Thanks, seitan.

Pretty impressive, finding 1900kg of cocaine worth around €95M.

There’s always cocaine money in the banana stand.

You don’t damage 100+ years of history by an artist so groundbreaking that he is a household name to this day just to get your name in the papers.

They didn’t.

Depends on your definition of ‘damage’ - if a drop of soup gets under the plexiglass, I’m not clutching any pearls. If the paintings were completely destroyed, I would not be supportive.

That said its a moot point because these headline grabbing demonstrations have been nondestructive. Stonehenge is fine. The sunflowers will continue to be sunflowery.

irreplaceable cultural artifacts

I mean it won’t be exactly the same, but I’m pretty sure they can buy more of that plexiglass that got soup’d. Calling plexiglass a cultural artifact feels like a bit of a stretch, but I do think it’s replaceable.

But what about The Economy®™?!? We can’t possibly have Apple only make 10s of billions of dollars in profit instead of 100s of billions of dollars because we made the price of goods destroying our planet more expensive!

If we start to make the cost of goods proportional to the associated environmental destruction, I won’t be able to buy the 12th pair of Nikes for my shoe collection. I might have to wear my clothes more than once, and GASP, take public transit places.

Like sure, our grandkids may get to grow up in a world looking like something out of Mad Max, but at least I wouldn’t have to suffer any inconveniences to my lifestyle.

Getting a couple of ounces of soup on a picture frame is hardly the “vandalism of art” people are making it out to be.

I know Lemmy has mixed feelings here, but I personally applaud these activists for risking prison time to draw attention to a major existential threat.

I find it quite entertaining to see all the art aficionados coming out so shook by them getting a little bit of soup onto some plexiglass and a picture frame that they probably couldn’t even describe before these incidents. Close your eyes, Is it walnut or cherry? Painted or oil finished? Ornate or simple? 5 or 7 inches wide? Symmetrical or asymmetrical along a horizontal axis?

These protests, which thus far have involved basically zero actual damage of cultural significance have driven significantly more attention (good and bad) to their cause than anything else that has been done. Their protests are non-violent and generally nondestructive.

That said, the real crime here is the judge sentencing 2 years in prison for getting some soup on the frame of a painting - I don’t support violent protests, but I’m pretty sure you could just go around and slap oil CEOs in the face for a fraction of the sentence.

Agreed! I feel like now, while we’re thinking about these very charismatic creatures, might be a good time to remind folks about cattle, who form strong social and familial bonds

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159114003128

We show that the dam and calf express behaviour suggestive of a strong bond even in the absence of nursing.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/cattle-family-bovidae

Cattle are naturally social animals and form small herds, the composition of which varies according to the species

The entire herd not only feeds and moves around as a colossal single unit, but individual animals will also gather around an injured or sick animal if it is threatened by predators

https://animalequality.org/blog/2024/08/19/dairy-industry-hurts-cows/

To keep the milk flowing, farmers artificially inseminate her about once per year.

A strong bond forms between the mother and her baby immediately after birth. Within a day or two, the mother cow will be separated from her calf. She will cry for her missing baby for days.

A male calf is considered useless to the dairy industry because he cannot produce milk. If he isn’t raised and sold for beef, this baby will likely be sold to the veal industry.

Food for thought

Hard to have infinite growth without infinite growth.