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from the calling-for-compulsary-education-by-skipping-education dept.
Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.
It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:
who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.
The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:
Our Demands
- Green New Deal
- A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
- Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
- Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
- Preserving our public lands and wildlife
- Keeping our water supply clean
Our Solutions
- The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
- Emission standards and benchmarks
- Changing the agriculture industry
- Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
- Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
- Stop mountaintop removal/mining
In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:
world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."
At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.
How does your school treat such events?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:10PM (2 children)
So what? The results are exactly the same. Even most comic book baddies have motives. And quite a few of these CEOs and politicians are certainly psychotic enough to be at least partially motivated by an enjoyment of the non-consensual infliction of suffering.
The other half of the problem that I've mentioned before is the massive, almost infinite, dilution of responsibility that human society and the corporate system particularly instigates. Employees do as they have been trained to do. Consumers do as those around them do. Their actions have negative effects, but no-one is directly responsible for the harms that happen. The problems are far, far deeper rooted in humanity than any one person or group of people. If some people refuse to behave in line with the corporate norm, others will be brought in to carry it on. Because the decision making process is incredibly spread out across many thousands of people and also learned from and developed in reaction to millions more, it's almost impossible for any one person to fix it. We're all a part of this. Our actions do indirect harm yet we continue them because of the culture we were conditioned to be a part of.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Sunday March 17 2019, @03:44AM (1 child)
This is actually one of the things that Mr Orwell explained in his rather famous book, but it was apparently a bit too subtle and is often missed.
It is the use of power that these people find exciting.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 17 2019, @12:24PM
I call it "control", the deepest ring in my model of hell. Lust for money, then wealth, then power, then control, hello satan. I never thought about my model of paradise but it must be some mirror image, like: charity, authority (over self, mind you), justice, sacrifice.
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