It’s all for publicity. You should post the videos where the police are being all nice and chatting her up and taking selfies with her before carrying her away at the last protest. News outlets only posted the videos of her being carried away. Other outlets leaked the before images of her posing for pictures and smiles with the cops. It’s all bullshit.
Good.
Because it highlights it internationally and brings more attention than if they didn’t. Attacking/protesting the corporations which are most responsible for the situation we’re in has shifted public consciousness to understanding.
So why was she protesting the building of a wind farm a few weeks ago?
I find it funny how her protesting something hugely beneficial was met with general silence.
Well because the wind farms are destroying Sami land? And other alternative placements exist for the wind farms, but not for the reindeer the Sami hunt. Agree or not, but it’s not because she’s protesting the concept of wind farms in Norway.
How are wind farms “destroying Sami land”? Please fill me in.
Full disclosure, I work in the industry so I would LOVE to know how a wind turbine tower which at it’s base is typically no more than 5 m in diameter (15’) is destroying anything when wind farms are commonly installed on farm land with essentially no disruption to the field and it’s use to grow food.
To be more blunt, the comment was an outright mischaracterization, and if not out of ignorance, then a pure lie. Typical bullshit used to discredit people offhand.
I thought you were kidding, but she actually did. Wow!
The context is that it’s being built on indigenous land which they use for herding. So it’s not perfect, for their side, but it’s definitely not “Greta is against wind power”
I feel like you guys don’t understand how the laws work in sweden, you can’t just pick and choose who you charge (I expect that it’s like that in any non-corrupt country)
Even in relatively corruption-free countries, there are often shadow mechanisms the governments uses to decide who they charge with a crime.
Prosecutors can just say they don’t have a case, or they can fumble the case purposefully in the initial stages to give credence to the “no case” idea.
We don’t have to look any further than how police charge themselves to see how the laws don’t fairly apply to everyone. And a simple google search will reveal that Sweden is not immune to police corruption, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
“Disobeying police orders”, which is what Thunberg was charged with, is one of those catch-all laws that are purposefully vague in a way that allows police total discretion over how to enforce it.
I guarantee in this case that calls were made all the way up the top of the Swedish government before police decided what to do here.
Basically, my point is that there are so many strings to pull, even in developed countries, that it’s often possible to suss out the motivations of the administration just by examining how charges proceed.
What this says about Thunberg getting charged for her actions? Probably nothing significant. Sweden cannot allow activists to freely disrupt their economic infrastructure, especially those involving energy. So they charge her as “normal” regardless of her celebrity status. Though they will be very careful to do everything by the book with so many eyes on the case.
You talking about the same government that allowed two different people to burn the Quran, one Infront of the Turkish embassy, while being blocked by turkey to join Nato? I don’t think you guys understand, sure there is corruption in Swedish politics, but if any of them tried to influence the rule of law? They’d be unbelievably fucked
E: I’m literally swedish wtf
I think most people are either unaware of or don’t believe the fact that we have laws that to some extent curb the ability of individual ministers to influence the running of government agencies.
This came up a lot when Trump was trying to get our minister of justice to release A$AP Rocky, which was just something they were unable to do.
Absolutely amazing. For those who say are saying that it was too extremist of a position, I’d say fuck off. She is doing what we all need to be doing. Oil companies and governments aren’t going to help us out of the climate catastrophe that is coming. They simply aren’t. Capitalism will not allow it. This is the only option we have left.
Something that intrigued me was how Martin Luther King managed to do so much through nonviolent protest. Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat and the bus boycotts made people realize how absurd and unfair Jim Crow laws were.
He even participated in a sit in at a department store and was arrested for it. People were getting arrested in such numbers for such simple things it made people think about what King and his followers were trying to do.
I have no doubts that Ms. Thunberg has good intentions, but her protests are simply ineffective. In this case, “blockading” an oil port just frustrates people for delaying a crucial product.
Do you have any idea how the civil rights protests worked? Do you think MLK just asked everyone nicely to give black people rights pretty please? MLK did the exact same kind of thing as Greta, so don’t even pretend you give half a shit about MLK when you’re making it crystal clear that you don’t know a goddamn thing about his methods or beliefs. You wanna know what MLK actually thought about violent protests? In his own words: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
I hate how often people like you use MLK to hide behind while misinterpreting him and ignoring everything he actually stood for.
It’s frustrating when people think talking down to others is going to change minds. It’s no wonder progressive activists fail to make progress.
If you expect people with different perspectives to get behind people like Greta you’ll want to adopt a better strategy. Otherwise, you’ll continue to polarize folks.
The second I saw MLK’s name I immediately though I was about to read a dogshit take. You did not disapoint.
I really don’t get comments like this. An insult, delivered in some slightly eloquent flourish. What’s the point?
I don’t know, man. I’m not saying it was the best thing that could’ve been done, but at least she’s actually trying to get us to stop cooking ourselves. It wasn’t like she went full blown eco terrorist.
There are other problems in addition to global warming. The scientific reports I’ve heard of conclude that this is not a civilization killer. It’s a serious problem, but it’s not at the 100% serious level that it’s portrayed at.
And that 100% serious level is not a place you want to be, in terms of responses, if your responses might cause other problems that could reach the 100% serious level.
Like nuclear war. Nuclear war is a real possibility, and it’s something to avoid at all costs. It would be worse than global warming’s projected effects.
So if we cause a nuclear war by taking actions to avoid climate change, we fucked up and killed ourselves by overreacting.
I’m not saying it’s likely. I’m just giving some context into how the major changes being proposed scare some people. A lot of people see the economy and the power structures of the world and all of our fossil-fuel burning industry as a delicate system that is keeping us all fed enough to not be starting wars. Some people are more worried about fucking with that system than they are about climate change.
An analogy would be if you were in a little shack in the wilderness, in the bitter cold winter, and you had a heater that was producing noxious fumes like carbon monoxide.
It’s a really fucking serious problem to have th carbon monoxide in your air. So you’re like “let’s shut off the heater and replace it with blankets”. But if the blankets aren’t effective enough, you freeze to death.
Another analogy would be facing a man-eating tiger while there’s a minefield behind you. Two dangers. And someone who only sees tiger will be like “what the hell are you doing?? This is life or death! Get away from that tiger!” but there’s a legit worry about that minefield too.
Global warming is a new enemy of humanity. But we have to be careful that we don’t resurrect the old enemies of humanity while we’re fighting global warming: famine, war, disease, etc.
Another analogy: human culture is a gigantic codebase that somehow runs. The code was written by developers who aren’t here any more. There’s very little documentation. And this program is running and providing us with food and peace. Mucking about in the code, even for very good reasons, could disrupt existing features that we rely on heavily.
