I don't think the current round of art protests turn people away — but they also don't really help much. There's actually a body of research about what works: large groups, acting nonviolently, with coherent coordinated demands that can be acted upon.
Thank you for sharing the supporting article. Sometimes, evidence contradicts intuition. From your link:
Less is known about the relative impacts of non-violent but disruptive tactics. “Is it better to throw soup on a painting, or block traffic, or glue yourself to something?” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University in Washington DC. “We don’t know which is the most effective.”
But there is evidence that these types of protest can have an impact. Social Change Lab gathered opinions in three surveys — each asking around 2,000 people — before, during and after disruptive protests in the United Kingdom by Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion in April 20228. The protesters blockaded oil depots and glued themselves to government buildings and oil-company offices. Most people who were surveyed opposed the actions, but continued to support climate policies and Just Stop Oil’s goals to stop new fossil-fuel projects. This counters the view that disruptive action can sour public opinion on an issue.
Overcoming bias is an essential part of science literacy in both acknowledging climate change as a phenomenon and policy change to prevent it.
Yeah, disruptive can be completely acceptable. The problem is that it takes more than just disruptive to be effective — not just avoiding a negative impact, but having a positive one.
Sprays famous rocks with corn starch
Throws soup at some plexiglass
Glues hand to some road (more damage to the hand than the road) and makes a temporary trafic jam.
You can't get less radical than this, because then it wouldn't be a protest.
These people have my respect, because they play "the traditional media" like a fiddle.
Here is what I've learned: If you see an angry person with purple or green hair, they are emotionally unstable and impossible to have a civilized argument with.
Their cause to steer away from fossil fuels is a very good cause to strive for. But only when the technology is there to bridge the gap when renewables aren't producing energy. We're getting there, but not today.
And the actions and unrealistic demands of this spoiled university brat who's living the good life isn't helping their cause. There are several interviews of this girl, when you see them you will wonder how on earth is she in a university, she's not smart at all, she can ramble though
Yes we have, but I can't afford it. These stop
oil want to redirect subsidizing from oil to renewable. This sound great in theory until you think about all you need to go renewable: a lot of solar panels for sun, wind turbines for winter, large battery, gas boiler replaced with heat pump, petrol car replaced with electric (wife), motorcycle replace with electric (me commute)
No matter how much the government subsidizes this, this will bankrupt every middle class worker with a mortgage 3x over. And even if you want to do the conversation step by step to save up, in the meantime your unsubsidized fuel is 5x more expensive so you have nothing to save up.
The electricity grid should absolutely be replaced ASAP. Old homes with ancient gas, coal, and oil heating will also need more modern alternatives like geothermal, heat pumps, or even direct electric heating.
Not literally every single thing needs to be replaced today.
You're ignoring my statement when you say "not everything needs to change today".
When subsidizing switches from oil to renewables (this is what stop oil wants) there is no gradual transition because oil will be too expensive. If that happens I can't afford heating or transportation unless I replace those with electric, which I can't afford either.
Well, that is the primary effect that their actions have: environmental groups are considered more often as "potentially dangerous" since "Just stop Oil", "Extinction Rebellion", and "Last Generation" suddenly popped up out of the nowhere into the limelight with their crazy and stupid stunts.
Reactionaries will always piss and moan about every kind of protest; "stupid stunts" or otherwise. Those are the people you don't listen to, because if they had it their way, there would be no protesting.
The fact is that even their outrage draws attention to the issues and non-disruptive protests typically don't have anywhere near that level of notoriety.
Edit: adding a sourced article that cites multiple studies on the matter.
Environmental groups are considered more dangerous now than they were in the 90s/00s when Earth First and ELF were burning down homes, Sea Shepherds were sinking whaling ships, and there was this guy named Ted in a cabin in Montana you may have heard of?
pretty sure the sockpuppet brigades of "these protests are worse than the pollution" and "protest never changes anything" are are working for the oil industry. In fact:
i just... harming the cultural artifacts is damaging to all of humanity. they should be targeting the people responsible more directly first. target their houses and their boats and them personally. target their families and the people around them. target the art they own...
hell, the same group does do things that hit the appropriate targets. i just don't think they're going the right direction with the art protests specifically.
the article is right, this isn't going to change anyone's mind one way or the other. it's not going to affect the minds of oil execs. the most it might do is increase the donations to the police that guard the art. it is at Best, mildy counterproductive.
the most it will do is piss everyone off. everyone is already mad, this is just making it worse.
it's destroying our common heritage. the history that we can see on front of us. to learn from where we came and see how we can progress.
I am not in favor of this tactic (nor of blocking random-commuter roads) but I would never dream of saying “okay that’s it, because that happened I have now decided that climate change is not important anymore.” I cannot imagine any too significant amount of the public operates that way.
I can say for me they do. Whether it actually damages precious public things or not is irrelevant.
The conversation isn't "oh man, what can I do to stop climate change and stop big oil interests" it's, "what a bunch of shits and now I want to burn tires to show I don't support their cause.
They need to be public and not be assholes about it. I want to have more renewable energy options and less carbon products but blocking traffic and desecrating Stonehenge doesn't give me any actionable things.
Except to adamantly disavow their movement.
They think it starts conversation, but it doesn't. Not the way they want. It's not meaningful. And she said they wouldn't actually do it if there was the possibility of damaging the art? Cletus isn't going to take that into consideration. He's going to say "fuck that idea I had about solar because the solar folks are damaging museum things!"
It's really disappointing because I get and support the cause, but I truly believe they're damaging any support with their short-sighted antics.
There is no conversation. There is no cause. Burning tires would be against your own self-interest. Why do you think it's their responsibility to persuade you of that? If Cletus doesn't install the solar, his own grandkids will suffer.
It isn't up to them to persuade you or Cletus. You know the facts. You need to be fighting for your own future.
What are "superconsumers" and "supersharers?" Are those politically neutral terms, or are they further extentions to the right like the graphs seem to imply?
Yes, they are suspected right-wing bots separated from the data-set based on a set of criteria that marks them as outliers.
The “supersharers” and “superconsumers” of fake news sources—those accountable for 80% of
fake news sharing or exposure—dwarfed typical users in their affinity for fake news sources and, furthermore, in most measures of activity. For example, on average per day, the median super- sharer of fake news (SS-F) tweeted 71.0 times, whereas the median panel member tweeted only 0.1 times. The median SS-F also shared an average of 7.6 political URLs per day, of which 1.7 were from fake news sources. Similarly, the median superconsumer of fake news sources had almost 4700 daily exposures to political URLs, as compared with only 49 for the median panel member (additional statistics in SM S.9). The SS-F members even stood out among the overall supersharers and superconsumers, the most politically active accounts in the panel (Fig. 2). Given the high volume of posts shared or consumed by superspreaders of fake news, as well as indicators that some tweets were authored by apps, we find it likely that many of these accounts were cyborgs: partially automated accounts controlled by humans (15) (SM S.8 and S.9). Their tweets included some self-authored content, such as personal commentary or photos, but also a large volume of political re-tweets. For subsequent analyses, we set aside the supersharer and superconsumer outlier accounts and focused on the remaining 99% of the panel.
It's not even close to fake news. Logarithmic scales are standard in this kind of visualization. The thrust of the result is that right-wing people share more fake news, and if you look at the graph, this is clear. If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.
So if anything, the graph undersells the thesis in the name of creating a more compact and readable visualization. There is no deception here.
If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.
Exactly, and that's the problem! When the chart makes it look like the right "only" shares maybe twice as much fake news when it's actually 10x-100x more, it makes the right look way less bad than it actually is.
I'm less upset about those, but I agree that it would be nice to have a vertical gap between them and the ideological clusters above to make it clearer that they're orthogonal categories of grouping.
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