There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it.
I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)
And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.
> There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change.
So as somebody who noticed this bit of drama, and looked into it, I can explain. It's actually all very simple. Here goes:
It's a stunt!
Yup, they say that much. They tried protesting, they tried blocking roads, but were making page 10 of the newspaper. So they came out with some dramatic, outrageous plan that they knew wouldn't do harm (they planned this well in advance, and glued themselves to glass, not to the actual painting) but would be weird enough for people to talk about it. Plus there's a degree of symbolism in it.
> (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)
Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism. Glue yourself to a gas pump? You'll get insulted and probably dragged off, plus gas stations are kind of meaningless and replaceable and often not anywhere very interesting. Protest at oil infrastructure? It's typically remotely located, and secured. You won't be noticed before you're removed. Block Shell's HQ? Good luck blocking a huge building with multiple entrances and security.
Point being there's nothing oil related I can think of where you could cause some sort of disturbance, quickly get attention, have the press get to you before you got forcefully removed from there, and have the story be interesting enough to have a prominent place in the news.
They also threw food on some of the paintings - whether or not they were aware of a protective glass pane beforehand is unknown - and at least in one case glued themselves to a 16th century picture frame, itself a priceless cultural artefact.
The people who think the Jan 6 attack was a good idea will add it to the list of other things leftists do that they think justify the Jan 6 attack.
For that matter I'd say that a lot of what "Black Lives Matter" does is also nihilistic. That is, there is not a lot of expectation that things will change because their ideology doesn't believe that things can change and because it won't look at the variables that could be changed to make a difference. What I do know is that some investigator will come around in 20 years and ask "why is this neighborhood a food desert?" but the odds are worse than 50% that they'll conclude that "it used to have a supermarket but it got burned down in a riot" is part of the answer. In the meantime conservatives will deny that the concept of a "food desert" is meaningful at all and also say that Jan 6 was OK because leftists are always burning down their neighborhoods and getting away with it -- except you (almost) never get away with burning down your neighborhood in terms of the lasting damage it does to your community unless your community is in the gentrification fast track, see
(It might be the sample I see, but I know a few right-wingers who admit that there is a lot of craziness on their side but it is justified by what the other side does whereas I never hear from leftists that it's justifiable to say that "A trans woman is indistinguishable from a natural woman" because of something stupid a conservative did.)
What do you mean? They got what they wanted, more or less. They're a group of people organized around an idea, figured they weren't getting attention, so they went to look for a way to get some. That's all there is to it.
I think you're expecting some sort of special significance here. No, it's not complicated or even special.
On its own it doesn't. If you need to recruit people to your cause though you need people to know you exist and there's somewhere they can join.
> Giving up saving the planet for the goal of getting attention is fundamentally nihilistic.
Er, how are they giving up?
What they're doing is regularly shouting "Save the planet!" at people. Only this time they picked a weirder way to do it, because nobody was paying attention to the more normal ways they had to say it.
"Propaganda of the deed" is as likely to make people think climate change protestors are crazy and just make them close their earflaps as it is to motivate more people to take desperate nihilistic actions. This spectacle at best convinces people to tune out.
It's got to me more like this.
You have to tell the ESG people that what matters about Exxon Mobil is (1) they have to stop fact investing in producing oil that other people burn, (2) it wouldn't matter if they became a "net zero" company by pumping CO₂ from their oil refineries in the ground and using synthetic fuels in their trucks, (3) it doesn't matter how many women they get on the board.
People who are concerned about climate change in the US should be concerned about institutional reform in the Democratic party. Namely, we shouldn't be in situations like
where a lunatic that could be beaten by a ham sandwich could win because the Democrats don't think that Pennsylvania deserves a senator who can verbally communicate effectively. (e.g. out of everybody in the state Philadelphia could get somebody in the top 1% of verbal communication skills as a Senator, why do they have to get somebody who is disabled?)
I haven't the faintest idea of what you're talking about.
Again, I think you're under the impression that this particular event was supposed to be in some way Meaningful. Part of some grand strategy or a big movement or something. I'm telling you it's not.
As far as I can tell, https://juststopoil.org came into existence around February this year. They're just a small, new group formed around opposition to Big Oil that's trying to make some noise. This paintings thing is attempt #25, and it just happens to be weird enough to make the news, but not fundamentally different to the 24 that came before it.
In fact they tried previously gluing themselves to microphone at a news agency:
I see no indication that this is part of some grand strategy from the Democrats or something. No, it's just a small group doing a weird thing and getting news coverage because weird thing is weird.
Edit: And in fact, Just Stop Oil is UK based, so they have nothing to do with the US Democrats or Pennsylvania.
If it's helpful, this organization has in fact actively sabotaged oil infrastructure in the past to protest and no one gave a single shit. They had a whole week where they decommissioned several pumps back in August. I think its helpful instead of asking "why don't they <obvious>" to assume someone has already tried it.
There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it.
I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)
And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.