Been seeing a lot of outrage thrown at them recently their protests and been seeing a lot of people trying to disrupt these protesters for “disrupting” them and that they could cause inconvenience to emergency services but at the same time,I feel as though these actions are necessary sort of to better spread the message since the bourgeois media is going to turn a blind eye to it. So, since I’m not really familiar with the whole thing, I want to see what you think of them.
My opinion is that it’s a waste of time. Oil won’t be stopped unless a whole lot of people get a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of putting rounds in oil execs, really soon. The feedback loops have already started, and will only speed up as they continue to occur.
Just Stop Oil is linked to oil heiress Aileen Getty. I suspect it’s entire purpose is to make climate activists look bad and take attention away from affective actions. https://nitter.net/SarafromMI/status/1581002787617284097?t=UQFqNtm68odaoQKKKNee1Q&s=19
I suspected that. “JuSt sTop OiL” sounds actually stupid, it’s not like it’s easy or something, we could start the process of stopping oil if we abolished capitalism but then saying “we JUST have to stop the OIL” sounds totally naive
This is actually from a strange article made by the Telegraph in October last year that went “viral” in similar lib tabloids to try and play both sides of dunking on the activists. Getty is a co-founder to the CEF which donates to a bunch climate activist groups including XR and JSO, but was singled out by tabloids as the sole source of income for the groups. I haven’t found much to either confirm or dispute her claims in never engaging in oil herself, but it does seem like a usual billionaire philanthropy grift.
But I wouldn’t throw the whole movement out just because some billionaire is donating to it. It sounds a bit like a “yet you live in society, curious.” At the end of the day it is a lib org through and through, we shouldn’t expect any different. If ssome people think activists “look bad” because they blocked a road or threw soup at a protective glass with a painting behind it, I don’t want to see what they’ll think of riots.
Well spotted. Their actions don’t seem to do much beyond being loud and obnoxious, and their goal is also their name and their slogan. No organization that takes itself seriously would define everything about itself in 3 words.
*No serious socialist organisation
The benefit is that every time they’re in the news, people hear the slogan, ‘just stop oil’. I don’t think they’ll be very effective in the long run. But at least they’re keeping the topic in the press. Like, Greece is on fire, and all we hear is how holidaymakers are going to get home; the MSM won’t connect the dots to global warming of their own accord.
ineffective liberals. They should be spending their time organizing with socialists, trying to actually take power, not doing protests that the bourgeoisie will just ignore anyways
At the same time, most westerners don’t even know they need to be organising. Attempts like this—and their ultimate failure —can radicalise the people involved and people watching. Because one day, they’ll ask, why isn’t this working. And the spirit of a revolutionary will start to visit them in their dreams.
We don’t have time for people to come to their own conclusions, we needed socialism yesterday to begin the transition to clean energy
Agreed. Socialists need to be taking every opportunity to make that case. JSO is making another such opportunity. We can use their actions to say, ‘this is practically useless, what we need is XYZ’.
Much of the outrage is manufactured or astroturfed. For example, I wouldn’t call myself a tweeter, but I did create an account recently just to observe (morbid curiosity, if anything). So I follow a few JSO people. I never see their tweets directly. Instead, what Twitter shows me are the outrage videos about just stop oil. So the Twitter algorithm prioritises the negative responses over the organisation itself, even when one follows the organisation, but none of the people responding. Twitter is amplifying the negative voices. The mainstream press does exactly the same. Then the press uses Twitter as evidence that ‘everyone’ thinks JSO are wrong. In turn, Twitter platforms the press as evidence. There’s a powerful feedback loop that cuts out the supportive voices.
Do I support them? They seem to be quite harmless but they are keeping climate change in the news cycle (even if it’s bad coverage). They won’t achieve anything more than that, unfortunately. It’s equivalent to asking politely.
For the people who are genuinely outraged, LMFAO. This is nothing. Assuming that 99.9%+ of the people are from the imperial core, if they think JSO is disruptive, there’s a rude awakening coming.
Just wait till we’re five years down the line and: the roads are washed away or flooded; everything’s on fire; the tarmac is too hot to drive on; surprise snowstorms close highways all year round; millions of people living in coastal homes flock ‘inland’; floods drive millions of people out of homes that property developers built on floodplains; billions of people are displaced and move to the north, where things will be ‘safer’; jobs disappear because global supply chains start to disintegrate; jobs disappear because workplaces are unbearably hot or unable to operate under water.
This is just a tiny selection of the shit that’s coming this way – in a part of the world where, we know now, people think wearing a mask or standing a little bit away is far-too-high-a-price to pay for other people’s health and safety. Those snowflakes getting upset at these milquetoast protesters – it’s going to get tedious hearing them complain, ‘Why didn’t anyone warn us; I’ve lost everything’ while their insurance company puts them up in a hotel.
Not sure how to “just stop oil” even if we had substantial political power. You would need to replace the entire global economy.
Of course that should be done for all the reasons we already know, but saying “just stop oil” makes it sound simple and makes environmentalists sound kinda dumb.
Kids doing something they believe in while everyone else is arguing about whether they are causing too much of an inconvenience.
Meanwhile the planet is on fucking fire, both literally and figuratively.
The “white moderates’” hostilities against activists of any kind because they cause inconvenience or because the truth is uncomfortable, have always plagued movements like these.
The critique doesn’t come from an honest wish to see the movement succeed, they just want activists out of sight and mind.Edit: And at least JSO are regularly drawing attention to one of the two big climate issues. The other being animal agriculture.
At least the name is terrible and reeks of liberalism
Frankly they’re too mild. That doesn’t mean I don’t support them, but I think they could do with some actually disruptive protest tactics. It’s hard to do any “annoying protests” in Britain without being arrested though. Though, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Perhaps many will agree that there are probably better ways to further such goals. However, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support them. Let’s be real, if we were to bring awareness to a certain cause, havoc and terror must be caused.
I saw some youtubers who infiltrated JSO’s ranks and sabotaged their plans, while still claiming they care about the environment and that something should be done. The hypocrisy is unreal.
Do not fall for what the mainstream media says about such movements, since disruption and terror are one of the few weapons we have when fighting against the despotism of the bourgeois elite.
