Extinction Rebellion
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Another cross we have to bear. According to an editorial in today’s Times:
”Extinction Rebellion has allowed a hard core of ideologues and Marxists infiltrators to dictate its agenda.”
and
”It has, like many idealist causes, attracted cynical and opportunist manipulators, the Young Communist League, the Socialist Workers Party and those seeking to infiltrate any movement with anti-capitalist and anti-establishment potential. Their banners outside the printing works on Friday urged ‘Socialism not Extinction’.“
I don’t know to what extent this is true — but presumably there is photographic and video evidence for that banner — but we know from experience that this is a tactic that vanguardists like SWP employ all the time. So it is at least plausible but I doubt that they have taken over XR. I imagine in fact that XR leaders and followers welcome their presence on their demonstrations as much as strikers do on their picket lines.
XR’s leaders have shown that they are quite capable of deciding such rash and counter-productive actions on their own, motivated by naive and vague spiritual values.
The Times also reports that XR is split on the issue “as the storm on Twitter shows”. Anybody know anything about this?
Alan wrote
“Rather than “the rapidly-heating planet”, would it be more accurate instead to say “the rapidly-melting planet””
The melting point of igneous rocks varies, but silicates solidify at 600 degrees C (although this will depend on pressure, Boyle’s Law and all that). So actually Alan it would be very inaccurate and dare I say a smidgen alarmist to say rapidly melting planet. Although you could argue that as the lower and upper mantle are fluid, although not all liquid so they go through a constant process of melting and solidifying, but the inner core of the earth is thought to be solid, due to the pressure of gravity at the earth’s core
All this week the Times has been wreaking its revenge on XR for blockading its printing presses last weekend. It has been publishing the names and occupations of those arrested and what a list of “petty bourgeois” they make.
But more relevant is the article published on Thursday about who has been financing XR. One is “Ben Goldsmith, the financier and environmentalist” and “government adviser”, a trustee of the “Children’s Investment Fund Foundation” which gave XR a grant of £137,000. The CIFF was set up by “the hedge-fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn”.
Why would these members of the capitalist class finance an organisation like XR? In any event, after XR’s latest stunt, it appears they are no longer going to. The Times’s article is headed “Blockade backfires on climate activists”.
So it looks as if they are pissing off capitalists as well as workers. Quite an achievement.
Bijou, I think you know i was referring to the arctic and antarctica polar regions where glaciers are melting at record rates, far more rapidly than all the previous models predicted.
And now we have after the Siberian forest fires, the Western American fires burning. Half a million climate refugees, even if the media decline to use such language.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54128872
And, as you say, ALB , the Times has its very own agenda in discrediting XR, not merely because of its campaign against the press but Murdoch, the owner, remains a Climate Change Delayer, and there is ample evidence of this from his Australian media coverage. Even one of his sons has distanced himself from their position.
But the innuendo that somehow financiers and hedge fund managers are using the XR campaign is questionable. The biggest backer has been the the Climate Emergency Fund – so who finances them…George Soros?
Goldsmith told The Times: “I wonder if the kinds of shock tactics employed by Extinction Rebellion today are in fact putting people off engaging with these issues at all.”
So perhaps the money from his source will dry up.
And so too therefore will the pink boats and other expensive equipment as well as the glossy leaflets.
But what is this new thing, a “Climate Change Delayer” ? What do you have to advocate or do to earn this epithet ?
Delaying climate change seems like a good idea to me.
A word i picked up today
But it means delaying action, not slowing down actual climate change
I assumed that that’s what it is meant to mean but it’s not what it means literally. And is the term Climate Delayer or Climate Change Delayer?
It looks as if it’s a term you ought to discard as quickly as you picked it up !
Alternatively, we could use it to throw at anybody who campaigns for the problem to be tackled within capitalism as they are delaying the establishment of the only framework within which it can rationally and lastingly dealt with ie the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.
150 public figures hit back at government moves to classify Extinction Rebellion as an “organised crime group” in a letter to be published in the Observer.
Floppy XR
We have asked them to stop being floppy”, he added. “It might seem like a silly thing to say, but when we arrest them and pick them up they go all floppy, which is why you see four or five officers carrying them away. It’s a complete waste of officers’ time, and a complete pain in the neck. If they could just behave like sensible adults — you’ve made your point, you wanted to be arrested, you’ve been arrested, get up and walk away with one officer and stop wasting police time. This is a real issue, and they will not do it, and it is a flipping nuisance.”
Sir Steve added: “The problem with them going floppy and four officers carrying them away is that it looks to the general public like the police are overreacting here. We’re not making them go floppy — they’re just being a nuisance.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel calling the group “eco-crusaders turned criminals.” Following the blockade she added: “The very criminals who disrupt our free society must be stopped. And together we must all stand firm against the guerilla tactics of Extinction Rebellion.”
The lunacy continues
Now they have started to intimidate critics:
What’s wrong with them? Either they are nasty anti-democrats or they like shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, that’s just it, they’re not democrats: they want to impose a solution, and argue that the situation is serious enough to warrant use of force. Hence the mythic 3.5% rule
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
(as the article states, that’s 2.3 million in this country, which would be a epic number of participants, and well beyond what they’re achieving right now).
Another example of XR anti-democratic tendency?
Scotland’s Climate Assembly was set up to allow people to make recommendations on tackling climate change. It is independent of government. Extinction Rebellion says it is withdrawing from Scotland’s citizens’ assembly days before their first meeting.
XR say it is “increasingly controlled” by civil servants.
XR Scotland says it has decided to leave the assembly’s stewarding group – which advises on the running of the assembly. It has also withdrawn its endorsement of the citizens’ assembly – saying it is “no longer a good enough response to the climate emergency”. It says the assembly has been “blinkered” and therefore cannot come up with radical enough solutions to climate change.
XR claims the secretariat – responsible for organising and running the assembly – has “actively resisted” including views of certain experts “because of their association with XR”. Despite initially being open to the assembly setting its own ambitions the secretariat has started to insist that any recommendations are actionable by the Scottish government, XR claims. And the civil servants seconded to the assembly use “government processes, ways of working and attitudes towards the scale of the crisis”.
“We invited Extinction Rebellion to join our stewarding group in the spirit of transparency and to ensure a range of perspectives informed the assembly design,” a climate assembly spokesman said. “They provided some constructive insight, and we are disappointed they have decided to leave. Our first commitment is always to our assembly members. We must ensure they hear balanced evidence from a range of experts that allows them to discuss and make recommendations on how Scotland should change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way.”
A spokesman for the Scottish government said the assembly was independent and it had no influence over the content of its meetings.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54830823
XR…its ma’ ba’ and i’m goin’ hame in a huff ?
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