By David Futrelle
Breitbart editor-at-large John Nolte got a lot of side-eye yesterday when he suggested in a tweet that 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg deserved a spanking.
It turns out that Nolte wasn’t the only person — or even the only middle-aged man — whose first thought upon seeing Thunberg address the world on the existential issue of our ongoing climate catastrophe was, hmm, I think that teenage girl needs a good paddling!
Here are a few of the others.
Some felt it was her parents who deserved this sort of punishment.
“When you run out of arguments, there’s always hitting” doesn’t really seem like the greatest way to deal with children, or adults.
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Ew, ew, ew, ew! I never want to hear the word “spanking” ever again now.
Fuck your religious fundamentalism, guy, and no, spanking should only be reserved for the worst or not done at all – depending on the child, it can firmly mark the abuser as someone they can no longer confide with.
What has religion done for the environment? Frankly, fuck all. Wars have been fought in the name of religion and that’s caused a ton of damage and still does to this day. It’s only served to oppress people.
Petroleum companies are benefitting from this mentality of how the Earth and everything living on it is stronger than it is.
And, they call liberals unhinged. These cjw’s , or corporate justice warrior have no shame whatsoever.i remember what happened to the parkland kids. I have zero tolerance for these keyboard gangsters. Rememember, what you hate; you become.
I notice that many are comparing her to the Hitler Youth. The projection is quite strong with these Twitterers.
I don’t even get it- ignoring everything wrong with corporal punishment, what are they proposing she be punished for? It’s neither illegal nor immoral to speak in front of congress?
These dipshits are seriously impeding on my sexy time jargon
Some of the most compelling comments I’ve heard on this matter are that men are angry at her because, for once, you have a 16 year old girl out there, with media prescence, that isn’t sexualized.
And, notice how her being 16 years old merits her getting treated like a “little girl”, yet when a 16 year old gets pregnant and wants an abortion, all of a sudden she is an adult and needs to take full responsibility for her actions.
Smarting off to her elders, I think.
David J. Wise’s take gives me the willies. “We should just leave the climate up to God.” Translation: If the world is ending then it’s God’s will, and if anything our job is to speed it along, all hail the Rapture!
Well, that wasn’t a phrase I ever wanted to see. Thanks, David!
Just being a young woman who isn’t dressing for the male gaze is enough to get plenty of hate. Her being in the public eye and criticizing the status quo? I’m kinda worried about her safety, frankly.
I think the thing with climate change deniers is that if they deny that humans created climate change, then they can justify doing nothing. They can think to themselves, “This warming is natural, an act of God. In the bible God said He would never send another flood to wipe us off the face of the earth! That’s why we have rainbows! The ice caps won’t melt and everything will be all right!”
Whereas if they accepted, “Holy shit, we did this to ourselves, and God ain’t said shit about preventing catastrophes against ourselves, look at WW2 and all the other apocalyptic wars! We’re doomed unless we get on this shit now!” they might have to, you know, inconvenience themselves. Or admit a 16-year-old girl was right! Truly the End Times would be upon them.
So instead they lie and suggest barbaric practices like killing people via whipping (and they’re quite wrong if they don’t think the parents would die from being whipped through every town even if no other person laid a hand on them besides the official whipper) and strapping teenage girls for being uppity.
I’m absolutely in awe of Greta and her young comrades; they fill me with hope and joy.
I have to believe she’s just the most visible manifestation of an underlying paradigm shift. I know obviously some kids aren’t interested in climate, and some of the protesters now will fall by the wayside as they get older.
However I won’t allow myself to even contemplate the possibly that the momentum is anything other than irreversible; and that by the time her generation is in charge, climate awareness will just be inherent in the population.
So innate that our current mode of life will be truly baffling to them; like the old craze for radioactive toothpaste or whatever.
If my hypothetical kid turns out to fail twice as hard as Thunberg I’d be so proud.
@Alan Robertshaw
A lot of kids are interested in climate these days though. They know that this is a problem previous generations have created and refuse to solve, and that if they want to survive they’ll need to deal with this one themselves. Their elders have failed, so they’re stepping up to the plate.
I’m hoping both of those things come soon.
I expect future generations will believe that we were very negligent and foolish. I’d say a more accurate comparison is the way we view lead paint today: we knew it was a bad idea then*, we did it anyway. Much like climate change.
*The toxicity of lead has been known for centuries, but during the early 20th century lead lobbying groups worked to cover up the damage that lead does so they could keep turning a profit on leaded gasoline, paints, plastics, and other materials. This is why the US didn’t ban lead paint or leaded fuel until the 1970s. Much like how corporations today deny climate change to make money.
@ naglfar
That’s a much better example.
Or to keep the cosmetics theme; maybe I should have gone with the toxic makeups. Even at the time people knew they were lethal; there were satirical cartoons about it.
I do wonder about climate deniers. I’m sure there are some genuinely ignorant people amongst them; but do the political ones really believe what they say? Or is it a right wing virtue signal (in the technical sense of the phrase)?
Not an original idea with me, but someone else commented on the sad fact that a 16-year-old is “mature” if an adult male wants to have sex with her, but she is “just a child” if she calls adults to task for not safeguarding the only environment we have…
@Alan Robertshaw
Toxic makeup is sadly still a thing. A while back in another thread I discussed it with Lainy. It appears most lipstick still contains lead. I don’t wear makeup much, but when I do, I have to make an effort to search out that which isn’t toxic.
I think most of them have been brainwashed. They’ve convinced themselves it is the truth. I’ve tried to argue with relatives who deny it, and they refuse to even listen to my arguments, nevermind respond. The only thing they believe is what they see on Fox News.
@Ann K
And in the eyes of the right, a 30 year old man is just a boy if he does something wrong, but a grown man if he does something that isn’t wrong but that they don’t approve of.
@Naglfar: The Hitler Youth thing was something spread around by Dinesh “rhymes with mouse trigger” D’Souza.
@Nequam
Sounds right up Dinesh’s alley. I tried reading one of his books once to understand conservative views, but I couldn’t get very far. Every page required the reader to make ludicrously false assumptions that completely conflicted with reality.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-epa-regulated-pollution-2019-8
I get the feeling these guys want to spank a 16 year old girl for other reasons then “punishment”.
As much as I love my parents, they spanked me as a kid. I think it somehow contributed to that being my kink now.
what the heck does “[au]tistic” mean???
And of course, one of them’s an anti-vaxxer too. Remember the days when that shit was mostly associated with left-wing cranks, what we used to call the “crunchy granola” crowd? I’ve noticed that a lot of them have veered from the far-left to the far-right over the last several years; The Huffington Post went from a notorious repository of anti-vaccine propaganda to actively purging it from their pages, while Donald Trump threw anti-vaxxers a bone during his campaign. The same thing happened with 9/11 conspiracy theories; now, for every old-guard Bush-era far-left blogger claiming that Cheney and Halliburton were responsible, you have a far-right YouTuber claiming it was the deep state or the Israelis (and that QAnon is gonna blow it wide open).
Interestingly enough, I clicked on the link to Nolte’s twit…er, uhm, tweet and received the message it wasn’t available.
Not knowing much about Twitter, I’m hopeful this means he took it down, hid it, deactivated it, what have you, because Twitter was spanking someone –and it wasn’t the young lady in question.
I say “more power to her.”
As for these so called “adult men” suggesting she be turned over someone’s knee (a position I loathe with the heat of a billion suns), their words tell me *far* more about their fantasies than I ever wanted to know.
Also, I’m not trying to kink shame anyone who *is* into that. I just grew up seeing far too many instances on TV where the plot called for an adult woman to be turned over her husband’s (or some other significant male in her life) and spanked like a child.
My vision still goes full on red haze today if I have the misfortune to stumble over that image in TV or film.
Again, no intention to shame anyone who is into spanking–just my personal squick.
The idea that Thunberg is mentally unstable is extremely telling (Maxime Bernier, a guy who thought Canada’s Conservative party wasn’t being conservative enough and formed his own party, has touted a similar line). I mean, folks like these have repeatedly established that they think mere deviation from their opinions is a mental illness, so I guess I can almost believe that they’re not being flagrantly ableist against autistic people. Almost.
I read an observation recently that protests didn’t seem to effect any change until relatively recently (as in ~5 years ago). Millennials have ultimately been a complicated bunch, but many have been pretty vocally left-leaning (or maybe the Overton window shifted hard right) and open to socialism. We weren’t making memes about eating the rich, but the prevailing notion that the political system needed to be radically fixed was definitely there. It’s just, look at what happened to Occupy. Look at #metoo, which only became a mainstream force for change a couple of years ago. Look at the broken promises of the Kyoto Accord. It seems less like Gen Z is suddenly ultra-woke, and more like they’ve been, in some sense, better equipped to be more vocal about it. Previous generations were promised one thing and given another. With this coming cohort of young adults, that pretense seems to be gone.