So in other words, Ms. Getty is more of a performance artist than she is an activist.
Can find precious little on exactly what she does or does not do except having funded this activism-financing outfit. You see the Wikipedia page is scant, and this article adds hardly anything other than very sparse comments on how she fully supports these sorts of actions and that she’s aware of the suspicion of her links.
I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while. Ditto for all the rabid pseudo-progressives that only discredit our causes.
It can’t be a coincidence that we currently have two other threads on similar topics, one on vociferous vegans and the other on transgender. The intensity of the hostility one is confronted with for failing to abide by increasingly abstruse rules must be the result of concerted efforts to discredit progressive policies.
I think I am with Stranger on this one. I don’t see strong evidence that this is some sort of false flag operation, nor do I see a convincing argument that this would be a useful strategy for someone wanting to sabotage climate change action.
Is it a useful strategy for awareness? I don’t know. It horrifies me because I value art and history. I could certainly believe that maybe they are doing these things in such a way that there is not permanent damage, but I have not read enough to learn about what mitigation was required because of their previous actions.
Ive built elaborate props, costumes, set up events to get media attention, done the press releases, talked to reporters, attended inquiries, all that stuff. Did it help at all? I don’t know. We tried to never inconvenience anyone or break anything, but there will always be hostility if you stir the pot. What I do know is that every little right, every priveledge we have was fought for by people stirring the pot and being the squeaky wheel.
Will we beat this? Probably not. Humanity is a long river of misery, failure and deciept, but there is progress sometimes.
From the AP website:
“Workers cleaned the stones and the roughly 4,500-year-old monument was visibly undamaged, said Nick Merriman, the chief executive of English Heritage.
. . .
Just Stop Oil said the paint was made of cornstarch and would dissolve in the rain. Merriman said experts cleaned the orange powder from the stones because they were concerned about how it might react to water.”
So the stones were dusted off and ready to go for the solstice. Still annoying, but not damaging.
People have a hard enough time following the simple rules, like “address people the way they would prefer to be addressed”.
Which convoluted rules were you thinking of?
“Would” is the wrong term, because this isn’t a hypothetical. These folks are effectively sabotaging climate change activism.
I’m just amused that it’s admitted that what they are doing is counterproductive while simultaneously insisting that they need to do it because it gets attention.
If that’s what you’re applauding, then you must be advocating that we turn our backs on the environment. Because something counterproductive to the cause by definition is harming it. That’s literally what that means.
It’s good that the monument wasn’t actually damaged but still, let’s make environmentalists look like they’re crazy, that should help.
What they’re doing doesn’t need to be done. Calling attention to real environmental problems needs to be done. But that’s not what this group has ever done.
“Useful idiot”, not KGB operative. Same scenario as anti-nuclear activists and the fossil fuel lobby. It’s much easier to quietly amplify existing nutjobs than to set up a whole psyops operation.
Just Stop Oil doesn’t seem to take a clear position on nuclear. Best I can find is this statement:
The government is failing to effectively plan for sufficient renewables and battery storage, relying on uncertain technologies such as CCUS that are not yet commercial at scale and on highly capital-intensive projects and risky technologies like nuclear that are unlikely to deliver in the timescale needed.
At least that’s not quite as bad as Greenpeace, etc. I’d almost agree with them on that point had they explicitly advocated not shutting down existing facilities.
Well, I don’t. Actually, it’s really easy to do just that.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-cant-deal-with-transgender-anymore/
Specifically, this :
So what you’re saying is, the rule you’re supposed to follow (calling people what they want to be called) is the simple one, and the rules you’re not supposed to follow (based on things like their chromosomes or their governmental documentation or the shape of their bodies underneath their pants) are the complicated ones? That doesn’t sound like much of a dilemma, to me.
Plus, in playing the “not enough time!” card, they sound like the predicted anti-mitigationists who some think will eventually flip-flop and say “yes, climate change is real, man-made, and very bad, but there isn’t enough time to do anything about it.”
The guy got in trouble because he claimed that a trans woman was almost certainly faking being a trans woman. He was specifically ignoring how she identified. That’s the rule he broke.
If I say that some black guy is faking being black, that’s obviously an insult. If I say they’re faking being gay, that’s an insult.
You don’t need any of the convoluted rules the guy is going on about to understand what the problem was. Don’t accuse a trans person of faking it. And call them what they want to be called.
There’s a reason the thread you posted pretty much immediately ignored the guy and moved on.
To make it clear if it isn’t by the statements I’ve previously made, I’m not “advocating” or apologizing for the tactics of the “Just Stop Oil” protestors, which as I have noted is definitionally trolling. I am responding to the assertions that they are “idiots”, “nutballs”, or (as a couple of posters have asserted with no evidence whatsoever) covert “oil-industry activists”. I don’t think any of these allegations is true; I think they know what they are doing (seeking and actually getting attention to an existential risk for industrial society) and are doing so with genuine intent.
Whether you think these tactics will be ultimately effective in achieving systematic change on a global scale (I do not, not just because their actions are opprobrious but because there is too much inertia and too severe of immediate blowback for governments of major industrialized nations to take effective action) the fact remains that they are actually getting front page and lead story attention while the increasingly dire scientific studies and public lectures merit the occasional below the fold story, often alongside ‘feel good’ stories about fanciful carbon absorption technologies or lists of the things you can personally do to reduce your direct carbon footprint, as if switching to an electric range and eating “Impossible” meat is really going to have a manifest impact on greenhouse gas emissions even if they were adopted en masse.
Throwing paint on historical artifacts and gluing themselves to the pavement is kind of dumb and clearly not very effective, but it is mostly harmless. If they actually wanted to have some real impact I suppose they should sabotage refineries and bomb oil and gas fields, and then we could just label them as terrorists and throw them in a Supermax prison. Or they could compile scholarly metastudies and give public lectures, which has accomplished essentially fuck all to date in terms of actual policies to try to reduce emissions to what is now completely fanciful Paris Agreement emissions limits, Yes, what the protestors are doing is absolutely trolling; specifically, they’re trolling leaders and society at large for not acknowledging and making even marginal sacrifices to take the only effective action to abate what is now unambiguously a global catastrophe rolling out in not so slow motion. If that is “nutballs”, it isn’t nearly as nutty as continuing with business as usual with a few carbon credit schemes and electric car subsidies thrown in to get the participation prize in ‘trying’ to preserve industrial society, but not actually taking any effective steps toward transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure or materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And this is despite climate experts having warned of this hazard for over thirty-five years, and the consequences of ignoring it.
You know what is actually “nutballs”? The fact that the COP28 summit was hosted by a major oil and gas producer and essentially used as a global market to make deals and trade in petroleum futures, with tossing some spare change into a “loss and damage fund” for island nations that are imminently facing eradication by rising sea levels and progressively more violent storm surges and cyclones. While researchers are in a remote corner of the event giving presentations about yearly coral bleaching events, destabilization of the polar vortex, and how ice shelves are much closer to being undermined and facing faster collapse than previously thought possible, in the main area of the carnival-like event oil industry executives are mingling with the leaders of G7 nations and economists from the World Economic Forum are assuring us that continuing on this path with hydrocarbon energy with just a few head nods to a need to find emission reductions some time in the future (before we achieve truly catastrophic global temperature levels but after the current crop of leaders has retired and kicked the can down the road to their successors, who will mostly try to do the same thing. Of course, if any of them stood up and said, “We’re going to take the drastic steps to actually reduce our demand to the extent practical and transition to sustainable energy system”, they would be vilified, excluded, and doubtless quickly removed from office, because actually recognizing the extent of this problem is tantamount to political suicide.
Throwing some colored corn starch on a bunch of standing stones that are really only of public interest because of all of the largely fabricated mythology surrounding them is about the least nutty thing about this state of affairs.
Stranger
By “genuine” you mean “genuinely bad”? Because otherwise here is your logic:
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They want to make positive change for the environment.
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They are doing this is a manner that harms the effort to improve the environment, by discrediting environmental activism.
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They aren’t insane or stupid, so therefore know precisely what they’re doing and are achieving what they set out for.
Your logic is contradictory which is why people are giving you shit for it. I can only assume you’re not expressing yourself effectively because this doesn’t seem like the kind of argument you’d normally make.
I’ve made clarified my statements, my “logic” is not “contradictory” insofar as I don’t think these tactics are effective even if I think the protestors believe they are, and to be frank I’m tired of retreading the same misrepresentations and baseless insinuations. I’m going to bow out of this thread and you and the other participants enjoy your recreational outrage over the issue of protestors engaging in essentially harmless (if ineffectual) public displays.
Stranger
I’ve met a grand total of one transgendered person and perhaps half a dozen vegans. I’ve never had a single problem with them, although I admit I’m often extremely worried of saying or doing something wrong. I actually used incorrect pronouns with the transgendered person I was talking with and was absolutely mortified (she told me it was ok).
Generally, it’s the increased level of aggressivity that is so pervasive nowadays that makes me sick. If someone tries to rally me to their cause by screaming at me or degrading works of art, they lose me immediately. And society is full of such dramatically stupid “actions” that actively hurt their cause. So much so, that I’m sure that some of them are part of a concerted effort to discredit it.
Pardon me, but could you possibly provide a transcript of portion of the conversation that was problematic? I’m finding it difficult to imagine what pronouns you were using other than you/yours.
Maybe they weren’t speaking English. Some languages are a lot more gendered.
Got any examples? TIA