If you ever wanted to read about fake druids vs. environmental activists, now’s your chance.
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Not paint, literally orange corn flour. Stop spreading disinformation for big oil pls
I can root for people protesting climate change and think this was incredibly idiotic.
The article says it came out of a spray can. So how am I spreading misinformation?
Not misinformation, disinformation. You read the article, yet choose to act like this is comparable to spray paint or something else that won’t immediately wash off. This is like getting indignant bc somebody threw a couple eggs at a great pyramid. It’s stupid and irrelevant to climate change, but sharing articles where the title says they threw acid instead of eggs is just fucking wrong, and serves no purpose besides discrediting climate activism
They posted the article with the headline completely unchanged. If you wanna be mad at someone, be mad at The Guardian.
I am for sure, all the articles I’ve seen on this have called it paint and it’s really disingenuous and frustrating. The way they describe it makes it sound like they took a can of paint and splashed it on the stones. I interpreted it that way at first and got pretty mad, imo there’s no good environmental message that’s sent by destroying the ruins of long dead civilizations. At least defacing classic European art can be seen as a protest against the colonialist attitudes that led to climate change, Idk how actually effective it is at forcing change but part of me gets some morbid satisfaction from it :3
Paint: a coloured substance which is spread over a surface and dries to leave a thin decorative or protective coating.
So in this case the cornstarch is the paint. No misinformation at all.
Nobody’s first thought when they read “paint” is corn flour that easily washes off. Headlines written like this play these kinds of semantics games with their headlines to drive angry engagement, or even to push a political agenda sometimes. The Guardian seems to run articles critical of the oil industry fairly often so maybe this isn’t sinister like that, I’d have to do more research on The Guardian and the article’s author to get an idea
It’s stone. Stone is full of cracks. It will get into those cracks and not wash off.
Furthermore, environmentalists pissing people off in the middle of a religious ceremony does nothing to help with an environmental cause. That’s the way PETA goes about doing things. Do you think they’ve been remotely effective?
You know what else will get into the cracks?
Rain. To wash it off.
That’s really not how things work. We know a lot about ancient foods specifically because they get stuck in cracks in tools and we can get them out and study them. The rain didn’t get the tiny flecks of wheat out of the cracks.
“The rain didn’t get the tiny flecks of wheat out of the cracks” Yet somehow it’s clean. Why are you continuing to act like this is comparable to actual paint? You’re whining about something that’s literally not a deal in the slightest, you really should stop making free propaganda for oil companies
slight wording edit at the start
Maybe if you had given me that article before you started berating me for not knowing what I was talking about, I might have been educated on the subject.
Are you really not able to talk to people without insulting them?
This is a fine powder which will dissolve in water. It will wash out and honestly, if it doesn’t, it’s so deep in that its completely unnoticeable and doesn’t matter. Much worse has happened to Stonehenge.
I think this action lacked some supportive commentary, a spoken idea why they did it and what does it mean. It comes of as an attention bait without a clear message. It’s also too random to associate it with climate activism without a context.
After hearing about that I thought what would become our Stonehenge if we fail miserably (Statue of Liberty, like in Planet of the Apes?), or if we get back into a new Stone Age making this circular monument both the past and the future of humankind. I would not probably care that much if they actually damage it a bit if that’s for creating a powerful symbol, adding to it’s (contemporary) significance instead of taking from it. But that’s too much to ask, it seems, all we can do is orange paint.
I get that the stunts will draw attention to the environmental issues the activists are protesting for, but surely not pissing off the public would be beneficial in spreading a message to them?
The uninvolved public would just remember the attempted defacings, and not care about the damage being temporary or minimal.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment, but I feel like the methods are pointless and even might have a reverse effect. Doing this does nothing really to help the cause, imo. Any minimal publicity it gets, I feel, just invigorates the right leaning conservatives to have more fuel to hate “the left” and “liberals”. I just don’t see any benefit to these types of stunts.
This isn’t minimal publicity, minimal publicity is what they got when they directly targeted fossil fuels by blocking the supply lines.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2023/12/the-method-behind-just-stop-oil-annoying-madness/
Are you seriously really upset at coloured cornflour being spread over some rocks?
Those stones will be suuuper useful to us after we died because our global ecosystem collapsed.
Maybe we should set up our own stones for explaining to future generations why we didnt do anything about climate change until it was too late.
Here in the US we have one of the two main political factions regularly threatening terrorism, execution and even war.
When people are already arguing to take you out behind the chemical shed and shoot you, it’s a little out of touch to think they give two shits about your future health in a changing climate. Or our planet, they probably think they can get to Mars with Elon or something, or god will rapture them, or whatever they think, I don’t know.
You think people should care about future generations? They probably should, but we have parents that don’t give two shits about their own kids, much less anyone else’s.
I’m not sure how this helps though. These people can say to future generations, “well, we didn’t get people to stop using fossil fuels, but we did damage a 5000-year-old monument that was made long before anyone had the idea of burning fossil fuels to make people aware of a problem they were already aware of but powerless to do anything about.”
This isn’t going to stop oil companies from drilling for oil.
It reminds me of a friend of mine I used to follow elsewhere on social media. Every day, she would post pictures of ‘death row dogs’ in nearby shelters that were going to be euthanized. There was fuck all I could do about it. I already have two dogs. I don’t have room for more and I couldn’t afford more. So all it did was make me feel like shit. Then she started posting photos with “too late” messages and I stopped following her.
How does that help?
How does that help?
We’re talking about it
Which does exactly what? Is it at all likely that anyone actually able to do anything about this was unaware of the climate change disaster we’re facing and this will change their mind?
If you dont see any value in common discourse, you have already given up on life and the world imo.
you have already given up on life and the world
Yeah, that sounds about accurate for me…
This is hardly common discourse.
Note how we are talking about how large of douchebags the activists are and just how much they damaged a cultural heritage site.
Fuck these people.
“The orange cornflour we used to create an eye-catching spectacle will soon wash away with the rain…"
Yeah. That’s their intent. But they really don’t know for sure that their stunt won’t have some completely unexpected effect. Some slow reaction with that specific kind of stone that only matters if the powder gets deep into some cracks for 200 years or whatever. Or attracts stone eating bacteria of some sort.
The point is that they dont know what they dont know. Every time they pull one of these stunts, they are introducing the risk of irrevocable damage to historically significant objects that should be left to future generations.
Stop fucking around with human history. Stone Henge is a world wonder.
But we’re not talking about it. We’re not talking about political action, or technological solutions, or mitigation programs, or investments in adaptation, or natural resource management, or harm reduction, or food distribution, or drought management.
No, we’re talking about a bunch of first world children who decided to paint a bunch of ten-thousand year old rocks for attention.
Normally I would say this damage was inappropriate. But, considering humanity is going to be eradicated in the next hundred years, give or take, I think maybe we should be doing more to slow that down.
But how will this slow that down?
The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Obviously humanity is not being squeaky enough. Maybe if enough things are destroyed, The rest of the world will finally pay attention.
Why do you think “the world” matters? This is mostly the fault of a few corporations and their executives couldn’t give less of a shit about what someone does to Stonehenge.
Oh I don’t think the world matters. In fact, I’m super happy humanity is about to be wiped out of existence. We are all pieces of shit.
But you would think more people would be interested in saving it. A significant portion of humanity is uninterested in hearing about Global warming. Those people need to wake up.
A significant portion of humanity is uninterested in hearing about Global warming
What is “significant?”
And, again, hearing about it doesn’t mean you can do something about it. There’s fuck all I can do about it.
How do we stop evil corporations? With political action. How do we get political action? Either by voting or collective activism.
There’s no solution that doesn’t require ourselves to spring into action, even if it’s “mostly the fault of a few corporations and their executives”.
Voting for whom? They’re all corrupt, or haven’t you noticed? We’re living in a global oligarchy.
Also, why on Earth do you think environmental activists pissing people off will help with any sort of collective action?
How do we stop evil corporations? With political action. How do we get political action? Either by voting or collective activism.
That is true.
But they are doing activism for the wrong side. The conservatives and far right will jump on this one, because they just gotten handed a talking point on a silver platter. “Radical left activists attack cultural heritage site”. They couldn’t have asked for a more perfect one.
FWIW this kind of alarmist talk only lets people write off your comment as hysterical. Humans are not going to go extinct in the next 100 years, Canada isnt going to become hotter than Arabia and become unlivable.
What we might (and even possibly the most likely scenario is to) get is wide scale societal breakdown, starvation of billions, mass migration of billions of those currently living in regions that become uninhabitable but dont starve, and the consequant resource wars that those entail. The future is bleak enough without making up even worse things that wont happen.
Would you like to make a wager?
Yes. One gazillion dollars.
See? See how ridiculous you sound?
That does sound ridiculous, but it’s your comment not mine.
Wanna bet?
That a viable population of humans will be alive in 2124? Sure how much do you want to bet? I think your chance of collecting from me if im wrong when im more than 120 years old are slim though.
1k, put in escrow. Pay out to whomever.
Yet this kind of protests just alienates the protesters from the population they want support from
They want support from me.
Your example shows exactly what people are missing. Just because you did not have the capacity for more dogs doesnt mean that other people never got convinced to save one of those dogs. If those pictures convinced even just one person to adopt a dog, then it was worth the minor inconvienience that you had to go through.
Similarly the actual damage from this protest is slim to none (if they used the same stuff as usual that just washes away with water) and if it convinces somebody to get politically active for climate change then it was already worth it.
You thinking that you are powerless, shouldnt result in other people being forced to be powerless when they are not.
Who’s actually doing that, though? I mean that sincerely. Is there anyone who wouldn’t have gotten involved, but who was swayed to do so by orange paint on historical artifacts? This seems like directionless compensatory venting by activists whose other strategies are failing to meaningfully persuade.
Further, what’s the balance of people in the other direction who have an inkling that they’d consider doing more, but who are swayed against it by the increasingly unhinged extremist tactics these protestors are using? There’s an entire online ecosystem rife with a combination of climate denialism, analytical paralysis, and doomsaying, and there’s a non-zero number of people who likely either stop caring or throw their hands up in frustration because protestors are doing more harm than good by throwing what I’m sure looks to them like ridiculous tantrums. For every ally they gain, they probably lose some, too.
And that’s not even touching on the fact that systemic structural changes are the only possible solution to this problem, and making the average person feel guilty and/or agitated is a weird form of victim shaming.
A better way to propose your question is: out of all the millions of people on Earth who hear about these activities, will literally 0 of them take any meaningful action against climate change?
The likelihood of that quite small, suggesting a non-zero value. That non-zero value is likely to be smaller than the damages of water-washable paint.
I’m not advocating for anyone here, but I think that’s the calculus OP was suggesting, and it makes perfect sense to me.
If eye-rolling and annoyance produced greenhouse gases, then it might be a different story.
I’m not sure I follow. You’re suggesting that >0 people take meaningful action as a result of hearing about this protest. I’m saying that >0 people take fewer meaningful actions as a result, and >0 probably turn away from your cause when they hear about stupid shit like this. So for every one convert in the right direction, there are some in the other direction. Whether or not the two balance is certainly up for debate, and which side you prefer to highlight at the expense of the other, depends on your preconceived opinion.
Which really just reiterates that this kind of nonsense is a net negative, because the people who respond positively to it were already converts in the first place.
That’s not how climate change works. Everybody except for politicians and fossil fuel executives are me in this scenario. We’re just being told constantly how the world is getting hotter and something must be done and there’s fuck all I can do about it. And that’s also true of every person at Stonehenge that day.
We can’t control where the energy comes from and what cars are made and what bottles drinks are put in. And it’s really clear that it doesn’t matter who we vote for either.
So, in this situation, people see these stunts and just get angry and stop paying attention since there’s nothing they can do about it anyway.
Again, how does this help?
There are so many “annoying” protests that this logic can be applied to that would seem pretty short-sighted in retrospect.
It’s not these people that future generations will think poorly of.
So this is just about what future generations will think, not about solutions?
but we did damage a 5000-year-old monument
As far as I could find out, they used orange cornflour that will just wash off the next time it rains. The most amount of damage anyone could seriously bring up was that it could harm/displace the lichen on the henge.
That’s not to say that I specifically condone the action, but it’s a lot less bad than this article makes it sound. It’s the same with the soup attack on one of van Gogh’s painting, which had protective glass on it. So far all the JSO actions targeting cultural/historical things (at least the ones that made it to the big news) have been done in a way that makes them sound awful at first hearing, but intentionally did not actually damage the targeted cultural/historical thing.
I think the biases of the journalist/news outlet/etc. are somewhat exposed by which parts they focus on and which they downplay or omit entirely.
I hope you’re right because this article says they used a spray can.
Also, orange dye can easily get into cracks in the rocks and stay there for a very long time. Especially if it displaces the lichens. That won’t make it collapse, so maybe ‘damage’ is not the right word, but this is potentially long-lasting vandalism which, as far as I can see, will have no effect on the actual problem.
I hope you’re right because this article says they used a spray can.
Which brings me back to the last point in my comment. I also hope I’m right but the two times I looked into it (right after the attack and before writing my comment) both came up with that result and also it seems that English Heritage came out today saying there was “No visible damage”.
As I said, I’m not writing to defend the action, just pointing out that the OP article is, willfully or not, omitting certain aspects that could make JSO look a little bit better.
To play devil’s advocate against the devil’s advocate, I’m not sure “Stonehenge covered with orange corn starch by Just Stop Oil activists” would have communicated the kind of emergency these activists are hoping to convey, so they’re clearly counting on the headline grabbing people’s attention and triggering their outrage meter. In that way, the journalist might even think they’re helping the JSO group.
I agree, I think they’ve been remarkably responsible about avoiding lasting damage. What upsets me is how they’re fueling the far-right rage machine with more propaganda ammunition at a time when we are already fighting a fierce and undecided battle to live in a world that isn’t run by exclusionary ideological nationalistic idiots.
It’s like they cannot understand that some people don’t want the world saved, and agree with Hitler when he wrote about the tears of war being the bread of future generations. A sentiment that basically says suffering=good. So, more suffering=better. Will climate change cause suffering? Well, guess what then.
It’s not the same thing. At least your friend was calling attention to a cause she cared about
Much like climate change- who is not aware that there are dogs getting euthanized in shelters?
I don’t understand why all of you are talking about raising awareness of something everyone is aware of.
These activists make fighting to end climate change harder every time they pull this shit. It’s pure asshole behaviour.
People here keep saying it raises awareness. Who isn’t aware at this point? And why do they think doing this sort of thing helps the cause? Pissing people off doesn’t get them on your side, it does the opposite.
Yea I struggle with understanding that explanation too. I think something that plays a huge part of this is personalities that group together. Most people understand how important social game is. All activists seem like they have no social awareness. Their only goal is attention. They take the idea that there is no bad publicity to an extreme. I really believe many of these activist are being organized and funded by the oil industry without even realizing it.
As always, while I support their claimed ideals, I can only see them as petty vandals who care more about attention seeking than their cause. They certainly won’t get any of my time or attention. If you’re against Big Oil, protest Big Oil and half the population will agree. If you’re intentionally seeking my outrage with unrelated crap, you got it: rot in jail
They do it because the stuff you’re asking for doesn’t really work, but this does. Activism is about making noise, there aren’t many tools beyond that and they’ve worked for all sorts of issues in the past.
The point is that JSO doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2023/12/the-method-behind-just-stop-oil-annoying-madness/
the stuff you’re asking for doesn’t work that well, but this does
I didn’t think that this works. The examples where people claim “is just like this” I don’t see as being like this.
The ones that work are ones that have some relation to their cause. Forcing everyone to really think about an issue Inherent to the act. For example, going about and doing this to parked private jets, which they did.
Just doing anything to get attention isn’t useful if there’s no Inherent message in the act itself. Especially with climate where everyone already has awareness, just not action.
Being merely loud is not going to sway hearts and minds in your favor.
It’s orange power which washed off with water
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak condemned the action, saying: “This is a disgraceful act of vandalism to one of the UK’s and the world’s oldest and most important monuments.”
A senior druid and pagan priest, King Arthur Pendragon, said he “totally” disapproved of the Just Stop Oil protest and that the group’s actions “alienate any sympathy” for their cause.
Pendragon, who is standing as an independent parliamentary candidate for the area, said: “Stonehenge is a living, working temple at times of celebration and pilgrimage such as the summer solstice and, as a well-known protester myself, I totally disapprove of such behaviour as demonstrated by these people, who do nothing to enhance and everything to alienate any sympathy anyone has or had for their cause.”
The priest has previously been involved in several protests at the monument and lost a legal challenge over a £15 car parking charge at the site in 2017, claiming the fee breached his human rights.
Mike and Julie, who did not wish to give their surnames and had come from the west coast of the US to visit Stonehenge, said it was a shame the path around the stones was closed after the incident.
In a statement, JSO said it was time for “megalithic action” and called for the next UK government to agree a plan to stop the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.
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