy. The illusion of parasocial friendship is a shaky one, and any wrong step can quickly sever that feeling of identification, leading to an outsized emotional reaction of deep betrayal and disavowal of the celebrity. And equally it probably feels wrong to you to have a friend who does not share your opinion on this big political issue that is very important to you, so silence can only be tolerated for so long as well.

The reasons for this are actually pretty complex. The price of making a blockbuster has risen to $200-$350 million which makes any big movie an extremely large financial bet for the studio executives making it. And with such a big bet, the natural drive is to reduce uncertainty and make it less of a gamble. So to accommodate this, the movie making model has basically transformed from the traditional model where a film is written in full and then shot, to one which is much more like software development where you iterate on a movie and continuously improve it through test screenings and post production, meaning a lot of the movie is actually created now in the edit as you incorporate all that feedback and data to push it towards a version that audiences will most respond to. Test screenings are a huge culprit. Studios will look at audience reactions to characters, story beats, set pieces, humour, and anything disliked or confusing is cut from the movie whilst actors that resonate are promoted and given more screentime, new characters are added in, characters can be cut out of scenes, climaxes change, entire sequences are reshaped through ADR and editing, romance sublots are cut or added, character beats are removed and have to be added in expository dialogue to make the script still work, the ordering of events can change and the entire film is malleable to input from marketing if franchise direction changes midway through a shoot or a planned tv show is cancelled and beats now have to be incorporated into the film. It's a modular style approach to movie writing where everything is hot swappable and interchangable, nothing is set in stone, and stories are now written to be maximally adaptable and facilitate continuous iteration and reconfiguration during post production as more test screening data comes back in. And the obvious big cost of this is narrative. Film scripts are no longer set up as a chain of dominoes each leading inevitably to the next in the way that competent traditional stories are constructed, which is the main source of their tension and propulsion. Without this, less narratively restrictive tools rise to the fore - big set pieces, humorous dialogue, characters behaving coolly rather than having complex, backstory driven beats leading to inner development. The writing process itself anticipates that this kind of post production adaptation will be necessary, so scenes are written as a much more open ended collection of rearrangable blocks that have less finality and are less causally tied to events before and after them in the current draft, with the idea that the final narrative will emerge in the edit after extensive revision and rearrangement. In short, movie executives are pursuing an endlessly adaptable product, and the cost of that is the inevitability and finality of a traditional movie with a well constructed narrative.

It's wild to me that the guy taking a surprise unconsented sh*t in your mouth ended up being the mild prelude to the true horror of the story

The issue is that the online climate in 2026 and her own 'spotless' image make it very difficult for her to voice any of her grievances openly, whether justified or not. And with her extreme success and wealth, she could target any artist on the planet and still be accused of punching down. But you wanted evidence. I think the strongest kind of evidence here is not connecting the dots on past behaviour, but instead identifying a pattern and making a (falsifiable) future prediction about it. So first think about someone in Taylor's position working under the constraint that they cannot openly be seen to target any of their rivals. What kind of leverage does she have, what power can she bring to bear? The strongest tool in her arsenal is using her broad public appeal and massive media spotlight to draw attention from other artists' success and projects, diminishing them and directly impacting revenue and chart positions. This is also one of the tools that is most visible to us. So that's the pattern. Targeted attention stealing to directly hurt her rivals by making announcements, releasing projects and dropping variants on the same day that they are releasing something major. What would this look like, versus an artist just releasing her projects when they're ready? And a harder question - how do you distinguish 'directly targeting and stealing a rival's shine' from 'pursuing her own commercial success as much as possible, sometimes at the expense of her competition - but with no more targeted intent or malice than is inevitable under a competitive capitalist system'? To me, the only real way to get a sense of this is to have an eye to all of her releases and, over time, develop a gut feeling or intuition about whether it all looks entirely innocent, whether it looks like a competitive businesswoman pushing for her own success with some inadvertent casualties along the way, or whether you feel there is something more intentional and malicious hidden beneath the plausible deniability. So that's my proposed evidence. Each time she announces something, releases something, or surprise drops a new variant in her next album cycle, look at what else is coincidentally happening that day. And start to mentally tally up how often it happens to coincide with something an alleged rival is doing. It's not really worth litigating individual announcements, since there will almost always be a plausibly deniable reason for why the date could have been chosen. But just observe her actions and, over time, see what your gut tells you. Are you becoming more convinced of her innocence? Less convinced? See where the feeling leads.

I think these arguments actually disguise and conceal an uglier side to the current touring dynamic that people often overlook. Since major artists have started selling their tickets for astronomical prices when they do have the star power - and in some cases using things like dynamic pricing to squeeze every last dollar they can out of their fans, leveraging all of the demand that they have - they're effectively using their positions as market leaders to say to fans "you can afford to see me in concert if you only see me in concert". In 2026 the idea of utilising your disposable income to see a range of artists live has become pretty intractable, even if cheaper tickets for smaller acts were routinely available. Much of the consumer spend has been concentrated on the biggest of the big now that those acts have realised what they can get away with charging, leaving little room for anyone else in the touring world. Sadly, spending hundreds and hundreds just to see your fave live (and no one else) has become the new norm, and I don't think this is a problem that will go away if smaller artists just 'become more realistic' with their prices.

What convinced me this conspiracy doesn't withstand scrutiny is that it wasn't just a televised event that people watched across america that could theoretically have been faked in a studio - it was a huge, continuous event happening physically in space that could be monitored around the world using radio, radar and even optical telescopes to track the trajectory and signals coming from the mission. And don't forget that one of those observers - the USSR - had every reason to want to discredit the moon landing as part of the space race. Soviet listening stations would have intercepted the radio signals coming from the spacecraft and would undoubtedly have identified anything erroneous about those deep space transmissions (based on the physics of them, which would have been very difficult or impossible to fake), and I can't see any plausible reason they would have wanted to keep that fact a secret.

This is a human rights issue where the human rights of both groups are directly opposed. Respecting the human rights of one side requires you to reduce the respect you show to the human rights of the other side. That makes it messy and incredibly thorny to figure out the morally correct choice. There is a ton of grey area in this case as a result. An easy human rights issue looks like this: is it ok to let a company fire an employee because the employee became disabled and now has to use a wheelchair? A difficult human rights issue looks like this: is it ok to infringe individual privacy in the name of national security that protects the health and lives of society at large? Should we let a baker refuse to make a cake for a gay marriage because of her religious beliefs? Or the internet's favourite topic du jour: is suppressing hate speech a defence of equality or a dangerous erosion of liberty? Language like "ableist" is simply inapt to cover issues that involve any kind of nuance or grey area. The whole point of that language is to reduce things to black and white, good or bad, right or wrong - making it simple and clear cut by condensing all nuance into a binary. It doesn't work like that here. Calling someone ableist for responding emotionally to a racial slur might be well-intentioned (if we're working very hard to give the benefit of the doubt) but it is very clearly the wrong language choice to fit this situation because it collapses any possibility for counter-argument or respect or consideration to be given for the competing rights of minorities not to be subjected to racial slurs. You're right to object to its use here and to highlight the damaging consequences. "Ableism" language is effective and appropriate in cases where we're just asking "is it wrong to discriminate against disabled people?", like in the wheelchair at work example. But here we're asking "how do we handle a situation where any affordances to protect the human rights of one side is to the detriment of the human rights of the other?" And using the word 'ableist' adds nothing to that - it just invokes the concept that "disability discrimination is wrong", which is good and correct but devoid of any substantive function here. It's simply not useful for enhancing the discussion and doesn't take us anywhere. I've (gently) been trying to advocate for the rights of the disabled man in this thread because I am also disabled and empathise, but there has indisputably been a very stark difference between the grace and understanding afforded to the man with tourettes and his sympathisers, versus anyone reacting emotionally to the racial slur, expressing outrage or advocating for the actors/black community at large. This is de facto unequal treatment and inequality that is in no way excused by the underlying debate being a grey area. I can only guess at how much further damage witnessing this difference in treatment must have done to affected communities and individuals, in addition to hearing the original slur. It is important to acknowledge that (and the few instances of actual, clear cut ableism without excuse do not detract from it). "What ends up being worse?" is difficult to answer conclusively and a genuine grey area. Despite that, there are a number of much more clear cut questions that we can tackle effectively: - Is there anything that can be done to enhance the rights of both parties without disadvantaging either? (sensible precautions around the original event and its broadcast) - How much of the potential rights infringement and damage here can be offset onto institutional responsibility (the bbc/BAFTAS) rather than trying to litigate against individual actors and risking their rights to do so? - How do we make sure that both groups have opportunity to advocate for their rights and an equal voice in the discussion surrounding it in the aftermath? (prioritising empathy for both sides and reducing accusatory, binary language that collapses nuance and prevents counter-argument) - Can we leverage this unfortunate experience as a learning opportunity for both tourettes awareness and for how quickly and easily it seems like the rights of the black community are brushed aside, minimised and sidelined the second there is any reasonable excuse to do so? - What is the best way for the parties involved to handle the situation in the aftermath in order to reduce the harms that have been inflicted now that everyone has had the time and space to take conscious, deliberate action? - What lessons can be learned to stop this ever happening again? - And yes: are there any actions here that can be condemned as inexcusable without detriment to the rights of disabled people or the black community? (no one at the BAFTAs even bothering to speak to MBJ and Delroy afterwards feels particularly egregious to me; and I'm severely under-impressed by both statements/"apologies" we've been given that show such a blithe disregard for the hurt and harm caused by the involuntary actions, and in no way justified the length of time taken to release them)

I'll charitably say that your observation isn't wrong, but it is also just pointing at the entire basis for the song. It can all be boiled down to the line "caught in a bad romance". As a piece of music, it's designed to model obsessive attraction that oscillates between desire and revulsion, is never allowed to stabilise, and just keeps circling the same one idea without any hope of being able to break out of that. It doesn't sound like a beautiful, rising melodic arc because that's not the point of the song - it is trying to feel trapped, static, and feel like you're stuck in this one idea that you cannot break free from. That's why the verses have such a rigid pulse, a flat melody line, clipped and repetetive phrasing, why the song has a psuedo ritualistic repetitive hypnotic chant (?), and harmony that never opens up or explodes. That's also why the oooh ooh oooh parts stand out so much because they are the one raised, lyrical melodic line you get anywhere in the song - because the entire rest of the song is about doubling down on relentless obsession, but that one moment in the second half of the chorus is where the narrator is able to take a small step back and glimpse the emotional tragedy of the situation. That was my interpretation anyway - that the song is designed to be addictive, but it is not designed to be melodically satisfying. But wtf do i know, I didn't write it lol

I think there's something pretty important getting largely overlooked in all this - and that's the question of where responsibility really sits for what happened. The two questions people are focusing on: "do the people who heard the slur have a right to be upset?" (Yes, obviously, how is this even a question); and "could he control it? Why that word? Was it really involuntary?" (a technical, in depth issue that requires specialised knowledge of neuroscience to really address) are both emotionally charged and volatile, and for good reason, but they're subordinate to a more primary concern in any disability case. And that's the question of: why did this happen? Who was in a position to prevent it happening? What could have been done to predict and manage this situation ahead of time, and limit the scope of its consequences through proper planning? Who's responsibility was it to do that? Since it happened in the UK, I'll give the UK law perspective. This awards show is a commercial event is run by BAFTA. BAFTA: Organises the ceremony Controls the venue Controls the broadcast Sells advertising Licenses the event Makes money and builds brand value from it Has the freedom to make any decision they want around how the show is handled Even though BAFTA is formally a charity, the awards ceremony is a major commercial media product with sponsors, advertisers, and broadcasters. They are the ones with power and resources. They are the ones in direct control and who are making arrangements. They are the primary entity benefiting from the entire show. So under both UK law and basic ethical reasoning, responsibility sits primarily with them to prevent individuals with disabilities being disadvantaged by the arrangements and decisions BAFTA has made in the course of setting up this awards show and deciding how to run it and what measures to put in place around it to handle foreseeable disruption. Disability law is very clear on this: since they are the ones who want to put on this commercial show, they are under a duty to do so in a way that makes reasonable adjustments for those with disabilities and make plans around them - their literal job was to allow him to attend the show in a way that would prevent his disability from becoming a public harm to him, to the actors, and for everyone viewing the show online and at home who would be disturbed by having to witness it. At a basic level you have to ask yourself - is this a story about a disabled individual and whether he was racist, whether he meant it, whether he's sorry for it, whether anyone else has a right to be upset? Or is this a story about a powerful organisation failing to accommodate disability in a high-pressure, profit-making environment, and allowing predictable harm to happen as a result? Under UK disability law, if you are running a public, high-profile event and you know someone has a disability that may cause disruption, you are expected to make reasonable adjustments. That means you don't exclude the person, you don't pretend the issue doesn't exist, and you actively plan to reduce harm.These are all the ways I can think of that BAFTA can and should have tried to avoid harm, which as far as I'm aware are just normal broadcast tools: Seat him away from sensitive microphones Use muting/censorship systems Provide a private box Position sound dampening Brief production staff Have contingency plans Agree safeguards in advance Have support staff present Edit the slur out of the f*cking broadcast???? These tools exist precisely to manage unpredictable situations like this one. Not using them is a choice, and it's BAFTA's choice. A choice that had the effect of failing to accomodate a disabled person, exposing him to public backlash, allowing his disability to become a spectacle, amplifying harm to others, and yet allowed them to profited from the broadcast anyway. When you look at it objectively, who created the conditions for a disabled man to shout an extremely charged racial slur at a prestigious award show on live television? The disabled man? Who suffers from largely involuntary, but foreseeable behavioural tics? Or the entity that runs the whole thing and is the primary benefactor of the event? Ultimately BAFTA's mismanagement put a disabled person in an inadequately supported position, it exposed actors to a horrific racial slur at an extremely inopportune moment sullying what would otherwise have been a highlight of their careers, it created a viral controversy that they will benefit from the attention it brings, and so far they've avoided accountability for it. Remember that when you direct anger that the individual, you're letting the institution off the hook for their culpability and failings. And as an aside, I suspect this is likely the reason why an apology has not been forthcoming - the disabled man likely has a legal case against BAFTA that could be negatively affected if they make a statement or apology that could be perceived as an admission of guilt, they are having to contend with what it means for them as a spokesperson for people with their disability to apologise for behaviour arising out of their disability that the medical consensus amongst qualified professionals agrees is involuntary and not possible for the individual to control or shape, they are presumably also facing an extreme amount of negative emotions and feelings of futility around their lifelong disability and inability to control it, wondering if they've just ruined their entire career in one awful moment etc. None of this is to downplay any of the harm that has been done to the victims of his outburst or to say that they are not owed an apology or their hurt dosen't matter, I'm simply raising it to make the point that there are plausible reasons for the delay in issuing an apology that have nothing to do with bad faith on the part of the disabled man, so it is probably too soon to reach a foregone conclusion about his guilt and culpability based on his silence. But regardless - there will be a response from him at some point, and people are entirely free to make whatever inferences they feel justified at that time once he's said his piece. It's just a little too soon to draw such confident conclusions about it yet (in my personal opinion, that others are of course free to disagree with).

I can understand why people would be skeptical about the argument 'his disability gives him an excuse to say racial slurs' because it sounds incredibly dubious on its face (not to mention that it requires a historically persecuted minority to 'bear the burden' of a white man's disability when it has nothing to do with them, they have no capacity to defend themselves against such abusive outbursts from people with tourettes, and it's terrifying to have to live in fear of having to deal with that at any time, in any venue (even the damn baftas), just any time someone else decides to make it your problem you are helpless against that. And worse still, that same group are being told 'they are not allowed to feel the very obvious and justified emotional response that hearing that slur would trigger' because of it, since a disability is involved so their feelings are not just invalid but also make them morally wrong for feeling emotions after hearing the n word hurled at members of their community who are world famous actors who should command the respect commensurate with their extremely impressive artistic contributions). All of that is an incredibly bad look and would require a high burden of counter argument to displace - so people in this thread are not wrong for being defensive about it and showing skepticism towards any purported justification of him saying the slur. But here is the important nuance. The disability is not being used as an excuse for someone saying a racial slur. The disability is being used as the causal mechanism for what caused the slur to be spoken at all - in effect, they're not saying 'yeah it was bad that he said it but he's disabled so cut him some slack', what they're actually saying is 'the disability was for all intents and purposes the entity that spoke the slur through his mouth, and the man didn't do it through any decision or action of his conscious will at all'. Essentially, something analogous to having an epileptic fit and losing control of your body, except the 'fit' in this case is your body saying extremely inappropriate slurs. This again is a pretty extraordinary claim to make and a very difficult one to parse for people who do not have experience with involuntary behaviours in the brain. Skepticism in these circumstances is logical, healthy, and frankly the bare minimum needed to actually show some semblance of care about protecting minorities from being subjected to hearing extremely charged racial slurs. It is an extraordinary claim and it needs an extraordinary justification. I think it all comes down to the question of 'why would he choose that slur out of everything else he could have said, if it wasn't already floating around somewhere in his brain or he didnt secretly think that and just voice the thought that most people would have been able to keep private?' Here is the medical argument: The brain does not store all words equally - it does not encode 'banana' in your memory the same way it encodes a racial slur. This is because It attaches a property called 'salience' to different words, kind of a measure of relevance and 'charged-ness' that it attaches to the word like a score, and then whenever a relevant topic comes up, the thoughts with the highest salience scores will bubble up first. You can see why a racial slur would be tagged in memory as one of the highest risk words because it is implicated across so many domains: social punishment, shame, fear, strong emotions, moral rules etc. So a slur is going to be encoded in memory and tagged as one of the highest salience options because it is tied into emotional and threat systems in a way that 99.9999% of words are not. From early childhood, you learn: "Never say this" "This gets you in serious trouble" "This is dangerous socially" And as a result these words become: Highly overlearned Emotionally charged Quickly retrievable It's like storing the word in a file marked CRITICAL: DO NOT OPEN. And this ironically makes them neurologically 'heavy'. So slurs are prioritised in tourettes sufferers because they have high salience, and you would expect a non-racist brain to tag racial slurs with just as much salience as a racist one (possibly more, because the taboo seems greater if you can appreciate the moral wrongness of using a slur). The other tentpole of the scientific explanation is the question of how big a part tourettes really plays over inhibition control, or to what extent was he actually just a helpless passenger witnessing the word come out of his mouth like he was someone else's puppet? The neuroscience of this part is very complicated and involved so I won't go into the minutia of it, but essentially the takeaways are that tourettes often feels to its sufferers like motor/vocal output happens without any conscious thought to generate it, and the inhibitory systems that don't work in tourettes brains are at a very subconscious level so a neurotypical individual would not even be aware of the 'salient thought that is inappropriate and gets inhibited' neurochemical process that fails in tourettes individuals. All in all, this is a sh*tty situation for everyone involved that has a lot of complexity underneath it and I honestly feel bad for all parties.

To me there's a pretty obvious and broad musical purpose being served by most of these. If you take "P-p-p-poker face" as an example, it's just a repeated hammering of the b note (in 8ths) that becomes percussive: (b)---(b)---(b)---(b)---(b)----(b)--- P P P poh ker face What would a normal artist have done instead? probably just elongated the vowels and sung the b notes as three quarter notes: (b)---------(b)---------(b)------- pohhh kerrrrr faaaaceee So it's really just a simple musical substitution of emphasising sustain for emphasising rhythm, which gives it stronger groove (important for dance music). But at its core it's as basic as splitting one piano note in half and playing it twice. The innovative part is taking such a simple concept and applying it to vocals, in a way that it usually isn't.

I feel like the difficulty with this perspective is that it overlooks a lot of important nuance: - just because being with a major label has both positives and negatives, it doesn't mean that the overall package you get when you sign with them is in any way fair or balanced; - there is a gross inequality of bargaining power between prospective artists (often broke, desperate teenagers) and the major record labels they want to sign with, meaning the artist basically has no power to negotiate or modify individual unfair contractual terms before they accept them. They just have to sign an unfair deal and hope they don't end up one of the unlucky ones who gets screwed over; - which is made much worse by the major labels having a combined monopoly/oligopoly over music, shielding them from the free market pressures that would ordinarily force them to offer fairer contracts to avoid new talent being poached up by the first competitor to offer a more reasonable deal; - and the brand of unfairness hidden in these contracts is particularly venomous because it gives the record label the free choice of whether to operate the contract in the usual fair way the artist expects where they get to release music and have a career, or to keep them in contractual purgatory hell for years and years without being able to release anything. The artists who ended up with the latter did not knowingly accept it as a downside that comes along with the upsides of signing to a major label - they were forced to roll a dice because of the corrupt, exploitative system they work in, and they just had to pray they wouldn't lose the gamble; - all of this is pretty universally agreed to be anathema to fair contracting practice and is tantamount to economic entrapment, tying up an artist's livelihood, stalling their income and legally preventing them from making money off of music through any other means in the meantime.

Billboard is intended to be a chart that measures an artist's overall success. Success can be viewed as a combination of two metrics: global popularity (fan engagement) and commercial impact (sales & stream income). Typically artists do not just care about their level of popularity in isolation - what also matters is their conversion rate of listeners and fans into hard sales and numbers (see: Taylor Swift). Billboard has historically weighed subscription data higher than ad-supported data to reflect this. Its stance has always been to view paid engagement as a stronger indicator of fan commitment and popularity, and a paid stream as a higher value fan than an ad-supported one. Where does youtube come into this? In comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, the bulk of their streams are from ad-supported users, not paid subscribers. So the effect of billboard weighing free streams less than paid streams is actually that it weighs the data from the youtube platform as a whole far more weakly than Spotify and Apple Music. This matters a lot for youtube because billboard's rules influence how the industry defines value, power, and legitimacy, and having equal weighting would greatly improve youtube's negotiating power when it comes to labels, label marketing and advertisers. In the current market youtube has less value and less prestige, despite having the greatest global reach, being the key driver of viral hits (with tiktok), and being highly represented in emerging markets and youth demographics. So pulling out from billboard is basically youtube saying "either recognise mass free engagement as equal, or admit that your charts no longer reflect how music is actually consumed."

I understand where you're coming from, and Sabrina does deserve to be lashed for the lack of pre-election endorsement. But I would just invite you to consider: - speaking out against the use of her songs is an unambiguously good act, whereas remaining silent about their usage is (somewhat ambiguously) an evil/complicit one. A choice to do the latter can be justified, but the burden shifts onto Taylor to defend it with a compelling enough reason for the silence. - does it really matter if most of the people criticising Taylor or asking better from her are doing so for 'stan war' reasons, if the net result is increased pressure on her to do something good? And if this pressure did provoke a response from her, might it inspire people to apply similar pressure to other artists and result in more good? - since she's the biggest pop star in the world (by some margin), it is at least arguable that it's a good thing Taylor is held to higher standards and subject to greater scrutiny than her peers, even if this results in unequal treatment. - history has shown time and again that 'silent complicity' has allowed many of the most evil transgressions to continue unimpeded. There are always good reasons for people to stay silent, and often those reasons are fear for themselves or their own interests. But history has also shown that the presence of those fears is usually a good indication that it is more important than ever to speak up about it, even if you don't know what difference it would make or what good it would do. None of these points is absolute, and there are things you could say in response to all of them. But I think it's at least worth considering whether you could move beyond the reaction of 'this is unfair to Taylor' and towards something like 'this may be unfair treatment, but I can accept it since it's pushing towards a net good'.

The quality of the first two songs - in contrast to most of the album - suggests that she still has the spark needed to create great music, and the explanation for everything else on the record that's lacklustre is likely to be something mundane (in the order of tight deadlines and a rushed schedule) rather than any actual loss of talent. So even through I'm disappointed by the album, I'm still hopeful for the future.