From the article: *Large SUVs were particularly affected. According to the police, notes were attached to the cars indicating that they were harmful to the climate. The tyres were not punctured, but merely deflated. The cars were parked in the area between the S-Bahn line and Elbchaussee around Kanzleistraße. *

Personally, I like this protest way more than glueing themselves to the streets, causing traffic jams where cars burn gasoline for hours and ambulances / firefighters / police gets stuck, putting innocent life in danger.

The article is in German. Warning: this link leads to google translate.

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84 points

No form of protest is acceptable to liberals (let alone conservatives). When you peacefully protest, no one pays attention, when you damage private property, everybody screams, when you are disruptive while not damaging said private property, you’re still a dick. So who cares, keep on going.

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36 points

The problem is protests like these hurt working class families. Folks just trying to get by. In my area, you can’t exist without a car. If you want to protest do something that affects the decision makers. People like me have no power.

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17 points
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18 points

this “but the working class need to move around” tend to also be the first that complain when a bike or bus lane are made.

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16 points

I wonder how many people on the receiving end even change their mind. I feel like if anything they’d completely reject the cause that is trying to be pushed, and the end result is a circle jerk between people who were already in agreement.

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13 points
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Well, if they want to go shopping right now, chances are for this one trip they’ll take their spouses smaller car, public transport or maybe even walk. If SUVs become generally unreliable (because you never know if you have air in your tires when you need it), people will look for something more reliable. They’ll bitch about it, they won’t act out of conviction or so, but who cares.

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7 points

These type of actions do have an effect in SUV sales though.

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11 points

they mostly target SUVs. Also people of higher income are way more likely to have SUVs and use them more often.

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They target SUVs and alike. In what area do you live that a much more affordable and less gasoline consuming car wouldn’t work for you?

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12 points

I live in rural Michigan where we get several feet of snow each year. I drive a 10 year old used Jeep that was bought in cash with money we saved up so we could have a car that would handle the weather, our family, and the long distances we have to travel to work or shop.

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14 points

SUVs are justified in rural communities where there either the weather or terrain make small vehicles unviable at best and outright dangerous at worst. I have family in rural Spain who have an SUV because they live halfway up a mountain and a car that can tackle driving along a dried up riverbed was essential. It’s less wasteful to keep an SUV for 10 years than buy a small car and have it destroyed by unforgiving terrain in less than 6 months.

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24 points

I’m pretty sure that Hamburg isn’t such an area, and that SUV’s are a totally unecessery folly there. This isn’t hurting working class families. (Also, people like you do have power, organize)

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7 points

Yeah, they should’ve thought of that before being too poor to buy multiple vehicles for each situation.

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33 points

In the areas of Hamburg that have been targeted not one single person needs an SUV. We have reliable public transport that’s easily accessible to wheelchairs or strollers as well. So yeah, it did target the right people.

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5 points

To what end? Do SUV owners write bills? Will inconveniencing nonpolitical randos get anyone talking about the issues, let alone talking about them without souring the discussion for climate activists, who now look like vindictive assholes?

This reads like petty vengeance against people with marginally larger carbon footprints and with the wrong kind of social performance, not genuine activism. If you’re gonna slash tires, do it to the politicians ffs.

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10 points
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It depends on what the goal of the protest is and an assessment of whether the act is going to actually be successful in bringing about the change they want.

If that isn’t taken into account it’ll just make people more ingrained in their beliefs, and possibly increase hatred towards the groups and the cause overall. Which can just lead to increased conflict and increase extremists on both spectrums.

Sometimes then the cause just devolves into people on both sides just reveling in getting to act out their primal desires.

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9 points

If you own a SUV and you know there is a risk of your tires being deflated by taking it to the city center (or if it has happened to you already), you will probably avoid it.

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4 points

Exactly. They’re clearly just asking for it. There is not a single legitimate need for vehicles like that or to take them places they are allowed to go and so we can accurately assess the culpability of the owner and punish them accordingly just based off of their vehicle type and where it is.

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21 points

I’m a liberal, I can field this one. The form of protest I find acceptable is destruction of government and corporate property, but not working-class peoples’ houses and mom-and-pop businesses. Is it really so much to ask to have rioting confined to productive activities, such as trashing city hall, looting Amazon DCs, destroying private jets and yachts, assaulting corrupt politicians, tarring and feathering billionaires, and burning down police stations? The establishment has successfully recuperated progressive protest by tricking people into associating it with low-level domestic terrorism, “we get what we want or maybe your houses burn down”; what we should be doing is repeatedly yanking the choke chain on the state and the 1% so hard their eyes pop out.

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8 points
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Trashing “city hall” isn’t productive.

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3 points

Let me just skip the implications and address your real meta point: no I am not a January 6 apologist or sympathizer.

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5 points

There are always going to be a “protest/activism is good but this is unacceptable” for any act of disobedience.

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