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All Hail Taylor Swift, Person of the Year!

Taylor Swift has reached the final stage of being famous: It has become cool and hip to ridicule her.
 
Swiftmanis is silly, but she makes records that lots of people want to buy, and gives concerts lots of people want to attend. I don't see the issue here; it is not like she is forcing anybody to buy her stuff. I don't care for it personally but to each his own.
 
lionking said:
Anyway, the lady herself arrives in Melbourne in a day or two to play 7 concerts in Sydney and Melbourne and the whole nation has taken leave of its senses, in a very good way. I don’t think any visitor in the past 50 years at least has attracted such hysteria. Not the pope, not the queen, not the US President, no other celebrity and no sporting star.

I’m looking forward to it.
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Beatlemania for the 21st century.
My own question is who is harmed by all this?
Answer: Nobody, really, if people want to spent their money that wey, let them.
 
I think Trump will turn on Swift, and one reason will be she is probably worth more then he is in Actual take it tothe bank wealth. Her personal wealth is over a Billion.
 
The Atheist said:
Rolling your eyes at your own strawman - how precious.

Nobody ever said there were no fights.
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The Atheist said:
Not buying it. The soccer and rugby world cups and the Olympics provide equal or greater pressure and don't cause players to lose their cool. These guys are highly-paid professionals and any rugby player doing what Kelce did would be dumped.
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You make it out as if fights are a rare thing in rugby, yet there seems to be quite a few compilation videos youtube, as well as articles discussing fights and braws in rugby.

Believe it or not, football is not really known for fights. In most games the closest thing to a fight you might see is someone pushing another player away from them after a play or telling another player off (verbally) after a play. From the articles I posted, it seems like this is typical of rugby as well. (I don't watch rugby, and rarely see it, so I don't know.)

The sports in the U.S. that are actually known for fights are baseball and hockey. Bench clearing brawls are a thing in baseball. They usually happen after a batter is hit by a pitch or a brushback pitch.

But fighting – after the whistle, at least – has never been part of football’s culture. Baseball is another story. A player is hit with a pitch or one of baseball’s several hundred unwritten rules are broken, and the benches empty for an infield shoving match.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/nov/30/nfl-fights-brawls-michael-crabtree-aqib-talib
 
TomB said:
You make it out as if fights are a rare thing in rugby, yet there seems to be quite a few compilation videos youtube, as well as articles discussing fights and braws in rugby.

Believe it or not, football is not really known for fights. In most games the closest thing to a fight you might see is someone pushing another player away from them after a play or telling another player off (verbally) after a play. From the articles I posted, it seems like this is typical of rugby as well. (I don't watch rugby, and rarely see it, so I don't know.)

The sports in the U.S. that are actually known for fights are baseball and hockey. Bench clearing brawls are a thing in baseball. They usually happen after a batter is hit by a pitch or a brushback pitch.


https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/nov/30/nfl-fights-brawls-michael-crabtree-aqib-talib
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Truth. In a couple of the playoff games, they lost like 15 yards just for "taunting". I guess in football you're getting your direct hits in with enough regularity that you "get it out" during play.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Here's her webpage:



I will leave others to dig deeper to make their own judgements into the value of her research to the corpus of human knowledge.
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So I sit on a lot of PhD thesis committees, and have been to scores of PhD defenses. However, I have never been on a social science PhD thesis committee, and therefore have not been in the room for discussions about the "value of [the] research to the corpus of human knowledge." Basically, I don't know enough about the field to know what constitutes a valuable contribution.

And neither do you. What you have done here is no better than the idiot congresscritters that publish their annual "can you believe these projects are getting funded by the National Science Foundation! Chirp. Chirp." Because, when I see those lists, in the fields I know about, my answer is always, yeah, that makes sense, I can believe they have been funded.

And this situation is even worse, because there is no indication that there were any resources "wasted," so you don't even have that.

In the end, ultimately the objective of a PhD education is to increase the knowledge of the world. If, by using some aspect of the works of Taylor Swift, the student has been able to increase our knowledge about and understanding of the world, then they have accomplished the goal of a PhD. What value that contribution has to the world we can argue, but what contribution it has to the field in which the person works, that's going to take more expertise and knowledge about the field than I have. As such, I have to rely on my colleagues who do work within the field to make the assessment of whether the contribution is significant, and my ignorant opinions really don't matter.

Again, we aren't talking about how to best use public funding for research, we are talking about educational standards of an institution and a field of study. Saying, "it was based on Taylor Swift" is a lame attempt at, what, poisoning the well? At best. Temple University gave Bill Cosby a Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) for his thesis on the educational role of the Fat Albert cartoons. Yeah, because what he did made a contribution to the knowledge about education.

Do you have any legitimate complaints about the thesis in question as to why the work was not appropriate for a PhD? Have you read the thesis? Or an abstract? Or is this merely a dismissal of the value of any social science research?

PS Sorry for the rant, but damn this pisses me off
 
TomB said:
The sports in the U.S. that are actually known for fights are baseball and hockey. Bench clearing brawls are a thing in baseball. They usually happen after a batter is hit by a pitch or a brushback pitch.


https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/nov/30/nfl-fights-brawls-michael-crabtree-aqib-talib
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That article makes it sound like it happens a lot in baseball. It really doesn't. The thing is, each team in baseball plays 162 games. You face a single opponent probably 8-12 times (lots of things come in to play there) and there are probably 10 bench clears over the course of a season total. So we're talking about 10 bench clears in 2,430ish games. Most of those don't even turn into actual fights, just a lot of chest bumping and flexing.

That being said, if a batter gets hit then the pitcher can get the raw end of a stick pretty quick.
 
angrysoba said:
It would be if all drugs were permitted, I suppose. But that isn't the case, and so drug-taking in sport selects for those who are willing to cheat, and also for those best at masking their use. Of course, this is a big tangent so I think we don't need to continue with it here.
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Sorry, I should have added a smiley.
 
plague311 said:
That article makes it sound like it happens a lot in baseball. It really doesn't. The thing is, each team in baseball plays 162 games. You face a single opponent probably 8-12 times (lots of things come in to play there) and there are probably 10 bench clears over the course of a season total. So we're talking about 10 bench clears in 2,430ish games. Most of those don't even turn into actual fights, just a lot of chest bumping and flexing.
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When I was in Minneapolis in summer 1989, I went to something like 13 Twins games. There was one bench-clearing event in one of those games.

I've probably been to 40 MLB games total in my life and that was the only one. Given the rate they happen, it is probably "lucky" that I actually saw one.

I've only also seen one manager get ejected (Gene Mauch, back in probably 77? Carew was still with the Twins because he was arguing a safe/out call on Carew's attempt to steal home)
 
pgwenthold said:
So I sit on a lot of PhD thesis committees, and have been to scores of PhD defenses. However, I have never been on a social science PhD thesis committee, and therefore have not been in the room for discussions about the "value of [the] research to the corpus of human knowledge." Basically, I don't know enough about the field to know what constitutes a valuable contribution.

And neither do you. What you have done here is no better than the idiot congresscritters that publish their annual "can you believe these projects are getting funded by the National Science Foundation! Chirp. Chirp." Because, when I see those lists, in the fields I know about, my answer is always, yeah, that makes sense, I can believe they have been funded.

And this situation is even worse, because there is no indication that there were any resources "wasted," so you don't even have that.

In the end, ultimately the objective of a PhD education is to increase the knowledge of the world. If, by using some aspect of the works of Taylor Swift, the student has been able to increase our knowledge about and understanding of the world, then they have accomplished the goal of a PhD. What value that contribution has to the world we can argue, but what contribution it has to the field in which the person works, that's going to take more expertise and knowledge about the field than I have. As such, I have to rely on my colleagues who do work within the field to make the assessment of whether the contribution is significant, and my ignorant opinions really don't matter.

Again, we aren't talking about how to best use public funding for research, we are talking about educational standards of an institution and a field of study. Saying, "it was based on Taylor Swift" is a lame attempt at, what, poisoning the well? At best. Temple University gave Bill Cosby a Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) for his thesis on the educational role of the Fat Albert cartoons. Yeah, because what he did made a contribution to the knowledge about education.

Do you have any legitimate complaints about the thesis in question as to why the work was not appropriate for a PhD? Have you read the thesis? Or an abstract? Or is this merely a dismissal of the value of any social science research?

PS Sorry for the rant, but damn this pisses me off
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Here we go:

Abstract

This research explores the role of commodification in participation in celebrity-centric fandom communities, applying a leisure studies framework to understand the constraints fans face in their quest to participate and the negotiations they engage in to overcome these constraints.

In fan studies scholarship, there is a propensity to focus on the ways fans oppose commodified industry structures; however, this ignores the many fans who happily participate within them. Using the fandoms for the pop star Taylor Swift and the television series Supernatural as case studies, this project uses a mixed-methodological approach to speak directly to fans via surveys and semistructured interviews to develop an understanding of fans’ lived experiences based on their own words.

By focusing on celebrity-centric fandom communities rather than on the more frequently studied textual fandoms, this thesis turns to the role of the celebrity in fans’ ongoing desire to participate in commodified spaces. I argue that fans are motivated to continue spending money to participate within their chosen fandom when this form of participation is tied to the opportunity for engagement with the celebrity. While many fans seek community from their fandom participation, this research finds that for others, social ties are a secondary outcome of their overall desire for celebrity attention, which becomes a hobby in which they build a “leisure career” (Stebbins 2014). When fans successfully gain attention from their celebrity object of fandom, they gain status within their community, creating intra-fandom hierarchies based largely on financial resources and on freedom from structural constraints related to education, employment, and caring.

Ultimately, this thesis argues that the broad neglect of celebrity fandom practices means we have overlooked the experiences of many fans, necessitating a much broader future scope for the field.
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Wow! Ground breaking stuff. Who'd have thought groupies would hang around celebrities (virtually or in real life) to try to meet them and that this would give them bragging rights amongst the other groupies?
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Here we go:



Wow! Ground breaking stuff. Who'd have thought groupies would hang around celebrities (virtually or in real life) to try to meet them and that this would give them bragging rights amongst the other groupies?
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Making a scholarly inquiry into something previously taken for granted seems to me like the proper work of a PhD candidate.
 
theprestige said:
Making a scholarly inquiry into something previously taken for granted seems to me like the proper work of a PhD candidate.
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In this case not "taken for granted", but bleed'in obvious.

Universities are just businesses nowadays trying to bring in $$$ rather than enforce any kind of standards.

Probably why they do this kind of thing.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Here we go:



Wow! Ground breaking stuff. Who'd have thought groupies would hang around celebrities (virtually or in real life) to try to meet them and that this would give them bragging rights amongst the other groupies?
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It seems to me to be fine as a PhD study. If you started looking through medical abstracts you could probably find sentences that apparently state the bleeding obvious that having heart attacks is bad for your health.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
In this case not "taken for granted", but bleed'in obvious.
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The number of things that have been claimed to be "bleed'in obvious" that have been shown to be wrong in a PhD thesis would create enough material to fill a PhD thesis

Your understanding of what it's about is flawed.

ETA: this is especially the case in sociology. One of the big lessons that we learned when I took Intro to Sociology in college was that there were things that seemed logical and obvious that, when studied in sociology, were found to be, actually, not correct. I don't know much sociology, but yeah, you don't take anything for granted, even the bleed'in obvious.
 
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pgwenthold said:
The number of things that have been claimed to be "bleed'in obvious" that have been shown to be wrong in a PhD thesis would create enough material to fill a PhD thesis

Your understanding of what it's about is flawed.
ETA: this is especially the case in sociology. One of the big lessons that we learned when I took Intro to Sociology in college was that there were things that seemed logical and obvious that, when studied in sociology, were found to be, actually, not correct. I don't know much sociology, but yeah, you don't take anything for granted, even the bleed'in obvious.
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...and celebrities can extract money (as opposed to just good honest sex in the old days) from groupies who want to meet them.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
In this case not "taken for granted", but bleed'in obvious.

Universities are just businesses nowadays trying to bring in $$$ rather than enforce any kind of standards.

Probably why they do this kind of thing.
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A tad hyperbolic. Universities have been handing out honorary degrees since forever. I really don’t see why an artist who has created some of the most well-regarded music since Michael Jackson getting a degree in fine art. When I was at university, students in the fine art department got a degree for perpetrating a hoax on some media organizations by pretending they had spent a grant on a holiday in Spain. Whereas Taylor Swift gets one for making actual art that is bought by hundreds of millions of people! Of course she should get a doctorate. Or did you complain when Jonny Cash got one? Or Elton John? Or Billy Joel?
 
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