From the article: *Large SUVs were particularly affected. According to the police, notes were attached to the cars indicating that they were harmful to the climate. The tyres were not punctured, but merely deflated. The cars were parked in the area between the S-Bahn line and Elbchaussee around Kanzleistraße. *
Personally, I like this protest way more than glueing themselves to the streets, causing traffic jams where cars burn gasoline for hours and ambulances / firefighters / police gets stuck, putting innocent life in danger.
The article is in German. Warning: this link leads to google translate.
Being a climate activist is important.
Being malicious to others is garbage behaviour and you’re doing nothing but making sure people actively want to hurt the environment out of spite.
These people also give genuine climate activists a bad name. Reminds me of when extremists ruined the word feminist. It’s hard to explain to people that you want women to be treated equal, but you don’t hate men and want them to die.
No form of protest is acceptable to liberals (let alone conservatives). When you peacefully protest, no one pays attention, when you damage private property, everybody screams, when you are disruptive while not damaging said private property, you’re still a dick. So who cares, keep on going.
The problem is protests like these hurt working class families. Folks just trying to get by. In my area, you can’t exist without a car. If you want to protest do something that affects the decision makers. People like me have no power.
In the areas of Hamburg that have been targeted not one single person needs an SUV. We have reliable public transport that’s easily accessible to wheelchairs or strollers as well. So yeah, it did target the right people.
To what end? Do SUV owners write bills? Will inconveniencing nonpolitical randos get anyone talking about the issues, let alone talking about them without souring the discussion for climate activists, who now look like vindictive assholes?
This reads like petty vengeance against people with marginally larger carbon footprints and with the wrong kind of social performance, not genuine activism. If you’re gonna slash tires, do it to the politicians ffs.
They didn’t slash the tires, they just let the air out. No damages.
I would rather they slashed politician’s tires than let out the air in random people’s tires.
I mean…here we all are…talking about it. Some people are being more civil than others, but some people are genuinely attempting to discuss the role of individual responsibility in the face of catastrophic climate change.
I’m pretty sure that Hamburg isn’t such an area, and that SUV’s are a totally unecessery folly there. This isn’t hurting working class families. (Also, people like you do have power, organize)
Yeah, they should’ve thought of that before being too poor to buy multiple vehicles for each situation.
You think poor people drive around SUVs in Hamburg because they use them for work?
I’m going to assume that you don’t know this so I’m gonna let you know: the targeted area is one of the most expensive to live in in Hamburg. And I’m going to repeat myself. Almost nobody in Hamburg needs an SUV.
The problem, in my country at least, is that these working class folks who just want to get by still vote for the same parties that don’t give a shit about the environment. So I’d say they are clearly part of the issue.
this “but the working class need to move around” tend to also be the first that complain when a bike or bus lane are made.
I wonder how many people on the receiving end even change their mind. I feel like if anything they’d completely reject the cause that is trying to be pushed, and the end result is a circle jerk between people who were already in agreement.
The SUV owner is going to pay a cost eventually either way, the only difference is when they pay enough of a cost from climate change itself to wake up it will be far too late, so you may as well exact the cost on them now wherever you can so they cannot ignore that it is effecting their life in an immediate way.
That said, I think protests like this are primarily about keeping climate change squarely in public discussion. Same reasoning with the activists who splashed paint on the glass cover of that Van Gogh painting.
No one anywhere should be able to just ignore climate change and nothing is more important than confronting it, not an SUV, not a glass cover on a Van Gogh painting, not the coal jobs in West Virginia.
Well, if they want to go shopping right now, chances are for this one trip they’ll take their spouses smaller car, public transport or maybe even walk. If SUVs become generally unreliable (because you never know if you have air in your tires when you need it), people will look for something more reliable. They’ll bitch about it, they won’t act out of conviction or so, but who cares.
These type of actions do have an effect in SUV sales though.
they mostly target SUVs. Also people of higher income are way more likely to have SUVs and use them more often.
They target SUVs and alike. In what area do you live that a much more affordable and less gasoline consuming car wouldn’t work for you?
SUVs are justified in rural communities where there either the weather or terrain make small vehicles unviable at best and outright dangerous at worst. I have family in rural Spain who have an SUV because they live halfway up a mountain and a car that can tackle driving along a dried up riverbed was essential. It’s less wasteful to keep an SUV for 10 years than buy a small car and have it destroyed by unforgiving terrain in less than 6 months.
I live in rural Michigan where we get several feet of snow each year. I drive a 10 year old used Jeep that was bought in cash with money we saved up so we could have a car that would handle the weather, our family, and the long distances we have to travel to work or shop.
I’m a liberal, I can field this one. The form of protest I find acceptable is destruction of government and corporate property, but not working-class peoples’ houses and mom-and-pop businesses. Is it really so much to ask to have rioting confined to productive activities, such as trashing city hall, looting Amazon DCs, destroying private jets and yachts, assaulting corrupt politicians, tarring and feathering billionaires, and burning down police stations? The establishment has successfully recuperated progressive protest by tricking people into associating it with low-level domestic terrorism, “we get what we want or maybe your houses burn down”; what we should be doing is repeatedly yanking the choke chain on the state and the 1% so hard their eyes pop out.
Trashing “city hall” isn’t productive.
Let me just skip the implications and address your real meta point: no I am not a January 6 apologist or sympathizer.
That’s not what I mean at all. My point is vaguely encouraging people to “trash city hall” is dumb.
There are always going to be a “protest/activism is good but this is unacceptable” for any act of disobedience.
It depends on what the goal of the protest is and an assessment of whether the act is going to actually be successful in bringing about the change they want.
If that isn’t taken into account it’ll just make people more ingrained in their beliefs, and possibly increase hatred towards the groups and the cause overall. Which can just lead to increased conflict and increase extremists on both spectrums.
Sometimes then the cause just devolves into people on both sides just reveling in getting to act out their primal desires.
If you own a SUV and you know there is a risk of your tires being deflated by taking it to the city center (or if it has happened to you already), you will probably avoid it.
Exactly. They’re clearly just asking for it. There is not a single legitimate need for vehicles like that or to take them places they are allowed to go and so we can accurately assess the culpability of the owner and punish them accordingly just based off of their vehicle type and where it is.
Climate activists have been trying peaceful, convenient protests for decades now yet humanity is fucking up the environment faster than ever.
If your example with feminism shows us something, it’s that no matter what you do your actions will be misconstrued by bad actors and your image will be tarnished in a counter-campaign regardless, so if you want to protest something, just skip the phase when you do polite convenient gentle reminders, and go straight to violence and terrorism, if that’s what you will be seen as anyway.
Considering they let the air out of the tires and left a polite finger-wagging note, I don’t think they skipped the gentle reminder phase.
Daily reminder that property damage is not violence, but random acts of property damage isn’t the same thing as genuine activism. We must be mindful of the purpose of a political act, and whether the act actually accomplishes that purpose. What is the purpose of inconveniencing random SUV owners? Will this affect any change, or will it merely entrench people’s existing attitudes?
Imo if you’re gonna slash tires, do it to the politicians. More news coverage, clearer message, and you don’t come off as petty against people for having the “wrong” kind of social performance (eg driving an SUV instead of an electric) and trivialize the issue.
I also advocate for the enlightened position of “murder people in bigger cars than me”
lmao wait who gave feminists a bad rep? what is this altright strawperson?
I think they’re talking about the post-GamerGate anti-SJW movement where atheist youtubers converted to debunking straw-feminists. Maybe they’ve gotten out of that pipeline but haven’t internalized that those “bad” feminists were caricatures of their actual positions or cherry-picked crazies?
yes, this is likely the case, the last sentence
That is why I like this targeted actions over the gluing themselves to the road ones. This is targeted to people destroying the climate. I don’t think there is any good reason to drive an SUV or a sports-car in a city, and it is actively harmful. To pick up your equivalence: Feminists fight misogyny and inconvenience those guys actively showing it without necessarily alienating average guys.
One reason to drive an SUV in a city is that it’s the only vehicle you own. I park my truck in a city often but I don’t live there.
A truck is not an SUV.
That’s not the point