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.
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
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.
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.
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True, good point. I still don’t see their approach become successful because from what I gather it’s just “raising awareness”, I’d hope by 2023 people are aware of climate change. I really feel for the young activists who are a part of JSO because they are trying to do something to fix the situation and are met with so much hostility from the public. To me it does come across as a way to drain young socially aware people’s time/energy away from useful actions and towards actions that won’t have any outcome.
The best approach for climate action is through workers & unions organising, eg: https://youtu.be/J5Whs9IsTds
Should probably read this, my friend.
She simply inherited oil money, she never had anything to do with the now defunct oil company her family ran. She seems to be trying to use the blood money for good. Obviously, she’s a lib though.
The funny thing about the people that call JSO a psy-op, is that the real psy-op is in having people like you unwittingly spread this propaganda.
I’m curious, did you see some reactionary say this on twitter and believe it without doing a single google search? Surely you didn’t, right?
Good point about the inheritance. Actually I have seen it spread by communist from a “they are not left enough” perspective.
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.
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.
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At least the name is terrible and reeks of liberalism
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’.
at least they are organizing
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.
I think they are being demonized and are not the baddies most people think they are.
First of all, one needs to put things in to perspective: Actions of JSO are victimless crimes. Throwing soup on a painting protected by a glass or blocking a road from vehicles.
I haven’t read about JSO’s protests disrupting any emergency services. Usually in protests like these the protesters let emergency vehicles pass.
JSO is using these methods to gain attention that climate movement wouldn’t otherwise get. There still are many people who don’t understand or care about climate change.
We would not even be talking about JSO if they did not pull off these kinds of stunts. If they only wrote blogs and open letters nobody would even know about them.
Climate change is already killing people: 60,000 people died due to heat in Europe last year. More people will die due to extreme heat and drought. Millions of people will become climate refugees. Oil companies, those that JSO is protesting against, have falsified information about climate change for years. They know that fossil fuel is not a solution. They are killing our planet for profit.
So no, I don’t think that JSO is the bad guy here.
60,000 people died due to heat in Europe last year
We’ll see a different kind of protest when the over-privileged start to see their loved-ones randomly die of heat, cold, floods, fire, and other adverse weather.
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.
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.
better than doing nothing.
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I personally like what they’re doing. But overall I think their activism falls on deaf ears. I think a lot of movements like theirs makes the mistake of assuming that civili disobedience implies people will rally around your cause, just like MLK and civil rights. The public reaction seems to be quite the opposite. It’s unclear to me if the behavior of our species is sufficient to evade the worst of climate change tbh. It’s a movement much harder to get action on than basically any other topic
Their message is fine and I understand why they carry out certain stunts, it’s obviously to get eyes on the issue, but it seems the general public does not understand these tactics and just get angry.
At some point I worry that the public will turn against stopping oil and go into full support just to stick it to the people they find annoying.
“Oil may be destructive but you’re annoying so I’m gonna double down my support for the corporations just to fuck with you.”
Nah. The people who are so against these protests would have never tried to stop using oil anyways. That’s not who they’re targeting.
Pissing off those people and letting them whine and make fools of themselves just brings more attention to the people that do care.
This is true and I agree, it just kind of sucks that the people who are annoyed and pissed off are the ones seemingly being amplified on social media and the news.
It’s by design. Capitalist media benefits from climate change denialism and the denigration of climate protestors.
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I guess the media just seems to be pushing the idea that people are annoyed. When they are trending on twitter the biggest tweets I saw were of people complaining with thousands of likes to go along with it. It’s probably an algorithm thing but I guess I still worry.
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