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I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere. Even the reddit thread about her the other day was full of hate. I honestly

• bt848 7y ago
  You are surprised by vitriol toward young women on Reddit? You must be new.
• Santosh83 7y ago
  Those who hate her either wish they could be as influential as her or hate the threats to their way of life that they believe will be the inevitable result of seriously addressing climate change.
  • throwaway744678 7y ago
    Can't you really imagine anyone honestly disagreeing with this whole thing without being a total moron as you seem to describe?
• DanBC 7y ago
  > I honestly don't understand, can someone explain? She's a woman, she's young, she's autistic. She faces a triple-whammy of discrimination because of that. She's also calmly reminding people that climate change is real and poses a risk of harm to the world, and she's actually doing something to stop that. For some reason climate change is absurdly polarised.
  • GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
    I'd think pointing out uncomfortable truths about our world play a big role in that too
  • leereeves 7y ago
    Brilliant strategy, making a young autistic woman the face of the climate apocalypse movement. Now any disagreement with the movement can be dismissed with allegations of discrimination instead of discussing the issue.
    • yongjik 7y ago
      Well, maybe if the world listened to actual climate scientists, Nobel laureates, NASA and its satellite data, or even freaking Al Gore, we wouldn't have come to this. But people didn't listen - or rather, enough people didn't listen, and now we have to listen to a young autistic teenager girl berating us for sitting idle while the world burns (metaphorically speaking), and IMHO we all deserve it, and you'd better get used to it, because that's not even the remotely worse part of the climate change.
      • leereeves 7y ago
        > while the world burns (metaphorically speaking) Here's where you lose me. I don't see a world burning, and past predictions of coming apocalypse have proven false. Yes, the world is warming. We're going back to the temperature of the world a few million years ago, still much cooler than it was during most of the history of life on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
        • yongjik 7y ago
          Protip: If you have to argue the Earth was warmer "a few million years ago", you've lost the argument.
          • 7y ago
• BrandonMarc 7y ago
  People hate hypocrisy. Greta may be innocent, but her helpers buy far, far more plane tickets than us - her target audience. Scratch most environmentalist attention-seekers, and you'll find hypocrisy. Look at Prince Harry.
  • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    That doesn't make the message wrong.
    • edejong 7y ago
      People don’t make purely rational decisions, especially for ‘saviors’ and especially when it’s about respect.
      • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Sadly, that means that there's no means to convince them. If she'd done it in a rubber dingy and swam back across they would have rejected her on other grounds.
        • throwaway744678 7y ago
          This would have been a PR stunt all the same, though.
  • jedberg 7y ago
    Commercial air travel pales in comparison to industrial CO2 output. It’s definitely something, but even if all air travel stopped it would barely make a dent.
  • seppin 7y ago
    People hate anyone else telling them what they should be doing, even if they are correct in doing so. The fact that it's a young girl is even more threatening for many adult men.
  • 7y ago
• seppin 7y ago
  She's attacking the number one birthright of every western citizen, to consume as much as they want in pursuit of luxury and comfort. How dare she suggest we should limit our personal consumption for a greater good? When you throw in the fact that many (falsely) believe the science is wrong, you have a perfect storm.
• reddotX 7y ago
  the same anglosphere produced Trump and Brexit...
• edejong 7y ago
  You forget that she can be both a figurehead and a leader. That’s actually where the real problem is: as a ‘savior’ she anthropomorphises the climate crisis. Most people don’t know how to attack abstract ideas, but as soon as the idea gets a body, the party begins. IMHO, Thunberg could, in the long term, be a net negative to the climate discussion, because it allows for much stronger polarization.
• epistasis 7y ago
  For decades, anybody who reports on climate change, at least in the US, gets bombarded by hate mail. Given how much more effective Greta Thunberg is, I can imagine it only amplifies the hate.
• ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  I assume it's mostly just that women seem to make good targets for this kind of "2 minute hate" in communities that lean male in demographics. It also helps the "super-logical climate denier" vs "irrational hippie climate alarmist" thing that so many cling to even now. Everyone knows young females can't use logic, that's just science fact. However, I like to think that there's at least some inkling that if a sufficient number of 16 years old are this uncompromising then anyone voting for climate denial today is just storing up problems for themselves in the future as these kids will be the ones paying for their retirement. And if they're paying for a needless climate emergency at the same time, sympathy is going to be in short supply.
• andrepd 7y ago
  It's a mixture of jealousy of all the attention she is getting, and simply not being able to take it that "a little 16 year old girl in pigtails is telling me what to do!" It only makes it even worse that she is absolutely right in almost anything she says, I imagine it makes it even more galling.
  • davidivadavid 7y ago
    The thing is that people will react like that about anything regardless of her being right or wrong. People don't like being talked down to. That's a fact you have to take into account when you want to persuade them. If you ignore basic facts about human psychology, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
• macspoofing 7y ago
  >I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere. I'm not sure about the hate. She is a young girl who is passionate about the climate. Great! But because she is a young person, she is being used by activists as cover and a mouthpiece for their views, because you can't criticize a 16 year old for the reason you demonstrated - you get called out for being mean to a young person. Also, 16 year olds are not a good resource for setting complicated geo-political policies. They just aren't. They have a very shallow and superficial understanding of the issues because they have no life, professional or academic experience .. which is why they make a good vessels for dishonest activists. For example, if carbon emissions are as terrible as IPCC report makes them out to be, nuclear energy HAS to be on the table as the primary driver for decommissioning coal and natural gas plants. But she's against it because older dishonest activists are against it and she's parroting their views that we can cut emissions without nuclear. >She's got this highly logical, consequential way of thinking that I've only seen in much older, highly successful people before. She's 16. Don't project things you want to be true. >What's so terrible about that? Nothing. But she's also not saying anything new. Everyone sees the IPCC numbers.
• deleted 7y ago
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• fvdessen 7y ago
  I do not dislike Greta the person, I dislike the rethoric around her; At face value she is a young, smart and motivated person who asks us to just ‘listen to science’, and I have no problem with that. The problem I have is that there is a plethora of very powerful people hiding behind her[1] when she says ‘listen to science’ it means ‘listen to those people’. But you cannot debate with what those people propose because you are only presented with Greta, and any critique is countered with ‘how dare you criticise a child’ [1] For example she is working with greenpeace who’s agenda on climate is IMHO completely removed from science
  • yongjik 7y ago
    That's an odd complaint to make regarding a "controversy" where one side kept being fueled by advocates in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry...
• michaelt 7y ago
  If you want to farm upvotes on social media, you gotta preach to the choir and make them feel good about themselves. Engaging intellectually with the other side is inefficient. You can get more upvotes with less effort with humorous personal attacks against them. For example: Donald Drumpf, amiright? Who the hell buys a gold-plated toilet? Tiny hands. Sad. Dashing out a comment like that is far quicker than analysing the impact of subsidies and protectionist policies on the American manufacturing and agricultural industries - and easier for people to engage with to boot.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I honestly don't understand, can someone explain? She's literally a child lecturing the grownups. It fits that "emperor has no clothes"/out of the mouths of babes trope. The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion. Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing. Real and viable solutions tend to be more nuanced than that and allow for the complexity of the real world. But arguing against this essentially cute little tribble of a media sensation makes you "obviously stupid" plus a monstrous asshole who clearly kicks puppies as one of your hobbies. That rankles people who recognize the attempt to win by manipulative social bullshit and thereby simply shut down substantive discussion of a genuine and serious problem that, no, is not going to be resolved by telling 7 billion people to Just Behave! It doesn't help that the Pope blessed her work, basically. That just doubles down on all the high handed, moralizing preachy nonsense that swirls around her.
  • davidivadavid 7y ago
    That sounds about right to me. Notwithstanding the pre-existing culture war, using a child to lecture adults just seems like a terrible PR strategy, and to me explains most of the backlash she's getting. I think her net effect will turn out to be negative for her cause. People don't like being talked down to. Is it that hard to understand?
    • johnchristopher 7y ago
      > I think her net effect will turn out to be negative for her cause. It's said people behind her are coming voters. > People don't like being talked down to. Is it that hard to understand? Have you heard how she is being talked down to? It will be remembered view smearing is all they had when confronted with that. It was an opportunity to get things moving, to get people behind a project and they turned it down (again).
  • svara 7y ago
    >She's literally a child lecturing the grownups. It fits that "emperor has no clothes"/out of the mouths of babes trope. >The people who back her want to hold her up as someone wise beyond her years. The entire thing is primarily an appeal to emotion. She's telling a story that directs a lot of attention to an important issue, no more, no less. It sounds to me as if you're criticizing her essentially for telling a compelling story. What standard are you holding her to? She's not a politician, CEO, engineer, etc. ... >Greta is the face of the idea that there is a simple and obvious answer that could be readily implemented, if only us sinners would get up off our slothful, gluttonous sorry asses and Do The Right Thing. Your choice of words, not anyone elses. The fact that this is what her words sound like to you does help answer my original question (where all the hate comes from) though (see atoav's sibling comment...). The rest of your comment is basically saying that she makes a complex issue sound too simple. Maybe so, but claiming that something is "too complex" is often an excuse for not doing anything. In fact, quite a lot could be achieved by measures that are relatively simple. A carbon tax would be a great example. If the publicity she's generated can speed up the introduction of such a tax, she'll have done more for our future than most of the experts she's apparently supposed to defer to.
• atoav 7y ago
  Easy. She is the perfect figure (young, a girl, autistic) with the perfect message (science based climate disaster destroying life for her generation) to induce a sense of guilt in typically middle aged men. You know – the kind that goes online and write about how environmentalists are not consequential enough and how they are really just hypocrites and not true environmentalists. The mechanism is simple: What Greta does, feels to them like she is holding a mirror in front of their faces. They hate what they see. They cannot bring what they see together with their self-image. So instead of going to the bottom of their own feelings and exploring why that girl enrages them so much, they rationalize it: "she isn't a real environmentalist, because she didn't do X or Y propperly" etc. The world however still thinks she is on the right side of history and then they realize that just rationalizing it to themselves won't cut it. So they open the browser, log in, ... To their defense: most probably don't even realize it works that way. Many men are quite bad at understanding their own feelings because they never learned how to do it. But sadly lying to themselves will likely make it worse..
  • leereeves 7y ago
    > She is the perfect figure (young, a girl, autistic) with the perfect message (science based climate disaster destroying life for her generation) Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response. And still does, in fact, even after years out of the spotlight. Perhaps this has nothing to do with her and is simply disagreement over the issue. Gore did have the same message. His predictions of imminent apocalypse were wrong, and many of us old enough to remember that are naturally skeptical about the latest batch of apocalyptic predictions. And the venom? That exists on the fringes of any political issue, and advocates amplify the voices of a few loudmouthed fools to discredit any reasoned disagreement. The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
    • atoav 7y ago
      > Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response. These are merely multipliers, not in it self constituting the whole impact. What had more impact was the record drought throughout Europe that happend when she started her thing. Even the most critical people at that time realized that the weather was doing something that it usually didn't do. I am not an American and Al Gore is not as widely perceived here as in the US I suppose (also because the whole climate thing is not such a polarizing issue over here). > The perception of widespread hate is manufactured. Is it really? I didn't see such strong reactions against a single person for a long time. Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street. I mean really – how is that normal?
• orbifold 7y ago
  Why should anyone listen to her and not actual scientists? Do people really need to be guilt tripped to believe something that is overwhelmingly supported by facts and has been publicly debated for >20 years?
• coldtea 7y ago
  >I do not understand the hate she consistently gets specifically in the anglosphere. Even the reddit thread about her the other day was full of hate. I honestly don't understand, can someone explain? Many people tend to not respond well to pedantic know-it alls pointing their finger, even more so when it's some teenager lecturing the grown ups, even more so when their "grassroots" rise was manufactured by media/ad agency parents and their friends...
• mieses 7y ago
  There are "F--k you Greta" bumper stickers in Germany which is not in the anglosphere unless you get really technical.
• enjikaka 7y ago
  While climate sure needs attention, Greta is only a marionette. She only "became famous" to promote her mothers book [1] on climate change. Both the book and Greta are driven by a PR bureau [2]. And to be honest that's a disguisting way to use a child for self promotion. [1] https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789177951117/scener-ur-hjartat/ https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789177951117/scener-ur-hjartat/ [2] https://uvell.se/2019/04/25/iles-pr-byran-bakom-greta-thunberg/ https://uvell.se/2019/04/25/iles-pr-byran-bakom-greta-thunbe...