Come on. Civil disobedience is a cornerstone of peaceful, democratic protest. Every black American who sat at a white lunch counter or in the white seats on a bus was breaking the law and "causing a public nuisance."

As for putting aircraft at risk, the Economist won't actually let me read the article (I wish people would stop posting links to sites like this), but I doubt they actually put anyone in danger. It's like the environmentalists who spiked trees to stop loggers--they clearly marked the affected trees, they openly informed the loggers of what they'd done, and even if they went ahead anyway, a properly maintained saw has safety measures that would prevent injury. But they were still spun as trying to murder loggers.

Is this a good, effective, worthwhile protest? I dunno. But there's got to be more a more coherent argument you could make.

This is not civil disobedience.

Flying drones to shut down an airport is nothing like sitting in the white seats of a bus. That's a ludicrous comparison.

Such drone attacks are dangerous (they do put aircrafts at risk), affect thousands of people, cause millions in damage, and, simply put, are lightweight terrorism. It is quite right that the article open with a reference to the IRA attacking Heathrow airport with empty mortar rounds to shut it down. This is exactly the same thing.

And it is completely ineffective. The only result is to alienate the majority of the public.

Of course, you are completely entitled to your opinions, but I'm not going to engage them because I don't think you're really interested in having an open discussion about this.

Why do I say that? Because in response to a pre-planned demonstration from a group that has made abundantly clear that they intend to engage in acts of civil disobedience that are 100% non violent, you have used the words "drone attack", "terrorism" and have likened them to the IRA.

I'm pretty confident I have absolutely no chance of changing your mind here, but it would mean a lot to me if you were to just consider for a moment your choice of words and what they say about your tolerance to people who hold different opinions to you.

>but it would mean a lot to me if you were to just consider for a moment your choice of words and what they say about your tolerance to people who hold different opinions to you.

>I'm not going to engage them because I don't think you're really interested in having an open discussion about this.

>I'm pretty confident I have absolutely no chance of changing your mind here

What's that about tolerance of other's opinions?

So far these people interfering with the airport operations have been compared to India fighting the British for independence, African Americans fighting for their civil rights and people hiding Jews from the Nazis. And you want people to take your arguments seriously?

Well, for starters, you are literally quoting me out of context. How about quoting me properly instead of making yourself look ridiculous?

> Of course, you are completely entitled to your opinions, but I'm not going to engage them because I don't think you're really interested in having an open discussion about this.

I feel like I shouldn't need to point out how this disproves your implication that I'm not tolerant of other people's opinions. But maybe I actually do. Yikes. Acknowledging that someone else holds a differing view but choosing not to engage with it is something I consider completely reasonable. Maybe you don't, and hey, that's cool! It's your opinion after all :) In case it wasn't obvious though, due to my forceful tone, I do want to state unequivocally for the record that not only do I respect that you might hold opinions that are incompatible with my own, but I also accept your conflicting opinions are 100% valid. If I then come up with rebuttals (even if they're worded as angry internet justice warrior rants), it's not because I think you're fundamentally an idiot, but because what you're saying makes me angry enough that I want to try and get you to look at things a different way. That's not intolerance. That's social discourse.

> So far these people interfering with the airport operations have been compared to India fighting the British for independence, African Americans fighting for their civil rights and people hiding Jews from the Nazis. And you want people to take your arguments seriously?

Actually, I didn't make those comparisons. So why are you making strawmans of other people's arguments and using them to discredit me?

>Because in response to a pre-planned demonstration from a group

Has anyone actually checked if extinction rebellion actually has any plans to fly drones round Heathrow? Currently we are taking a very vaguely worded article from the Economist at face value. Not to cast aspersions, but the Economist does talk a lot of bollocks sometimes.

The Economist is one of the most serious source in the business.

And yes, this is factual and does not come from the Economist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48470623

This is absurd moral grandstanding; you took three paragraphs to say "my opinions > your opinions." If you're going to do this at least don't try and pretend to be following the HN guidelines.

I respect people with different opinions. I do not respect people who try to impose their opinions through criminal and reckless actions.

By the way, I have not likened their actions to the IRA's, the article does that based on fact. That's obviously a very disturbing and inconvenient fact to you but that's a fact nonetheless.

Again, what they are doing is not civil disobedience and has no place in a democratic country.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, let alone Godwinesque ones.

Quite right. Disobedience is being told by an immoral law to do something immoral. Such as to turn in a fugitive slave, etc, and then not complying.

This action is actively committing acts to interfere with people who are engaged in exercising their rights as free human beings.

>Every black American who sat at a white lunch counter or in the white seats on a bus was breaking the law

Are you seriously comparing sitting on a bus in the wrong seat (harmful to no one, costs to no one) to interfering with airplanes with a drone (potentially harmful, costly to others)?

>As for putting aircraft at risk, the Economist won't actually let me read the article (I wish people would stop posting links to sites like this), but I doubt they actually put anyone in danger

"I can't read the article, but I'll talk about it anyway..."

Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens. Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.

> Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens. Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.

Sure, but it's also a vastly more complex problem. Those examples consisted of specific regimes which protestors wanted to change in specific ways, and making enforcing the law more trouble than it was worth for those regimes was a simple and logical route to achieving that change.

I don't see the same logical connection between the large-scale technological and institutional change across the entire globe needed to avert climate change and some guy in London with a drone ruining people's holidays.

If you're trying to achieve complex behavioural changes as opposed to rendering a bad law unenforceable, it's probably a good idea not to pursue a strategy consisting solely of irritating the general public.

>Without breaking laws and causing public nuisance India would still be part of the British Empire and African Americans would still be second class citizens.

Every protest isn't the equivalent of India fighting for independence.

>Climate change is a vastly more serious problem than either of those two.

Fortunately, you don't get to decide which issues are "most important" to other people.

Unfortunately with climate change nobody gets to decide, because physics decides for us.

So, you're saying global extinction isn't important?

It's a tough line to swallow from the GP, but I wasn't expecting anyone to disagree that human effected climate change was important. Surely it's the most important issue humans have faced, ever?

Problems can be profoundly serious and important in their own right, without needing to be ranked against one another.

Doing that just leads to emotion-charged-but-pointless arguments.

Global extinction? No, we shouldn’t make trillion dollar policy decisions based on fairy tales.

This hypothetical situation is bordering on the absurd, I think. XR has made it abundantly clear what they intend to do, and when + how they intend to do it. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I would venture that the chances of their actions causing a plane to go down are so extraordinarily slim that it's an utter waste of time to discuss the implications of it happening.