Greta Thunberg

If you have anything to say about her, this is the thread.

It's also cool to not have an opinion about her at all.

I completely understand how she would irritate people who deny the existence of climate change or stand to benefit from the status quo.

What I don't understand is how anyone else would disagree with her or her methods, but those people certainly seem to exist. Has she done or said shit that I'm not aware of that should make me dismissive of her presence as a public figure?

Frankly, I don't understand why she's considered so "divisive" in the first place.

She seems like a nice, smart kid. I’m convinced that the only reason she’s seen as “divisive” is because human beings are the worst kind of garbage.

Yea the divisive aspect seems to be a media narrative based on how a teen that speaks with passion & intelligence about our planet melting down causes old men to attack her online. Including the President.

She is amazing and truly inspiring as well. Something that she explicitly talks about is the under-representation within the media of the other young climate activists throughout the world (many of them indigenous) who are not given the same level of attention. It is a true credit to her that she would bring attention to something like that.

The only problem with Greta is that she can be co-opted by pond scum like Hillary Clinton who referred to her as a "rebellious sister." That isn't her fault. She obviously can't control that. In fact, I think she has been really outspoken in her critique of neoliberal, market reformists who think that they can tinker their way out of the climate crisis. The assholes just have selective hearing though and have decided to pretend like she doesn't say those things.

"She's divisive" is just the same both-sidism that creates headlines like "Trump and Thunberg trade barbs" instead of "Leader of free world mocks and belittles teenager with autism".

I'm just super-confused right now because I'm not talking about old men, Fox News viewers, climate change deniers or any of the people who you'd expect would delight in punching down at her.

I'm sure that most people who find her "shrill" or actually express a desire to "spank her" do fit into those categories, but there are people in my life who are younger than me, don't watch Fox News and do believe in climate change as a man-made phenomenon who just... despise her for some reason. And it's been a truly weird source of contention between us!

When I talk about her, it feels like I'm trying to defend antifa all over again, I try to explain how they are a super-small group of people with zero influence in our society and the media has framed them to be a total boogieman... and yet they're still a "problem" for some reason that needs to be addressed on the same level as violent white supremacy (the twist you didn't see coming here: both suck but this is America so you've gotta just let 'em be). Maybe there's no real parallels between her and antifa at all--maybe she's just viewed as a figurehead for the kind of "woke" young people that lots of older people with progressive politics still love to hate for reasons no more rational than anything else that's happened over the last five years or whatever.

Spoiler:

Makes perfect sense to me that young people ought to be angry about the state of the world they've been born into but whoa, I guess that's going too far!

I guess she's worthy of a because she "whisper yells" and that's what's matters most?

The "whisper yelling" seems to me just a symptom of her scandinavian language & autism, but who knows. What you described though - the folks despising her for just some reason... - sounds like a combo of jealousy and culpability. What I find difficult about Greta Thunberg is what I admire about Greta Thunberg: admiration of what she says requires a sort of self-implication if you're going to buy into it, and that's inherently an uncomfortable and difficult place to exist. We - the educated humans in places where we can view, thousands of miles away, a speech about a decreasingly abstract idea like climate change - are the problem, and the solutions are uncomfortable and require us to act beyond liking videos, commenting on posts, and retweeting.

I don't ever feel like the target of Greta's rage though. Am I mistaken in thinking that way? What I find so admirable about Greta is that she doesn't waste time lecturing people about plastic straws and recycling. She understands the gravity of the situation and is pointing the finger at people in actual positions of real power, which is why her presence at these economic summits of world leaders and financiers is so important. Her rage seems to be directed at the moral bankruptcy of political leadership and the sinister evil of profit-driven systems that continue to profit from their investment in the extraction, refinement, and distribution of carbon-emitting energy sources despite their knowledge (for literally decades) that these systems of production and consumption will have grave environmental impacts.

I think she is pointing the finger where she should and getting people to understand that solving these problems requires us to think beyond the level of individual personal responsibility and start thinking about bold, collective solutions to what is the global and planetary issue of the 21st century that will eventually need to be addressed, one way or another.

WP64 wrote:What I find so admirable about Greta is that she doesn't waste time lecturing people about plastic straws and recycling. She understands the gravity of the situation and is pointing the finger at people in actual positions of real power, which is why her presence at these economic summits of world leaders and financiers is so important. Her rage seems to be directed at the moral bankruptcy of political leadership and the sinister evil of profit-driven systems that continue to profit from their investment in the extraction, refinement, and distribution of carbon-emitting energy sources despite their knowledge (for literally decades) that these systems of production and consumption will have grave environmental impacts.

I think she is pointing the finger where she should and getting people to understand that solving these problems requires us to think beyond the level of individual personal responsibility and start thinking about bold, collective solutions to what is the global and planetary issue of the 21st century that will eventually need to be addressed, one way or another.

I think this is spot-on. A good description of what she's after and how she does it, for sure. But when you say,

WP64 wrote:I don't ever feel like the target of Greta's rage though. Am I mistaken in thinking that way?

I think the answer is maybe yes. Or for me the answer is most certainly yes. Because as a citizen of a country that isn't doing much to solve these problems - and fuck, that's scary, because 100% our leaders know these problems exist, they just think our wealth is large enough, our landmass is insulated enough, our walls will be tall enough, and (and this is the really really frightening part) that collectively we'll be okay enough with border securing genocide to keep ourselves more or less immune to climate change - I feel that I'm complicit. So maybe the Great hate has something to do with that - dunno, just postulating. It's like in the movies when somebody's angry at someone and then lashes out at a third party who says, "the fuck did I do? I'm just sitting here!" And in this case, yeah, you're just sitting there. I'm just sitting there. People, in my experience and myself included, are very comfortable just sitting there, being passive. And I think that's part of the problem and part of the thing Greta's tilting against. Our leaders need to change, definitely, that's the big one, but there's no incentive for them to change until we make it impossible for them to not do so. And that's uncomfortable, especially uncomfortable for those with more education and more wealth, because it brays against the capitalist idea that our education and our wealth are both personally good and good for society and are a replacement for, e.g., going to war and not having running water and not living on the street and being uncomfortable inclement weather, etc etc etc.

Actually got passed by this on the way home tonight.

I have not watched this (why the fuck would I?) but yeah this has got to be the single worst YouTube thumbnail I've ever seen that doesn't have any red arrows or circles on it.



the absolute god of opportunistic punching down, but unfortunately you can only do jokes about Evangelicals for so many decades

Yeah. That's incredibly on brand for him. Greta has done an incredibly brilliant job of making herself almost impossible to appropriate and manipulate. The "blah blah blah" comment is a really good example of that. I feel like a lot of people, including "leftists," fundamentally misunderstand the nature of her protest. She isn't petitioning the ruling class for reforms. She isn't even asking for a seat at the table. The whole point is that the establishment and political status quo has completely failed us (especially her generation) and can no longer be relied upon.

I can't fathom having the energy to convince myself to hate this girl. Boggles the mind.

Can't imagine setting up that thumbnail thinking it makes Maher look like anything other than the biggest asshole on the planet.

What makes no sense is that it’s not an anti Greta rant.

Not sure if any of you watched the clip based on your posts but it’s actually a rant that goes after millennials for their consumerism in the face of the climate disaster. He compares Greta to Kylie Jenner and goes on to point out the disparity n followers, Greta 13 mil, Kylie over 200 mil. Then uses that as a spring board to talk about all the ways millennials/gen z are bad. It definitely on brand, but maybe not the way you expect.

Ah.

I've gone great lengths to keep myself from hearing Bill Maher's voice ever again so no. At least it's not as bad as it looks.

All life on earth, from the beginning of time until now, is 99.9 percent extinct.

When I was a kid, they taught me civilization was about 10K years old or so. Now, we know that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. There could have been dozens of civilizations like Eqypt and we would have no clue. There could have been full blown Star Trek space travelling civilizations on the bottom of the ocean somewhere. We really have no idea what Plate Tectonics has done to our planet over time. So, at the end of the day, the ancients might have known more than us and it seems we may have regressed a little bit in some ways than our ancestors.

Sorry for the rant, but, this is the sort of thing I think about quite a bit. And, I guess the point of my rant is not's a matter of time, but a matter of when. If the thunder don't get you the lightning will and the only thing we can really be certain of is that earth as we know it will be completely destroyed at some point and be re born into something we couldn't envision if we tried.

What do I think of Thunberg? I think she's just a lucky kid who was at the right place at the right time.

John Boy Walton wrote:When I was a kid, they taught me civilization was about 10K years old or so. Now, we know that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. There could have been dozens of civilizations like Eqypt and we would have no clue. There could have been full blown Star Trek space travelling civilizations on the bottom of the ocean somewhere. We really have no idea what Plate Tectonics has done to our planet over time. So, at the end of the day, the ancients might have known more than us and it seems we may have regressed a little bit in some ways than our ancestors.

How much History Channel do you watch?

chrondog wrote:

John Boy Walton wrote:When I was a kid, they taught me civilization was about 10K years old or so. Now, we know that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. There could have been dozens of civilizations like Eqypt and we would have no clue. There could have been full blown Star Trek space travelling civilizations on the bottom of the ocean somewhere. We really have no idea what Plate Tectonics has done to our planet over time. So, at the end of the day, the ancients might have known more than us and it seems we may have regressed a little bit in some ways than our ancestors.

How much History Channel do you watch?

none