World snooker championship disrupted by Just Stop Oil protesters in Sheffield

[ThatRobGuy]

Perhaps a self immolation would work better. I think in the Vietnam war era it did help to punch it home to disengaged Americans that wow maybe there really is some suffering happening which people have been trying to bring to our attention.

Overall I think people will go on ignoring "sensible" tightly targeted protest, and only seeing freaked out young people when it gets awkward.

I think there's a pretty decent track record for ones that are sensible "better targeted" protests.

I'd argue that the civil rights movement and all the strides that have been made there were the result of targeted protests and boycotts.

Is every sensible protest going to work? No...but some do.

And even if one agrees with some of these "less focused" approaches of just disrupting/vandalizing random things to get peoples' attention (and hope they'll magically get on board), certainly there has to be few steps in the progression between "let's protest outside of the office of BP/let's block the driveway to the oil refinery/let's raise money for this candidate who's passionate about this issue" and "alright, time to just start breaking stuff...let's throw soup on a Van Gogh and glue our hands to the wall"

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

I mean how dare these protesters interrupt my fun to project their despair over our natural systems dying by the hand of human action.

The problem is that everyone believes that their cause is important. It might be OK for climate protesters to block roads, but what about when it's Brexiteers? Or anti-vaxxers?

 

[durangodawood]

The problem is that everyone believes that their cause is important. It might be OK for climate protesters to block roads, but what about when it's Brexiteers? Or anti-vaxxers?

The protests we're discussing are illegal, as they should be. That in itself means protesters have to have a level of commitment that should prevent irritating actions from completely proliferating.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

The protests we're discussing are illegal, as they should be. That in itself means protesters have to have a level of commitment that should prevent irritating actions from completely proliferating.

The problem is that when these types of "ready, fire, aim" protests gain traction, it can actually reach a pretty problematic level (despite being illegal) if too many people placate them in the name of "being seen as being on the right side of the argument".

We've had a few of those in the US. The Chaz/Chop is a notable example of what happens when too many people take the soft approach of "well, the thing they're upset about is really important, so we should just let them blow off steam and express themselves however they see fit"


The tough thing is, really impulsive, irrational people can still be passionate about issues that actually do matter.

Society needs to still be pragmatic enough to separate the message from the methodology. For instance, progressives should be able to say "y'know, these goofballs are going about this the entirely wrong way" without fear of their own tribe accusing them of "selling out" to "the other side" or "not taking the issue seriously enough". Much like conservative shouldn't have to tip toe around the fact that the people participating in Jan 6th were idiots, out of fear of being called a "RINO" by their own tribe.

But unfortunately, tribalism has supplanted reason in a lot of modern discourse.

 

[durangodawood]

The problem is that when these types of "ready, fire, aim" protests gain traction, it can actually reach a pretty problematic level (despite being illegal) if too many people placate them in the name of "being seen as being on the right side of the argument".

We've had a few of those in the US. The Chaz/Chop is a notable example of what happens when too many people take the soft approach of "well, the thing they're upset about is really important, so we should just let them blow off steam and express themselves however they see fit"


The tough thing is, really impulsive, irrational people can still be passionate about issues that actually do matter.

Society needs to still be pragmatic enough to separate the message from the methodology. For instance, progressives should be able to say "y'know, these goofballs are going about this the entirely wrong way" without fear of their own tribe accusing them of "selling out" to "the other side" or "not taking the issue seriously enough". Much like conservative shouldn't have to tip toe around the fact that the people participating in Jan 6th were idiots, out of fear of being called a "RINO" by their own tribe.

But unfortunately, tribalism has supplanted reason in a lot of modern discourse.

We havent seen the "chaz's" proliferate at all. In hindsight it looks ridiculous and no one does it.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

We havent seen the "chaz's" proliferate at all. In hindsight it looks ridiculous and no one does it.

I saw the chaz as an extreme escalation in the pattern of other protests that were happening at the time.

But we saw protests escalating to the level of property destruction and some instances of physical violence in a lot of major cities around the US.

 

[durangodawood]

I saw the chaz as an extreme escalation in the pattern of other protests that were happening at the time.

But we saw protests escalating to the level of property destruction and some instances of physical violence in a lot of major cities around the US.

I think a lot of that was just opportunistic looting. And I dont see at all how we draw a line from these climate protestors to those riots, which would have happened even if no one ever heard of a climate protest.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

I think a lot of that was just opportunistic looting. And I dont see at all how we draw a line from these climate protestors to those riots, which would have happened even if no one ever heard of a climate protest.

I think the escalation occurs when
A) the motivation to actually prosecute is tamped down for political signaling reasons (and in some cases, prominent political figures actually siding with the people who are tearing stuff up) When the vice president is basically fundraising for bail funds for protestors/rioters, I think that can encourage some bad behavior. VP: ""If you're able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.""

B) when it becomes evidently clear that the only thing to come of it is just a slap on the wrist in the form of a petty misdemeanor and a small fine (if you're one of the few that get caught), it's not much of a deterrent.

It sounds like the UK is a little more harsh on these things than the US court system is being, but still pretty lax none the less.

For instance, the name Emily Brocklebank shows up as being a person who's participated in multiple protests associated with the group. She had already gotten charged after supergluing herself to a Van Gogh back in November, but had her 21-day sentence suspended in favor of six weeks of remote monitoring. She popped back up in March in a protest where she and others laid down on an F1 track during the British Grand Prix.

She once again was charged, but the actual jail time was suspended, and her and the others involved got things like "60 hours of community service over a period of 12 months"

A spokesman for the group even said:
Victoria Lindsell, speaking on behalf of Just Stop Oil, said she was "relieved" by the "lenient sentences".

"I think the judge has reflected that he recognises that ordinary people are trying to protect the future of humanity and therefore the sentence has been fairly lenient and we're pleased about that," she said.


Which means they'll all likely do it again... When the people who are supposed to be the adults in the room start excusing the methods because they agree with parts of the message, that's the recipe for enabling bad behavior.

 

[durangodawood]

I think the escalation occurs when
A) the motivation to actually prosecute is tamped down for political signaling reasons (and in some cases, prominent political figures actually siding with the people who are tearing stuff up) When the vice president is basically fundraising for bail funds for protestors/rioters, I think that can encourage some bad behavior. VP: ""If you're able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.""

B) when it becomes evidently clear that the only thing to come of it is just a slap on the wrist in the form of a petty misdemeanor and a small fine (if you're one of the few that get caught), it's not much of a deterrent.

It sounds like the UK is a little more harsh on these things than the US court system is being, but still pretty lax none the less.

For instance, the name Emily Brocklebank shows up as being a person who's participated in multiple protests associated with the group. She had already gotten charged after supergluing herself to a Van Gogh back in November, but had her 21-day sentence suspended in favor of six weeks of remote monitoring. She popped back up in March in a protest where she and others laid down on an F1 track during the British Grand Prix.

She once again was charged, but the actual jail time was suspended, and her and the others involved got things like "60 hours of community service over a period of 12 months"

A spokesman for the group even said:
Victoria Lindsell, speaking on behalf of Just Stop Oil, said she was "relieved" by the "lenient sentences".

"I think the judge has reflected that he recognises that ordinary people are trying to protect the future of humanity and therefore the sentence has been fairly lenient and we're pleased about that," she said.


Which means they'll all likely do it again... When the people who are supposed to be the adults in the room start excusing the methods because they agree with parts of the message, that's the recipe for enabling bad behavior.

At the top of this page I was only trying to address the hypothetical problem of this type of protest becoming everyones tactic for every sub-existential grievance. I dont think we've seen that all. So far its been a very finite set of events, all amplified by media because its interesting, and amplified in discussion forums, also because its interesting.

 

[DarkForest]

Climate change can only be addressed at the international level, with all countries setting goals with penalties. We need to look at this like WWII. We didn't casually discuss how to get to victory.

The sad reality is the the developing world will want a piece of the pie and they won't care about international standards. Meanwhile the developed world has gone insane and moved away from clean, renewable sources of energy like nuclear. Nuclear being 'renewable' if it was used with breeder reactors and removal of materials from oceanwater.

Wikitime:
"A breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates more fissile material than it consumes.[1] These reactors can be fuelled with more commonly available isotopes of uranium and thorium, such as uranium-238 or thorium-232, as opposed to the rare uranium-235 which is used in conventional reactors.
[...]
Breeder reactors could, in principle, extract almost all of the energy contained in uranium or thorium, decreasing fuel requirements by a factor of 100 compared to widely used once-through light water reactors, which extract less than 1% of the energy in the uranium mined from the earth.
[...]
With seawater uranium extraction (currently too expensive to be economical), there is enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy the world's energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy."

The world's nations will act like a den of thieves as the situation gets worse.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Climate change can only be addressed at the international level, with all countries setting goals with penalties. We need to look at this like WWII. We didn't casually discuss how to get to victory.

I would agree with that. I would be more specific and say unless China, India, US, and Russia all get on-board (emphasis on China), any mitigation effort will be for naught. And right now, it's a pretty risky gamble for any country to hamstring their own price point on certain goods with the hope that China will adopt clean energy.

The sad reality is the the developing world will want a piece of the pie and they won't care about international standards.

...and I can't totally fault them for that.

"Hey, I realize you've been living without air conditioning, cars, and infrastructure while we've been getting filthy rich of fossil fuels for the last 80 years...but shucks, bad timing for you guys, we've decided it's bad now so you need to stop using it and adopt only clean energy sources" is going to be a very hard sell.