Moggy wrote:Disrupting public transport is monumentally stupid.
There’s no excuse to attack somebody like that though.
The guy protesting on the train wasn't a criminal or a terrorist or anything like that so for a mini-mob to attack him whilst on the ground demonstrates how regular people can suddenly go wild in a crowd. But if you are a Londoner having to travel pre-sunrise on over-full of grouchy people on London transport then you understand - that rage is never far away from anyone! What this protestor's fatal error was, was to initiate a kick on the person climbing up, that then made him a nuisance and an aggressor.
Also, I saw a bit of ITV news and an asian guy who, may have taken the footage, was saying that the protestor chose the wrong place because these were working class people having to go to work and to pay their bills. I specifically say the guy is asian because there has been some discussion recently that Extinction Rebellion (not environmentalism) is predominantly a middle-class white protest group. The rationale being that people from ethnic minorities in London are more likely to be working class, also white working class all have to focus on matters closer to home, i.e. people on the protest don't have to worry about getting fired.
Earlier this year I was in a group. And what I was initially shocked by was the middle-class students, were the most vociferous supporters of Extinction and wanted to cover them. These students who had gone to private school, spoke with received pronunciation, had fees and living expenses paid for, and corrected me for pronouncing the letter T in the word ofTen. In fact it was bordering on the militant and when talking about it in front of others they would visibly get angry. Going from 0-60 on the indignant scale made them look irrational.
Gemini73 wrote:The government et al won't have to do much for Extinction Rebellion to become hugely unpopular. They can just sit back and watch the more militant members hang the whole movement.
This is what I was seeing a while back. For so long Extinction have had an excellent PR game in that, I would say, the general public who didn't support them had no negative feeling about them, in London the sympathetic mayor was able to use this as license to have the police take a non-confrontational approach and allow them to peacefully block high profile areas. But when you have the more passionate members who are frustrated with government and want changes immediately then they want to raise the game by taking a more aggressive approach. Blocking bridges, fine. Singing, fine. But that video today is not likely to draw much sympathy for the protestor who was assaulted. It's a huge PR blunder because it risks turning this into a class war.