Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Extinction Rebellion’s official website, the angry commuters who attacked the protestors holding up their train reacted violently to the protest because they are stressed by climate change.
Today’s tube action: how it happened
October 17, 2019 by Extinction RebellionThis morning, members of Extinction Rebellion climbed onto trains at Stratford, Canning Town and Shadwell. At Canning Town, members of the public pulled two rebels from the roof of the train.
…
Some of those involved in the planning, on hearing the feedback, chose to step back from the action; but some of those involved continued and ultimately carried it out.
…
It’s no less through love and fear, and due to the same conditions of oppression that we face ourselves, that we saw such a disturbing reaction from some of those on the platform at Canning Town. These were commuters trying to get to work so they can support their loved ones. We recognise that disruption at Canning Town affected those already suffering the hardships of a toxic system – those who are the most at risk from the effects of climate and ecological collapse.
…
Read more: https://rebellion.earth/2019/10/17/todays-tube-action-how-it-happened/
I used to work in East London, regularly went for a beer with friends, mostly in the pubs around beautiful Tredegar Square in Mile End, just down the road from Canning Town where the climate protestors were attacked.
The East Londoners I met are proud, hard working people. Like any inner city community they have their issues. They have a strong sense of community, they don’t suffer fools who want to mess with them or their families. They love and care for their precious green spaces. I don’t recall anyone in East London ever telling me their top concern was “climate and ecological collapse”.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Based on models, they predicted that if the wilderness were to be fragmented into blocks of X size, Y number of species will die out.
Based on this, the activists went out and started acting as if all the predicted species had already died. They didn’t need to name the species, because according to the model they were already gone.
Problem is, when actual scientists went out into the actual world and started counting noses. The species that were supposed to have died out, didn’t.
To be really crude about it, show us the bodies.
Imagine the reaction of the commuters if they were delayed in getting to the football match of their favorite club?
This might be one of the most perverted, self-serving, bastardization of reality, rationalizations I’ve ever heard.
“…the angry commuters who attacked the protestors holding up their train reacted violently to the protest because they are stressed by climate change.”
I’m admittedly no Stephan Lewandowski, but that sure seems like a steaming heap of ‘Motivated Reasoning’ on the part of XR.
Who would want to be Stephan Lewandowski?
Please! It’s Stephan Lewandowsky, not Stephan Lewandowski.
An easy way to get the correct spelling is to take “what Lysenko spawned,” and simply rearrange those letters to get Stephan Lewandowsky.
Now everyone has equal access to climate excuses. All is well. Move along.
I was a commuter for 30 years on the London Underground.
We put up with poor unreliable service, overcrowding, being too close to your fellow man set your nerves on edge and on occasion people we knew and work with got BLOWN UP BY JEHADI BOMBERS. The slightest unusual behaviour caused a disproportionate emotional response.
Then along comes an idiot from XR, I am not surprised at the reaction!
Today these utter crackhead fools, blocked Oxford street 😐 they are absolutely hated across london, maybe all of england.
They have gone over to the dork side of the farce.
The louder they squawk, the more they act like stupid, self-centered spoiled brats – well, the reaction is that the more they will turn off anyone who might give them some attention and maybe a whiskey jigger’s worth of empathy.
I would like to know just where they get the information that XX number of species have just gone bye-bye for good. There is no dearth of bugs, birds or blossoms in my area and as far away as 500 miles from my house. The only thing that shuts off bugs is incoming cold weather, which -since it’s nearly November – is going to happen soon. IF I’m lucky this weekend, I may just see some latent dragonflies zipping around, looking for mates, but generally the dragons and butterflies and moths are going in for the winter. Squirrels already have dense coats and layers of fat. Late season plants like compass plants and goldenrod are gone now, because that is what Mama Nature does. It’s all part of the cycle of life, which those imbeciles in XR don’t understand.
Everything will be back in the spring, maybe even a little early, if the OFAlmanac is close in their forecast. Supposed to be warm and wet next spring and summer, which will mean more chances for shooting trilliums, cranebill, mayapple, woodland anemones, etc., never mind the birds that will be returning on time and setting up housekeeping.
And these XR morons think everything is gone extinct???? They have to prove it! And proving it means they show exactly what it was and where the extinction happened in the REAL world, NOT in their imaginary world of made-up catastrophe. I doubt that even one of those morons can name a bird species or a plant species or even knows what are mosses and what is algae.
The XRs are too ignorant for words, have ZERO understanding of basic biology, know nothing at all – NOTHING!!! – about the natural world, and are led by grasping, soul-sucking charlatans who see them for what they are: ignorant useful idiots. Here in my area, they’d be arrested for being a public nuisance, and anything else that can be attached to them.
They get zero sympathy from my end of the train car.
A little info here on the census of bugs: 925,000 SPECIES of insects have been identified so far. The estimate on the total number of species of insects, including those as yet unidentified, is somewhere between 2,000,000 and 30,000,000 SPECIES.
That does not includes the spiders. In the order Aranea, there are 48,200 named species of spiders worldwide, including ticks, mites, and scorpions. The guesstimate on how many species in Aranea are not yet identified and named is somewhere between 90,000 and infinity, since there a billions of spiders of all sorts everywhere. Spiders are found in fossils, too, really, really old fossils, back to the Carboniferous era.
Knowing that little amount should allow anyone who is serious to trip up these weisenheimer XRs and hand them a brief, but savory defeat.
How does it make sense to protest around mass transit? Isn’t mass transit supposed to be the green option for commuting?
They were stressed out because they were trying to get to work on time like responsible people and some self righteous wankers were stopping them.
The big problem is the media coverage.
No media coverage and encourage Joe Public to start forcibly getting ER timewasters out of the way.
ER is nothing without media coverage..
London Underground Recent History.
On 7th July 2005 52 people lost their lives to Jehadi Terrorist Bombers on the Tube, travelling to work.
On 21st July 2005 4 failed terrorist bomb attempts were made on passsengers going to work.
On the 22nd July 2005 the Metropolitan Police shot dead an innocent Brazilian Man on the Tube as they wrongly identified him as a fugitive bomber from the day before.
Along come the idiots from Extinction Rebellion, climb on the Trains, I am surprised they only got punched and kicked, the Brazilian man got shot 3 times in the head!
Now that is called ‘denial ‘
Dear Mr Worrall
” … just down the road from Canning Town where the climate protestors were attacked.”
The ‘protestors’ were not attacked, they were the attackers. The public were defending themselves. Good for them.
DP
I have a lot of sympathy for the commuters, but the fact is if they had just stood back there would have been no physical confrontation. Of course if the police did their job properly and arrested this rabble there would have been no motivation for people to take the law into their own hands.
I am tired of a relatively few nut cases being allowed to disrupt the lives of the masses and think they have a right to be protected when doing so. If you aren’t civil then you have no right to expect people to be civil to you.
I get it Rah, if I still worked in London and had suffered weeks of disruption from these freaks, with stuff all response from the useless London mayor, I would be really mad as well.
The “protesters” were breaking the law, acting irresponsibly, intimidating innocent commuters. That is an act of terrorism and they were dealt with, by the public, and rightly so.
These people get away with a docile public, too scared to take action, leaving any action to police, who, as we have seen, do nothing.
It is time for the public to react and in this case the public did. If XR don’t like it, they should think twice. This is the first incident, I expect to see more reactions from the public.
This “rebellion” needs to be crushed.
I am originally from South London, Croydon. Londoners don’t take this crap for long.
These people are scaring young children into believing they are going to die if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions very quickly…..I was 12 years old in 1962 and living in London. I was likely to be killed by nuclear bombs at the height of the Cuban Crisis….I remember the Evening News paper with the headline S.O.S Stay Off Shore….as the Soviet ships were heading towards Cuba. I was scared with good cause. These protesters haven’t got a clue about what they stand for. They are scaring children with mass hysteria based on corrupted and often wrong information.
A quick check of the weather on 17th Oct shows that London had a temperature range of 7-13 degrees C and the long term average is 8-14. Therefore it is absolutely not possible for the protesters to claim climate stress as an excuse for their actions on this day. This BS really needs to be called out and hefy jail time needs to be dealt to make sure this type of anti-cocial behaviour gets nipped pronto.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/gb/london/ec4a-2/october-weather/328328
What do you do when your child throws a tantrum at the supermarket and refuses to move? That is how these people should be treated.
Listened to the ER spokesperson on the BBC interview tonight . . .
the new Buss word was
” Climate Breakdown `
used somewhere in almost every sentence he uttered.
`Breakdown` is far more scary than the current benign “Climate change”
Jono: this is precisely what the Guardian has decreed! George Orwell’s Newspeak put into action. Read this – it is mind-boggling:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/guardian-language-changes-climate-environment?mc_cid=ed78942318&mc_eid=3826076df6
In the immortal words of an anonymous petroleum trader during a 2005 invasion of his workplace by Greenpeace activists,
Sod off, swampy!
Of course. It was nothing to do with XR “protesters”! Nah, couldn’t be them because they are saving the planet.
These XR people disrupting others’ lives reminds me of spoiled toddlers having a temper tantrum when they don’t get what they want.
Glad there were adults in the room.
Anyone who has travelled on the tube in rush hour knows that the environment down there is toxic and those enduring it are likely to react badly to anyone who tries to keep them in it for longer. Believe me, after 15 minutes with your nose in someone else’s armpit (I am small) you come out and breathe great gulps of London air with pleasure
Especially the Victoria line.
“According to Extinction Rebellion’s official website, the angry commuters who attacked the protestors holding up their train reacted violently to the protest because they are stressed by climate change”
Yes of course. That makes perfect sense. If it weren’t for climate change there wouldn’t have been the Extinction Rebellion and if it weren’t for Extinction Rebellion there wouldn’t have been the stress that caused the retaliation against those childish morons of Extinction Rebellion.
My (second) favourite video clip of the XR protests (behind – of course – the idiot being unceremoniously hauled off the Tube train, and being treated to the business end of some size elevens) – is of the co-founder of XR (who’s name escapes me) chipping away at the glass front of the Department of Transport building, with a sissy hammer (which she’d obviously never handled before) and a little chisel (ditto) – and getting nowhere.
Comedy gold….
I hate to admitt it, but I geel sympathy for XR and believe they have a point worth considering. The commuters acted like stressed animals in a circus. It is true we live unnatural lives with high levels of stress we are not supposed to cope with. We should be stressed once a week or month. Now we are stressed daily, that wears us down. I think XR are wrong on science of climate, but kind of right on social psychology and economics. Truth is often spread out on both sides.