As shown by Greece, the European Union in fact seizes wages from minimum salary workers. I don't care if a mall where I shop is owned by a French Corporation or a Chinese Corporation. But I do care if a foreigner entity comes and seizes part of my salary.
You don't care if a foreign power controls a mall - but that is not the same as controlling ports / other infrastructure.
You can tax every person's salary by ramping up fees at the ports, or destroy all the malls in the country via the port.
I'm not saying it's a bad deal or a good deal - I don't know enough about all the effects.. but there isn't much difference in taking some money from a paycheck and making everything you buy with said paycheck more expensive for example.
Read about the austerity packages enforced by the EU in Greece over the last decade. Raised taxes, lowered tax brackets, restricted withdrawal of money from bank accounts, slashed pensions, cut bonuses and overtime, and on and on. Devastated Greece for years.
It exists in Germany and it drives electricity price to the top. Current price for private households is around 0.4 Euro per kilowatt hour (0.5 US Dollars). Large part of it are taxes.
As an Italian constantly exposed to American videos showing clear irrational US based police brutality, I am not sure what you are talking about. Have you got any sources supporting these claims?
"The detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells. Police doctors at the facility also participated in the torture, using ritual humiliation, threats of rape and deprivation of water, food, sleep and medical care."
None of the responsible parties served any time.
- Way too many to count cold blooded murders of people in custody. The Aldrovandi, Cucchi and Magherini cases are emblematic as they at least got covered by the media.
- General lack of accountability and transparency.
- Widespread abuse of power by intimidation.
- Flat out lies, helped by crap media. I'll bet you $1,000 that on Dec 25, 2021, the news will report a variant of the following story: an elderly person called the police because they were lonely and wanted a friend to share a glass of spumante with.
20 years ago are not that long ago, neither 30, also the police does massive profiling during protests, I've had plenty of friends being profiled (pictures + videos + cross checks) during mild protests just because they were waivings signs.
let me rephrase, the italian police does actively get your pictures, cross checks you, and do a profile about you without even being recognized as a previously person of interest to law enforcement
1) The other examples in the same comment are more recent.
2) What happened there was so bad Italy was found in violation of ECHR. That nothing has substantially changed is in and of itself a major part of the problem.
I'm Italian too. It's a problem but honestly our famous cases of policy brutality would barely make the news in the USA, which IIRC had municipal police run off-the-records torture sites.
Depending on your point of view. I felt it was a self indulgent sprawling mess.
I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects).
I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”.
Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag.
At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
Yes. I watched the documentary. I don’t expect to agree 100%, but that doesn’t mean have I to keel over laughing at its chasms.
In regards to Iraq, his opinion that Gertrude Bell’s influence led NATO to give tribal sheiks disproportionate power in the new Iraq was a hilarious simplification. It’s just an absurd narrative chasm, that ignored so much about what happened then.
An in regards to the civil war in Iraq, that didn’t boil over because NATO stopped paying the militias off. There was so much at play.
The China stuff was interesting, but uncontroversial. That stuff is quite an accessible history. The archive footage was fun though.
It just felt like I was watching a number of different documentaries. One about race relations and trans rights; and one about China.
It all just would have been better as standalone works. He could have even edited things differently, each episode covering a certain subject. He maybe could have had a concluding thesis that was better than “China: it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be”.
I agree.
I lapped up alot of his stuff, without a second thought.
After watching a deconstruction video of hypernormalisation I was left thinking I had been suckered again "loose change style"
I was recommeded to watch his lastest release (of which the full 8.something hours is available directly on Curtis' own you tube channel)
I watched the first 20 / 30 minutes and turned off. It felt like how I imagine brain-washing works. Lots of weird (and jarring) footage un-related to the voice over, werid music (not required for what is supposed to be a documentary IMO) and jumped from topic to topic without any cohesive thread or reason. No longer a fan.
If somebody from cloudflare is readying this. This is great. Please do not fix it, or if you do, provide a way for legitimate limited bypassing when, for instance, using puppeteer from an AWS instance.
