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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

Here is the link of the group, claiming and explaining the attack (in german):

https://de.indymedia.org/node/344525

Basically they fear, that green capitalism can work, so they attack the most prominent representant, so we all realize, we have to deindustrialize and live with very little.

I mean, there are some valid criticism of Teslas Gigafactory (and Musk in general), like that they pollute the groundwater already much more than allowed and the regulators are looking away.

But all in all, I am not that convinced, by such actions or manifests.

And Teslas or the Cybertruck are by themself surely not that ecologic - but they help make the transition much more, than continue to build combustion engines.

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> Here is the link of the group, claiming and explaining the attack

No, thanks!

They chose violence in a country where democracy is working: as such, they only deserve to be closed behind solid bars and NO DIFFUSION of their opinions.

To be fair, it was violence against property, not people. That is quite a difference. (but I am not saying, that they would not also attack people)

And this is a hacker news forum, focusing on curiosity. I am curious about why people do weird things. Sometimes they have good reasons, often not so much. But I still like to judge myself at the source and not read what others concluded.

With everything going on in Germany surrounding Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Gaza, I have to wonder if this is sarcasm?

At least they have the common sense of not picking on the domestic car manufacturers but a weaker target ...

As usual with these kind of people I think they are counter productive to their own goals.

Or they are simply living in Berlin and only damage things in and around Berlin.

I really dislike how extremist eco activist groups keep trying to link any sort of badness to capitalism. "Nothing good will come unless we have a violent revolution." That's how dangerous radicalization happens.

In reality a ton of work is being done to reduce carbon usage within the current framework, importantly while still maintaining a good quality of life and not sending us back to the dark ages. Not enough, sure, but things are changing.

Because they don't want to help the environment, they want to feel recreationally outraged and like heroic revolutionaries ending evil. Environmentalism is just their latest wedge to insist that the solution to all problems in the world is their preferred revolution. They actively dislike and frustrate measures that would actually help address real problems, as it would take away their excuse, and they'd rather the problem continue (or hopefully get worse) than admit that they're not the solution. That last bit is often quite explicit - "We can't end $x until we end capitalism!" etc., and accusing more moderate groups of being bourgeois infiltrators or various -isms for daring to actually get something done instead of shouting about an ill-defined utopic revolution ad infinitum

And they majorly slow progress and tarnish public opinion of legitimate movements by forcing their way in. It's group narcissism

There's no such thing as bad publicity. We are talking about it, picking what is better and what is ridiculous, imagining alternatives and ways forward... would this discussion be here on HN otherwise? Same in other corners of the net, same in the real world. Soup attacks and road gluing keep the topic in the focus lights, the way the rallies of old, having fallen in "normalcy", have not.

"Soup attacks and road gluing keep the topic in the focus lights"

Those things tend to keep the focus on the soup. Or was there anything constructive to actually combat climate change, that has been done, because of those attention seeking actions?

You've just mentioned the topic yourself, giving it a little bit of attention and making others do so too, and you might well not have done that without these stunts, or even had this opportunity. One thing such stunts do very well is ensure that people don't have that topic driven out of their minds entirely, anchor it there, even if it doesn't take center stage. That makes it much easier to activate through other campaigns, channels or even uncoordinated word of mouth, and while that may not seem like much, big corp marketing departments spend fortunes to do the same for their brands. Is there a risk that soup stunts will foster resentment to a degree that harms their goal? Absolutely, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Most people appear to forget the stunts fairly quickly, whereas climate change as a topic is gaining traction, and while it's hard to attribute any of this directly to the various steps taken to foster awareness, it's well established that anchoring an idea in people's minds is a crucial basis for bottom-up action – just look at how the MAGA slogan has galvanized the US far right, to a large degree by firmly anchoring certain core tenets in people's minds, even those on the other side of the aisle. I'm wary of the downstream effects the current protests may wind up having, but I can't think of an alternative that's actually doable and that would have the same amount of impact.

And the focus here is on the violence, not climate change.

If you want to debate climate change, submit a scientific report.

Those people just want activism for the sake of it. So they have the feeling they did something and they did, but I do not see it as productive or constructive towards the goal, rather distracting and further dividing.

When was the last time you have read a scientific report? I for one have very rarely looked into them, shame on me. But I can testify that my entire family, while concerned with the climate change, never reads any scientific reports, so submitting yet another one will change absolutely zero on what they think. Exactly this is the problem those extremists try to address: to bring and keep the topic in people's minds, by any means. Do we like their means? No. Are they effective? Yes, as argued before already.

Well, I skim over them, if I see them here, which is what I was talking about. To reach the non tech people, I rather would create good visualisations explaining things, or a game about it (which is what I am doing). Those destructive actions here will make people ask the politics to spend more on police instead.

I read the English translation. Quite a broad-ranging manifesto!

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