this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Again, that's bullshit. If they "disrupt pollution" by for example peacefully protesting at an oil rig, they risk life in prison on terrorism charges since that's how insane the laws are, in exchange for little to no media attention.
At a pro tennis event in Washington DC, on the other hand, the media is already there, peaceful protest isn't called terrorism and due to the location, there's an excellent chance that some of the very representatives who are standing in the way of climate action or at least someone from their inner circle are actually THERE.
TL;DR: You seem to either have no clue what you're talking about or be exactly like the negative peace demanders that held back MLK and his fight for justice.
Protesting an oil rig is always going to be peroformative, even if that one rig is shut down there are tens of thousands of petroleum extraction sites that will be unaffected, the total production would be unaffected.
However there are less than 900 patrolium refineries in the world. There is not enough refinery capasity to make up for any disruption to one of the largest refineries.
And there's a reason that actual disruption is illegal, and performative nonsense carries lighter consequences. The reason is that oil companies absolutely LOVE for protests to be ineffectual and just cause disruptions among leftists. Obviously these "gluing myself to stuff" protests have NOT helped the environment. Nobody ever actually thought they would.
No. The reason is that the politicians are corrupt as fuck and oil companies have a lot of money to bribe them with. Also, the vast majority of the politicians are fascists who hate protesters and neoliberals who pretend to be their allies but prefer order to justice when it comes down to it.
You clearly have no clue about how protest works today a opposed to 60s to 90s. Media attention is the number one thing that you need to be able to inspire systemic change. Attention that you mostly get via what you so ignorantly call "performative nonsense" while advocating for sacrificing everything to further the cause only very little if at all.
You can't change the conversation without inconveniencing someone people and you can't change the system without first changing the conversation.
That's exactly what I said. The corrupt politicians will punish actual protests and go light on ineffectual protests (gluing oneself to items) because the oil companies love ineffectual protests and want to punish effective protests.
This has NOT led to more attention for environmentalism. It has only led to people speaking negatively about people who glue themselves to items. It has not led people to talk more about the environment. In fact it distracts people from the environment and works in the favor of oil companies.
But a protest must do more than merely inconvenience some people... especially when it only inconveniences normal people who might already agree with you but don't have much power. It's clearly just narcissistic attention-grabbing for their own egos.
If the conversation has been changed, it's been to distract from environmentalism and put focus on the warped egos of a few fools who glue themselves to things. 100% counterproductive.
You've said nothing of substance. And these protests have no substance.
Actually, it pushes the envelope. People making sacrifices makes the best kind of point to other people.
The Arab spring comes to mind.
Was that man also an idiot who didn't inspire anything?
At some point, the spark will catch.
It depends on the protest. You can't just do a random thing and expect people to get inspired. Gluing yourself to something makes you look foolish. Not inspiring. Blocking traffic is actually related to the problem, so it can start a spark.
Some of the best environmentist protestors are the ones who chain themselves to trees to stop old growth logging. These are excellent and passionate protests.
The glue and paintings nonsense works against this. It's stupid and distracting and discouraging.
Yes, and how is turning yourself ON FIRE related to a constructive solution to the problems in the Middle East?
I hear your point but I'm not buying it. Sounds like fear to me. I think people should do ALL KINDS of shit EVERYWHERE. Not fit themselves into some kind of rational frame of "what makes sense".
I'd guess it's not what "makes sense" that sparks revolutions, it's the real crazy stuff.
Setting yourself on fire is an ultimate and devastating personal sacrifice, not a bratty lashing out at random stuff. No comparison. However, once you set yourself on fire you can't help anybody anymore, ever, so it's still a bad idea.
Gluing yourself to things has proven to be a failed strategy. Everybody just makes fun of you. It's humiliating and does a disservice to actual activists.
Brief disruption of a single large-scale pollutant out of a million more just like it, before being thrown in jail for decades on terrorism charges, is not "actual disruption". Statistically it doesn't even rise above random noise in terms of effect, and people would hate them more, not less. They would be branded violent terrorists trying to destroy our infrastructure. You would be sacrificing everything and all other forms of effectiveness to have the tiniest, barely-detectable impact on the root issue.
The problem is systemic, and so must be the solution. You cannot break a system by destroying one of a million nodes in the system. If we had the power to stop this via direct action, we would have already long been capable of solving this with political action well before that point.