Far-right parties rattled the traditional powers in the European Union and made major gains in parliamentary elections Sunday, dealing an especially humiliating defeat to https://apnews.com/article/france-macron-election-legislative-parliament-national-rally-07b742fe000170af8ee410e292bf23e2...
No, he’s describing the second. The first was when the old entrenched powers like the British Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Tzar, the Ottomans etc got into a big kerfluffle after an archduke from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated and everyone’s big alliance rings got triggered.
It was a war between strong empires that had been entrenched over centuries trying to play big power politics basically.
The second was about nationalism and strongmen. The first already had a bunch of strongmen and huge empires jockeying for position, and it was more about weakening perceived rivals. After it ended, many people wanted to return to that sort of status quo, which helped fuel nationalism and the rise of strongmen in the interwar years.
A Los Angeles City councilmember furiously criticized the Burbank Police Department after security video appeared to show two officers dumping a homeless man in front of his field office on Thursday....
I’d like to know when weaponized population became a thing.
You have places bussing homeless to other places, creating a sort of homeless person hot potato where they get bussed from place to place.
You have Abbot bussing new border crossers, with no information or instructions, to random cities for political points.
You have Russia trying to push migration westward to economically and politically pressure NATO.
You have people in the Middle East refusing Gazans any exit, leaving them in the line of fire.
Probably more examples, but that’s just a few semi-related ones off the top of my head, of civilians being turned into various sorts of location-based proxy weapons. It seems to me this doesn’t go that far back in history, and is specifically a feature of the modern age. And all of this in the midst of a time when birth rates are declining to a level insufficient to fuel the modern rat race.
No, I’m not talking about mass migration generally. I am talking about specific people taking specific groups of people and utilizing power to either move that group or prevent them from moving, in order to intentionally do harm to a completely separate third party.
The weaponization aspect, specifically. After thinking about it further, I can put it in a historical context. It could be similar to driving peasants into a medieval-era fortified city before you besiege it, in order to put greater strain on the food supplies. Or perhaps if Attila the Hun had intentionally driven various tribes ahead of him in order to weaken and destabilize the Roman Empire.
Far-right gains in the EU election deal stunning defeats to France's Macron and Germany's Scholz (apnews.com)
Far-right parties rattled the traditional powers in the European Union and made major gains in parliamentary elections Sunday, dealing an especially humiliating defeat to https://apnews.com/article/france-macron-election-legislative-parliament-national-rally-07b742fe000170af8ee410e292bf23e2...
Burbank police accused of dumping homeless man outside LA councilmember's office (www.cbsnews.com)
A Los Angeles City councilmember furiously criticized the Burbank Police Department after security video appeared to show two officers dumping a homeless man in front of his field office on Thursday....