Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
So what if she doesn't? She can make a lot of good inspiring a segment of people even if she isn't effective at changing the minds of anti-science denialists. Like if that is the yardstick, almost everything fails against it.
It's like an election. One school of thought says you should be motivating your base and you focus on GoTV operations and so forth to drive up excitement and commitment in your base. Another says to prioritize persuasion and appealing to the moderates in the middle who might move one way or another. But it isn't like Biden is going to be convincing the Jan 6th truthers that he really got elected, and that isn't really a relevant political yardstick.
But if you needed to convince the Jan 6th truthers that Trump lost legitimately, would you choose a foreign teenage girl as your communicator?
I'm not sure the base in your analogy needs rallying. The problem are the intransigent/fearful or greedy people who think environmental destruction is preferable to a compromised economy of any duration. We need to get some of those people to change their minds in order to give any better environmental legislation any prospects for passing. And it needs to be the American intransigent who are targeted, because we still have economic weight to throw around globally. Thunberg does nothing to those people who should be targeted other than further entrench them.
Then again I don't know that there is any way to reach those we need to reach. That points to a fatalist tinge to Thunberg's ascension, giving up on trying to communicate and just saying what you what to say however you want to say it with no real goal in mind other than the projection of your ideology- in other words just giving up totally and trading material progress for some temporary gratification which is better than nothing.