Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
MillMan:
can we continue to provide bread and circus vacations to Hawaii and Italy for the middle class before they turn to political unrest instead?

Interesting choice of countries as examples! ;)

People are turning to political unrest, it's just for the moment mostly polite and inadequate in the first world, (and pretty easily squelched through mass digi-surveillance knowing protestor plans in advance).

In other parts of the world it is so far equally inadequate, if much less polite.

ISIS notwithstanding... Their protests (and Boku Haram's) are scary and have grabbed headlines, but the idea of a Caliphate is far from new, and will probably not fly long term unless one or two things happen. One, the levels of social collapse exceed Egypt's or Palectine's (or Yemen's, or Somalia's), or seconfly the first world violently over-reacts (again) and continues the kind of of dumb-brute, collateral damage-rich campaigns to reduce Muslim population willy-nilly through attrition and superior firepower.

Tony Blair's solution (to pretty much everything.)

Or, we could draw silly lines on a map and watch the consequences unfold as Islam goes through its tortuous schisms while we engage, enable and enrich corrupt elites in order to plunder their territories' fossil fuels.

Oh, wait...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sat Sep 27th, 2014 at 01:36:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Top Diaries

Occasional Series