mozz

I think this conversation may have reached the end of its usefulness. Why are you insisting my grandma is racist? Why do you think damaging (edit: pretending to damage) an Andy Warhol painting hurts Mitch McConnell in any way, or that popular support for ending climate change (by “the vast majority”) would be in any way shape or form unimportant to ending climate change?

Edit: Actually, don’t answer that. You seem very committed to arguing against points that aren’t what I’m saying, and insulting my grandma which is 1,000% unwarranted, such that I don’t think there’s any point to continuing. Again, my grandma was a physically active anti-racist activist back in a time and place when it was wildly unpopular and genuinely dangerous to her physical safety to be one. Your insisting on asserting otherwise is, one, uncalled-for and insulting, and two, an indication of how cavalier you are about saying things that simply aren’t true.

I’m happy to continue the conversation if you’re open to being civil and listening to what I’m actually saying (although you’re in no way required to agree or anything). If not, then not.

If you were turned away from fixing climate change because of this nonviolent protest, you were 1) never actually on the side of humanity, and 2) do not understand what protests are or have ever been.

I’m not saying I was turned away from fixing climate change because of this protest. I wasn’t. Anyone who knows as much about it as you or I do would have to be insane to support saving humanity, or not, based on some trivial detail like this. I am saying, though, that a lot of people – the vast majority – are in your group #2, and yes, will be turned away by these actions.

These protests are progressive steps towards that old method, to remind them that we used to kill them for poor leadership, we could choose to do so again, and that we will start by destroying their property and financial investments first. That if they wish to live, and if they wish to keep their wealth, they need to start leading properly and stop putting our lives in jeapordy.

This isnt about swaying your bigoted dipshit of a grandma. Its about reminding turtle boy mitch and his country club friends in congress that we will burn down his house if he keeps ignoring this issue. Because we have exhausted the non violent options, and are approaching the point of needing to use violence.

My grandma marched with Martin Luther King, more than once, at a time when his approval rating with other white southerners like her was pretty damn low.

If we were talking about doing something that would directly impact Mitch McConnell and the other people who are engineering this crisis, that sounds great. I don’t agree with the violence, and we can talk about that, but the main point – directly impacting the people who are responsible – sounds to me like a great idea.

Directly impacting the museum curators and the people in Seattle driving to work doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like they’re just easier targets for your (very justified) anger and desperation to solve the problem. I think it’s highly unlikely that threatening any number of Andy Warhol paintings or closing any number of highways will ever bring the criminals in congress to their knees so that they beg for an end to it all if they agree to start pursuing sensible policies. I think it’s far more likely that when they see stuff like this they rub their hands together with glee and think about how they can use this to portray climate protestors in the news, and extend by another irreplaceable year the length of time they can continue their evil work, unimpeded.

I’m not saying this necessarily because I give a shit about the paintings. I’m saying this because I care about climate change, and building awareness and support for changing the policies that are destroying the planet is important to me. Actions that discredit the environmental movement and damage activists’ ability to get this vital work done are, to me, bad things.

The people using these tactics aren’t “stopping the deaths of real human beings.” Their actions are prolonging the policies that kill real human beings. You can curse at me all you want, or call me sociopath whatever; I’m still going to think that’s a bad thing.

The museums don’t agree with you.

What percentage of people in the world do you think are going to be positively impacted (in their thinking) by this action, versus negatively impacted? If you don’t care about that answer, then you are hurting the cause you claim to support.

Throw insults around all you want; you have that right, if you think that that’s a more important thing to do than educating people effectively about climate change.

If you’re so caught up in “this is what I feel like doing, I don’t care if it’s counterproductive,” to the point where you’re okay with turning people against these critical missions, then you’re a piece of shit.

Every big successful movement like civil rights had to consider whether the tactics they planned to use were going to be effective. There was an earlier candidate who could have been Rosa Parks, but she was a pregnant teenager, and civil rights leaders at the time didn’t make her the figurehead because they didn’t want the racist white men of the time to have any easy reason to dismiss her or beat up her character.

Does it make the general public at the time “pieces of shit” that they wouldn’t fight for the rights of a pregnant teenager just as much as a married black woman coming home after working all day? Yeah, kind of. Is that still something you should strategize about if you want to achieve civil rights? Yes. A thousand percent yes. Which is more important; being stubborn, or winning?

(And, as a side note, I think most people who support Israel over the Palestinians don’t “support genocide” in their own minds; they aren’t aware of Israel’s crimes in near as much detail as you and I are. I think if you asked them factually about how many Palestinians versus Israelis have died you’d get a real real wrong answer. If you try to fix that situation by making them late for work and screaming in their face about how they support genocide, get ready for the American public to keep supporting genocide for a long, long time to come.)

I have a private theory that the establishment likes to put ideas in people’s heads about methods of protest that are guaranteed to turn people against the cause that’s being advocated for. For some reason, it works, and protest groups adopt these methods.

Blocking highways is one of these; throwing paint on famous art is another.