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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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