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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TheGreatCitracett said:
Apparently this is what we're going to do:

View attachment 951917
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Didn’t the Green New Deal literally talk about taking cars away from working class people?

I even heard those dirty Republicans will be talking about paying for abortions of third-worlders. Especially top Republican, Bernie Sanders.
 
AnOminous said:
Ironically Astrid Lindgren has been canceled by SJWs recently for being white or something.
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She also wrote newspaper articles about Sweden's exceptional tax rates, exceeding 100% of a person's annual income at times (in the 70s) if they were rich enough to be squeezed like that. Which of course caused people to leave the country and the articles were about that, but whatever.
 
K. V. Bones said:
>Thunberg
>Berg
Spotted the jew.
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Common misconception. Names ending in 'berg', like a number of other Germanic words, simply refer to a person's family's place of origin.

In the case of a certain group, when moving to set up a new business or flee an angry mob they would often adopt names suggesting they were local to the new area, both getting a little separation from the name they had previously been conducting business under, and perhaps deceiving some people from the area into thinking they were locals.

'Berg' names are simply more common among the Jews because there can only be so many 'Benjamin the Merchant's without confusion and suspicion arising, and so they tended towards the location-based names, and those amongst them who did do honest work and thus might have taken on a surname like Bauer (farmer) or Wagner (wagoner) tended to disproportionately assimilate into the native population over time. It doesn't mean that every 'Berg' is a Jew, and Greta is not one.
 
3119967d0c said:
Common misconception. Names ending in 'berg', like a number of other Germanic words, simply refer to a person's family's place of origin.

In the case of a certain group, when moving to set up a new business or flee an angry mob they would often adopt names suggesting they were local to the new area, both getting a little separation from the name they had previously been conducting business under, and perhaps deceiving some people from the area into thinking they were locals.

'Berg' names are simply more common among the Jews because there can only be so many 'Benjamin the Merchant's without confusion arising, and those amongst them who did do honest work and thus might have taken on a surname like Bauer (farmer) or Wagner (wagoner) tended to disproportionately assimilate into the native population over time. It doesn't mean that every 'Berg' is a Jew, and Greta is not one.
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Behind every Jew, there is a Swede.
 
TaimuRadiu said:
Behind every Jew, there is a Swede.
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Swedish and German are similar languages and are part of the bigger Germanic language family. Other languages in this language family include Dutch, Danish and English. Just because she has a last name people might associate with being Jewish due to language similarities does not mean she’s Jewish. ‘Berg’ just means city in German. It might mean the same in Swedish as well.
 
JambledUpWords said:
Swedish and German are similar languages and are part of the bigger Germanic language family. Other languages in this language family include Dutch, Danish and English. Just because she has a last name people might associate with being Jewish due to language similarities does not mean she’s Jewish. ‘Berg’ just means city in German. It might mean the same in Swedish as well.
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Berg means mountain it pretty much all the Germanic languages. Burg means castle in German.
 
Gender Affirming Surgery said:
Eh, just “away” is good enough for me—but it’s been pointed out that the cost of using space as a dumping ground is too high. I’m not willing to smash numbers to prove it one way or the other, so I’m conceding the point out of laziness.
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If you're still curious about the numbers, the guys here already did the math for us. It ends up being way, way more expensive than I was expecting, actually:
To make their calculations, Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry at BBC Future start with the ballpark figure that it costs $200 million to launch an Ariane V rocket and get its 15,432 pounds of payload into a stable point in Earth orbit. A few years ago, The Atlantic estimated that the world makes 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage per year. By that math it would take more than 168 million Ariane V rockets to launch an entire year's worth of trash into space, at a cost of $33,696,200,000,000,000 ($33 quadrillion). Even if SpaceX succeeded in its goal to cut the price of launching rockets in half (and if it could build that many rockets, which it can't), the world still couldn't come anywhere close to affording that sum of money.

Plus, all you've got at this point is more than 168 million rockets full of trash in Earth orbit. To get them from there to the sun, you need to multiply the cost by at least 10. There you go, you've thrown a year's worth of trash into the sun... at a cost of just $330 quadrillion.
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Sheryl Nome said:
Let me put it to you this way.

Right now Pollution is free.

I want to create a price on pollution.
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Pollution comes back around in other ways though. I mean, most people are too dumb to see how and never really "feel" it but... I would demand that any funds raised from carbon taxes be very transparently allocated to cleaning up messes, and that's never going to happen obviously. But otherwise I don't mind fucking gross polluters over.
 
Homoerotic Cougar-kun said:
Pollution comes back around in other ways though. I mean, most people are too dumb to see how and never really "feel" it but... I would demand that any funds raised from carbon taxes be very transparently allocated to cleaning up messes, and that's never going to happen obviously. But otherwise I don't mind fucking gross polluters over.
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The externalities of pollution are generally not affecting the people who pollute, yes, so I want to price in those externalities.
 
Sheryl Nome said:
The externalities of pollution are generally not affecting the people who pollute, yes, so I want to price in those externalities.
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Fair enough. That's actually not a bad plan, if you can ram it through without every idiot scraping it off for their personal slush fund bullshit. Might lead to some surprising things, though (watch EV prices skyrocket due to the gross pollution involved in making batteries).
 
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