Climate Activists Spray-Paint Darwin’s Grave in London to Draw Attention to Climate Disaster

www.democracynow.org Climate Activists Spray-Paint Darwin’s Grave in London to Draw Attention to Climate Disaster

In the U.K., two members of the direct action climate group Just Stop Oil were arrested after they spray-painted the words “1.5 is dead” on the grave of Charles Darwin at London’s Westminster Abbey Monday. The protest follows the news last week that 2024 was the hottest year in human history, with...

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Not graffiti on smooth stonework! Winston, fetch my clutching pearls!

Glad for these guys. Their protests are the only ones that consistently get headlines and they make a point that nothing they do is permanent or a public danger.
I used to be more concerned about “le optics” of this but have come to the conclusion I was just being reactionary where I didn’t have to be.
- "Their protests are the only ones that consistently get headlines and they make a point that nothing they do is permanent or a public danger."
  No public danger?
  Like when they blocked a roadway and kept an ambulance from moving a patient? Or when one of their protests caused enough traffic to delay a responding ambulance resulting in 2 deaths?
  Or just in general figuring the best way to get across their message is to sit in a roadway.
  
  Cite your sources babes cuz it looks like you are repeating right wing propaganda straight from the Daily Mail and The Sun 😉
  About the incident of the two deaths: Just Stop Oil didn't delay us getting to M20 crash, says ambulance service
  
  Are you gonna acknowledge that this didn't happen or are you done replying?

And again they are getting attention.
- It's amazing and terrible that so few people are getting how this works.
  The climate going to shit should be the #1 news story on TV and the internet everywhere. Yes, it's more important than money.
  If everyone's just OKAY with living for the short-term regardless of the risk of edging closer to extinction, then we need to all be upfront and make that a petition, a referendum, a signed suicide letter.
- I strongly suspect a funding channel originating from fossil-fuel producers.
  
  Okay, assume that's the case.
  So the fuck what?
  I keep seeing counterpoints that assume that intent informs effectiveness, when that's demonstrably just not the case. If your statement is relevant, that means you must be able to draw a causal link between that hypothesis being true and the campaign being ineffective.
  
  Just like your troll farm account!

They succeeded in getting attention. Look at all the comments posted here. The issue needs attention. The issue also needs fact checking. I was pleased with fact checking I got from diffy.chat about the wildfires in LA County. Maybe fact checking bots should be included in online discussion forums.
- The bots are mostly langauge models, not knowledge models. I don't regard them as sufficiently reliable to do any kind of fact checking.
  
  The language model for diffy.chat has been trained not to respond from its own learned parameters, but to use the Diffbot external knowledge base. Each sentence or paragraph in a Diffy response has a link to the source of the information.

This was very brave. I applaud these activists. We should all do the same until politics listen and act accordingly.

I'm sad that even though I'm heavily in support of climate activisim this kind of useless stuff happens.
- I'm sad no form of protest will ever be acceptable for people who want to demonize climate activists.
  
  What the hell are you talking about? Somebody just punched the United Healthcare CEO's ticket to Hell several decades early. That enjoyed widespread support. By contrast, historical artifacts and working peoples' livelihoods have value. Meanwhile, climate activists just pull one smarmy, performative, insincere stunt after another, and not even so much as a drop of gasoline has been spilled on a single oil CEO's house.
  
  No I'm specifically using the word "useless".
  Lets just burn down Evil Corp's headquarters. Now that is useful.

Vandalizing graves and museums - what a great way to get supporters and make people sympathetic to your cause...
I have further ideas - how about beating some pre-schoolers or burning a homeless shelter to protest global warming? Or perhaps throwing mud at the elderly? Drowning some puppies? Since clearly these people believe all publicity is good publicity, think how much buzz that would generate!
- There's a fair bit of evidence that it works. That's why people keep on doing it.
- Yeah, since they've solely done completely harmless shit up until now, why don't they just murder some dogs? That's the same thing!
- What should they do?
  Protest in the designated area so that we ignore them more easily? But not somewhere where it blocks cars? Maybe stop chanting to keep the noise down?
  The normal protests don't seem to work.
  
  How about actually protesting something that's related to their cause? Blocking a highway is absolutely one of those. Or, if you want to throw paint at something, how about throwing it at an office of an oil company or a car/private jet of a CEO and not on a fucking grave?
  I never said they should not protest at all or not inconvenience anyone, but vandalism of random property or cultural heritage? No, I will not support that.

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