Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don’t give a shit about the environment personally, because they’re going to be dead before things get really bad. They don’t give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don’t talk about it. Shocker.
Sounds like an excuse.
What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.
I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.
Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.
Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.
And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.
I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.
You might be interested in this climate misinformation chart.
Hint: you’re at the top of the “climate delay” section.
Environmental groups are considered more dangerous now than they were in the 90s/00s when Earth First and ELF were burning down homes, Sea Shepherds were sinking whaling ships, and there was this guy named Ted in a cabin in Montana you may have heard of?
Citation fucking needed.
So here’s the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.
And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.
And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.
Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.
Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.
The essence of white Berkeley liberalism.
How naive. True change doesn’t come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won’t harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.
Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.
That’s the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.
Am I still being too subtle?
You don’t understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn’t like it. Responsible protests don’t hurt people’s feelings. They went too far.
So that’s why we should err on the side of caution, assume that animals who act like they have emotions actually have emotions, and give them the respect and rights they deserve as fellow thinking feeling beings?
Oh wait, no, let’s torture, kill, and eat them because we can’t “prove”, to whatever arbitrary “scientific” standard, they have the same intellectual and emotional capacities we do.