UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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From what I can tell the whole point of these protests is just iconoclasm. These presumably well meaning people have been told that the world is literally ending and that they need to make a statement by (mainly symbolically) attacking objects that other people value.
The climate crisis is genuinely a crisis but it's not going to be a cataclysm event like Roger Hallam is describing. It will likely play out as a gradual worsening in living conditions as certain occupations become unviable, increasing numbers of freak weather events, and then finally warmer countries becoming unliveable.
All of those outcomes are awful but shock tactics like this aren't going to convert anyone to the cause.
So why are you highlighting their activities and, absurdly, calling it an attack on democracy? You are giving their 'shock tactics' publicity (whilst denouncing those tactics as ineffective), claiming to agree with their message, and at the same time accusing them of an entirely different agenda: 'anti-democratic'. You make no sense.
Having a nuanced opinion means - to me - that understanding that climate change is bad but also understanding that there is a limited amount that we can do as individuals or a country to resolve it.
When I see JSO doing these stunts I worry that they are delegitimising the entire cause of climate change by taking such a hardcore stance. (And seemingly not caring about other societal norms in their protest.)
Just this is bad, very bad in so many ways. Even if you just mean large areas of Africa - where are the people going to go? The current political, economic, etc, etc of immigration will be nothing compared to that - right wing parties get a boost, stretched resources become overstretched, our food supply diminishes. But it won't just be parts of Africa - southern Europe gets hit by brutal heatwaves now, that is only going to get worse and a lot of our food comes from Italy and Spain. They are some of largest sources of rice, the others are India, Pakistan and Burma, as long as the monsoons aren't disrupted. If there's any shortfall in rice production they'll start reducing exports to feed their own people.
Agree it's bad. I just worry that JSO are taking the wrong approach in being abrasive instead of trying to win the argument.