just stop oil hot take and subtooting
Yeah, no fucking shit, but also how many pipelines have you sabotaged recently? How much disruption have have you inflicted on the fossil fuel industry? Do you have any idea how much difficulty and complexity and risk is involved in those sort of ops? How many fewer people are actually up for that shit?
It's all well and good understanding that direct action is often more effective than (or at least, an essential complimentary tactic alongside) peaceful protest. It's a very different thing actually carrying them out and taking on the potential consequences of spending the rest of your life in prison, or even being killed in the process.
(Note: If you actually have been doing crimes I am not interested in hearing about them and you should not be telling me. This is a rhetorical post about people complaining about activism being done imperfectly. It's probably better to try and find a way to help the situation that to just declare how much cleverer you are than a bunch of activists desperately trying to do *something* about our horrifying climate situation.)
@lucretia Fwiw, I strongly disagree with the initial premise voiced in your post.
Protest makes me sympathize with the environmental cause and want to support it.
Sabotage makes me think the cause is full of short-sighted childish wannabe-terrorists and shouldn't be supported.
The former gets more votes from regular folk, which is what ultimately drives change in a democracy.
@lucretia I would agree that disruptive actions are far less reprehensible than destructive actions.
> It's to cause direct negative effects to the owners of the thing being sabotaged
Is that worth it if it turns popular opinion against the saboteur, though? Seems like a one-step-forward-two-steps-back result before you even consider the moral implications.
> I would argue that if anyone is being childish, it's someone who decides they oppose enviromentalism simply because the news told them that some activists broke something
There's a big difference between supporting a moral or idea and supporting a cause. For example, I'm all for ethical treatment of animals, but fuck PETA. Ultimately, we're social creatures, so if activists act like lunatics, then normal people will want to distance themselves from those lunatics, and they do so by distancing themselves from the activism.
Re 2nd Point> I agree with JSO's current tactics and media strategy, but I do also agree with you on this front. I was thinking about PETA earlier actually, as an example of where this sort of thing doesn't really work at all, PETA seem to be a group focused on one very specific thing which causes them to be a complete disaster by ommitting any thought about how problems intersect. They're often very harmful to not only their own cause but various other related causes.
I think JSO are often framed as irresponsible or dangerous in the media, particularly in headlines, but further looking into it usually reveals the concerns to be blown out of proportion. They've generally given their actual actions a decent bit of thought and if anything seem to be provoking our outrage focused media to get their message to spread further.
The fact that they're generally considered annoying is an acceptable trade-off for me.
Sabotage has historically been part of this direct action, on various scales. My personal opinion on sabotage (to be clear, I do not think JSO are engaged in sabotage as their actions are typiccally non-destructive and primarily disruptive) as a tactic is that it can be very powerful but has to be undertaken with a great deal of deliberation and care. I also do not think sabotage is intended to sway voters, so how you respond to them ultimately isn't the point. It's to cause direct negative effects to the owners of the thing being sabotaged (stock price dip, loss of material resources, investor pullout, etc).
I would argue that if anyone is being childish (and to be clear this is a hypothetical, I'm not referring to you here), it's someone who decides they oppose enviromentalism simply because the news told them that some activists broke something, and decides they actually don't want the planet they live on to remain largely habitable out of spite.