7 ms·

You can surely justify doing whatever you want regardless of how bad it is if your justification is that you're saving all humanity. Even killing the people you

• rickdeckard 3y ago
  Agree. But majority agreement is not a measurement for reasonable action. When seatbelt laws were introduced, the science was clear, the majority of the public was against it. You could have decided to voluntary wear a seatbelt, and still put no dent in the stats of lethal car-accidents...
  • misja111 3y ago
    This is not a good comparison. The people not wearing seatbelts didn't affect the lives of others, they only (voluntarily) risked their own. ECO terrorism is trying to force others to live how they want them to live. Regardless how convincing your belief, I don't think this is ever a good strategy.
    • noobermin 3y ago
      I don't understand. How does not wearing seatblets being a risky choice for one's self strengthen your point? It was indeed exactly forcing people to live a different way by compelling them by law to use a specific implement while driving or riding in a car.
    • A_non_e-moose 3y ago
      Seatbelts made cars more expensive for people who didn't want them and a person without a seatbelt is much more likely to traumatize someone in an accident with their easier and more gruesome death. Few decisions are made in a vacuum with no impact to others.
    • FartyMcFarter 3y ago
      Seatbelts also protect the other occupants of the car from having a body thrown at them at high speeds.
    • hackerlight 3y ago
      Seatbelt laws force seatbelts onto people that don't want them. Global warming forces negative outcomes onto people that don't pollute much. Anything and everything can be framed as an act of force. It is therefore unhelpful to think of things in these terms.
    • jppittma 3y ago
      It's weird that this is so right, but so backwards at the same time. When you don't wear a seatbelt, you risk your own life. When the oceans heat up, and the fish start drowning, then everybody is affected. Destroying the shared environment is not your personal freedom.
    • satao 3y ago
      A friend of mine got paraplegic because a person in the back seat of a car wasn’t using a seat belt during a crash. The body got launched on my friends seat, killing her and breaking my friends spine. So seatbelts do protect others.
• zpeti 3y ago
  Also - in 2023 - if you really want to be an eco terrorist, you should be terrorising china, and most of asia. They are increasing their carbon emissions like there's no tomorrow. Frankly, nothing the EU or the USA is doing at this point will matter, if Asia carries on doing what they are doing. So these motorway blocking and paint throwing stunts are not only ridiculous narcissistic acts, that do more damage than good to the reputation of this whole eco activist movement, they are also completely useless in terms of CO2 reduction. We need to either invent technology (which we are) to reduce emissions, or even extract them for the air, OR we need some crazy form of diplomacy to stop Asia from growing (this is called war btw). It really is laughable that China is never part of the equation for these save the planet types.
  • mcpackieh 3y ago
    > So these motorway blocking and paint throwing stunts are not only ridiculous narcissistic acts, that do more damage than good to the reputation of this whole eco activist movement, This is worth emphasizing. This sort of acts are [generally rightly] seen as narcissistic trust-fund kids attacking the working class who are just trying to get to work so they can pay rent. Attacks on commuters is how you build animosity, not support. It is counterproductive but the people who do it don't care because they have narcissistic motivations. The more the victims of their protest hurl verbal or physical abuse back at the protesters, the more the protesters feel they have accomplished. Utterly counterproductive.
  • thorin 3y ago
    I would agree that China, India and USA are probably the key countries here ( and to a lesser extent other parts of Asia, Africa and South America). However I can't see China and India doing anything significant here. USA could be leading the change along with parts of Europe, but I agree it will be difficult to do anything without the largest and more developing countries getting on board. I know a lot of climate activists in the UK and while it's a noble goal, the UK is probably contributing less than 0.5% so any change there is fairly insignificant relatively.
  • CraigJPerry 3y ago
    If you brought emissions per capita in the US and EU down to levels of Asia, would that not far exceed the outcomes people are currently trying to get to? If you relocated the subset of manufacturing emissions that eminate from Asian manufacturing for the purposes of selling products to US/EU, while keeping to the above, so that product lifecycle emissions are accrued where they’re consumed rather than the current proxy emissions by outsourcing manufacturing to asia. Would that not automatically crater Asia emissions? Neither of these actions would require impressing action upon foreign sovereigns.
• TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  > Vote for what you want What if your country is locked in a two party system captured by elite interests with no desire to actually solve the problem? What if what you want is not available by vote? > form a new party What if your system is designed to ensure new parties always fail? > stop having kids Is our sacrifice really what is needed to stop climate change? Would it even make a difference? Are we doomed to live unhappy lives because of the system we were born in to? > stop buying things Shall we just perish then? > if the majority agrees we'll deal with it What if the majority agrees but a minority that disagrees controls the political system?
  • vasco 3y ago
    You seem to want to prove that the only thing left is terrorism, and I posit to you that you should genuinely ask yourself if other terrorists do not feel as justified as you do, and what you think about their methods.
    • hgomersall 3y ago
      I'm not sure anyone is advocating terrorism. Certainly that's not what I read in the previous posts.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
        I agree. Happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t believe TaylorAlexander has ever advocated for such, at least here on this forum, and there’s no reading, that I can imagine, of their comments here that would lead to me think they’ve started doing so.
    • TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      This would be true if I believed your argument is sound, but I don't believe that. You say terrorism is not appropriate, and we should do these other things. My question for you is, what should we do if those things have been ineffective? The goal is to get you to think more about what your are saying. Generally I would say the solution is to use every legal measure at our disposal including lawsuits[1], plus peaceful protest including blockades, to stop new fossil fuel projects from advancing and show corporations and politicians that we will not stop until the projects end. We also must learn about and pressure politicians to adopt rail and bike transit projects which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our cities. We must advocate for right to repair so existing machinery is not discarded in favor of the manufacture of more equipment and its associated emissions. We must advocate for veganism and an end to extreme meat consumption and all of the emissions associated with it. There is SO MUCH we can do beyond personal habits and voting. [1] https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-youth-montana-trial-c7fdc1d8759f55f60346b31c73397db0 https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-youth-montana-tria...
• rex_lupi 3y ago
  > stop having kids I wonder if such major personal and individual sacrifices are actually worth it, and if at all effective, when we leave those handful of companies which spew massive amounts of CO2 and other pollutants into the environment to operate
  • melagonster 3y ago
    I don't think so. maybe giving children good education is more important.
  • sdenton4 3y ago
    Not having a kid cuts off a whole branch of human reproduction; it's undoubtedly the best thing you can do for the planet, on the personal scale. Everything else pales in comparison.
    • hgomersall 3y ago
      It might be true within a very narrow scope but is irrelevant. There is no path to climate change mitigation that involves population control that isn't substantially worse than than problem. Just as individuals' decisions are only relevant when taken in aggregate, so too should an individual act as though their behaviour was an aggregate one. Climate change solutions can only be implemented at the societal level, as is becoming abundantly clear.
    • deadlast2 3y ago
      Stopping migration/immigration from poorer to richer countries would be an even better solution. Stopping all long haul air travel would even be better. If you are being honest you know this will never be solved because no one believes it.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        > Stopping migration/immigration from poorer to richer countries would be an even better solution Only instantaneously; integrated over the relevant timescales, the poor countries burn more while industrialising, and everyone (including the poor countries) installs renewables. I visited Kenya about a decade ago, the taxi was old enough to not have electric windows (so I suspect electric cars will take a while to become affordable for Matatu drivers); there was a geothermal power station. To actually solve the greenhouse gas problems needs everyone and everything to get greener, including air travel — given how long CO2 stays in the air, if we fixed everything worldwide except rail, that's still 400% of our global greenhouse gas budget. Aviation is about 19x, cement 30x, livestock and manure 58x; yet all of those combined — rail, air, cement, and livestock & manure — are still only about a tenth of our emissions
• hackerlight 3y ago
  > You can surely justify doing whatever you want regardless of how bad it is if your justification is that you're saving all humanity. Even killing the people you want to save. This is a snide way of saying that no valid justification can possibly exist. Yet you probably think dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan was a good idea. So clearly valid justifications for extreme levels of forceful action against an unwilling party -- far, far, far more extreme than blowing up an oil pipeline -- can and do exist.
  • vasco 3y ago
    > Yet you probably think dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan was a good idea Does pretending you know my position on topics not discussed make it easier to disagree with me? I'm anti-war and wish everyone would refuse to go to war, individually. Maybe that helps you process my actual comment with that out of the way.
    • hackerlight 3y ago
      I didn't think it was possible to have such an unserious worldview to the point where you believe that it is inherently and automatically wrong to take any forceful actions against an unwilling third party. So if a brutal dictator takes power, and I wish to take forceful action against that, I will be sure to remember that it is me and not the dictator that is the morally bad party.
      • vasco 3y ago
        Now you know it is, here's a wikipedia page for you to learn more as it is a tenet of several religions and philosophical thinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism I think it's as childish to discard this as it is to think it's "inevitable" to nuke people or to go to war. Everyone can have their own childish thoughts specially when I'm not in power or seeking a position where I have to make that hard choice, so I choose for me and I'll tell it to whoever asks.
• dgb23 3y ago
  You’re looking at this the wrong way. Violence is inevitable, in some form or another, if the climate effects are ignored to such a degree. At some point, some people are going to draw a line and say: “We tried to explain it calmly, we tried to be loud, we tried to vote, we did all the things we could but greed has won”. You’re arguing in terms of what people should do, and many people are doing those things, but if we look at it realistically it’s not enough. It’s incredibly naive to think that this won’t cause violence down the line.
  • veidelis 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    People who have no hope of actually helping the situation getting involved is the problem. Their only response might be violence, but that doesn't mean it'll do anything. Complaining works for children, because they're normally complaining about things their parents can do something about. It doesn't work for reducing pollution while avoiding plunging the world into the 1800s. That takes adults with brains.
    • flangola7 3y ago
      The whole point is complaining hasn't done anything. Direct action is ugly but historically gets things done.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        Direct action is the same as complaining in this case. This isn't a social issue; it's a technological one, and reality doesn't respond to complaining or violence. Only people-created things do. Ironically, less Greenpeace complaining in the 1980s would've meant more countries went the France route for power generation, which would've reduced a lot of CO2 over the last 40 years.
• rowanG077 3y ago
  The difference is that there is not a single inkling of evidence God exists. So becoming a terrorists doing Gods will is silly. Climate change on the other hand...
  • smcin 3y ago
    That sounds like the Mother of All Venn Intersections.
• winter_blue 3y ago
  > and if the majority agrees we'll deal with it In the U.S., a clear majority supports the party that wants to do something about climate change, but because of (1) gerrymandering (with the U.S. House), (2) disproportionate representation (the U.S. Senate), and (3) the electoral college (presidency / executive branch), the ability of the majority of Americans being able to exert their will has been severely damaged and dampened[1]. If the GOP succeeds at overthrowing even the feeble democracy that the U.S. has and establishing an illegal and cruel/evil dictatorship, would you still say that all liberals and progressives need to be peaceful and non-violent? [1] Hence the lack of action when it comes to things like climate change, civil rights, voting rights, treating immigrants with kindness, reparations for former slaves and the First Nations / native Americans, welfare to help low-income people, universal healthcare (or even just Medicaid expansion), etc.