Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced 2years for throwing soup on Van Gogh painting
juststopoil.org
juststopoil.org
Championing people like Ghandi or Mandela is a false equivalency as they actually fought to increase suffrage and representation. Just Stop Oil is advocating for non-democratic means to their specific policy positions. Maybe they are right in the long run, but they are not being intellectually honest about their justification.
Ostensibly the organization is about political mobilization. But they haven't actually endorsed a candidate or secured a referendum or achieved anything vaguely democratic. Which I am not saying they have to do. But claiming they are on democracy's side seems a bit premature.
they have already achieved their first policy goal: the UK no longer issues new oil and gas drilling permits.
https://juststopoil.org/2024/07/10/paint-the-town-orange-jus...
they have set another policy goal, and i expect they won't change a winning formula.
They are influencing me the other way. Every time I see one of their stunts I turn down my AC 5 degrees and run my car in my driveway for an hour. Doing my part to carbon offset their shenanigans.
are you happy with their recent achieved policy goal, blocking new drilling permits? if yes, perhaps your frustration is misplaced. notably, no art was actually defaced, so if that's your point of contention, it's all good.
can you identify or share some more effective tactics?
it seems to me that espousing an opposing position is likely less effective than almost any explicitly supportive tactic, so please be careful with that.
Additionally tactics that result in anyone not directly affiliated with the targets of the org being intentionally inconvenienced through traffic stoppage or other public disruption techniques.
Further I don’t believe that an energy policy that doesn’t at least partially rely on petroleum resources for decades to come is an ignorant position to take and by attempting to force a direction that is doomed to fail through these awful tactics will do more harm than good.
So no…in no way to I approve of their goals and I hope their tactics create a backlash that has a domino effect of causing their cause to fail.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/22/proteste...
Not a lot of folks with the fortitude to vote against the free ride of not paying for carbon emissions (transport, air travel, agriculture, shipping, etc), based on the evidence.
My opinion is that we need more democracy. The people who are most impacted by climate change, the poor and the youth, have the least influence on the issue. If they had a bigger voice, we’d be making different decisions.
But that isn't democracy then, right? Equal votes is the problem, when younger and future stakeholders should have a greater vote and say vs those who will not be around much longer or the wealthy (who generate outsized emissions [1] and a component of their wealth are fossil fuels based [2]). Unaccounted carbon emissions from consumption are our time's bread and circus, racking up the credit card and dumping the liability on future humans.
Imagine telling anyone over 60-70 or anyone near the top of the wealth spectrum they shouldn't get a vote in climate related matters. So instead, you have to just wait for them to age out, while you make whatever progress you can day by day. Or a version of a representative democracy where the longer you'll be here, the greater the vote you get. "No taxation without representation." if you will. The future having to pay for the past's lack of will to reduce carbon emissions is taxation, and the cost is going to be enormous [3] [4] [5].
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/23/only-the-super-wea...
[3] https://apnews.com/5949adfa46b84ee9aa28369f9c050e18
[4] https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-damage-economy-inc...
[5] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2024...
I think it's a bit misguided to believe that oil companies are solely using corruption to drive their influence, but then that they would also care about what in particular they are selling. If their profits came only from backroom deals, you'd think they would choose a cheaper and easier product to trick consumers into buying!
incredible
Even if the server is not damaged, the owner can be losing millions each hour that the server is out of service.
After each attack, the museum must close for a while and check if everything is correct in the other rooms also. The picture must be removed, cleaned by paid specialists, somebody must verify that its integrity has not being compromised and that nothing is slowly leaking under the glass. Insurance staff must come and write a report. Policemen must lose hours of work and write reports also.
There is a clear, measurable, and verifiable lose on ticket revenue for the museum. And the museum is not even responsible for the fact that people use cars!.
I don't know how much the Louvre earns each day, but those £5,000 for weeks or months of not having the Monalissa available for display seems a value too low to me.
This was the National Gallery in London, which I believe doesn't charge for admission because it's a public institution. But ... did the National Gallery actually close after these incidents, when just one painting was attacked and not actually damaged? That would seem to be an overreaction. In any case, I think a lost revenue justification for the damages along these lines seems kinda silly.
Rather the judge seems to have believed that the damage is to society overall:
> our culpability is at level A. You did reconnaissance and planning and talked to a journalist. Your harm is at category 1, which means extreme harm to society.
> There is nothing peaceful or nonviolent about throwing soup. Throwing soup in someone’s face is violent.
I think the problem with a legal system that treats throwing soup as violence and not damaging a painting as causing damage is that this flattening perspective only incentivizes activists to go big or go home. If you're going to be sentenced as if you did damage even when you did not ... then you may as well try to destroy the painting next time. If you're going to be treated by the legal system as if you committed a violent crime when you threw soup at an enclosed painting ... then maybe next time you should actually commit real violence. Note, it sounds like being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months. So you could physically accost people and get a much shorter sentence than these soup-throwers.
https://criminalinjurieshelpline.co.uk/blog/punishment-sente...
over the past couple decades, many american activists have realized that demonstrating certain political positions is dangerous, even if the demonstration itself and each individual participant is lawful.
so now there's a broad activist culture that encourages independent militant action against productive capital, general infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!
I can say that observationally, this just-do-the-emissions reasoning is real. Over the past several decades, many industrialized individuals and groups have realized that pushing certain harmful chemicals into the environment is lawful almost regardless of the amount. So now there's a broad emitter culture that encourages independent destructive action against productive ecosystems and planetary systems, threatening the long term viability of public infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!
The scale of destruction from climate activists is many orders of magnitude less than the destruction of what they're railing against. These soup-throwers are being charged, but Exxon/BP/Chevron are never charged with manslaughter or even reckless endangerment when a heatwave or hurricane which would not have happened but for climate change claims its many victims.
two wrongs don't make a right. "Bob shoot at me, therefore I can rape Lisa?". Sorry, but I'm not buying that BS.
I'm certainly not saying these activists should have no punishment (and they know that they're risking prosecution when they undertake their actions).
But we should also be keenly aware that the emitters that causing a giant and growing crisis which has already killed a bunch of people and will kill many more in the future are not facing any punishment, and this should be at least as significant a story as 2 people getting 2 years for throwing soup.
im fucking the planet, therefore bob can shoot at me
Stop-Oil need to be in a special class of ignorant to not even understand that old painting masters had none relationship with Petrol companies. They painted using only 100% sustainable vegetable oil taken from agriculture.
Would they have a tenth of a brain, stop-oil should be promoting the use of sustainable alternatives to fossil oils. They should be helping museums, not assaulting them.
Don't know. Wasn't there.
The museums work like a computer memory pile. There is an endless stream of people walking in. To keep the system running the same amount must walk out. To keep the system efficient, the flux must have a direction and only one. The tourists must walk the pile until finding the other extreme and walk out. The same door shouldn't be used to enter and exit.
If a museum is famous for a particular painting, it is assured that the stream of visitors will be directed towards that room, so nobody miss it. It will be placed most probably on a noble room with a door for entering and another in the opposite side to continue the visit.
If this area is blocked, suddenly the incoming flux of people can't go out. The museum needs to find an alternative route ASAP to release that flux pressure before the people start being crushed.
Most modern places will have planned that possibility, but architectures don't allow a secondary route everywhere.
What I mean is that, as long as the visit is arranged in the traditional way, to close a big museum just by the attack to a single painting is not impossible at all.
This just reinforces the idea that the 2 years are fully justified. Better stop it now.
> being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months
If you keep committing batteries each weekend, I bet that the next time the situation will change.
All civilized societies agreed that recidivists should receive harsher sentences than one-time offenders. Here we have a criminal group --organized-- to deploy a chain of senseless attacks on a campaign of harassment of --innocent-- museums targeting artifacts of huge cultural value for western culture. Without showing any sign to stop or symptoms of regret. Legally there is no point into treating each case as an isolated act because it isn't. They are steps on a bigger crime scene.
No. It's the National Gallery:
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/plan-your-visit
> And the museum is not even responsible for the fact that people use cars!.
That same page I cited has driving/parking directions to the museum.
There are climate-change protests every day worldwide that get no attention from media at all.
These stunts make the papers mostly because they're rage-bait, and consumers get their 2 min of hate. To biased readers, protests like these or those that target average people reflect negatively, which backfires on the entire ostensible "point" of these stunts (as opposed to the actual purpose) because it can be dismissed out of spite.
The broken record you hear is "protests are supposed to be inconvenient". That is not true. They're supposed to win hearts and minds, engender sympathy, as that is what builds traction. It's possible to use inconvenience for that, but it's on a gradient. Civil rights protests were effective, but no one seriously believes it's because they managed to annoy and inconvenience average people really well.
In PETA's case, they suck all of the air out of the room from other animal welfare organizations. These public displays do not change minds so much as they drive donations. So they end up control a bigger share of a shrinking pot.
At least in PETA's case they can show examples of animal cruelty and make people aware about an issue. But I don't think there's a single person out there in the world who needs museums vandalized to learn about climate change.
Meanwhile, there are lots of examples of tactful organizations that do not get headline attention but get decent policy results.
I think this oversimplifies things because one is a younger organization, and there are a ton of similarly named ones. People can't think of very many international charities, but the ones that come to mind aren't known for being notorious and off-putting (e.g. Unicef, Red Cross). Possibly PETA cannibalizes here as without them another more appealing replacement would get similar recognition? I'm not sure.
personally it's rationalist adjacent writing that got me interested in avoiding some conventional factory farmed products
And rage-bait gets more views. Protests designed for social media? Well played!
The cynic in me wonders if somebody is funding these protestors. If I were an oil baron I would feel deeply indebted to them.
My problem with Just Stop Oil is all their activism is just targeting people that have nothing to do with oil. They could be much more productive if they petitioned governments or people in power to change energy policy but no all they do is make the lives of people that have nothing to do with it miserable.
Their logic goes something like: "if I splash paint on this painting or block traffic, people will see our message and that will motivate them to join our cause". But in reality those people aren't going to be motivated to join your cause, they will just think you are a giant asshat.
I've talked to a Femen a few years ago (a Russian, exiled in France), asked why they go for visible but ultimately non-actionable acts, and basically her response was something like 'We want to shock the most bigoted, idiotic persons you know, so that they will talk about us to people without strong opinions at their family diners. You can't have real change even with strong words like "women are raped in their own bed" (it was waaaaay before Peniquot) if nobody is opposing you. We create an opposition to make our voice louder'. Or something like that, I mostly remember the last sentence.
People respond to activism like it's some new, obviously stupid idea, rather than a technique with a long history of being effective and essential to democracy and freedom. That is, people respond to left-wing activism that way, for obvious reasons.
Ok so other than voting for candidates/laws that assist with it and maybe driving an EV what can an individual do? How does ruined art factor into that?
> Building awareness and stimulating action is fundamental to any change.
If everyone has already heard about it everyday from the media and various internet people, how does a ruined art piece stimulate additional change?
Maybe they don’t like oil paintings.
They regularly blockade oil facilities and corporate office of oil companies.. except that does not make the news.