this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Shutting down oil refineries seems like a very effective form of protest to me.
That stuff is cool, but I'm pretty sure they're referring to stuff like throwing soup over famous paintings (or rather, the glass covering famous paintings). I have to agree with them if that is what they mean; these actions are far far too easy to present as just vandalism for its own sake, and there's no obvious connection between the targets and the intention of the protests.
Maybe, but they attract attention. This kind of attention, although bad, will bring people to talk.
The problem is it just brings people to talk about how awful these climate protestors are for vandalising things people feel culturally attached to. The conversation is never about climate change.
It does help that "actually they haven't destroyed a single work of art" is a pretty good entry point to explain how protests are just a way of displaying group outrage
Civil rights were won by relentlessly challenging the courts, exhausting the public so much it blew back on the government administration, and with the armed black Panthers present as an implicit threat - "if you decide to throw out the law, so will we"
It does bring up the topic of climate change several times, and yet's still more than the protest that do happen, but you never hear about because they don't inconvenience anyone. There have been plenty of instances of protests vandalizing rich people's yachts, for example, but that doesn't make the headlines and people don't care, so no attention is raised and it's ultimately meaningless.
Just Stop Oil's first protests were directly shutting down oil terminals, then oil companies bought private laws to stop that so they moved on to other, at the time legal, methods such as "slow marching". These were then also made illegal.