UK Riots

This week we talk about Taylor Swift, knife attacks, and immigration politics.
We also discuss immigration rationales, riffraff, and terrorist plots.
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Transcript
American musician, singer, and songwriter Taylor Swift, at age 34, recently became the world's first music industry billionaire who's primary source of income is their music-as opposed to side-businesses, work, and royalties in adjacent or completely disconnected industries.
A lot of that wealth has stemmed from her incredibly successful, and ongoing-as of the day I'm recording this at least-Eras tour, which began in March of 2023 and which is her sixth tour, and by far the biggest in scope, scale, and success.
The Eras Tour, by itself, has surpassed a billion dollars in revenue-the first tour to ever hit that milestone-and it's had all sorts of interesting direct ramifications and repercussions, like bolstering Swift's music sales and streams, but also indirect ones, like creating a sort of economic weather system wherever these tour stops are planned: it's been estimated, for instance, that the Eras Tour contributed something like $4.3 billion to the GDP of the United States, and the WSJ dubbed these economic impacts "Taylornomics," as the combination of travel, food, entertainment, and other spending surrounding her tour dates, folks coming from all the around the world to visit the relevant cities, attend the concert, and spend on those sorts of things while in town, has all had a meaningful impact legible in even the huge-scale numbers of national income figures.
Swift, then, has been having quite the moment, following the several decades of work in this industry leading up to this tour.
And the swirl of activity-economic and cultural, especially-around her Eras Tour stops have made these events central to the collective consciousness, grabbing lots of airtime and watercooler talk wherever she shows up, because of how much of an event each of these stops are; and notably, they have been very well reviewed, in terms of the performance, the sets, the planning, everything-so it would seem that the attention being focused on these shows isn't superficial and reflexive, it's the result of having put together something pretty special for people who are willing to spend to attend that kind of event.
It maybe shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that there may be people out there looking to garner attention for themselves and their causes who see these events as an opportunity to do exactly that.
Three sold-out shows in Vienna, Austria were cancelled in early August due to a plot by what seems to have been several teenagers looking to kill as many people as possible outside the tour's local concert venue.
An investigation into this plot is ongoing, so there's still a fair bit we don't know, but what's been divulged so far is that three people have been connected to the plot and detained, the main suspect is a 19-year-old who planned to use knives and/or explosives to kill as many of the 30,000 or so onlookers who gather outside the show venues each night as possible-and another 65,000 people would have been inside the venue, so that's a lot of people, and a lot of potential for stampede-related injuries and deaths, alongside those that could be caused with knives and bombs-and that he, alongside two other suspects, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, was inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida-the 18-year-old, who is an Iraqi citizen, apparently having pledged himself to the Islamic State.
Propaganda materials from both terrorist organizations were found at the 17-year-old's home, alongside bomb-making materials, and he was hired just a few days before being caught by a company that provides some type of service to the concert venue; specifics about what said company provides haven't been officially divulged yet, but the theory is that this job was meant to give him and his accomplices some kind of access, allowing them to do what they intended to do more effectively.
There were a lot of disappointed Swift fans in Vienna who in some cases spent thousands of dollars just getting and staying there for the concert, only to be told that it was cancelled; most of the response from those affected in this way seems to be relatively upbeat, though, considering the circumstances, pretty much everyone breathing a sigh of relief that this plot wasn't pulled off successfully, which could have resulted in something like what happened at Manchester Arena in 2017, when an Ariana Grande concert was attacked by an Islamic extremist with a bomb who killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.
Swift's representatives have said that her next concert, scheduled for between August 15 and the 20th, are still on the books and ready to go, at London's Wembley Stadium, which will close-out the European leg of this record-setting tour.
London's mayor has said that local...