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.
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.
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).
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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
1: https://gentlemanscodes.com/chivalry/the-sack-of-constantino... 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople
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