Ok, I’m new here and fully expect to get flamed to a carbonized crisp by the intelligensia, but here goes…
Tree huggin’ dirt worshipping environmental protestors… what’s the deal? Do you really expect to change anyone’s mind by chaining yourselves to a fence, a fellow comrade and a 50 gallon barrel? Perhaps you should immolate yourselves to make a dramatic statement about the health effects of non-carbon sequestered fires.
Also, I rather appreciate being lectured to on local environmental and economic issues by a kid from upstate New York (who thought that Virginia ended at Arlington) and who drove a Mercedes-Benz SL class luxobarge to the protest… that absolutely helps your credibility.
Plus, too and also- what’s with the smell? Does your belief system abhor the use of soap and water? No one in these hills will take you or your argument seriously when you smell like a cross between a Phish concert parking lot and a locker room. Patchouli oil is not a substitute for hygiene, sorry to tell you.
Honestly, I’d give your viewpoint some honest consideration if you’d only take a damned bath and act like an adult. Until then, you’re just children playing in the dirt.
If it weren’t for the drag queens at the Stonewall Bar, it might have been longer before the Gay Rights movement started up.
If it weren’t for the radical actions of ACT-UP, AIDS may have infected many, many more.
If it weren’t for the marches of Martin Luther King Jr and the actions of Malcolm X, there may be a larger race divide in this country.
The social and political movements usually start with the radicals before getting cleaned up and filtered down to the rest of us. I remember in High School fighting with the administration to get them on board with recycling. Issues that have been resolved now haven’t always been so sanitized and pretty and it’s the group that pushes the problem up in a big way that gets it noticed.
In the interim, are these folks annoying? Sure. But these vanguards help the movement by bringing it to the masses.
Soap, apparently.
The Environmental Movement has been around long enough that the “radical” element is un-necessary and annoying and counter-productive. Now they are just in the way.
What the heck is wrong with Upstate NY? How did we get dragged into this?
ETA: Oh, apparently my location doesn’t show because I am a guest. Regardless, I live in Upstate NY. If you could just keep said smelly protestor that would be fine. We don’t want him back.
Dominion Power’s Virginia City coal-fired power plant development… which is supposed to be the latest iteration of clean, safe coal-fired energy. I’d have preferred a nuclear power plant myself, but what the hey.
There’s nothing wrong with upstate NY per se, but when Pippie the Protestor from Ithaca, NY drives 10+ hours to Jerkwater, VA to *lecture me on my local issues *it just doesn’t ring true. Perhaps he and his agenda would be better served working his own local scene?
Yeah, but the “movement” has been taken up by the big corporations now (doing less than they used to saves them more money! Think paperless statements, if Amex, for instance had a cost of .65 per mailed statement, say they mail a million statements, that’s an additional $65,000 saved, for other industries, YMMV) this isn’t some fringe issue but a platform piece for the upcoming presidential election. Protestors (generally) want increasingly radical changes to policy without regard for the impact on the economy. There are some who actually believe $10 a gallon gas would be good for the US without taking into account that even if every personally owned vehicle on the road were replaced with an electric duplicate, that the big trucks that bring our food, clothing, housewares and supplies will STILL run on oil-based fuel that, if at that goofy-assed price point, would cause prices so high for common goods that people may actually starve because they can’t afford enough food. Is that hyperbole? Maybe. Still, what if it happened? Where do we draw the line between green and blood red?
The message is available to everyone at any given moment thanks to the internet. The need for the protest has gone the way of the dodo.
I know, geographically, Ithaca is part of upstate. By most definitions, at least. (Sorry treis, I still don’t agree with your definition.) It’s not exactly part of the culture of upstate. Ithaca is its own little enclave of weirdness in the middle of what had been farming country, until very recently. Heck, Albany, is more in tune with the surrounding area than Ithaca is, and the jokes about Albany being an enclave unto itself are legion. (Hiya, Anaamika!)
I first met the dyed-in-the-wool Ithaca socialist back in the 80s at Cornell. And these were the sorts of people who would wear fur to faculty dinners (which I helped cater as a student worker) and would talk about supporting the Sandanistas, and down with the Man. Between bites of their caviar and crackers.
OTOH, those sorts are not all bad, either - it was largely because of their actions that the University, and others, such as Hahvahd, divested themselves of South African investments until after Apartheid ended. But there is often a jarring note between their words, and their actions.
I can’t speak for the unwashed neo-hippy. But as a Green from the other side of the fence, protests can do wonders and us in the volunteer activist community welcome neo-hippies, concerned parents, very well educated medical and science professionals, aging actual hippies (well OK, these are usually our leaders) and Republicans that care about water and air quality.
I am part of a group and umbrella of groups that stopped a dangerous garbage incinerator with protests. Got a very nasty polluter to halt and clean up using protest, members going to the county meetings and photo of the visible leaching in the local bay from a private pilot that helped out and was a Wall Street Broker.
That young unwashed hippy will probably grow out of his current phase.
MLK et al were really different than ACT-UP and the tree-hugger types. They were peaceful and well groomed. The public was horrified to see them being set upon by hoses and dogs. Contrast that to the anti-globilazation anarachists. I root for the police to kick their trustrifarian asses. The Stonewall rioters were doin it for themselves, I don’t think they were trying to influence Mr and Mrs middle-America.
As for ACT-UP, I don’t know of they ever accomplished anything. I do know the radical gays in SF prevented the bath houses from being closed early in the AIDS epedemic and are responsible for the deaths of thousands.
That depends. Is the machine really necessary, or is it a convenience that causes more damage than it ameliorates? And what solvents are required to wash the machine in question?
What a weird fetish! Because they were “well-groomed”, thats why we were horrifed to see them “set upon by hoses and dogs”? How about because they were people, how about because they were right! Woiuld they have been less right wearing day-old socks?
Ever been fucked over but good by a banker, or a lawyer? How’d he smell?
Well, if you conservatives would stop using “intelligentsia” as a pejorative, thereby indirectly exalting ignorance and stupidity, then you wouldn’t get crisped.
Sakes alive, you’re as bad as Vladimir Ilyich, with all that “intelligentsia” stuff.
Are they still having trouble with acid rain in Upstate New York? Poorly scrubbed* coal fired plants far away from Upstate New York did a hell of a lot of damage some time back. There is a reason the protestors consider it their issue, too.
Note the qualifier. I’m sure this plant is better and that Una will be along to edumacate me all about modern scrubbing systems.
For the most part, people choose how they look. By adopting the tribal outfit of protesters you set yourself apart and say “I’m not like you”. That make people less sympathetic to your cause. Now if all you want to do is have a big party with your buddies and smash a few Starbucks windows, that’s fine. But if you want to have an influence then grow up.
