They’ve done that and got prison sentences as a result.
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Saying I understand the goals of the group and still find the group’s actions incomprehensible in light of those goals is nearly a rebuttal, not claiming anyone said anything. Please stop assigning blame where no injury exists.
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It’s reported as being chalk paint, so cleaning is would involve a bucket of water and sponge.
Or you could just wait until it rains again, it is Britain after all.
(I’m not condoning or condemning this action, I’m too tired.)
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Yeah. I was driving around West Oxfordshire as I often do, since I live here. I came to a road I hadn’t used before, and it had a new road warning sign I had never seen elsewhere; “Broken Edges.”
I thought it was a metaphor for the whole of broken Britain.
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Perhaps people don’t understand this form of protest because it doesn’t even begin to make sense and appears to be at best counter- productive?
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@abides was putting words in @danimagoo’s mouth. She wasn’t defending them, she was pointing out that people are having a knee-jerk reaction to them and have ignored that they’ve very much posted their goals and reasoning online and that they’re not doing much new here… so, yeah, putting words in people’s mouths is VERY MUCH causing others injury here.
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It was a bit of an eye opener for me. When I was a kid you always knew when you crossed into Northern Ireland as the roads were so much better. They are in rag order now. But I just assumed that was NI which is going backwards fast every day.
That it was like that in wealthy Tory heartland was quite the shock. No wonder their voters are leaving for the British Fascist Party (what ever name they have this week. I genuinely can’t remember).
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I was kind of thinking that they shouldn’t just have to clean up the mess they made. I’m guessing a lot of crud has built up on and around Stonehenge, what with how many tourists visit it. I’m not saying make them clean up all 6500 acres of the Stonehenge part of the World Heritage Site, but the general vicinity of the megalith could probably use some scrubbing, picking up of refuse, etc.
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Orange corn starch, according to their website. The thing is, cornstarch doesn’t come in orange, so there’s some paint or pigment mixed in. Hopefully pigment, as that is less likely to stick to the surface without a binder. But I doubt they did extensive tests on the short term and long term impact of their choice of colourant not only on the stones and the lichen, but also any future scientific analysis of the stones.
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The people who will be truly upset by this (so leaving aside the gammon-coloured right and the performatively permanently outraged) are the core of people who are going to spend the night and early morning getting there before sunrise to see in the Solstice and have done for decades. And, I know, from having been enough times myself, that despite there being many tourists, those are people who already commit themselves to saving the planet.
Alienating/upsetting your allies is not an effective way of protesting and, if you can explain why it is, I will be less disappointed with your disappointment.
Stone circles can be found in every part of Europe showing how we’ve always cooperated across vast distances – we’re building on that legacy.
By defacing them, no matter how temporarily? That is bullshit.
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Does anyone know of a protest that has popular support while it’s going on? I don’t remember the comedian I’ll paraphrase here, but “Mohammed Ali wasn’t out there polling 80% while refusing to serve in Nam.”
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But usually protests tend to be supported by demographics that are natural allies to the cause. This targets exactly those demographics.
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I don’t disagree with that. I don’t know if I understand their strategy and target demographics well enough to say they’re not reaching the intended people.
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Generally speaking… no. Abolitionists were considered extremists, even by some who opposed slavery. Anarchists and labor activists were rounded up on the regular for decades prior to the legalization of unions. Bayard Rustin went to jail for his pacifism during WW2. MLK was one of the LEAST popular people right up to this death and so was Malcolm X, for that matter. Endless numbers of white people had a fucking meltdown over Muhammad Ali’s stance on Vietnam. Pretty much tons of Americans HATED anti-war protesters so much that they made up bullshit about them attacking returning soldiers. People hated punks who joined in anti-nuclear protests and pretended like they were just a bunch of violent thugs (when like with the anti-war movement, it was often a police riot). People have hated environmentalists for years now. Look at what’s happening with the pro-Palestine encampments… etc. People NEVER protest right, because if you actually protest right, you disrupt daily life.
And people hate that. They want to pretend major changes like ending segregation or legalizing unions just happened because people asked nicely with some signs, without ever bothering anyone, and that TPTB all of a sudden had a change of heart and fix things. That’s not how change EVER happens. Not once. It comes from below and often comes with serious disruption to daily life. Slavery needed a fucking awful, violent, bloody war to end it. Segregation needed massisve resistence to police/white violence getting media coverage. Etc.
We are killing ourselves right now. The Hajj just happened and over 500 pilgrims DIED because we have fucked our planet so much. 
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My proposal for defacing monuments would be: start with ones that are going to be destroyed. Like, anything on the coast, spatter paint on them up to where the projected sea level will reach. The message then being plainly that we are accepting far worse vandalism from the oil companies. That’s less clear for Stonehenge, which I hope will be fine.
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- Nᴀʀʀᴀᴛᴏʀ: Iᴛ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ʙᴇ ғɪɴᴇ.
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When people think of protests they often think of the civil rights era. The protests were able to raise awareness of issues that the media back then ignored. They also brought people together in support of a cause and created organization that last to this day. Think about how much face to face organizing had the be done to organize a march on Washington.
In present times, most major issues seem to covered by many media sources even though you may disagree with the coverage so simply highlighting an issue like climate change seems to have a marginal impact. Plus, people can now organize a march completely online.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t protest, but that protests and activism might have to adopt some new tactics.
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Because mass mediated coverage and the rise of social media has famously reflected pure reality that we know we can all implicitly trust to be free of bias… /sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
Or we could do what we know works and continues to work for change and accept that it’s not some sort of easy thing to make change from the ground up, and that it’s going to cause disruptions in the world. Better than letting people keep burning the fucking world down around us and let people go on pretending like that’s not happening…
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I get that such a punishment would feel like justice, but I’m not sure that it would be at all practical. This really sounds like one of those situations where having an expert trying to instruct and supervise a (probably unenthusiastic) amateur on some delicate cleaning procedures would be a whole lot more work as well as riskier than just having the expert do the work themselves. Some form of community service sounds appropriate as part of the punishment though, as well as paying for the cost for the experts to do the cleanup.
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