Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.
It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and
It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and
It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.
I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the “average middle-class Westerner” (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally “one of the worst offenders”. While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.
It gets the exact opposite effect. Yes they get attention alright. But the wrong attention.
People don’t think “oh wow yeah stop oil!” They think “wow these stop oil guys are absolute idiots, I don’t want to be associated with them”
That’s the point though. They’ve done other protest work “the proper way” and nobody knows about it because it doesn’t get reported on. They want the message “just stop oil” to be in the news, so they do what gets them in the news.
If they go for the “right” attention, they’re barely reported on by two local outlets. If they go for public outcry, they’re global news in hours. Their goal isn’t to get you to support their organization. It’s to keep you talking about and thinking about and caring about climate change.
Just Stop Oil said the orange powder paint was cornflour and it would "wash away with rain
That’s good, I suppose; I’m of the mind that historical art belongs to humanity.
However, if climate activists want to vandalize something to make a point, go vandalize the CEOs who are ruining the climate. They don’t care about history and preserving anything, as long as they’re making gobs of money, so punching somebody else in the face isn’t something that causes them any discomfort.
I think these guys get headlines exactly because they target things that “belong” to all of us. PETA throwing red paint on some rich schmuck wearing furs? That might get a minute of airtime. But (safely) paint Stonehenge, throw baked beans on the Mona Lisa, etc and every news outlet will cover it.
And yet, all I think when I see this is “these guys seem like assholes”.
If they ruined the house of an oil CEO, however… Heroes.
I thought the headline was a bit misleading, because obviously environmental activists wouldn’t “paint” or vandalize something like that.
Anyone who thinks they are assholes for doing this to a monument should be thinking about what oil companies are doing to less visible areas that are just as important.
Exactly my point. Their reason for doing it gets overshadowed by the act, because they are incongruent.
The act and the message should be essentially one and the same, because people’s attention is already stretched thin by a myriad of things.
If you put more focus on the act instead of the reason you don’t have your priorities straight. People should be out in the streets and destroying a shit ton of monuments important to the rich with what’s happening in the world right now.
Agreed. The key there is “important to the rich,” not “important to humanity.” Break all the rich people’s toys, make some noise. Go sabotage a SpaceX rocket or something.
But the fact that I’m focused on the act despite being effectively on their side means a ton of other people who aren’t on their side are too, and I can almost guarantee they can’t see past the act to really grasp the impetus behind it.
You think the Louvre and what’s inside isn’t important to rich people? Stonehenge isn’t important to rich people?
You and me shouldn’t give a fuck that these things get destroyed because if things keep going the way they are there won’t be any humans from the working class to enjoy them anymore in a century, so what’s the point of preserving them in the first place?
Destroy all that shit so people have to face the fact that our governments and rich people are ready to spend billions to restore a church in Paris while people in the same city are starving.
And it works, and may actually be effective at spreading your cause, the first couple times
After that, everyone already knows who you are and what you want, so the only thing they think of the next time you come up is “these assholes again?”
That’s the whole point. The CEOs dont care for their property either, there’s no point of vandalizing anything of theirs and ending up with lawsuits.
This message wasn’t to CEOs, it was to you.
Then they send their message to the informed but poor and powerless.
I disagree, though, that the rich don’t care about their toys. They may be able to afford to replace them, but it’s not like they go out and buy a yacht every day. And activists vandalizing public works of art or history can and do still face legal action from the governments that oversee or maintain them.
Ultimately, the rich responsible for facilitating and encouraging climate change aren’t going to feel any compunction to change if you never even punch in their direction.
It’s called raising awareness in society. This kind of coverage costs millions of dollars, and it only happened because they involved something visible we all care for in a way.
I guess, but who hasn’t heard of climate change at this point?
The conversation has to go beyond that, and their desire to raise awareness accompanied by acts like this only demonstrates their conviction, not the truth of our impending doom. They have to reach the people who still don’t think it’s real, and what does painting a historical monument have to do with climate change?
The plot they want people to pick up gets lost and the message is out of their control if the act isn’t self-evident with regard to their purpose.
I can go through the dictionary all day. That’s called activism my dude, and it was an excellent way to being attention to a particular issue they are campaigning for.
The act is self-evident in regards to their purpose lmao. They “painted” the environment (polluted it) in a way we could all relate to, in a effort raise awareness on other things happening in the environment that aren’t as visible.
They’re sending the message to people who are ready to take a plane to travel thousands of km to go check a bunch of rocks. They’re sending the message to people who vote. They’re sending the message to people that use their car to get stuck in traffic every morning instead of using public transport.
I don’t think you understand the point they’re trying to make…
And if you believe that, then they’ve failed.
Man, I’ve studied history and I still agree with all that they’re doing and even wish they had done permanent damage to all the things these protestors have sprayed. The hypocrisy is incredible.
It’s just like when Notre-Dame burned, billions started coming in while people in Paris are homeless or must choose between eating or paying rent.
These things are objects, living beings are dying due to our inaction and people would rather spend money to admire a fucking painting than think about it? That’s disgusting.
I’m still not convinced that these guys aren’t being fronted by oil conglomerates to make real climate activists look like morons.
Holy shit I’ve been wanting to say this since they started but figured it would sound too conspiratory. They prey on the most lonely and disillusioned progressives and get them to do stupid things from the feeling of being apart of something.
it‘s a conspiracy theory and I am not sure whether you are pushing it. yesterday there was a big discussion about it on another thread and the proof presented by some was garbage.
I have to admit I have no proof other than it wouldn’t be the worst thing these kind of companies have done.
That, and as far as putting down any sort of ‘grassroots’ movement, making them look like fools is a move straight out of Freakonomics in regards to how the KKK was effectively out on blast by the Superman radio Broadcast of the day.
By showing how crazy and dumb the organizations ‘secret codes’ & ‘rituals’ were, their numbers dropped precipitously.
Despite supporting probably all of their goals; I hate them.
Why? They’ve never actually damaged anything
No one should have to explain why throwing soup on a painting is a dumb way to protest - yes, even if the painting has a glass barrier
In the modern history of protest it’s the stupidest possible way.
Keeps us discussing it though
We talk more about their tactics than the message they’re trying to spread, so I don’t think we’re really discussing the things they’d want us to focus upon.
We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.
When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think anybody is researching anything. The average person does not have the drive or attention span for a Step 2.
Plus, I agree with their core ideology, yet I still think people who do this stuff are assholes, and I’m immediately annoyed on the outset. To expect people who aren’t invested in climate change to look past the “asshole” is a pretty big ask.
This. I truly believe that humanity will not stop burning fossil fuels until the last drop is gone.
I think it needs to get to a point where the public put pressure on companies and inconveniencing them will force them to choose sides. I’m not sure it’s the side of common sense though.
I’ve seen a lot of great comments in here about climate change, the oil industry, and the mass extinction we have happening right now.
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Yeah, why can’t they just quietly trudge towards our own extinction with resignation like the rest of us, instead of making a fuss.
Making a fuss? No.
Being dicks. Self-righteous, performative dicks. Fuck them.
Idk if petite bougeouis theatrics while trudging towards calamity is any better than doing it quietly. Maybe a little. And fuck the Mona Lisa. But defacing an archaeological site (even temporarily) for bougeouis theatrics is just icky
Lots of people seem to hate this and I do on some level get it. I’d be happy to talk about whether its a winning strategy or what alternatives there are (I’m not sure personally its the optimum form of activism)
What I would say is the evidence suggests:
- General public do seem to hate this stuff.
- There is a relatively little spill over from the organisation to the wider issue (as in people think these guys are idiots but don’t link to climate change or environmentalism more generally).
- It is evidenced to increase the saliance and perceived importance of climate change I.e. people hate them but spend more time thinking climate change is serious than before.
Lastly, what I would say is from my own visceral reaction to the Van Gogh painting: I felt a huge and sudden feeling of cultural loss. That something of our heritage was at risk and we may lose it and initially I was angry and sad but I realised that we are routinely doing this everyday with lost species. Heritage we haven’t even been able to document yet. All that is to say it maybe we have a discussion about what the best activism is and who we need to influence and how (I think we need to do better than just think we need everyone on side) but what we shouldn’t do is entertain for a moment that the scale of this action isn’t proportional and valid to what we face. We are hurtling towards a cliff edge and some people still have their foot on the accelerator. This is the equivalent of worrying about a vase in the boot. I want to save it too but at the moment we are endangering it more through business as usual than through some cornflour.
Good post. To be honest, when I found out that nothing they did was real, I came to appreciate them. But I don’t understand why we prop up fossil fuel in the first place.
It has a lot to do with money and technology. By the time we were able to have electric vehicles, oil companies were loaded and companies like to make money. So they spend money to lobby and keep themselves entrenched. Throw in some good feel bullshit to placate a simple majority of the people and that brings us to today.
If what they do was real it would have a much bigger impact.
I have a small issue with the analogy of lost things: throughout history, many things have been lost, living and nonliving, through both action and inaction. It is the nature of our impermanent existence.
But vandalizing our works of art servers our ties to the past and what they might tell us. Yes, we are currently accelerating the loss of species, but they will continue to come and go, regardless of our input. These links, however, can never be recovered. They are intrinsically unique, and their value to humanity is not something they have a right to gamble in a game of political chicken (because let’s be honest, it all boils down to governments’ responses to the current crisis).
And if this is truly an effort to draw parallels with our impending doom, it’s inelegant and ineffective, and I wish they’d put more effort towards actually doing something that makes the polluters want to change, instead of just pissing people off only to get lost in the next bombastic news story.
but they will continue to come and go, regardless of our input
I’m not quite sure you understand the problem with climate change. It’s not that “they” will come and go, it’s that WE will only go. There’s no “coming” back with any reasonable immediacy. Or were you arguing that the stones wouldn’t be there for exhibition by the jellyfish that would be the only thing left living in the oceans?
Now, it is my opinion that when Brawndo finally pushes the climate over the tipping point and life as we know it takes its final breath, that natural selection will do what it has always done and though life will change, it will persist in some form. So were humans able to outlast this foreboding obstacle and humanity persists, then so be it, but I honestly doubt they’ll give a shit about fucking stonehenge. If there were some life lessons from the past that only stonehenge can communicate, then it has obviously failed.
Sorry for delay I wanted to take the time to respond to you properly because I’ve probably thought similar to you at some point in my life and I want to explain how understanding what is happening has shifted that.
Yes, you are right the analogy isn’t perfect. Loss is part of change and change is a permenant. You are right that species and human history and culture has gone through both action and inaction from humans. My comment was about my own realisation that I (and probably wider society) was guilty of placing reverance and value too much on the human artifacts and not on the incredible natural history (the web of life that we all rely on) that we are losing. I looked at my feelings of potential loss about Van Gogh and questioned why I didn’t feel that way about our natural history and living beings we are losing daily and could stop destroying if we wanted to. So, you are right that losing the links to our human past would be tragic and we should try and preserve it* but the same is as true if not more true of our natural history. We are not separate from the climate and ecological systems we’ve evolved and developed in and whilst we could survive without links to our human history being disconnected from our natural heritage causes a number or mental and physical harms (the science is only just really beginning to understand these connections) and ultimately we rely on (e.g. food and clean air).
What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here. I realise, unfortunately, its an emotive term and I mean this in the way denial is talked about with respect to grief (which is what climate change is about to be honest coping with loss). You say that things always come and go and will regardless of our level of action. Whilst that is a truism it misses an important understanding of what’s happening. We are not just losing a few species or ecosystems here we are actually drastically changing the ratio of the rate of which things come and go. I.e. we are massively upping the rate at which things go whilst also limiting the rate at which they can come. Even this is an understatement unfortunately because what we are actually doing is pulling so hard on so many strands of the web of the life (Earth’s natural living systems) that the web itself is at risk of coming apart. Earth’s living system as a whole is as far as we know intrinsically unique to the whole universe and if we don’t manage to stem this collapse all those intrinsically unique human artifacts will likely be lost or in the worst case there won’t be much life to reflect on it. Its worth once again reiterating that the risk they took to the rocks was mindblowingly low espcially relative to other risks.
On their strategy I agree this is where there is room to start having a discussion about Just Stop Oils actions but we can’t do that I don’t think unless we start with the acknowledgement that their assessment of the stakes is valid and correct and that if effective their action (and tbh action that took real non trivial risk with Stonehenge) would be overwhelming worth it.
For what its worth I do think their theory of change is flawed and their self-care of their activists is lacking but if their aim is solely to keep climate change on the agenda with more people pushing for change they are succeeding (people hate them whilst they think about climate change and spend time on the internet and in person discussing climate change and what should and shouldn’t be done). The flaw I think is that they believe in an idealised vision of democracy where change happens when enough ordinary people want it whereas the reality is that public pressure is only one component of change espciaily when an issue is as complex and “spinnable” as climate change.
This is already too long so I won’t go into it but I also don’t think this issue boils down to a game of political chicken with governments. One of the challenges is the climate change is so sprawling and complex it brings up challenges to across lots if different scales and disciplines. The solutions are fundamental to our human story not just small technocrat shifts. There is no area of human activity that isn’t upturned by climate change and that ibudes archeology and anthropology.
Finally, if you are interested in learning about where I and others are coming from and the scale of our problems and challenges I recommend the following books:
- The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. This covers human history and we have created meaning and how it links with the environment and interconnects with the current issues we face
- Inflamed: deep medicine and he anatomy of injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Whilst not directly about climate change it does talk about how interconnected our health is with natural systems and how failure of connection to them leads to amoung other thing inflammation and disease.
- The climate book by Greta Thunberg. I haven’t actually read this but I know a number of the experts involved in areas that overlap with mine and I trust them. It might be guilty of focussing on the technical aspects of the issues rather than the human stories I think are more important which is why place it lower.
- There’s a lot of discussion to be had about Stonehenge particularly and how its been prioritised to be “preserved” at the cost and neglect of the surrounding archaeology. It also sad that none of the discussion and worry about potential risk to it covered the fact that the government is pushing ahead with sacrificing the wider site to car culture ( big underground new road, believing in the myth that more lanes stop traffic rather than the opposite). If we truly cared about that era of British and global history we would doing a lot more than “preserving” a few rocks which the Victorian moved about and romanticised anyway.
What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here.
Unfortunately, Lemmy is not a good medium for nuanced discussion. I assure you that I was not articulating climate denialism, just that we need to take a step back and realize that saving our links to history is greater than humanity itself (in my opinion). Humanity may not survive this catastrophe, and I would rather think that some future species on this blue marble finds proof that we lived and were more than a bunch of stupid apes; and perhaps, they could even learn from our mistakes and successes.
I agree, though, that their assessment of the problem is valid; I would just rather see them punching at the actual polluters, rather than flailing at humanity. And in fact, they used money they raised from this stunt to be able to paint Taylor Swift’s private jet. That’s something I can sort of support, though they still haven’t taken any steps towards painting the private jet of an oil tycoon, for example.
Like we all get it—the pollution is bad, but Taylor Swift isn’t directly responsible for manufacturing jet fuel. Taylor Swift isn’t responsible for lobbying governments to slow walk the transition to other energy sources. I want to see them use their effort to make headlines, because some rich oil magnate’s mansion is now orange (or whatever).
People need to be reminded that not only is the oil bad, but these specific people producing it are the villains making sure we get off of it too late. The act needs to encompass that full message, and so far, I feel like they’re only getting one piece and expecting the public to fill in the blanks—a big ask for average people who aren’t that engaged.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Take care.
You really have to scroll down google results to find Just Stop Oil’s social media due to the incredible publicity this action has generated about climate change resistance. Their Twitter account is https://twitter.com/JustStop_Oil, and they’re smashing their fund-raising targets via chuffed.
Stonehenge dosen’t containt oil, are they stupid?
No, but people are ready to burn a shit ton of it to go see it though.
it’s just some rocks, by celts. paintings probably do more damage to the environment than rocks
It’s not about if the object damages the environment, the point they’re making is that society is ready to spend fortunes preserving old objects while everything around them is going to shit. We don’t have our priorities straight, being able to take a plane to travel thousands of km to go see a painting from the 1600s is more important to us than making sure our neighbors are able to eat or keeping some species alive.
At some point we’ll have to wake up and face reality, there’s nothing more important than the incoming climate crisis and if we don’t address it, us preserving these paintings and Stonehenge and so on will all have been for nothing as it will be cockroaches that will be left to enjoy them.
don’t we have cameras? is everyone stupid?
After reading the article, and realizing that what they used isn’t “paint” as we usually think of it, makes me feel less of a homicidal rage.
This is besides the point, but I’m curious about the technical aspects. How do you “spray” cornflour? The second picture looks like it’s in some large cylinder. Is it pressurized, like a fire extinguisher?
If the powder is fine enough you could just blow air across or through a reservoir of it, maybe? That’s my best guess like a leaf blower with a bag of powder you pour in
More moronic arts and craftsy hippie shit giving the left a shit reputation in the UK
Labour is winning the polls currently.
In the words of not the mandalorian, this is not the way.
Using water-soluble paint is not the way.
Using soup is not the way.
Using powder that will wash itself away is not the way.
Blocking a street for a couple hours is not the way.
Glueing yourself to a pole is not the way.
What is the way then? Sitting quietly in the corner? Signing a petition on Change.org? Waiting for the politician that takes oil money to have a change of heart?
I don’t claim to have the answer, but this is not the answer. Ruining a unique unsolvable mystery of human past is dumb. Who’s feathers does it ruffle anyway?
But all those actions are exactly same as signing petition. Just louder and in many cases made more about the protesters then the protest. It’s more like doing something so that you feel you tried and media writes about it which males you feel like you did the change. But nature doesn’t give two shits about the protests neither is the current economy of consumption which leads us to the disaster. Being on the internet, discussing this matter right now is contributing to the problem and only shows that our life style, which we are happy with is the problem.
And yeah blocking the street causes much more pollution plus losses off everyone, so not sure what’s the goal there either
Should rub their noses in it.
