Many people have a preference for civility politics. They prefer negative peace over a positive justice. They have similar reactions when vegan animal rights activists point out things that trigger their cognitive dissonance.
Thankfully, their pissing and moaning about these groups still bring more attention to these urgent issues than quietly begging for justice ever has, so even if they don’t like it, these kinds of stunts are still effective.
Yeah, I don’t condone throwing canned food at paintings in museums - but that’s how I heard about them, so I guess it worked?
That’s cause those are the instances that the media decided to put on blast. They were also dumping paint on CEO’s cars and in corporate lobbies.
Understandable. But yeah, unfortunately, activists will likely need to continue doing more outrageous things as time goes on and these issues continue to be unaddressed.
And if it makes you feel better, those paintings are kept in protective frames, so the art itself has never been damaged to my knowledge. Even still, I’d take a few damaged works of art over an even more irreparably damaged climate.
I don’t boo them. But their message is equivalent to “let’s lose over 90% of Earth’s population over a couple of years” which isn’t too popular for some strange reason.
A better message would be “let’s use all what’s left of fossil energy to build out renewable energy infrastructure and downscale our lifestyles radically, as the time is short”. While still losing a lot of people, but that part is not said aloud.
Protests are meant to disrupt, some people just dont seem to get it.
It probably doesn’t help that they have an obvious conflict of interest: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/10/21/getty-oil-heiress-funds-climate-crisis-activism-just-stop-oil
Aileen Getty has not personally worked in the oil industry and has poured much of her fortune into philanthropic ventures related to the climate crisis.
Isn’t this what we want these rich people to be doing?
Mahbe this is fair, maybe it isn’t, but the general impression most people have of them and groups like them is that it’s mostly quite comfortable, upper middle class people causing pointless disruption in ways that primarily impact the ordinary working Joe.
I’m almost certain this was extinction rebellion rather than just stop oil, but think of the protests to block motorways in England or disrupt train travel.
What did that achieve? Made some people late for work. Is that radical or effective? No, and it’s annoying.
Or when you think of just stop oil specifically, you might think of someone throwing soup on a painting or orange powder on a snooker table.
What did that achieve? Again, annoyance for your ordinary working stiff who might have saved up quite a bit of money to travel to a fancy museum or bought a ticket to a snooker game.
Is that radical or effective? No, and it’s annoying.
The style of protest is largely ineffective, isn’t radical, and mostly just annoys the working class.
Maybe if they started committing some genuinely radical acts, like executing oil executives for example, it might be different.
Right now it just looks to most ordinary people like pointless annoyance by a bunch of wankers.
Edit: Just to be clear, and I hope this doesn’t break any rules, I’m pro executing oil executives and anti pointless shit like holding up tube stations or vandalising art
Most people get their opinions from the people around them, and the media they consume. If the media talked about them in a better light, it would change people’s opinions on them. People also hate the idea of being mildly inconvenienced, especially since most of the progress we’ve had from technology has been about improving convenience.
