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The No Space for Bezos movement: 'One man rents a city for three days? '
- philipallstar 1y agoIf 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.
- graemep 1y ago> anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and trans-feminist political space very like Guardian readers view of themselves!
- aaron695 1y ago[flagged]
- fred_is_fred 1y agoWhat does Jeff's wedding have to do with voting for Trump?
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIt's an incoherent and nonsubstantive movement that's about vibes more than logic. The words are only noise.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoArrrr mateyy, derr be signal in dem noise
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- elcritch 1y agoA 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. 1: https://gentlemanscodes.com/chivalry/the-sack-of-constantinople-a-betrayal-of-chivalric-code https://gentlemanscodes.com/chivalry/the-sack-of-constantino... 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople
- graemep 1y agoThey also gained wealth through trade. 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).
- tetris11 1y agoSome people yes, many others moved there for the work and settled. Like any other city in the world.
- ramraj07 1y agoThis might be a new record for blaming people for something that happened so many eons ago its not even likely they're descendants.
- tzs 1y agoIt 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.
- 1y ago
- meepmorp 1y agoKind of a shame it's not Elon, because then it'd be the DOGE returning to Venice.
- southernplaces7 1y 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”. 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.
- noitamroftuo 1y ago> 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?
- financetechbro 1y agoLots of “billionaire hating” Americans who still pay their monthly dues to Amazon…
- noitamroftuo 1y agoexactly
- pseudocomposer 1y agoIs 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.
- JohnFen 1y ago> 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.
- randycupertino 1y agoI 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.
- scotty79 1y agoI hope this will end tourism once and for all. I personally never liked it. Pretty much it's just wasted resources.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoThe 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.
- JohnFen 1y agoThe 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.
- leereeves 1y agoPerhaps inspired by T.S. Eliot: 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.
- mslansn 1y agoMost 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.
- 1y ago
- xhkkffbf 1y ago> "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.
- absurdo 1y agoWhat’s the root of this anti-tourism movement/campaign? I understand AirBNB aspects, but what about the rest?
- JohnFen 1y agoI 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.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoLiving 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.
- JohnFen 1y agoI'm sure there are many like that, but my experience is that it's usually the homeowners who are most upset, not minimum-wage workers.