Can someone please calmly explain how blocking a freeway across an ocean and a country on a different continent, is supposed to have any effect on a political issue in the middle east?
Can someone please calmly explain how blocking a freeway across an ocean and a country on a different continent, is supposed to have any effect on a political issue in the middle east?
I’m not saying I was turned away from fixing climate change because of this protest. I wasn’t. Anyone who knows as much about it as you or I do would have to be insane to support saving humanity, or not, based on some trivial detail like this. I am saying, though, that a lot of people – the vast majority – are in your group #2, and yes, will be turned away by these actions.
My grandma marched with Martin Luther King, more than once, at a time when his approval rating with other white southerners like her was pretty damn low.
If we were talking about doing something that would directly impact Mitch McConnell and the other people who are engineering this crisis, that sounds great. I don’t agree with the violence, and we can talk about that, but the main point – directly impacting the people who are responsible – sounds to me like a great idea.
Directly impacting the museum curators and the people in Seattle driving to work doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like they’re just easier targets for your (very justified) anger and desperation to solve the problem. I think it’s highly unlikely that threatening any number of Andy Warhol paintings or closing any number of highways will ever bring the criminals in congress to their knees so that they beg for an end to it all if they agree to start pursuing sensible policies. I think it’s far more likely that when they see stuff like this they rub their hands together with glee and think about how they can use this to portray climate protestors in the news, and extend by another irreplaceable year the length of time they can continue their evil work, unimpeded.
THE VAST MAJORITY DO. NOT. MATTER.
Read that sentence over and over until it sticks in your head. These protests Are. Not. For. Your. Racist. Grandmother. They are direct threats to the politicians who know better. They are direct threats to the people in power who are knowingly letting the climate worsen for profit. They are direct threats that say if they continue putting our lives at risk for money, we will burn down everything they own into ash that if we die we do so without making them richer.
You are gently tonguing and sucking turtle miches fucking balls with this bullshit rhetoric. You are getting him off in the worst way, because he knows climate change is real and does not care because IT MAKES HIM MONEY. He is in love with the fact that you think threatening him and his coffers “”“hUrTs ThE MoVeMeNt”“” because you are stopping anyone from actually holding him accountable.
Your racist grandmas opinion doesnt matter!! She isnt burning coal!! She isnt razing the amazon for cattle farming!! The people who store their expensive art in museums do!! These protests are not for your dumb as rocks grandma!! No one gives a shit what she thinks!!
These protests are reminders that we can do things that cost the people in power lots of money, because costing them money or killing them is all they care about, and we are polite enough to start with their wealth before their lives. End of story. Thats it.
Threatening art threatens their investments. Halting traffick shuts down their factories and offices. Its not for you! Its to cost them money, and then remind them that we will do worse, for longer, next time. Anything that would make their stock wobble makes them tremble. Anything that shuts down a city fucks every business in that city, and all those angry business owners turn to the politicians and cry “fix it daddy! Or Ill stop paying you under the table!”
THIS. ISNT. ABOUT. YOU. Its about hurting, directly, the people who cause these problems, in ways they cannot stop you from doing without killing you for it.
I think this conversation may have reached the end of its usefulness. Why are you insisting my grandma is racist? Why do you think
damaging(edit: pretending to damage) an Andy Warhol painting hurts Mitch McConnell in any way, or that popular support for ending climate change (by “the vast majority”) would be in any way shape or form unimportant to ending climate change?Edit: Actually, don’t answer that. You seem very committed to arguing against points that aren’t what I’m saying, and insulting my grandma which is 1,000% unwarranted, such that I don’t think there’s any point to continuing. Again, my grandma was a physically active anti-racist activist back in a time and place when it was wildly unpopular and genuinely dangerous to her physical safety to be one. Your insisting on asserting otherwise is, one, uncalled-for and insulting, and two, an indication of how cavalier you are about saying things that simply aren’t true.
I’m happy to continue the conversation if you’re open to being civil and listening to what I’m actually saying (although you’re in no way required to agree or anything). If not, then not.
You might be right. If youre not bright enough to grok that Im not talking about you, mozz’s, literal biological grandmother, and if you need to re-ask questions I have explicitly answered twice now, I dont think you can ever understand what protests are in a conceptual sense, let alone why these specific protests happen.
Good luck not walking into doors before opening them bud