Extinction Rebellion, ongoing disscussion.

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

Remember, XR is a highly distributed organisation, many autonomous groups. There's no mechanism to prevent a group doing something stupid under an XR banner.

Sort of like Occupy Wall Street?

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

Ironically the vast majority of those who are not sympathetic to action on climate change probably know exactly what is required to combat climate change but just aren't concerned enough for the future to have their current lifestyle drastically changed.

Otherwise known as "most folks" no doubt.

[Little John]

These arseholes targeted a hard pressed working class area of Tower Hamlets where people are working several jobs, 60 plus hours per week on minimum wage just to afford a shitty room in a shared house. All these people stood on top of those tube trains served to do was alienate ordinary folks.

They attacked the working class, not the establishment. Working class people recognize these "greens" for what they are; just another one of their enemies.

We are in the middle of a class war being fought on a number of proxy fronts.

[kenneal - lagger]

........We are in the middle of a class war being fought on a number of proxy fronts.

I think that you are on completely the wrong track there, LJ. From my knowledge of the people locally who support XR, and I am one of them, they would not deliberately attack anyone, let alone the working class. If they did attack the working class it would have been through ignorance rather then malice. They probably didn't realise the consequences of the location of their action. If you had been demonstrating around the City and Canary Wharf, Stratford and all stops on the way were the closest place to take action against the tube.

As others have said taking action against the tube sends entirely the wrong message to both those in power and those who need to be influenced to do more to combat climate change.

If anyone needs attacking it is the monied people of the city whose conspicuous consumption and support for fossil fuel companies and the banking sector are driving the economic growth which drive climate change.

[woodburner]

........We are in the middle of a class war being fought on a number of proxy fronts.

I think that you are on completely the wrong track there, LJ. From my knowledge of the people locally who support XR, and I am one of them, they would not deliberately attack anyone, let alone the working class. If they did attack the working class it would have been through ignorance rather then malice. They probably didn't realise the consequences of the location of their action. If you had been demonstrating around the City and Canary Wharf, Stratford and all stops on the way were the closest place to take action against the tube.

As others have said taking action against the tube sends entirely the wrong message to both those in power and those who need to be influenced to do more to combat climate change.

If anyone needs attacking it is the monied people of the city whose conspicuous consumption and support for fossil fuel companies and the banking sector are driving the economic growth which drive climate change.

My goodness, talk about mis-information. Your lifestyle benefits from fossil fuel use, whether you like it or not. Where do you think your clients get the money to pay for advice and for their buildings’ modifications to achieve your recommendations? They are the ones that are able to afford to do it. Many, many people can barely afford to scrape through from one month to the next, let alone have enough to “invest� in “climate mitigation�.

[woodburner]

For those who think extinction rebellion is a noble cause, is there any truth here?

What she (Gail Bradbrook) failed to disclose to her audience is the fact that Otpor!, the groups it subsequently spawned in other countries, and Gene Sharp, were all funded by the National Endowment for Democracy: an American NGO whose activities run parallel to the regime-change objectives of the US government, widely considered [3] to be a ‘plausibly deniable’ above-ground arm for CIA meddling. Another notable oversight from her talk was any mention of what replaced the corrupt governments that these activist movements toppled: slick neoliberals, passing ‘reforms’ that enabled the rapid re-organisation of their economies to suit western multinationals; and in the case of Egypt, the coming of the Muslim Brotherhood to power – later to be replaced by the military dictatorship of al-Sisi, which persists to this day.

For some, here are lies and mis-information, for others Roger Hallam has said the intention is to achieve system change, if necessary by bringing down governments. Some will note similarities in the video.

[eatyourveg]

'If we are able to maintain a finger-hold on reality, then we have to accept that climate science, based on elementary principles of physics, is not part of a corporate conspiracy, is not effete 'middle class' paranoia, and is not designed to exploit the public.'

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/aler ... -left.html

[Little John]

British media and Extinction Rebellion launch propaganda blitz against Bolivia’s progressive government

If you're still not getting it, Extinction Rebellion = Rebellion Extinction

https://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/ ... in-bolivia

On 26 August, Novara Media’s website published a vicious and reactionary article titled ‘It’s Not Just Brazil’s Forests That Are Burning, Bolivia Is on Fire Too’ by prominent Extinction Rebellion speaker and activist Claire Wordley. Novara and Wordley are recycling from the same imperialist playbook which has been drawn on in recent attacks against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua – the so-called Troika of Tyranny. The gist of Wordley’s article is that Bolivian President Evo Morales is to blame for the fires raging in the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS rainforest; that he is as ‘damaging as … the capitalists Morales claims to hate’; that he hasn’t responded to the fires effectively; and that when he has responded – such as by hiring a Boeing 747 Supertanker to douse the flames – he was forced to do so by ‘volunteer citizens’.

The Guardian and Independent promptly threw their weight behind this propaganda blitz: a 27 August opinion piece by Harriet Marsden in the Independent urges us to ‘look to Bolivia’, not Bolsonaro, when placing blame for the fires; and a 2 September Guardian headline tars Morales as a ‘murderer of nature’. This media offensive is evidently timed to try and exploit the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS fires to discredit Bolivia’s government in the run-up to the country’s general election on 20 October, in which Morales’ party Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is expected to win a fifth term.

The core of Wordley’s article is claims by ‘Bolivian activist’ Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a professional regime change operative and ‘the spearhead of a network of Western organizations that trained and advised the leaders of regime-change operations from Venezuela to Eastern Europe to the on-going anti-China protests in Hong Kong' (Grayzone). She was trained at the US’ Kennedy School which boasts all the key players in the recent attempted coup administration in Venezuela. Heavily funded by the US government, Vaca-Daza has led the propaganda attacks against Morales and kickstarted the #SOSBolivia hashtag to beg the imperialist nations for intervention, exploiting the forest fires for this purpose. Opposition candidate Carlos Mesa, who received $10 million from the US earlier this year, has also echoed these calls for outside ‘aid’.

Extinction Rebellion has eagerly responded to these calls by staging protests outside Bolivian embassies across Europe. Wordley’s article also quotes El Deber, one of the largest pro-opposition media outlets in Bolivia. While Wordley says her research was ‘unfunded work’ performed out of interest, she is producing regime change propaganda in the imperialist nations for free; those sources she cites and promotes are being handsomely rewarded by Washington.

The truth is less convenient for the interests of imperialism. For several weeks, there has been an increase in the fires in the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS rainforest, primarily in Brazil but which spilled over the border into Bolivia in early August. In response to this, Morales hired a Boeing 747 Supertanker, which in the past week has discharged 979,000 of the 1,892,330 litres of water which have been dropped on affected areas. In addition, the government’s efforts have included five helicopters dropping 873,720 litres, and contracted aircraft dropping a further 39,610 litres. The UN has recognised and praised these efforts due to ‘the large forces mobilised and Morales’ calls for a region-wide response’. Bolivia’s government reported that by the end of August ‘85% of the fires had been extinguished in around eight days of its operations’ (Grayzone, 29 August 2019). Morales also announced an ‘ecological pause’, which means that in fire-affected areas, land sales are prohibited so that agribusiness cannot profit from the fires and the damage caused – by using the newly cleared land for cattle grazing – and won’t be tempted to deliberately burn more forest, and so that once the fires have been extinguished a program of reforestation rather than exploitation can commence.

While it is true that earlier this year the Bolivian government allowed small farmers to burn some areas of forest land to clear way for crop production, saying ‘If small families don’t set fires, what are they going to live on?’, a NASA report has confirmed that the fires are concentrated overwhelmingly in Brazil. Wordley’s article ignores that of the one million hectares that have been consumed by fire in Bolivia since the beginning of August, less than a quarter has been rainforest, and that these figures are on a par with or less than the figures for previous years. The total area burnt in 2004 was 4.8 million hectares (more than twice the figure for 2019 so far) and in 2010 it was 6.1 million (including 2.7 million in forests alone, outstripping the total for all land types burnt this year) (Reporte: Incendios y Quemas en Bolivia).

As we reported in FRFI 271, ‘in 2011 [Bolivia] became the first country in the world to introduce legal protections for the environment on a par with rights protecting human beings.’ In June 2015, Morales called capitalism ‘a cancer for Mother Earth’. Bolivia has only recently managed to throw off the hawk-like claws of the IMF and is in no hurry to hand its sovereignty back to the US in exchange for so-called aid. Earlier in 2019, in response to flash flooding, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro García Lineras said ‘Bolivia has the resources...the era of begging [to outsiders] has passed, leave that to Carlos Mesa’. As we saw in Haiti in 2010, international emergency aid is militarisation and occupation under another name.

Across Latin America, capitalism cannot allow even progressive social democratic governments like Bolivia's to thrive, and with the presidential election approaching, these will only be the first of many vicious attacks against Morales and MAS.

[woodburner]

'If we are able to maintain a finger-hold on reality, then we have to accept that climate science, based on elementary principles of physics, is not part of a corporate conspiracy, is not effete 'middle class' paranoia, and is not designed to exploit the public.'

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/aler ... -left.html

A quote from the linked article:

Given that we really are facing extinction – the death of everyone we know and love, ourselves included – and given that, over the last thirty years, governments and corporations have completely ignored the entreaties of climate scientists and activists by powerfully accelerating, not restraining, the runaway corporate capitalist machine – then, adopting 'mainstream' standards, activists must be morally entitled to use violence, even extreme violence, in trying to prevent the elimination of life on earth. After all, people are already dying in large numbers. Misha Coleman, one of the authors of a study by Australia's Monash University, commented last July:

'There are absolutely people dying climate-related deaths, [especially due to] heat stress right now.

'During the Black Saturday fires [in Victoria, Australia, in 2009] for example, we know that people were directly killed by the fires, but there were nearly 400 additional deaths in those hot days from heat stress and heatstroke.'

An example of conjecture dressed up as absolute fact.

There are no doubt weather related deaths, but to extrapolate this and claim it is caused by man made climate change is just yet another prediction of the end of the world, many of which have failed to come to pass since the 1600s (or before).

“People are already dying in large numbers�

True, but then there are a hell of a lot of people, and people are being born in large numbers, larger than those dying. Even with large numbers of people dying from whatever cause, the numbers are more than made up in a matter of weeks, or at worst months.

There is not a climate emergency.

[eatyourveg]

'There is not a climate emergency.'

You just sit down and have a cup of tea. We'll let you know when it's safe to come out again and those nasty people telling fibs won't upset you any more.

[Little John]

'There is not a climate emergency.'

You just sit down and have a cup of tea. We'll let you know when it's safe to come out again and those nasty people telling fibs won't upset you any more.

Climate change is real. It has had many causes over the history of the planet. Many of them totally unrelated to life, some of them definitely related to life and today's climate perturbations are almost certainly due, in significant part to the actions of mankind.

However, in terms of how those changes pan out in the eventual direction, severity and, finally, speed of occurrence is not known or understood to any significant extent other than via very imperfect modelling. Yet, with a truly religious-level of certainty, these Extinction Rebellion arseholes claim our own kids will die in their millions from it. The truth is, they have far more likelihood of dying in their millions for at least two other reasons including peak industrial resources and war as it happens.

I don't happen to be close to Woodburner's position on climate change. I think it is far more serious than he does. However, I am not the worst kind of a twit either. The kind that thinks they are cleverer than they are.

[kenneal - lagger]

"Divide and conquer" seems to be working well at the moment.

[Little John]

'Climate Change Trans Counselling' by Will Franken (inspired by Greta Thunberg)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo8qXxnFuRQ&app=desktop

[woodburner]

But seriously though folks.

[Little John]

Meanwhile:

Paula Densnow writes “Well, well, well. I guess the marching orders at Davos included more than just focusing on climate change.

I see no other reason for a teenager supposedly focused, laser-like, on saving the planet, to come out for increased censorhip.�

https://meaww.com/greta-thunderberg-fac ... disturbing

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has considered quitting Facebook, as she finds the social media platform's "lack of taking responsibility very disturbing".

She cited that it takes negligible interest in curbing the massive amounts of hate speech, conspiracy theories and lack of fact-checking that reigns on the forum.

Sharing her sentiments on a Facebook post to her 2.6 million followers, the 16-year-old wrote on Wednesday, October 23: "I am, like many others, questioning whether I should keep using Facebook or not."

"Allowing hate speech, the lack of fact-checking and, of course, the issues of interfering with democracy... are among many, many other things that are very upsetting," she wrote.

"The constant lies and conspiracy theories about me and countless others, of course, result in hate, death threats and ultimately violence. This could easily be stopped if Facebook wanted to. I find the lack of taking responsibility very disturbing," she added.

In conclusion, she noted: "But I'm sure that if they are challenged and if enough of us demand change — then change will come." The post was accompanied by a video that showed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifying before House Financial Services Committee.

In the new report video from earlier that day, Zuckerberg was being asked about Libra — his latest cryptocurrency project, while he was also grilled for his organization's refusal to control hate speech or other false advertisements.
Youth activist Greta Thunberg speaks at the Climate Action Summit at the United Nations on September 23, 2019 in New York City. While the United States will not be participating, China and about 70 other countries are expected to make announcements concerning climate change. The summit at the U.N. comes after a worldwide Youth Climate Strike on Friday, which saw millions of young people around the world demanding action to address the climate crisis. (Getty Images)

On Thunberg's side, she has claimed that as the attention on her and her activism continues to grow, she and her family members are being harassed and bullied on social media. "The one who suffers is my sister," Thunberg told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

"She is 13 years old and has to endure systematic bullying, hatred, and harassment. The people who write threats and hate to me do it to the whole family, even to her. The difference between me and the people who are left at home is that I am always traveling, inaccessible."

Just a day after sharing her heartfelt message to her followers, urging them to demand Facebook change its policies and police such negative messages, Thunberg also apologized to other celebrity figures who have been harassed by people pretending to be her on social media.

"It has come to my attention that a few people have been trying to impersonate me or falsely claim that they 'represent' me in order to communicate with political leaders, famous actors, singers and musicians,'" she shared on both Facebook and Twitter.

"I apologize to anyone who’s been contacted — and maybe even misled by this kind of behavior. I hope that those who want to sincerely reach out to me will do so using the recognized channels. The good news in all of this is that this just means we're having impact. Activism works. And see you in the streets!'"