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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.
Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.
I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It's not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don't care why you're news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you'll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.
That may be the core of the confusion here. I'm saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I'm saying that feeling powerless doesn't make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.
It's not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn't, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It's not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we're talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn't convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.
So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it's not about being in the news, it's about making effective action more likely to happen.
I think when you get to the point where you're comparing mass murdering puppies to spraying corn starch on a rock then you're not really arguing in good faith anymore
Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I'm not even English and I am pissed. You don't even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.
This is literally supervillain stuff. It's the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he's gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it's shorthand for "these are the bad guys", right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.
How anybody wouldn't get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise "climate action" and they proposed this I wouldn't just fire them, I'd sue them for trying to sabotage me. It's incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.
Tad dramatic mate. It was literally people praying corn starch on a rock. Calm your tits.
No.
And you can't make me.
And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I'm refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.
That's the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.
Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it's not the puppy coat.
It's Apple's hydraulic press iPad advertising.
You do realize that isn't any better, right?
Are they attempting that? Because if thousands upon thousands of scientific papers and our best and brightest describing what climate chabge is going to do, hundreds of peaceful protests, hundreds of protests at oil rigs and depots and FF company HQs and politicians houses and banks financing FF companies, and experiencing first hand the actual effects of climate change don't stir people to action, what will?
These protests are to keep climate change permanently is the public consciousness, so people and the media can't just bury their heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening while they get us to chase whatever culture war bullshit is going on.
The people who actually give a damn about this and take action aren't going to be put off because someone sprayed starch on a rock, or put paint on a piece of glass in front of an art work. And the people getting their knickers in a twist over that are the people that were never, ever going to do literally anything to help the problem.
Oh, so it's even worse. They aren't trying to get any practical effect, it's just pointless vandalism that won't achieve anything. Cool.
Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven't spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It's a distraction, at best. It's the sand the "people and the media" bury their heads in.
I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn't do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are... you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.
I also don't get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is... honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.
Ok