Comment by kombine
7 hours ago
> The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction
Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".
> "the laws"
We live under law or we die under anarchy.
There are many other reasons that can kill you under the law besides anarchy, one of those is climate change and GP definitely has a very valid point.
Clearly the 'drill-baby-drill' crowd doesn't like Greenpeace at all and is doing what they can to muzzle activists because they know that if they manage to squelch Greenpeace then many lesser funded organizations will not be able to do anything all all. But history doesn't give a damn about any of that.
Ironically, a lot of the folks I've known sitting in trees might hold that the NGOs soak up resources and actions and basically prevent material and direct action.
The hyper-local point of that is how my buddies haven't taken grinders to the flock cameras because there is a local de-flocked group who is trying to exhaust legal actions before moving on to other options. But it's not like that kind of direct action is thought of as unethical by a lot of us, even if it's legibly illegal.
And regardless of what a person thinks about the direct action, the (very separate) idea that these larger, legal, above-ground groups are what keep folks who have very strong "feelings" from acting is a position held by folks on all sides of these things. That strategy seems central to the neo-liberal method of dealing with social unrest.
In that ecosystem, if you kill off the big NGOs you might see a thousand tiny and headless ELFs bloom.
If the post-neo-liberal (god what a shitty turn of phrase, sorry) strategy looks like "ICE", then good luck to them; the 3000:100000 ratio didn't go well in Minneapolis and as more folks start looking at how we didn't have a winter at all where I live (it's 65 degrees this week at almost 7000' in SW Colorado and the ground frost has broken) then that strategy might be subjected to reality.
You can die under law, too.
Little known fact is that you can die over law too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk