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

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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
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https://web.archive.org/web/2019090...certain-men-1.4002264?localLinksEnabled=false
Found this thought-provoking indeed.
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If Thunberg's mum and dad really were concerned about her, they wouldn't let her decide how they live and lecture others (while not practicing what she preaches) and instead encourage her to focus on school and going to university to study a science degree. She's going to have a tough time later in life.
 
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They managed to find the whitest looking Indian girl in New Delhi. I know India is still a colour based society, to a degree that the west won't ever accept because only white people can be racist or something, but there's no way an Indian girl this white has ever lacked for anything. Find some charcoal slum girl to champion your grift, then maybe I'll pay attention.
 
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greengrilledcheese said:
How does it feel Greta? They've tossed you aside for a much younger street shitter.

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https://tw.tinf.io/Reuters/status/1317193602234306565 (https://archive.vn/kfBDh)
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Tathagata said:
They managed to find the whitest looking Indian girl in New Delhi. I know India is still a colour based society, to a degree that the west won't ever accept because only white people can be racist or something, but there's no way an Indian girl this white has ever lacked for anything. Find some charcoal slum girl to champion your grift, then maybe I'll pay attention.
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Yeah, that's what I'm thinking they did; find and create a new fake mouthpiece. I'd not be shocked given how artificial child activists have been proven to be.
 
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mr.moon1488 said:
>Air pollution
I know farts and shits go hand in hand, but still I think the literal shits should be the priority here.
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Indoor Air Pollution is actually the #1 cause of death world wide. This is because a lot of the third world is still exceedingly rural and relies on solid fuel (coal and dried manure) for a fuel source to heat and cook. This fills the house with a ton of smoke and basically just starts to kill you from an early age. She is basically like 'Please help, I don't want to die from breathing', which is entirely and very likely. Its a huge cause of childhood mortality as well. It is basically the worst thing for you and slices apart life expectancy.

Greta's cause, compared to this is nothing. People are dying RIGHT NOW from very low indoor air quality. Not 10 years from now, not some nebulous date in the future, right fucking now. And let me tell you, dying from this shit is no joke. Lung damage, heart damage, brain damage, it fucks you up so badly.

Also she reminds me of the retarded green peace activists who scared people off 'Golden Rice' (Rice enriched with vitamin A) because it was a GMO crop. This absolute fucking disaster is estimated to have cost India over $1 TRILLION DOLLARS in lost labor costs as well as medical costs over 20 years. The US had Wonderbread for this reason, but the staple food of many countries in the third world is rice. But these type of activist faggots screamed that it would murder all their children and completely fucked these people out of it. They would (no joke) go to where these crops were planted and intentionally destroy them. So I've got no respect for rich, Western activists who shout a lot and make a lot of noise doom saying while stroking the cock of their pet first world issue while the third world burns palm oil trees, creates a toxic lake you can see from space in Mongolia, and causes over a trillion dollars worth of misery to the poor.

Fuck activists. They can all eat shit.
 
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Secret Asshole said:
Also she reminds me of the retarded green peace activists who scared people off 'Golden Rice' (Rice enriched with vitamin A) because it was a GMO crop. This absolute fucking disaster is estimated to have cost India over $1 TRILLION DOLLARS in lost labor costs as well as medical costs over 20 years. The US had Wonderbread for this reason, but the staple food of many countries in the third world is rice. But these type of activist faggots screamed that it would murder all their children and completely fucked these people out of it. They would (no joke) go to where these crops were planted and intentionally destroy them. So I've got no respect for rich, Western activists who shout a lot and make a lot of noise doom saying while stroking the cock of their pet first world issue while the third world burns palm oil trees, creates a toxic lake you can see from space in Mongolia, and causes over a trillion dollars worth of misery to the poor.

Fuck activists. They can all eat shit.
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That would be Vandana "Fertilisers are rape" Shiva. Who wrote the foreword to Extinction Rebellion's book. And, oh look! Here she is hobnobbing with the Swedish doom goblin in Paris! Imagine my shock.

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So, yes, basically they are all one and the same. They don't want to make any fucking difference. They don't want to solve global warming because if they did that they'd be all of a sudden unemployed. That is why they shriek at actual solutions (i.e. GMO crops for world hunger, nuclear energy for global warming) in favour of demanding "system change" (read: people like them in charge).

A lot of them also have this rather uncomfortable and dare I say it, racist, attitude towards the third world. They see them as a sort of noble savage living in bucolic harmony with nature. When in reality they are starving and dying of preventable disease or civil war and would do anything, ANYTHING, to gain a Western standard of living because the idea of having a life expectancy above 50 and an education and a stable, non-corrupt government is more important to them. But they can't have that. Think of all the pollution!
 
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That'll lead to local subsidence and landslides, but, it doesn't cause the fault lines between the tectonic plates to speed up, that's just silly. There's a difference between "earthquakes" in the common parlance and your house falling into a sinkhole, even though the earth moving under you is happening in both. Arguing the San Andreas Fault is getting worse because of fracking in Iowa is intellectually disingenuous.

Oil doesn't "Grease" the mechanisms of continental drift. Sucking it out of the ground doesn't make earthquakes worse, just as ideas in the 50's right after tectonic plate theory was accepted to pump seawater into the major faults of the world to lessen the friction won't make them go away.

But you shouldn't be surprised, they keep blaming forest fires set by arsonists or dumbasses playing with fireworks that grow to tremendous size because they refuse to clear dead wood and underbrush on car emissions and try to force you to buy a Tesla or go to jail....
 
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Secret Asshole said:
Fuck activists. They can all eat shit.
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Activists are why we in the West don't have this shit choking us to death though. If we didn't kick up a complete shitstorm when the air we breathe goes down in quality and we're choking to death, this would be happening to us too. And yes many of these activists are NIMBY motherfuckers who only start kicking up a shitstorm when their own air quality goes to shit. Even those kinds of selfish, shitty NIMBYs deserve credit.

It's largely because we have shit like the First Amendment and the God-given belief in our own righteousness that the instant environmental quality where we live starts jacking up cancer and creating visible smog and deteriorating our quality of life, we jump right over to the city council meetings and other shit and make these motherfuckers' lives so goddamn miserable that they get that shit out of here.

So I would not say fuck activists so much as fuck these free-floating "activists" who aren't actually activisting at any particular visible thing.
 
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