If you're not happy with the Guardian's "pay us or accept cookies" stance - here's the tl;dr:
> Many of the No Space for Bezos activists are based in Laboratorio Occupato Morion, which describes itself as an “anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and trans-feminist political space”.
Some semi-professional activists have added Bezos to their list following the advent of this:
> Politically, Bezos has swung from what everyone always assumed was mild support for the Democrats to active support for Trump.
A bit ironic in my mind that people enjoying living in a city infamous for gaining much of its historical wealth and art by betraying the Byzantines and sacking Constantinople under the guise of helping it [1] are now complaining about ultra wealthy people renting out the place to enjoy that historical art.
As for Constantinople, historians argue about who betrayed who. The counter argument is that the Byzantines refused them promised supplies leaving them no option but to take them by force or starve.
Even the same historian in different books can make it look quite different (Peter Frankopan's description the The Silk Roads reads quite differently from one of his other books).
It is probably a lot more likely that they are descendants than you would expect.
Any given random person from a long time ago tends to have either no living descendants now or a whole lot of them. The sacking of Constantinople was long enough ago that probably most now people in Europe are descended from people who were involved.
I try! Ok I’m not blaming the people now for being descendants. The lead character in the story was an American foreigner anyways.
When I took on of the boats around Venice I had a European couple going on about it. They kept calling it a city of thieves, shrug.
More that for a city where important pieces of the historical artifacts and art was stolen by betrayal it’s a bit ironic to complain about modern wealthy people.
As in “how dare rich opportunistic Bezos rent this city where he can see beautiful Byzantine treasures stolen by rich opportunistic Doge Enrico Don-solo.”
Then again maybe it is an intentional backdrop for the story.
> Many of the No Space for Bezos activists are based in Laboratorio Occupato Morion, which describes itself as an “anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and trans-feminist political space”.
With organizations like these, one is almost tempted to guzzle down the full mix of Trump fan koolaid.
From personal experience with people like these, rational conversation, reasoned debate and just plain critical thinking go straight out the window. The more radical the group (and many of them have an amusing tendency of devolving into ever deeper radicalization) the faster you can throw the useful things above through that window. It is often nearly impossible to avoid offending them in the extreme if you even slightly disagree with whatever some of the more concentrated such organizations' most radical posture on X or Y happens to be.
Note: None of this is to take away from the different flavor of crazy and ideologically irrational that you can find with your average grouping of hardcore MAGA types.
Humans gonna tribalize, with so many such groups each thinking themselves to be on a new cutting edge of intellectual evolution, failing to see just how much they're instead living up to little more than our most primitive tendencies.
> When she heard that Jeff Bezos was getting married in Venice this June, Heather Jane Johnson felt worse than she had in her entire life. Twenty-five years ago, she ceased trading as a bookseller in Boston, Massachusetts. “I lost a lot because of Bezos and the complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon,” the 53-year-old says. “A big reason I moved to Italy is because I felt betrayed by my countrypeople.”
I like how she blames the "complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon", which I believe gets overlooked a lot. Isn't one way of eliminating billionaires to stop using their products?
Is there actually a viable alternative to Amazon that ever-increasingly-overworked people can use? Not tech workers like (I assume) you and me, but say, a single dad janitor or mechanic?
Many of these same things happened with Wal-Mart in the 90s in rural America, destroying thousands of small businesses.
I’m all for individual responsibility, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge all the government-mandated economic forces that let Amazons and Wal-Marts establish these types of monopolies.
Individuals need a way to organize to prevent this. That’s historically what our democratically-elected government did, but since Nixon or so, it’s not really been democratically-elected at all.
> Is there actually a viable alternative to Amazon that ever-increasingly-overworked people can use?
Of course there is. For a minor amount of extra effort, for most things, you can get them at a local store, order them directly from the manufacturer's website, go to eBay, etc.
The idea that people are so overworked now that they can't do these things is ludicrous, historically speaking. What's happened is that people have prioritized convenience and often view even slight reductions of convenience as disastrous. But it's not, really.
Yeah, the idea that you have to buy anything from Amazon is puzzling to me. I sometimes look things up on Amazon to see the reviews, but then I buy from Ebay, if I'm not able to shop for it locally. But I know people who act like they wouldn't have toilet paper if Amazon stopped working.
I've tried my absolute best to not buy from Amazon and it's incredibly difficult.
A lot of manufacturers just point to their Amazon page to buy.
The few you think isn't, will just ship from Amazon based on the boxes that gets sent and quite a few times I ended up paying more for this pleasure.
A lot of stuff just isn't anywhere else either.
If manufacturers really care about getting out of Amazon's vice, they should first start to do their part of the heavy lifting.
No, it is not.
That ship has sailed.
The reason why they are as powerful as they are is because their companies became structural and feudalistic in nature.
We, non billionaires, are a new form of consumer that is more akin to indentured servitude than free-will choosers of products.
If you think that’s still all it is, well you’re drinking a very late-stage-American-capitalism brand of kool aid.
No offense but if you truly believe that and it’s not sarcastic, you have been brainwashed. It’s not particularly difficult at all to only buy local or through local intermediaries.
Amusingly the internet brought us both the scourge of ultra large distant foreign corporations and easy access to local supply chains because it made discovering suppliers close to you easy.
Where you do your shopping is actually extremely significant and meaningful. You can support your community and its prosperity very easily with your wallet this way. I think a significant part of why this is not put forwards more is actually because of how impactful it is and how contrary to the interest of the few it goes.
That’s not true. In many ways and many places monopolies like Amazon or the mega restaurant chains effectively killed any viable alternative for low-income people
Amazon is Walmart 2.0. For over a decade shopping at Walmart was frowned upon by many in the US, criticized for enabling the corporate destruction of mom-and-pop retail. It had little effect beyond virtue signaling to your peers.
All the while those same people had Amazon boxes cluttering their homes.
I think a lot of this folds into the broader "anti-tourist" sentiments and protests happening across Europe this summer, and this wedding is just a nice big perfectly timed reason to protest even more.
The theory is that travel is broadening. Seeing how people in other societies live good lives too, even if they do things much differently from your hometown folks.
The best comment on the value of travel I ever heard was from the comedian Lewis Black. Paraphrasing, he said that the true value of seeing the world is when you come back and can see your own home with brand new eyes.
Most places with anti tourist movements are places that are completely unable to make money off something that is not tourism. Let’s call them what they are: places that want to feed off the rest of the country.
Which is why I said most places. Some places are definitely able to live without tourism, especially the biggest cities. Most places have absolutely nothing to offer besides a beach and pubs to get drunk in.
> "No Big Ships, an anti-cruise, anti-tourist campaign, which started here before spreading across Europe; No One Is Illegal, a grassroots refugee solidarity movement; "
So "no one is illegal" is not accurate. People who come on cruise ships should be banned.
I don't know about this place in particular, but I've lived in places that attracted lots of tourists.
Tourism brings a whole bunch of problems, and the more tourists there are, the worse those problems get. The locals often (barely) tolerate tourism because it also bring economic benefits. But if those benefits don't filter down adequately to the locals (at least adequately enough to compensate for the losses), then tourism just becomes something that makes everything worse for them.
Living in a place like that, I've found the locals that complain the most are not coincidentally among the least educated, least intelligent, and most unlikely to recognize the economic benefits that tourism brings to them.
These are people who are employed as servers and similar service workers yet complain many of their customers are from out of the area. I don't know how you fix that. What's crazier is when you point out the economic drain that would occur were tourism to slow, they often simply shrug and point to the state to save them from their woes.
I'm just noting the irony that the activists embrace refugees coming to Venice but not tourists. And really I'm focusing on the way that they say "no one is illegal" when they clearly don't like tourists and want to make them illegal. (And I might agree with both of these stances in a less ironic way.)
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread> Many of the No Space for Bezos activists are based in Laboratorio Occupato Morion, which describes itself as an “anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and trans-feminist political space”.
Some semi-professional activists have added Bezos to their list following the advent of this:
> Politically, Bezos has swung from what everyone always assumed was mild support for the Democrats to active support for Trump.
very like Guardian readers view of themselves!
1: https://gentlemanscodes.com/chivalry/the-sack-of-constantino... 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople
As for Constantinople, historians argue about who betrayed who. The counter argument is that the Byzantines refused them promised supplies leaving them no option but to take them by force or starve.
Even the same historian in different books can make it look quite different (Peter Frankopan's description the The Silk Roads reads quite differently from one of his other books).
Any given random person from a long time ago tends to have either no living descendants now or a whole lot of them. The sacking of Constantinople was long enough ago that probably most now people in Europe are descended from people who were involved.
When I took on of the boats around Venice I had a European couple going on about it. They kept calling it a city of thieves, shrug.
More that for a city where important pieces of the historical artifacts and art was stolen by betrayal it’s a bit ironic to complain about modern wealthy people.
As in “how dare rich opportunistic Bezos rent this city where he can see beautiful Byzantine treasures stolen by rich opportunistic Doge Enrico Don-solo.”
Then again maybe it is an intentional backdrop for the story.
With organizations like these, one is almost tempted to guzzle down the full mix of Trump fan koolaid.
From personal experience with people like these, rational conversation, reasoned debate and just plain critical thinking go straight out the window. The more radical the group (and many of them have an amusing tendency of devolving into ever deeper radicalization) the faster you can throw the useful things above through that window. It is often nearly impossible to avoid offending them in the extreme if you even slightly disagree with whatever some of the more concentrated such organizations' most radical posture on X or Y happens to be.
Note: None of this is to take away from the different flavor of crazy and ideologically irrational that you can find with your average grouping of hardcore MAGA types.
Humans gonna tribalize, with so many such groups each thinking themselves to be on a new cutting edge of intellectual evolution, failing to see just how much they're instead living up to little more than our most primitive tendencies.
I like how she blames the "complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon", which I believe gets overlooked a lot. Isn't one way of eliminating billionaires to stop using their products?
Many of these same things happened with Wal-Mart in the 90s in rural America, destroying thousands of small businesses.
I’m all for individual responsibility, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge all the government-mandated economic forces that let Amazons and Wal-Marts establish these types of monopolies.
Individuals need a way to organize to prevent this. That’s historically what our democratically-elected government did, but since Nixon or so, it’s not really been democratically-elected at all.
Of course there is. For a minor amount of extra effort, for most things, you can get them at a local store, order them directly from the manufacturer's website, go to eBay, etc.
The idea that people are so overworked now that they can't do these things is ludicrous, historically speaking. What's happened is that people have prioritized convenience and often view even slight reductions of convenience as disastrous. But it's not, really.
A lot of manufacturers just point to their Amazon page to buy. The few you think isn't, will just ship from Amazon based on the boxes that gets sent and quite a few times I ended up paying more for this pleasure. A lot of stuff just isn't anywhere else either.
If manufacturers really care about getting out of Amazon's vice, they should first start to do their part of the heavy lifting.
Amusingly the internet brought us both the scourge of ultra large distant foreign corporations and easy access to local supply chains because it made discovering suppliers close to you easy.
Where you do your shopping is actually extremely significant and meaningful. You can support your community and its prosperity very easily with your wallet this way. I think a significant part of why this is not put forwards more is actually because of how impactful it is and how contrary to the interest of the few it goes.
All the while those same people had Amazon boxes cluttering their homes.
And if you look at the Fortune 500 list, the succession is nearly complete; Amazon is #2 just behind Walmart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500#Overview
The consolidation cycle continues relentlessly - the interesting question is what does Walmart 3.0 look like? Aliexpress?
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
So "no one is illegal" is not accurate. People who come on cruise ships should be banned.
Tourism brings a whole bunch of problems, and the more tourists there are, the worse those problems get. The locals often (barely) tolerate tourism because it also bring economic benefits. But if those benefits don't filter down adequately to the locals (at least adequately enough to compensate for the losses), then tourism just becomes something that makes everything worse for them.
These are people who are employed as servers and similar service workers yet complain many of their customers are from out of the area. I don't know how you fix that. What's crazier is when you point out the economic drain that would occur were tourism to slow, they often simply shrug and point to the state to save them from their woes.
I'm just noting the irony that the activists embrace refugees coming to Venice but not tourists. And really I'm focusing on the way that they say "no one is illegal" when they clearly don't like tourists and want to make them illegal. (And I might agree with both of these stances in a less ironic way.)