Some climate activists are also involved in the desecration of cultural symbols. Many of these actions are symbolic, for example: The glass over the Mona Lisa protected her from Riposte Alimentaire protesters who threw tomato soup at herBut this is so counterproductive as environmental activism that it makes me question the sincerity of the rebels. What does great art made hundreds of years ago have to do with environmental degradation? If you want to send a more topical message and still get attention, why not stop traffic? The message could be that soon people will not be able to afford cars due to resource costs and climate impacts, and users will now have to accept a future where trips like the everyday commute will be rare and expensive. I’m no expert, but I think it’s useful to connect a happening (as it was called in the 60s) to a message, drawing attention to what bad outcomes the future will bring and what that means for ordinary people.
Instead, some protesters have engaged in escalating exploits. IM Doc posted the following tweet today:
How to lose friends and have no influence on anyone. Stonehenge. Why? https://t.co/BsKtGFs67Z
— Mark Seddon (@MarkSeddon1962) June 19, 2024
More from the Sydney Morning Herald Courtesy of Pastor Kev:
Two climate change protesters who sprayed orange paint on the ancient ruins of Stonehenge in southern England were arrested on Wednesday after two passersby intervened to try to stop them…
The incident occurred just days before thousands of people were due to gather at the roughly 4,500-year-old stone circle to celebrate the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
English Heritage, which looks after the site, said it was “deeply upset” and that curators were assessing the damage, while Just Stop Oil said the paint was made from cornstarch and would dissolve in rain.
A video released by the group shows a man identified as Rajan Naidu, 73, spraying orange mist from a fire extinguisher-style paint sprayer at one of the vertical stones.
As people shouted “Stop”, a man in a hat and raincoat ran over, grabbed Mr Naidu’s arm and tried to pull him away from the monument, and was joined by a man in a blue shirt who tried to grab the spray paint from him.
A second protester, Niamh Lynch, 21, managed to throw three stones before the first passerby, wearing a hat, stopped her…
Just Stop Oil is one of many environmental groups across Europe that have attracted attention and backlash for disrupting sporting events, throwing paint and food on famous artworks and disrupting traffic to draw attention to global warming.
The group said it acted in response to the Labor Party’s recent election manifesto, which says it will not issue any more licences for oil and gas exploration if it wins the July 4 general election. Just Stop Oil supports the moratorium but says it is not enough.
This kind of behavior is not as obviously outdated as the (arguably bought off) protesters in Georgia who are opposing a pre-transparency law that would require U.S.-level disclosure of foreign donations to NGOs. They are trying to portray themselves as pro-democracy. What they are defending is U.S. and EU interference.
But alienating the masses from your cause (and not showing resistance as workers would show with a general strike) is so obviously foolish that it makes you question what is really going on. Email from GM:
I can’t help but wonder if all of this was deliberately orchestrated to completely discredit concerns about climate change — to make them as ridiculous and abhorrent as possible, so as to maximally repel people to the idea that there is a real problem.
It has always seemed to me that in the West the “Left” was destroyed according to exactly such a deliberate plan, and associated with the insanity of gender and race studies, which had two very “useful” effects: firstly, it distracted attention from the real problems that concerned people in the past, and secondly, it completely discredited the “Left” in the eyes of the general public.
If it was indeed a planned event, it was an astonishingly successful and well-executed plan, but why not?
We must always remember that during the Cold War, the tactics of both sides were largely similar to each other, because practical needs and similar situational factors tend to lead to convergent evolution. The CIA smuggled cocaine from Latin America, the KGB smuggled heroin from the Middle East, etc. Also, we know that most of the intellectuals were fully controlled by Eastern Bloc institutions because their archives were opened there. The same archives were never opened in the Western countries. One cannot help but wonder if the same programs were in place there.
It wouldn’t be the same, of course, because the Communists didn’t need to do so much ideological manipulation (the ideology was official and unchanging, and there was no real public debate in the first place, so there was no need to shape public consciousness through public intellectuals and universities), but the main point that the intellectuals were directly controlled is probably true on both sides. And it’s not at all necessary for them to all be puppets all the time, it would be a lot more subtle than that of course.
So why not try the same strategy when it comes to climate change?
That’s when the crisis really started to take hold.
And by the way, it’s really noticeable right now. I’ve been working from home for the last year and I’ve been tending to my grandparents’ garden, and what’s been going on there is a very objective measure of how things have changed.
1) Last year, there was no rain at all from early August to early November – not unusual for August, but extremely unusual for September and October – and indeed in October, restrictions were imposed and water began to become scarce.
2) September was no different to any other August in terms of temperature, with 30 degrees every day, and 25 degrees every day in October.
3) Usually, fresh vegetables end in mid to late September because that’s when the first frosts come and kill the plants. It’s been that way throughout the 20th century (I remember it all the way back in the early 1990s). Last year, the last fresh tomatoes were harvested around November 10th, and that was the only time we had frost, and the days before that it was still 20-25 degrees. That’s completely unreasonable for our area.
4) We barely had a winter. This has been the norm for a while. Winters started to get noticeably shorter around 2000, but now we can’t even call it winter. We had two cold spells, one week each in December and January, but otherwise it was 20-25 degrees around the new year. And the cold weather (by “cold” I mean 10 degrees, not -10) mostly ended by late January. This is in a place that a few decades ago was buried under a half meter of snow for months.
5) And this year it was even more noticeable. Usually the trees here turn green and flower after April 15th. This year it happened around March 15th. Strawberry season is roughly May 20th to June 10th, but this year they ripened in early May. Cherries ripened on May 10th to 15th. Usually it happens in early June. Apricots ripen around July 1st, but this year they fell off the tree already a few days earlier and ripened around June 10th. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc. start harvesting at the earliest on July 1st, but it was June 15th. Basically everything was 15-20 days earlier.
6) This may sound great, because who doesn’t want fresh vegetables in November? But last year, there was no rain for two months during the second rainy season. The main rainy season is from May to June, and while there was regular rain in May, there was no rain at all in June. Combine this with the snowpack disappearing from the mountains, and you can see what’s in store for us in the long run.
While there are certainly annual variations in temperature and rainfall, the growing season remains fairly consistent regardless, and these variations are clear indications of significant change.
So this is a real question: How do we fool the public into genuinely believing nothing is happening when the effects of climate change are impossible to miss?
Lambert agreed: “They must be police officers. Who else would do something stupid like that?”
