Recently, when a bunch of "Just Stop Oil" activists disturbed a World Snooker Championship game and, as per Gen-Z-climate-activist tradition, threw food all over the tables and sat themselves down in their anti-oil garments, a Twitter user quipped: "These types of climate protests are so detrimental to raising actual awareness and widespread support that if it ever came out that these people were paid for by gas and coal-owning billionaires I'd probably believe it".
Now, I don't know if the companies behind the well-made but questionable How to Blow Up a Pipeline have any such dubious ties (neither the production companies nor the distributor, Neon, have any deals with Big Oil that I could find). But man, what a time to do a psyop to make the enemy look deranged when said enemy will agree with the assessment and be proud of it!
Here is a movie loosely based on a book -- whose name-similarity to some kinda Dark Web instruction manual isn't accidental -- that speaks straight-out about how violence is a necessity for "climate justice"; essentially how destruction is correct so long as it's (purportedly) in the name of the right cause. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked. It was racism in 2020, it's climate change now; I just thought it was gonna be less mask-off terror apologia and more trying to rationalize throwing soup at art to make fossil fuels go away.
Then again, the book predates all those incidents and this manner of disruption was fairly commonplace in Sweden, the author's homeland, before the big vandalism stories of recent UK and US news. Perhaps the real surprise is that it came out after the Nord Stream incident -- an as-yet-unresolved case (of POSSIBLE eco-terrorism) that damaged decidedly more than "replaceable property" (what many radicals will tell you is the only real victim, even on a bad day). Not that this ever really stopped at "property", especially among the new wave of post-Thunberg soup Zoomers.
I sometimes ask: If, for example, a patient dies inside an ambulance as a result of road-blocking climate protestors -- as has literally happened in, you guessed it, Sweden a few months ago -- is that person deemed a necessary sacrifice for the utopia? After all, what's one death vs. The doomsday you've been told you're preventing? Do you redirect the trolley to kill one human when there are 8 billion hypothetical humans on the other track?
I accuse people of pussyfooting around this query, but I realize they've been answering me through actions for some time. When activists were convicted for the incident in Sweden, there were additional manifestations -- not in the name of the person that died, but the ones that got arrested.
Will a film like this exacerbate things? Hopefully not. It's being praised by the Usual Journalists for portraying the "terrorists" (sometimes in quotes, sometimes not) in a sympathetic light, but I didn't read them as outright unblemished. Someone will go "This was my Joker" but someone always does.
