Two are heirs (a Getty and a Kennedy) and the third has made a career of advising celebrity philanthropists."
The reason why this doesn't look rational or 'for the cause' is because the target in question really has nothing to do with the petroleum industry. Johannes Vermeer painted this art in 1665 before the industrial revolution. The subject is just a woman with a pearl earring. So neither the painter nor the work of art have any persuasion or symbolism that encourages fossil fuel use. It seems totally illogical to commit an act such as this. I think the public at large sees no connection between what the activists went after and what they are trying to achieve. When that happens, it delegitimizes the movement in peoples eyes.
What picture exactly is of course not important. Any popular picture with a glass plate in front of it could have done the job. I don't they have any ax to grind about Vermeer, nor will the controversy have any connections to him or his art.
I don't think this is true, for most people. People do not generally stop and think in a deep and reflective way after getting angry about something. What these activists did was not inspiring and it did not look like justice. They aren't Rosa Parks 2.0, they're people throwing liquid at valuable inanimate objects which people find beautiful while gluing themselves to surfaces at a museum. There is no powerful symbolism of defiance here, this is not speaking truth to power. They just look like childish weirdos. Childish weirdos do not make me self-reflect and question if I'm actually the one doing something wrong.
This is correct. The target is an irreplaceable piece of art. It's supposed to stand in for the earth (or some subset like nature). That's the point. The stand-in for the petroleum industry is whatever commodity they are throwing at it
It's also pretty logical because it doesn't actually cause permanent damage, but sensationalist headline writers make it seems like it did. So the stories get more virality then they otherwise would.
the Animal Liberation Front didn't ask the public to destroy slaughter-houses. the sea-shepherds didn't ask the public to attack whaling vessels, and to give an example from fiction 'Avalanche' didn't ask the public to attack power stations.
Di Caprio is rich and support nature conservation. Is not really so much difficult if you are rich. You just buy a chunk of land with a unique ecosystem, keep people from entering on it and you save ten species from going extinct. Is as simple as that.
What I would -not- expect is the children of some millionaires convincing poor or dumb people to perform humiliating, illegal and dangerous stunts in public for a small fee.
Lets imagine the outrage if one influencer would be caught paying homeless people to glue their heads and hands to a wall, and videotaping them while claiming, hey! I do it for the environment!.
This is mocking ecologists, manipulating poor people to perform degrading acts in public and endangering invaluable art. Three in one, all in the same stinking package.
This kind of fun is unacceptable, and should have consequences.
Oh do you mean that land in Hawaii that he blocked native caretakers from accessing and has since been taken over by invasive species?
Not. Try again.
Time has disproven these people. I don't see how this is any different.
I don't think most vegans will quote them for their change, but their activism that gave animal welfare attention in a attention economy, when it would otherwise simply not have gotten any.
I often eat at a Nepalese vegan restaurant and the food sure beats McDonald's or burger king. Not to mention they actually believe in veganism, they don't just have a token veggie burger on the menu because the market wants it.
They even prohibit consumption of baby food with meat on the premises :)
As for prohibiting baby food, I would kindly tell them to go fuck themselves. Nobody is going to prohibit a parent from feeding their baby with food already prepared and bought. Its exactly this type of rhetoric which makes moderates skip on vegan community (and I eat vegan dishes on a daily basis!)
I don't want whoever to believe, I want a neat combination of healthy, tasty, and good for environment/animal, but in a spectrum. Not extremes, not any toxic belief systems.
(As for McDs and BK there are better veggie and vegan options available but I prefer BK vegan way over McDs vegan, hands down. That we have these options is a sign of time. When I was full-time vegan it was a nightmare to go out eating. Now we have New York Pizza delivering delicious vegan shoarma pizzas.)
Winter of 2022, half of Europe. PETA can frolic naked in the snow if they want.
Why buy an expensive tablet made of nasty coltan if a brat is just going to assault you and jump over it?, oh wait... in fact they don't do it.
This hypocrites bully grandmas "in the name of ecology" while using all the time products made of materials that destroy the African rainforests and must be replaced each five years occupying entire landfills, and never think twice about it.
And in their totalitarian utopia we all wear plastic replacements. Of course plastic fur is super-ecological. Have you heard of the problem with particles of "micro-leather" or "micro-fox-hair" polluting the oceans for decades?. Me neither.
They are directly responsible of the death of animals and plants. Ruined clothes that would last an entire life otherwise, have now to be replaced at a much faster pace and hidden from sight, so more small carnivores will die for the children paint.
They liberate chimps in the zoos with the results that the chimps must be shoot and killed by the same people that cared for them for years. Great job lads!. This animals could have a long quiet life. Save the chimps! under soil
They blocked fixing the American grey squirrel invasion in Italy when it was possible. Grey is a squirrel species know for eating complete rings of bark and killing entire branches. Now the grey squirrels are killing the young trees and also propagating a virus that kills the native red squirrels. They were told before by the zoologists that the squirrels would be a problem. They just don't care.
They did the same when the first racoons invaded Japan in 90's. Now the rampant coons cause millionaire damages in agriculture, threaten japanese unique biodiversity and scratch and urinate over 800 years old japanese temples damaging invaluable cultural artifacts. They were warned about it. Stupid, stupid people.
They liberate alien carnivores that kill millions of birds. They never apologize by this, or showed the slightest sign of remorse.
In resume, they are poison for a sensible ecological management and always take the wrong side in terms of nature conservation. This is what happens when you put toddlers to do surgery.
But of course the rest of people are not moral enough and not saint enough. Not like them.
I would consider myself a person in favor of the ethical treatment of animals, and PETA campaigns like (the now quite old, but eminently memorable) "rebranding fish as sea kittens" [1] are so far out in la-la land, so ridiculous, and go so far in letting perfect be the enemy of good ("let's go after those unethical pescatarians!") that the organization loses credibility.
It doesn't help that in the intervening years, my main interaction with the organization (as well as Oxfam, ASPCA, etc) has been shady third party donation subscription hawkers trying to earn commissions off of tricking me into acknowledging them on lunch hour.
If there have been improvements in the treatment of animals over time, I'd make my own subjective leap to say they happened in spite of PETA, not because of it.
My point was: Effective activism does not have to be likeable. Going for the opposite seems a viable strategy.
I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all that someone had something nearly bad happen to them (wildfires encroaching on their houses) and that caused them to become attuned to an issue and start taking a form of action to curb it (funding protestors).
Again, not the actions I would take and in my opinion they’re ineffective actions, but we shouldn’t guffaw at people for becoming attuned to something through tragedy or near tragedy.
Someone who smokes cigarettes whose partner dies of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking who then decides to quit smoking and become an anti-tobacco activist should not be written off just because they're "only doing it" because it directly affected them via someone they love. Someone who is extremely rich because their ancestors made a killing selling oil who decides to become an "activist" after their mansion almost burned down due to wildfires should be mocked. Anyone can throw soup at a painting. Only the super rich can influence politicians (in america at least).
How do you know this? It's not exactly and either situation here.
People who do love and adore fine art are not limited to the super-rich (this was after all on public display), but I bet it cuts the super rich who can afford to hang originals on their bedroom walls a little deeper than most.
That said, I do know I'm not normal in many ways, perhaps more people than I assume care about originals.
If the human race goes extinct due to global warming or whatever reason, at least we left these artifacts behind.
They are not doing it "because their mansions ... almost burned down". They are doing it because they know that this will distract people from their real actions. And they look like philantropists now which is far from reality.
I don't support their actions. If straight-forward conversations how the earth is going to become uninhabitable doesn't change people's patterns, then I doubt shock-media will either.
"How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your very eyes?"
Being as they said, "apparently", and that a similar stunt was pulled previously, of which also had protective covering, seems to show that nobody intended (or did) destroy anything.
all it takes is a single copy-cat to ruin a less protected piece.
their message is shocking and attention-grabbing, not responsible.
They won't take responsibility but when Joe-Bob runs into the next museum and legitimately destroys something whilst emulating their antics it will have been their fault for instigating this recent spree.
Or bored kids with crayons will try colouring it in and/or peeling off gold foil[1] if it has any, or well meaning idiots will try to restore it like that Jesus picture, or a hundred other things because the public isn't just the best of us, it's all of us.
If art isn't protected, it will be damaged. Failing to take preemptive defensive measures against predictable threats is not as blame-worthy as the actual proximal causes, of course, but it's still blame-worthy.
[0] I've met someone who had to be sectioned after something similar made them think they were a car and therefore started walking along the middle of a lane.
[1] I've witnessed that.
If you are an activist, or you condone this kind of thing, it is important to realize that the average person is not going to delve any farther into this story in order to give the activists the benefit of the doubt. They are going to be upset that an innocent work of art was vandalized - even if it wasn't actually harmed in any way. They will associate the cause with unhinged and irrational people.
Maybe next time, they should try self-immolation instead. It might spare a painting.
They are doing it for their own good. From a long time.
As long as profits increase nobody gives a damn. See for example "America's most beloved war criminal".
Those kind of protests do one thing : discredit those organizations who made them. Just notice that there are mainly very young people who carry those "protests", who are easily fooled to do such things. Unfortunately for some of them can be a harsh lesson (jail time).
Most people don’t care that deeply about the things that don’t affect them (or their friends/family).
This is exactly what you'd expect from a society where a significant portion of people are alienated, experience their lives as meaningless or senseless, and where free-floating anxiety is rampant. To be sure, you would expect such people to seek meaning, to derive their sense of identity from the group that provides them with meaning, and to exhibit frustration and aggression towards the rest of society, from whom they are isolated anyway and therefore have a tendency to treat as an undifferentiated mass of "bad people". More concretely, you would predict these people chant the same slogans, and respond with extreme defensiveness when the thing that provides them with meaning is criticized.
It should also be obvious that such people are inherently primed for action, and that a bit of money and encouragement is enough to set things in motion.
EDIT: another thing that is hopefully obvious is that none of this precludes the existence of an actual environmental crisis.
I would believe that more if it weren't constantly done in front of TV cameras. This is about drawing attention to yourself because you can't convince someone with rational arguments.
It is, ultimately, a tantrum as most of the world doesn't find their message convincing.
The world needs fossil fuels, as Europe is discovering right now. Rich kids vandalizing art doesn't change the fundamental reality that fertilizer is made from natural gas and higher fossil fuel prices cause mass starvation - millions or billions would die if we stopped producing synthetic fertilizer from natural gas. And the price of natural gas directly drives the price of the food that the global south needs to buy each day. It's one thing for a London Art Student to say "I'm willing to pay more for bread", but it's quite another thing to impose those higher prices on the global South, as commodities are sold in a global market.
That trumps whatever performative display these children throw.
If they wanted to do things in a serious manner, they would work on developing technologies that would allow the world to create fertilizers, heat homes, and power industry in a cost effective way with alternate mechanisms. And if they lacked the skills to do that, they could fund the work of others to find feasible replacements. Ultimately it's technology, rather than tantrums, that will determine how food is grown and factories are powered.
I don't disagree. I don't think the two are mutually-exclusive. The public performance is very much part of the quest for transcendence, and has its equivalents in the other forms of radical ideology.
> Ultimately it's technology, rather than tantrums, that will determine how food is grown and factories are powered.
Quite. And to your point, the interesting question now becomes: why are they throwing tantrums instead of useful work?
Every theory I have seen falls into one of two buckets:
1. They're incapable of it, or being undermined
2. It's not actually a solution they're after
I think it's overwhelmingly #2. Moreover, I think the thing they're actually looking for is exactly transcendent meaning.
>fertilizer is made from natural gas
P.S.: Is this true? I can see how it could be, but I was not aware of this. That's quite ironic, if indeed true.
I wasn't aware of this but does it really contribute to global warming? It's not burned and its alternatives aren't much better. After all, manure is probably even worse.
The same way using fossil fuels for plastic isn't so bad if we recycle it because it doesn't end up in the atmosphere.
Luckily electrolysis will soon be cheaper in parts of the world (or everywhere if we priced in externalities).
Millions or billions will die if global temperatures continue to rise.
Insane, crazed, deluded, suicidal terrorists have nothing in common with climate change emergency messengers unless you wish to shoot them both.
You need to reevaluate your values and priorities if you think people who take great, deliberate personal risks to ensure our long-term survival have anything to do with those who are willing to end our lives and our freedoms for the "glory" of a sky god.
I respectfully submit that you have completely missed the point, which is that the underlying motivations are remarkably similar between both groups.
A lot of this is guesswork, though. It could just as easily be that these activists are simply very angry about climate change and feel compelled by their anger to take some kind of action but (like a lot of people) aren't good at channeling it into constructive action.
My sense is that a second component is at play, and that it either adds an impulse to act, or increases frustration to the point of an outburst. It’s interesting to note that the behaviors are (a) highly ritualized and (b) carefully premeditated. They are certainly not consistent with an angry outburst. This is what I am trying to explain. I suspect the same is true of Eric Hoffer.
In turn, CEF is one of many donors to Just Stop Oil, who in turn did the Van Gogh protest. I don't understand how people draw the conclusion that the Just Stop Oil protests are some sort of anti-climate conspiracy because a board member/donor to a group that gave a grant to JSO inherited oil money (but probably does not have significant financial ties to the oil industry anymore). Even if she wanted to bolster support for oil companies, why would she use this tactic? While a lot of people don't agree with the protests, I don't see anyone saying that they now support more oilfield leases as some sort of counterreaction.
Plus, Getty's other donations are to far less controversial organizations that are definitely trying to solve climate change. For example, the Climate Reality Project trains people to lobby for climate-friendly regulations. It's clear that that does not align with the interests of oil.
There's a much simpler theory: Just Stop Oil is a bunch of normal, fallible, non-conspiratorial people using a distasteful and likely ineffective tactic to advocate for a sensible policy (stopping new oil drilling) being funded by wealthy, fallible, non-conspiratorial people who probably think the protests will have an impact on policy and are probably wrong.
My view is that there are people in our society whose personalities make them so passionate about righteous causes they wind up becoming delusional extremists. When enough of them get together and have a source of support, you can end up with this kind of thing. I have no doubt they truly believe they are helping to avert the apocalypse by doing this.
You see this in every major social issue, for example in housing 'affordability' everyone tries to blame foreign Chinese buyers, even when (depending on the area) they might only be 10% of all house buyers. Part of the problem, yes, but rarely even close to the bulk of it.
Most importantly it distracts away from all the other more natural causes of the problem that are harder to confront (like well-intentioned run-of-the-mill climate activists making dumb decisions all on their own).
In Europe we traditionally take a very dim view of using houses as a financial speculation item. Though neoliberalism has unfortunately undermined that somewhat. But Chinese investors aren't really a problem here. I think it's more NIMBY zoning restrictions that makes house building not keep up with population growth.
Around 20k houses (combination of apartments for rent, condos + houses for sale) are built per year.
Housing prices in major cities are the most obvious and stupid supply and demand situation in existence. Build 100k houses per year in Seattle and prices will go down, and the same is true for any city that is facing a housing price problem.
If existing residents are now flush with capital why can't they invest in new properties and businesses which benefit us domestically?
Not building new houses is the bulk of the problem. Foreign buyers are still a problem when you aren't building enough houses because at some level you won't be building enough for good reasons. 10% of the time you shouldn't be building new buildings for good reasons like... heritage buildings or low income developments. But zoning, building height, etc etc (and often over-zealous heritage policy) limits housing to a much higher degree.
These compounding restrictions on supply side capital investments, like how the number of small businesses being created has declined in the last two decades, is another big part of it. Regular people having more $$ via productive capital investment = more money for housing. The housing crisis is largely a reflection of a lack of places for productive capital. Which is a complicated multi-factor problem, that foreign buyers only play a small part.
Does not imply she wields actual power to change the oil industry. Does not imply she agrees with the moral choices of of her parents. And Getty Oil is no more:
> Getty Petroleum filed for bankruptcy protection (Chapter 11) on December 5, 2011
After all, sincere people can and often are counterproductive.
You’re not in the news to my knowledge…
If most Americans curved their consumption (didn’t buy the latest iPhone every year, drove less) that would do way more than any climate change awareness.
I get that people want to do radical acts because they feel good, but that doesn’t mean you are making a big difference.
In short: lack of awareness is not what is in the way of preventing climate change, personal choices are. Personal choices don’t make the news, but are for more important than these acts, which make you feel good but don’t do anything.
As for Aileen Getty, I'm on the fence. I think she has good intentions but threw money at these morons.
As for the morons, while I agree the message is good, the approach does nothing but damage the cause. They recently smashed all the pumps at my local petrol station. All that you end up with is pissed off people who associate the cause with negative people. This is a universally downward spiral.
Google isn't showing me who that is; the only results I'm getting talk about the Getty heiress. Can you please tell us what that guy's name is and ideally a link to the story you're referring to?
Personally I think acts like this have the opposite effect. "Those environmentalists are loons" is probably a common response. If you want to discredit a movement, giving attention to most extreme people is a good way to do it.
Apparently activists of this variety tend to be highly narcissistic, with movements that engage in highly ineffective, yet high publicity activities like this being deeply attractive to these types.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/infantilization-...
With regards to your article: I think the authors answers his own questions: These are serious scientists. They told everybody in the whole world that we are all going to die (I'm paraphrasing, but you get it) in the most adult and sophisticated way possible: Highly prestigious peer reviewed journals, conferences and so on for several decades. Nobody listed. THAT was highly ineffective. Now it seems like time for a change in strategy.
And given how very well it worked for the yellow vests and their infantile demands it looks like a good strategy.
"Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice?" ... "are you more concerned about the protection of a painting? Or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold hungry families. They can't even afford to heat a tin of soup". I will let you think on this. "No new oil" is the supposed solution to unaffordable fuel. And cold.
Sure, no new oil. I guess it is an oil painting. The good news? Maybe they are beginning to learn to not make statements.
So for the rest of the world maybe we can focus on climate change.
We didn't stop all human activity or activism for the last 70 years and neither should we have done so.
This is the biggest Whataboutism if have ever heart of.
If Putin decides to launch nuclear weapons at US/Europe, then US would do the same from their Ohio class submarines. Everyone knows this. But it's useful for Russia to amplify the threat since it distracts politically from their losing war in Ukraine.
Now since it's not likely we should focus on what is likely and that is climate change.
And ultimately, their crime is disrupting some museums, so they might be bad, but no more than people who litter or cheat on their taxes...
This is a textbook ad hominem.
Yes, there are exceptions. What you call "accident of birth". Statistically, they are uncommon.
Statistics part literally doesn't matter. You judge the person by their actions.
Whether or not that's actually what is happening here is a different story.
But given that she is a climate change philanthropist, I strongly doubt she has any active investments in the oil industry, and would not benefit from "making climate change seem crazy".
Especially when your birth is a great fortune
So you agree. The actions and not the birth are what matter.
> In videos from the Dutch museum posted online on Thursday, one of the men says:
> "How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your very eyes?"
> "That is that same feeling when you see the planet being destroyed," he adds.
Many people still don't acknowledge that climate change leads to /destruction/ of important ecosystems and human settlements. And that this destruction can and must be stopped. And for some reason this is a very difficult message to get across.
The thing is short of performing an act of what would essentially be terrorism (assaulting and injuring an oil company executive or a politician who screws up my nation's commitments to carbon neutrality or blowing up a mine or something) I don't think there is anything approaching a direct way for me to be involved in actually fixing the problem.
People acknowledge the problem, they just also feel powerless to fix it because in a lot of ways they are, and it's awful, and that powerlessness just makes this sort of "awareness seeking" activism rankle me even more.
I live in Sydney and I while back some activists glued themselves the road on the harbour bridge, massively fucking up traffic for hours (ironically this protest probably hurt the environment by causing a traffic jam). Nobody became "more aware" of climate change as a result, but they did have their day disrupted and have to spend more time stuck in cars and buses, they did have to stress about getting to work late, and in some cases probably stay at work late to make up the time. Those people are facing jail time, and as much as I normally do respect that protests have to be disruptive to be meaningful I agree with the penalty in this case. The only people they disrupted were normal people just trying to make it through the goddamn day. I think this whole thing with the art is similar. Absolutely be disruptive, but be targeted: glue yourself to the car of an Exxon Mobile exec, glue yourself to an access road leading to a refinery. Don't degrade public spaces like major roads or art galleries unnecessarily - the people making decisions won't care or be impacted and the rest of us will suffer just that little bit more.