DL Open Thread Tuesday October 18 2022
The climate activists from a group called “Just Stop Oil” gained some visibility for their cause by throwing Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting at London’s National Gallery. That gave some people the vapors, but the world is burning, so fuck your vapors.
Speaking of the earth burning, you’ve probably eaten your last Alaskan King Crab leg. Those crabs appear to be the canaries in the climate coal mine. I’m not a big crab guy. Our local crabs are too much work for too little of a payoff. Alaskan King Crab legs are ok I guess, but I’ll survive. It’s not like coffee is going away.
Even if currently declared commitments to reduce emissions are met, new research shows that coffee production will still rapidly decline in countries accounting for 75% of the world’s Arabica coffee supply.
No coffee (or rather extremely expensive coffee) is going to suck. But it isn’t like we can do anything about it. I mean the science is murky. Climate Change denialism wasn’t cooked up by the the Koch brothers in a DC convention dedicated to creating a climate change denialism.
On June 5, 1991, an organization closely connected to Koch Industries held one of the world’s first events devoted to climate change denial. Meeting at the Capital Hilton hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., dozens of academics, many of them male, white, and balding, gathered to attack the growing scientific consensus on global warming that James Hansen had helped bring to the public’s attention only three years earlier.
Late Addition:
listen to her explain the Van Gogh soup protest.
she’s got a point, no? pic.twitter.com/cObcWNx8aP
— michael mezz (@michaelmezz) October 18, 2022
The problem with symbolically defacing the Van Gogh is that while it gained the group publicity, it did so by making climate activism look stupid and destructive. How does that help?
There’s only a very tentative connection between the petrochemical industry and the expensive art in a public museum, so the attack doesn’t present the audience with a coherent, easy-to-follow narrative. I have nothing against symbolic gestures, but the symbol has to be something that makes sense to the audience. And as we’ve seen, the audience isn’t one to pick up on subtleties.
You are talking about it, so…
I’m already on their side, and it doesn’t put their particular climate-activism organization in the best light. I can support their cause without supporting them specifically, and given this stunt I wouldn’t.
They did this because they couldn’t get coverage when they blocked oil terminals, acts that were actually aimed at the right target and they say led to thousands of arrests. The answer to that is to get a bigger group of people. Non-violence works by overwhelming the justice system by having thousands of people arrested. Anarchy of this sort is fun but it has never produced many positive results.
I would also note that because of its protective covering, nothing was truly at risk here. Imagine what the outcry would be like if they had actually damaged the painting. That would be treated like a terrorist attack.
Every public protest is a stunt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Wynn_Bruce
Nothing is working. I say do whatever the fuck you want. It is suppose to be obnoxious.
Every public protest is a stunt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Wynn_Bruce
Nothing is working. I say do whatever the fuck you want. It is suppose to be obnoxious. Literally nothing was harmed anyway.
Well, they probably lost some skin on their hands where they glued them to the wall. If you’ve ever superglued your fingers together you know what I mean.
Sure, protests can be a deliberate freak show, but the goal remains Attention and how to grab some. Some are better considered then others, and I despise defacing art, but the goal was achieved and the world did pay attention. I’d much prefer a glitter bomb on Mitch McConnell, or for that matter a well aimed facial cream pie on Ted Cruz.
There is a simple reason nothing gets done about slashing petrochemical dependency: The stuff that’s still in the ground has a market capitalization of literally trillions of dollars.
Getting a conversation started is nice and all, but until you can come up with an argument that will convince corporations (and governments in countries where the resource is nationalized) to write off those trillions of dollars, the conversation won’t go anywhere.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/08/climate-crisis-fossil-fuels-ground
REV – Are you recommending self-immolation? I hesitate to call that an extremist act, but . . . . It is a stunt, though.