[kevin_morrill]

I get what you’re saying but is the track record of terrorism any better at causing constructive change? Really we need to engage a lot of people’s minds, and that just turns out to be really hard in our current culture no matter what angle you come at it from.

[giraffe_lady]

No, what I'm saying is that understanding peaceful movements separate from violent ones is missing the point. For example martin luther king jr's peaceful civil rights movement was effective in part because there was a credible threat of a violent movement on its wing. There was conflict and cooperation between these movements, they can't be cleanly separated. A lot of the reason white people came to the negotiating table at all was because of fear of what would happen instead if they didn't.

Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else.

The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient.

And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.

[bryanrasmussen]

I have to agree this is always the way I have understood every peaceful movement that has ever existed, the peaceful movements were big and there were smaller violent movements, it did not take an amazing inductive leap to think hey if we don't make some concessions sooner or later these peaceful folks are going to become violent like these others, and then there will be real problems for us.

Since India is also the start of this whole conversation Gandhi especially comes to mind.

[ramblerman]

You should be placed on some kind of watch list.

Also, How many innocent people do you think you need to kill exactly to sway the CCP.

[giraffe_lady]

Again I will make this point, again and again. Here, today, on HN, in this comment section, we have people endorsing mass population culling of the most dispossessed people on earth, and the least responsible for climate change. How am I the moral transgressor for arguing, abstractly, that redirecting the harm towards those actually perpetrating it is preferable?

The CCP isn't my problem honestly. Most of the major contributors to climate change are operated from within my own country, so I'll focus on that. There's plenty of work to go around, I'm sure someone over there can handle that part of the project.

The fact that people can never really come up with anything except "but well CHINA" speaks volumes to me. You aren't rejecting this stance because you abhor violence. Climate change IS VIOLENCE. Where is your outrage, what are you willing to do about it?

[ramblerman]

But you have no solution, you just condone killing a few people in your own country because surely that will do something.

The fact that you can't even understand this is a global problem and just figure "someone over there can handle that part of the project" is telling.

You are a dangerous ideologue.

[giraffe_lady]

No one ever actually asked what my solution was!

My actual position is that there does need to be an extremist counterpart to the peaceful climate movement that can plausibly escalate to violence against people. But that there are several steps along the way with chances for those in power to de-escalate first.

Things like targeted destruction of fossil fuel facilities and harassment campaigns against certain politicians and executives are likely to be very effective at raising the cost of contributing to the climate crisis. If those with the power to actually respond to those measures do so, it won't need to escalate further. Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.

[kortilla]

> Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.

The credible threat of violence doesn’t even work unless you can credibly threaten a huge portion of the population. Just look at how ineffective terrorism has been for the last 50 years.

Have you considered the civil rights movement was not successful because of the threat of violence but was instead successful because people actually changed their minds?

We have same sex marriage now, which was as unpopular as desegregation a couple of decades ago. When Obama went into office he was against same sex marriage. Society changed rapidly and without violence.

It likely changed so rapidly because it was not a coercive movement at all, but that’s just speculation on my behalf.

[kortilla]

Mass murders in the US won’t help if someone isn’t picking up a machine gun in China as well.

You just said “not my problem”, which means you don’t actually care about stopping climate change. You need to stop thinking about how to kill locally when the problem is global.