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I don’t want your money. Give it to a real charity.
Feel free to recommend charities in the comments field. Amnesty International do good work, for example. Greenpeace do not. Don’t give your money to them.
I don’t want your money. Give it to a real charity.
Feel free to recommend charities in the comments field. Amnesty International do good work, for example. Greenpeace do not. Don’t give your money to them.
October 10th, 2008 at 11:18
What’s wrong with Greenpeace? Just interested. I thought their recent court case was pretty damn good work, but I guess you probably wrote this before that.
October 11th, 2008 at 13:54
Well, I was particularly unimpressed with this advert:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZreEBnqlZlk
It’s the one where they show a plane being flown into a nuclear power station. It’s about the worst argument against nuclear power I have ever heard. People are vaguely afraid of nuclear power primarily because of a few huge disasters like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and they’re afraid of terrorists flying planes into things for much the same reason. But the fact is that if someone were to fly a plane into a nuclear power station, nothing much would happen. At least, nothing that compares to the nightmare scenario one might understandably imagine. The control rods would drop into the reactor and fission would stop. There would possibly be some leaking of uranium into the environment but realistically it’s just not a smart target for such an attack, not least because you don’t spread fear by polluting.
But the public at large don’t know that. They think “nuclear plant” then they think “explosion” then they think “oh shit, we’re all going to die”, and Greenpeace are happily letting them think this and playing on this fear of a totally imaginary doomsday scenario to get across an agenda which they have utterly failed to properly defend. That, to me, is the same as lying to people, and when you’re an organisation sustained entirely by donations, I have a hard time separating that from fraud.
And they seem to be totally okay with using sabotage as a means to an end…
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/germany041103.cfm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2000/sep/24/activists.gmcrops1
…which seems to me to be a pretty poor model. It’s one thing to think that GM is bad, that’s fair enough, but again you have to make your case rather than just trying to bring about your goal through any means necessary. Sabotaging the trial said nothing about GM (quite the reverse, presumably) but it said a lot about Greenpeace. The biggest barrier to GM is public acceptance, and that’s where its opponents should concentrate.
While Oxfam show clips of people in poverty and show you what they want to change, and Amnesty organise clever protests that connect to the thing they’re opposing, things like that paint Greenpeace as an organisation who just pick environmental-sounding targets largely at random or based on tabloid hysteria and then mercilessly attack them in underhanded ways. Why should I think they’re the good guys if that’s how they behave? Things like that are why Barack Obama has something like a 90% chance of winning the US election.
If they don’t explain why I should care about their causes, I have no reason to think they’ve thought them through, and if they think that Al Qaeda are a good reason to avoid nuclear power then I have good reason to think that they haven’t.
Gosh, that was a longer rant than I thought. I think it’s been brewing a couple of years.