Why is the only possibility for you to either get on the roads or do nothing? The criticism is that road blocking is an ineffective form of protest, not that protest as a whole is stupid.

I work in IoT by the way, and I’m directly involved in programming small computers that increase fuel efficiency in heaters. In other words, if climate change is your primary concern, you shouldn’t be inconveniencing people indiscriminately, because there’s risk of stopping someone like me who’s actually doing something that addresses the problem in a productive way.

I’m hardly close to the most important job that you’d be inconveniencing, just the most ironic one. These protests are certainly inconveniencing nurses on their way to their patients, lawyers on their way to their clients, families coming home to meet up for the first time since Christmas. Not to mention emergency workers being held up during active emergencies. This has all happened, and it’s happened way more than any goals achieved by the protests.

So no, we’re not all talk. I think most of us here giving pushback are all trying to better the world in our own way, and these protests are a consistent impediment to that, across the board. In fact, I would say anybody who bothers to take the time to say how stupid they think these protests are are doing infinitely more good than road blocking protestors, simply by virtue of maybe getting someone to stop that stupid shit.

The post doesn’t argue the point adequately though, it basically just implies people who think these protests are useless are ignorant. It’s completely pseudo intellectual, there is no argument made here. Stop pretending there’s some great wisdom lost on us when we point out how obvious it is that this is pissing people off and hurting your cause.

We’re not ignorant, we just disagree. On the contrary, it takes quite a bit of ignorance to brush off criticism of how harmful these protests are when it’s happening right in front of you.

I’ve learned to treat comments that start with “what those people don’t understand…” With a little bit more skepticism than others. I find that if your opening move is to imply that not believing your ideas shows ignorance, then chances are really high that you don’t have much confidence in arguing your case by its own merit.

Economic pressure can be a strategic move, sure. But, the road block has been largely indiscriminate, and the goal seems to be to create as much disruption as possible. Where’s the strategy in indiscriminate disruption? In fact, the corporations you advocate against are probably least hurt by shit like this, because it would be such a comparatively small hit than everyone else.

You are far more likely to inconvenience someone just trying to get by, or someone with something person and time sensitive going on than any corporation you’d like to “pressure”. They don’t feel this, they don’t think about this. You’re not disrupting corporate supply chains, you’re inconveniencing regular people.

That doesn’t even get to the fact that road blockages are extremely dangerous in emergency situations, and you’re putting far more lives at risk than your own by going out there.

If you are genuinely interested in taking a structured approach to protests, then I strongly suggest you start thinking of some other methods.

Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I’d say this parameter is a little arbitrary.

The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).

In 535AD, during Justinian’s reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.

It’s not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.