Didn't it turn out that the activist group behind this was funded by the heir to the Getty oil fortune?
I think it spawns a bunch of time wasting discourse online, but online discourse has always and will always be time wasting because it will never really affect the offline world.
The thing about shit like this act of protest is that it can spark off discussions between people in real life. Plenty of stuff like this has had some pretty checked out or downright chud people I know ask me about it knowing I'm pretty far left and think it's a gotcha, but has been an opportunity to steer the conversation more towards actual meaningful discussions or at least poking at an individual brainworm they have.
Were there other forms of protest that might have been more effective, maybe, but I think dunking on anyone who cared enough to go out and do something like this is misplaced.
Now if it were something like the group that had a homeless encampment removed so they could hold signs and do nothing, not even catch a news cycle, then I have a different opinion and am much more likely to call that an op because it's getting something the white pmc class wants done under the guise of something good that is ultimately ineffective
https://twitter.com/SarafromMI/status/1581002787617284097?cxt=HHwWgoCljZXq7PArAAAA
Hot take. Liberals and the general public won't believe that there is something truly existential going on until they see people actually performing action that seems proportional to the size of the threat being claimed.
This kind of mild action doesn't look like people seriously believe that the world is coming to an end unless something happens. To a lot of people it looks like a form of lifestyle protesting. It looks like a social media spectacle instead of the very serious kind of action they expect if people genuinely truly believe what they're saying.
Here in the UK especially people have not forgotten how the fur trade was destroyed by people literally attacking shops selling fur, destroying their stock. They haven't forgotten the radical animal groups that brought about change in animal testing by attacking the animal testing places and freeing animals. They haven't forgotten what radical climate activists of the 80s-90s also used to do.
What people see today is incredibly underwhelming compared to what action they have seen in the past, and for that reason it is hard to take seriously the existential nature of the climate threat because they genuinely do expect people to be doing huge things in response to something truly existential. The action being performed is not proportional to the size of the threat.
In essence what I'm saying is that this kind of action is the complete and total opposite of propaganda-of-the-deed. It undermines the claims made about the problems by being so underwhelming.
You can have a go at me for implying escalation is necessary but I do believe that the action climate activists are taking right now is grossly out of proportion with the claims being made. The action should be matching the claims but it does not, and that's no good.
escalation Honestly at this point it's hard to imagine an act that isn't justifiable. The stakes are infinite. The planet is visibly, rapidly dying. You can't possibly kill or immiserate more people than the weather will over the next twenty or thirty years.
Right?
I'm sure there's a problem with the existing action not matching the rhetoric. The general population is sceptical of exaggerative claims, they think if you truly believe the things you're saying that a lot more genuinely serious action would be happening but it's not... So they're left with questions about whether the rhetoric is real or exaggerated. They come to the conclusion it can't be that serious because nobody is doing anything. That people think that there's still some political method of avoiding it.
I think that when we go over the edge and into the realm of serious action shit will happen extremely fast, a lot of people will go over that edge simultaneously, things will kick off in a big way.
i dunno, i think this differs from your standard lib attention-raising things because it really hits such a hard societal taboo, and thats why it has garnered so much attention. its not just libs occupying an intersection while sitting in a bathtub of spaghetti or whatever, that everyone rolls their eyes at these days. destruction of priceless western art is so abhorrent as to be unthinkable in our societal context, and i think raising the idea that climate change is such an urgent and overwhelming issue that people (and particularly white people) would even threaten destruction of something so "sacred" over it really is something new. and if people are angry enough to do something like that, who knows what else they might be angry enough to do?
im not sure it was necessarily the very best action or the best target but the more ive thought about it the more i err towards at least critical support
living in our pod homes 2000 feet underground, no one is going to be enjoying Van Gogh.
My cave will have no lights?
yeah but i guess thats part of the point right? that theyre not doing actual damage but are explicitly threatening that they could. and western art is seen as such a sacred thing that even that threat is getting attention and pissing people off kinda like if they actually did do damage
as a perhaps imperfect analogy, protest marches back in the day carried a similar explicit threat - theres a bunch of us here peacefully marching for now, but we could be doing something less peaceful in the streets if you ignore us. theyve long since been neutered of course, and theyre easily ignored now because everyone in power knows that a lib protest march now is never going to actually follow through with any sort of escalation any more. i think a new kind of action like this art thing carries some new potential threat of escalation to actual damage (or at least it cant be entirely ruled out for now) that perhaps might give some people a bit of pause?
but yeah the gluing hands thing seems pretty lib
Honestly, if you're not using welding torches and main structural members are you even trying?
I'm listening to Lenin's "What is to be Done" right now. So far, I'm about half way through the six~seven hour audiobook. For the most part, I haven't really been able to follow what he's been talking until the section I'm at right now. He's dunking on groups who think the masses don't know what is wrong with the world and spend all their efforts trying to educate the masses on shit they already know. Then chastising those groups for not doing what the masses need and educating them in the politics of the situation ( I think. Or maybe its Marxism/socialism :edgeworth-shrug: )
This stuff feels like the type of stuff Lenin would be dunking on.
If Lenin was around today there would be a lot fewer Exxon excutives is all I'm saying, okay?
I think it might also be that competition amongst capitalists has them eating each other so they can't organise to fix anything
Yeah, but if any one of them diverts a useful amount of resources to mitigate global warming the other sharks will turn on them and rip them to pieces instantly. To say nothing of the sharks in Saudi, Russia, and Texas who would instantly become small fish if serious climate mitigation was attempted.
For most of them, they're psychopaths stuck in the prisoner's dilemna with other psychopaths, and they got to the position they're in by always choosing to betray the other prisoner, so they can't trust anyone. And for a lot of them their status as bourgeoisie is intrinsically tied up in setting the planet on fire as quickly as possible. Oil barons, beef barons, lumber barons, all kinds of barons cannot and will not agree to mitigation under any circumstances.
Can't discount the evangelical psychos who explicitly believe that god will either magically prevent anything bad from happening, or will rapture teleport them to heaven so it won't matter.
Yeah sure but it's even worse that they didn't have the sense of humor to pick a Warhol painting.
I advocate choosing warhol paintings and move to escalate from glue and soup to flame throwers.
Or flamethrowers? People take you seriously when you set their stuff on fire. There's nothing that inspires fear quite like a zealot aiming a blowtorch at something you love.
I think I disagree with the idea that most people grasp the extent of the threat climate change holds against society. If they did, most people wouldn't be satisfied with their preferred politicians. There's either some amount of ignorance about how bad the situation is, or people expect far too little out of politicians.
most people wouldn’t be satisfied with their preferred politicians
I think most people believe that this is the best that they can get, and that their guy would be doing more but they're constrained by other forces.
Which is absurd but these people wouldn't be libs if they understood and acceoted how political power works.
Look at biden's debt thing. Hailed as a victory even though biden could unilaterally cancel all federal debt by scribbling it down on a napkin. Libs seem to think that either he can't do that, or that it would cost him, or even that doing small incremental steps has some kind of inherent value.
They absolutely believe that doing small steps is inherently valuable. If he were to actually exercise power he'd be ruling by decree and he'd be no better than Trump. Actions have no meaning in their content, only in their appearance.
idk this seems like kind of a strawman I don't think the only reasonable read of the act is that the activists are trying to raise awareness.
I think it could be a lot of things. "It didn't accomplish anything" is a weak criticism from behind a keyboard, people don't have a ton of levers to pull that don't carry the risk of being locked in a cage for decades. Furthermore you don't actually know if it accomplished anything or not, it only just happened.
Like just off the top of my head it could be a direct attack on the niceties of the bourgeois. The rich are destroying the earth, so we can target and destroy things that the rich treasure in retaliation. It could be a forcing of the contradiction that caring about preserving art during an apocalypse is on it's face ridiculous, sparking conversation about how trivial Euro art is in the face of a climate holocaust. It could be something else I didn't think of in five minutes. But the idea that the only thing it could be is for awareness-raising as if there are many people unaware about climate change seems like a failure of imagination.
a direct attack on the niceties of the bourgeois. The rich are destroying the earth, so we can target and destroy things that the rich treasure in retaliation. It could be a forcing of the contradiction that caring about preserving art during an apocalypse is on it’s face ridiculous
This was my immediate take but the 'this is stupid/fed shit' reaction being pretty much universal has made me basically keep it to myself
Sneaking a can of soup into a museum is also just... really cheap? How much did this cost to pull off? 2 people, 2 museum tickets (if that particular museum required an admittance fee at all), and a can of soup. Museum tickets aren't THAT expensive, nor is soup. This could be pulled off by anyone in a matter of hours with no real preparation, training, or major financing and now they're on the covers of god knows how many media publications. Considering how much attention they're getting vs. how much they put into pulling this off, the cost-benefit ratio is incredible
people don’t have a ton of levers to pull that don’t carry the risk of being locked in a cage for decades.
You're right, but the stakes are the chance that our species survives the next few hundred years. Global warming is already so far advanced that the deaths of hundreds of millions if not billions of people are probably inevitable regardless of any action we take. Most people, including myself, haven't come to grips with the reality that we're all walking dead.
If people ever really internalize that they won't be gluing themselves to paintings. They'll be rushing exxon properties in human waves and merrily carryinh bombs in to oil depots.
But we're not their yet.
they did a ricky morty about that and it ended up bad, sorry :so-true:
