Science Greta Thunberg Megathread - Dax Herrera says he wouldn't have a day ago (I somewhat doubt that)

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? How can a 16-year-old girl in plaits, who has dedicated herself to the not-exactly sinister, authoritarian plot of trying to save the planet from extinction, inspire such incandescent rage?

Last week, she tweeted that she had arrived into New York after her two week transatlantic voyage: “Finally here. Thank you everyone who came to see me off in Plymouth, and everyone who welcomed me in New York! Now I’m going to rest for a few days, and on Friday I’m going to participate in the strike outside the UN”, before promptly giving a press conference in English. Yes, her second language.

Her remarks were immediately greeted with a barrage of jibes about virtue signalling, and snide remarks about the three crew members who will have to fly out to take the yacht home.

This shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but as some people don’t seem to have grasped it yet, we’ll give it a lash: Thunberg’s trip was an act of protest, not a sacred commandment or an instruction manual for the rest of us. Like all acts of protest, it was designed to be symbolic and provocative. For those who missed the point – and oh, how they missed the point – she retweeted someone else’s “friendly reminder” that: “You don’t need to spend two weeks on a boat to do your part to avert our climate emergency. You just need to do everything you can, with everyone you can, to change everything you can.”

Part of the reason she inspires such rage, of course, is blindingly obvious. Climate change is terrifying. The Amazon is burning. So too is the Savannah. Parts of the Arctic are on fire. Sea levels are rising. There are more vicious storms and wildfires and droughts and floods. Denial is easier than confronting the terrifying truth.

Then there’s the fact that we don’t like being made to feel bad about our life choices. That’s human nature. It’s why we sneer at vegans. It’s why we’re suspicious of sober people at parties. And if anything is likely to make you feel bad about your life choices -- as you jet back home after your third Ryanair European minibreak this season – it’ll be the sight of small-boned child subjecting herself to a fortnight being tossed about on the Atlantic, with only a bucket bearing a “Poo Only Please” sign by way of luxury, in order to make a point about climate change.

But that’s not virtue signalling, which anyone can indulge in. As Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and their-four-private-jets-in-11-days found recently, virtue practising is a lot harder.

Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.

But who’s the real freak – the activist whose determination has single-handedly started a powerful global movement for change, or the middle-aged man taunting a child with Asperger syndrome from behind the safety of their computer screens?

And that, of course, is the real reason why Greta Thunberg is so triggering. They can’t admit it even to themselves, so they ridicule her instead. But the truth is that they’re afraid of her. The poor dears are terrified of her as an individual, and of what she stands for – youth, determination, change.

She is part of a generation who won’t be cowed. She isn’t about to be shamed into submission by trolls. That’s not actually a look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. It’s a look that says “you’re not relevant”.

The reason they taunt her with childish insults is because that’s all they’ve got. They’re out of ideas. They can’t dismantle her arguments, because she has science – and David Attenborough – on her side. They can’t win the debate with the persuasive force of their arguments, because these bargain bin cranks trade in jaded cynicism, not youthful passion. They can harangue her with snide tweets and hot take blogposts, but they won’t get a reaction because, frankly, she has bigger worries on her mind.

That’s not to say that we should accept everything Thunberg says without question. She is an idealist who is young enough to see the world in black and white. We need voices like hers. We should listen to what she has to say, without tuning the more moderate voices of dissent out.

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergency of new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

joconnell@irishtimes.com
https://twitter.com/jenoconnell

https://web.archive.org/web/2019090...certain-men-1.4002264?localLinksEnabled=false
Found this thought-provoking indeed.

 

[Iron Hamster]

Greta is not happy with the film.

Toronto: Greta Thunberg Calls Out Celebrity Culture as "Absurd" | Hollywood Reporter

www.hollywoodreporter.com

One would think their parents would have warned them this would happen.

 

[TowinKarz]

Pretty sure the smoke alarm thing came about because of that boy scout that ordered a fuckton of them to make a homemade reactor that melted down and gave a ton of people cancer

No cancer case has been linked to David Hahn's activities, though it probably sped up his own death. He died young because not only was he messing with radioactive materials with no protection, but as soon as he got out of legal supervision, he went back to stealing smoke alarms, planning to do it all again. His mugshot for that crime has him showing a face that's been swiss-cheesed by lesions... Play stupid games.....

And the reactor did not melt down, it simply didn't have adequate shielding and he created a lot of radiation-impregnated dust during construction that hung around the neighborhood. Even then, the damage was mostly limited to the tool shed he built it in, that had to be trucked off to a landfill and buried. The "Reactor" itself was in what amounted to a foil-wrapped shoe box... not some refrigerator-sized thing that was rumbling like it was gonna launch out the rooftop at any second....

"The guy who killed his whole neighborhood by building a reactor that blew up" story isn't true, or rather is half-true, but circulates constantly with nobody taking anything away from it except "A lot of people must've got cancer and died".

Just proves my point that nuclear stories tend to grow into tall tales of death rays and mountains of glowing bodies, even when all the information is available. Like how Three Mile Island is held up as the "American Chernobyl" when ZERO deaths happened.

 

[Socrates]

No cancer case has been linked to David Hahn's activities, though it probably sped up his own death. He died young because not only was he messing with radioactive materials with no protection, but as soon as he got out of legal supervision, he went back to stealing smoke alarms, planning to do it all again. His mugshot for that crime has him showing a face that's been swiss-cheesed by lesions... Play stupid games.....

And the reactor did not melt down, it simply didn't have adequate shielding and he created a lot of radiation-impregnated dust during construction that hung around the neighborhood. Even then, the damage was mostly limited to the tool shed he built it in, that had to be trucked off to a landfill and buried. The "Reactor" itself was in what amounted to a foil-wrapped shoe box... not some refrigerator-sized thing that was rumbling like it was gonna launch out the rooftop at any second....

"The guy who killed his whole neighborhood by building a reactor that blew up" story isn't true, or rather is half-true, but circulates constantly with nobody taking anything away from it except "A lot of people must've got cancer and died".

Just proves my point that nuclear stories tend to grow into tall tales of death rays and mountains of glowing bodies, even when all the information is available. Like how Three Mile Island is held up as the "American Chernobyl" when ZERO deaths happened.

I'm half remembering the details from a shitty YouTube documentary on it so excuse the inaccuracies. Looking at his Wikipedia page it looks like it was a huge nothingburger that got blown way out of proportion by the media and subsequently ruined the guys life leading to a probable drug overdose killing him in 2016. A real sad story.

 

[Stoneheart]

ust proves my point that nuclear stories tend to grow into tall tales of death rays and mountains of glowing bodies

well glowing black bodies are involved most of the time...

Looking at his Wikipedia page it looks like it was a huge nothingburger that got blown way out of proportion by the media

well it was huge, the first reactor in autist hands...

 

[Ginger Piglet]

a huge nothingburger

With the exception of Chernobyl and possibly Fukushima, that describes most nuclear accidents. And the former was caused by massive corner-cutting by engineers when designing it (no containment building, graphite tipped control rods, etc.) and outright criminal negligence; the latter by the 5th most powerful earthquake ever recorded, and even then all the safety features worked as intended and only started to fail when the backup generators ran out of fuel and they couldn't get fuel to them because the earthquake and tsunami had destroyed all the roads.

The next biggest radiation release that springs to mind, the Goiania incident, was caused by improper disposal of a sealed medical radiation source with very radioactive caesium-137 chloride in it. These are the capsules that used to be used in cancer treatment, where a gamma ray emitter is housed in basically a giant lead brick with a single hole in it, and used to aim a plume of gamma rays towards the cancerous tissue. Nowadays they use three of four small radiation sources with low intensity plumes so that only where they intersect are they strong enough to damage living tissue, and they position the patient so the cancer is within that intersection, but back then it was just a single beam setup. Basically, some Brazilians found one of these capsules in a junkyard and thought it might be valuable, so they levered it open and found this blue glowing powder inside, which they proceeded to sell to people in the locale as something they thought was cool.

 

[le fishe]

Regarding the nuclear bad shit, you are all right when it coms to the dangers of it being grossly exaggerated, but there is one huge issue that is unresolved and that is what the fuck are we going to do with the waste. There was some kind of plans i saw ages ago which used a big laser to de radiate it somehow, but that big pile of shit left over from nuclear power plants are going to make plastic look pathetic in comparison. It will stick around for millions of years. You can dump it like everything else but that's hardly sustainable.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Greta is not happy with the film.

Toronto: Greta Thunberg Calls Out Celebrity Culture as "Absurd" | Hollywood Reporter

www.hollywoodreporter.com

I actually respect this response, the creepy messiah cult around this little autist is so extreme that it's overshadowing any work she was trying to do, good on her for calling it out.

Should have said this months ago, to be honest.

 

[Juan's Sombrero]

So, how useless is she for the Democrats now?

 

[Wilhelm Bittrich]

That's all I have to say about that stupid bint.
If a 12 year old who has to work in some african copper mine to support his family would have told the world " How dare you..." I would have listened, but that silver spooner spoiled brat can go die in a fire (in MInecraft).

 

[kcbbq]

The fact that people still think nuclear reactors are glowy green rocks in current year is a sad reflection on how pathetic our science education in the West is. See also the anti-GMO and anti-vaccine movements.

(For the record, uranium is a dull silver and the glow from nuclear reactors is blue in the form of Cherenkov radiation, which is emitted when a particle exceeds the speed of light in a medium and "bleeds" the excess energy off into the environment as a whole. I blame uranium glass. U-238 has a half life of roughly the age of the solar system and is an alpha emitter, so is perfectly safe so long as you don't eat it or rub it on yourself, and that applies to a lot of non-radioactive heavy metals too.)

Blame the radium paint they used to use on clock faces and stuff. Even though it was the phosphor in the paint that glowed green that's the color that got associated with radiation.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Should have said this months ago, to be honest.

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Obvious meme deployed.

To be fair, one of the best things about Corona-chan is that this Swedish doom goblin hasn't been all over the bloody news. Though there's been a few greenies claiming that if we all, as a species, went level 4 vegan, we wouldn't have had it in the first place.

 

[TowinKarz]

So, how useless is she for the Democrats now?

To tie it in to radioactivity - her half life is speeding up, every 3 days, she's only half as useful to the Dem/GND establishment as she was before...

 

[Super-Chevy454]

I actually respect this response, the creepy messiah cult around this little autist is so extreme that it's overshadowing any work she was trying to do, good on her for calling it out.

This one of these moments where Greta got it right like a broken clock who's right twice a day.

 

[Adamska]

To tie it in to radioactivity - her half life is speeding up, every 3 days, she's only half as useful to the Dem/GND establishment as she was before...

Especially since she's not a child anymore.

I still don't get the retarded obsession with using children as mouthpieces. I think the idea is it's supposed to be like "if even a kid knows this then it has to be simple to understand", but all I hear when they use them is the sound of Epstein's Rape Plane tbh.

 

[Mola Ram]

Especially since she's not a child anymore.

I still don't get the retarded obsession with using children as mouthpieces. I think the idea is it's supposed to be like "if even a kid knows this then it has to be simple to understand", but all I hear when they use them is the sound of Epstein's Rape Plane tbh.

It's nastier than that. It's so you have a spokesperson who is unassailable. If you subject someone like Greta to sharp criticism, fair or not, it's easy to portray you as a monster who attacks children. Greta is a twofer, since not only is she a child (technically); she's also mentally ill. This is also why they made her look so younger than she is, with the pigtails and schoolroom clothing. (See also: Christine Blasey Ford very obviously being coached to sound like a breathy little girl instead of a woman pushing 50.)

 

[Adamska]

It's nastier than that. It's so you have a spokesperson who is unassailable. If you subject someone like Greta to sharp criticism, fair or not, it's easy to portray you as a monster who attacks children. Greta is a twofer, since not only is she a child (technically); she's also mentally ill. This is also why they made her look so younger than she is, with the pigtails and schoolroom clothing. (See also: Christine Blasey Ford very obviously being coached to sound like a breathy little girl instead of a woman pushing 50.)

And attacking her parents and the creepy indian man who write her talking points for her are also fair game, since they also are the ones who chose to destroy her education for attention and relevance. Also only scumbags use children like human shields.

 

[Wilhelm Bittrich]

To be fair, one of the best things about Corona-chan is that this Swedish doom goblin hasn't been all over the bloody news. Though there's been a few greenies claiming that if we all, as a species, went level 4 vegan, we wouldn't have had it in the first place.

I can't see what connection eating meat has with a failed Chinese Bioweapon experiment, but ok, it's the greenies.
But Yes, please go all vegan, so that there's more Jjimdak for me and Ribeye's and Gejang and Samgyeopsal and Burgers and... *starts drooling all over the place*

 

[Grandpa Simpson]

That's all I have to say about that stupid bint.
If a 12 year old who has to work in some african copper mine to support his family would have told the world " How dare you..." I would have listened, but that silver spooner spoiled brat can go die in a fire (in MInecraft).
View attachment 1610477

View attachment 1610487

I see they have Greta a 17 year old, she'll be 18 in 4 months, posing for a photo-op with her on her mothers lap with little girl braids.

 

[CWCissey]

I see they have Greta a 17 year old, she'll be 18 in 4 months, posing for a photo-op with her on her mothers lap with little girl braids.

And once those 4 months are up, she'll more than likely be on Daddy's lap...

 

[Wilhelm Bittrich]

I see they have Greta a 17 year old, she'll be 18 in 4 months, posing for a photo-op with her on her mothers lap with little girl braids.

These Braids have nothing to do with little kids, they're either called French Braids or when worn a ring around the head Bauernkrone (Farmers crown).
They were quite common especially in the alpine nations and the nordic states until the early 1970's. Wearing these braids the swedish doom goblin is pandering to the conservative demographic in Europe.
Yulia Timoshenko did wear one on her inauguration as President of the Ukraine.

Spoiler

Originally these braids were worn only by commoners and people of lower nobility, the really became a fad after Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary has worn a braid in public.