I would argue it’s a slightly effective form… but only if they advertise the point. There’s been plenty of times I’ve seen this for environmentalism, and people start talking about it in the comments. Not completely directly, but it gets them talking. Like when they would super glue their hands to the ground, in one video one of the protestors threw the bottle into a drain. So people started talking about how hypocritical it was because that’s bad for the environment. Which was a small thing, but the conversation was happening.
People used to make fun activists who would throw red paint onto fashion models wearing fur. But over the years, that slowed down because designers stopped using real fur. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was because they were afraid of getting their stuff ruined, but now most designers won’t use fur for ethical reasons. Because they realize animals don’t need to be bred and killed for their suits.
The only real downside is that it does make them come off as assholes, but also no real way to turn that around. Like black people would do sit ins at restaurants, and a lot of white people hated them for it… but then other white people also got to see them get abused for it. Things like that can help change people’s perspective. With this, they throw it, and then it mostly stops there. They’re just assholes. It gets the conversation going, but not enough, because it just stops at them being assholes.
Because things were getting worse. And they’re still getting worse. And they will continue to get worse. We have charts and graphs and studies for a lot of different things showing things were getting worse, and have only continued to do so. Like the cost of living didn’t just steadily go up with a steady inflation. It’s been a curve. And then the last few years fucked us pretty bad.
Climate change. Still getting hotter. Still not slowing down enough. Some places are doing their parts, but places like here in the US, we aren’t doing nearly enough. And a lot of the stuff we are doing ends up on backfiring because of capitalism. For instance, California banned the single use plastic bags. But a lot of reusable bags are plastic. The law is the bag needs to be a certain thickness and be advertised as reusable… So places just made thicker bags. And then people still throw them away. So each bag is now more plastic than before.
So yes. They gave us a warning. Things got worse.
So we got a second warning. Things still got worse.
Then rather than shutting up as you would prefer, they gave us another warning. Still getting worse.