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.)
philipallstar•7mo ago
> 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.
graemep•7mo ago
very like Guardian readers view of themselves!