Spanish climate activists sprayed red paint across a superyacht owned by billionaire Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie in Barcelona on Friday, the second time the yacht has been the target of protests in the past two months.
Everyone’s complaining that this doesn’t do anything and is counter productive, but you know what this looks like to me?
Propaganda of the deed. Someone will look at this and think “I know better things to spray her superyacht with than paint…”
Make sure it’s something that will take her servants an extra hard time to clean
The bottom of the ocean would be pretty hard to clean.
They should put the billionaire on the bottom of the ocean, not the boat. The boat might be useful for something.
Billionaire’s yacht? Hardly. But it may be scrapped. Expensive furniture and tech sold, high quality engine and parts repurposed.
Yeah, then her servants would have to start filing paperwork and have another yacht pulled out of storage while they design the new one.
Not if the bottom-of-the-ocean thing happens when the oligarch in question is on board.
ADMIRALTY ORDERS
To Cpt. S. Technique
‘Intercept Walmart billionaire’s megayacht KAOS en route to extinction, INTENT ON CARRYING US ALL TO THOSE WATERS…Sink, Burn, or take her a Prize’
As an added bonus lots of chemicals and crap will be put into the environment.
Yup this sounds productive to vandalize someone’s boat.
Supposedly they used biodegradable paint. On that measure, you can’t fault them.
Tell us you didn’t read the article without saying that. Plus even if they had used normal paint, that’s literally nothing compared to what this yacht does on a regular basis.
Good. Symbolic protests are a way to surface issues suppressed by the dominant ideology. If it gets any media coverage it is a success.
All billionaires are ethically in the wrong.
Not really but this one in particular is the Michael Jordan of drunk driving and I believe got away with manslaughter.
Yes, really. There are no ethically sound reasons for a person to have all this money when there is so much inequality. Moreover, there is no ethical ways to accumulate all this money. If you are billionaire either you or your daddy had to do a lot of explicitly unethical shit, and in order to retain it, you have to do unethical shit, actively, right now.
Capitalism, no matter how benign, and well intended, is literally exploiting labor from those who are lesss fortunate. And thanks to that malignant leprechaun Milton Friedman, every MBA since thinks that they’re legally bound to maximize dividends for investors instead of compensating the people who do the actual production. It’s obscene, sociopathic, and literally evil. But if Jeebus didn’t want them to rich, they wouldn’t be, right?
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Bigot.
Expound.
Fuck yeah. They should live in constant and non-stop fear of the people they hoard from
“Fear”
You really think they give a shit? About something like this? They just pay someone $200 to clean the yacht. Sink it and they just buy a new one. This isn’t anything.
Lol you haven’t seen many rich people have you? This is definitely something they fear.
Then they have a weird way of showing it. They’re doing an awful lot of hoarding and exploitation for somebody within pitchfork distance.
I honestly hope you are correct.
The rich know there will always be people who will tell you you’re protesting wrong.
Oh ok. That’s fair I guess if you’ve found a better way. What have you done?
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Ok how many unions or political organizations are you directly involved in? If the answer isn’t something above bare minimum then I’m still firmly on team fuck superyachts.
Are you the person that spray painted the yacht? If not, then you’re just talking shit and doing nothing.
That’s better than telling people doing anything to stop 🙃
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I stopped shopping at Walmart and started shopping on Amazon. By switching what billionaires I support I am going my part.
Sad thing is, Amazons profit margins on their shopping shit is razor thin. It’s AWS that is making bank, and that’s like half of the servers on the internet.
They SHOULD, but this won’t accomplish that.
Let’s think of something better.
Look no further than medieval French engineering!
Time for some TrebuchetMemes?
Did you know a trebuchet can use a counterweight to throw a 90KG projectile over 300 metres?
All jokes aside, and we might agree in some specifics -
Any new order that was established needs to limit the violence as much as possible. Because revolutionary violence as often as not eats the children of revolution.
In the meantime though…
Good read
Wouldn’t hurt to complement it with one of their more modern techniques - large crowds using Carbon Dioxide, Water Vapor, Nitrogen and Oxygen
Governments should stop billionaires. Tax them 100% income tax after a certain amount of income, tax them 50%% of their networth yearly after a certain amount of value.
The government is now controlled, more or less, by said billionaires - too late?
I don’t think there ever was a time where not the richest were in power. From warlords to kings and now politicians in the pockets of CEO’s or shareholders by extension, people in power amass riches and with it more power.
Your post makes it sound like it was any different in the past. I certainly don’t remember that.
Nah, there’s more to tinker with, but fixable.
100% agreed, billionaires should not exist. It’s absolutely disgusting that they do. They’ll take and take and take and take some more. If you haven’t seen it yet, please check out this site visualizing Jeff Bezos’ wealth. These people believe that they owe nothing to a society that gave them the tools, infra, security, and workforce for their companies to succeed. The level of excess is really unfathomable, and this chart is like Power of Ten for helping you understand the difference in a few zeros.
How dare these activists do anything other than overthrowing the government and instituting a socialist utopia. I just can’t support this.
it’s a great start.
More mandatory overtime for her staff. She’ll never know it happened unless one of her social media managers sees it on Twitter and mentions it to her.
And then they buy more red spray paint on Amazon because Walmart was out .
Side note, didn’t the movie company make bank from people buying those V for Vendetta masks to protest against corporations or something? Vague memory of it
Yeah, between Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street those masks were very profitable for the people being protested against.
I’m sure their brief and ultimately pointless unpopularity was well compensated for by those extra revenues.
That’s what I don’t get.
The owner of the yacht doesn’t give a shit. It’s beneath them.
Those activists just made a headache for the working class crew who run the yacht.
Good work sticking it to the man’s working class employees! /S
They got their message on international news, and they did it targeting the super wealthy instead of blocking traffic or otherwise hindering innocent people. Frankly I don’t care if the crew has a ‘headache’ being paid to clean up some biodegradable paint, they’re just being paid for one task instead of another. What actual harm of any kind has this done? The benefit might be small but it’s nonzero unlike what most of us are doing.
they did it targeting the super wealthy instead of blocking traffic or otherwise hindering innocent people
Reminds me that the point of protest is to be disruptive. Oh, you’re blocked on your way to do your job? Your job is to do your job, not to fight other workers on behalf of your employer
I don’t get the whole ‘protest should not ever inconvenience anyone, ever’ line of thinking- if I’m travelling for work and I get stuck in traffic behind a protest, I bill my time and that’s how I pass the disruption signal along to where it needs to land
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They’re creating jobs by fucking up the yacht aren’t they?
Or is it only billionaires that “create jobs” when they fuck up the entire world?
Because targeted vandalism is easier and more satisfying to animalistic urges than the long work of organizing political backing, running for office, enacting societal change
Mate people have been trying all that since the 70s and it didn’t achieve much
Let’s make it a third time
Uhoh we’re out of paint
Manure is pretty cheap.
Also, manure is a good source of potassium nitrate…
What an incendiary thought.
Yeah the people in this thread are full of it lol
Scuttle it next time.
We gotta get the orcas in on this one.
Send in the orcas!
I love it. God bless us every one.
It would be super easy to get away with sinking known billionaire yachts worldwide if you do it right.
warg into the orcas?
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ITT: People who don’t think $100m+ yachts have countermeasures for attacks like this.
Yeah, one of the big countermeasures being the people who live on board, as in, the crew. I hope they can sleep at night knowing they killed a working class schmuck. Fire, or these more outlandish ideas of explosives and scuba shit, will almost certainly get the crew members if it’s enough to actually sink a yacht like this.
Hey look part of the crew died. Part has serious ptsd. And all that are left alive just lost their jobs. Meanwhile the billionaire has the boat insured so he gets his money back.
Super yachts are built similar to cruise liners. Compartmentalised below the water line. You breach one, it gets detected and will seal it off. They are obviously gonna be connected to several alert systems and will notify the owner or whomever is in charge of maintenance. If anyone does manage to damage the hull, gonna have to do it more than once.
Scuba certified activists. Sabotage the hull or fuck up the prop.
How do you sink a boat that big? Get a drill that can work under water? Explosives are too hard to make. Maybe burn it with a Molotov?
For a boat that big, you can get into the idea of an economic loss. For example, flooding the engine room for long enough can ruin the engines, and make the cost and time of repair high enough that you can practically rebuy the boat with the price.
Obviously it is insured, but insurance goes up when you’re the target of economic terror attacks (To think I live in world where I get to type that sentence). Also there would be the wait for a new vessel. And maybe… just maybe, the Waltons might think, “hey, maybe some people are upset we have a $110 million boat while our employees are on food stamps.”
I suppose if your goal is mere spite, making it no longer an enjoyable benefit for her to have a personal yacht would be a win.
Underwater cutting torch. Edit: now I’m bullshitting. No idea whether somebody would get sucked into the hole or whether there are underwater cutting rigs that don’t rely on surface support.
Yeah you wouldn’t even have to make a circle, just hold it there for a little bit.
Maybe make a few in different places.
I’d go with a thermite fire started by a drone. Much easier to do and harder to stop. Enough thermite will burn all the way through the boat, burning it and sinking it all at once.
That’s not a practical solution. Ukraine is using practical solutions with drones.
It wouldn’t work for Ukraine because their Drones are being shot at. For a super yacht sitting on a private marina? Totally would work. A couple pounds of thermite and a flair that can be remotely ignited. Land it on the deck press the button, it’ll burn to the haul before they even get the hoses.
Hmmm. I guess for this mental exercise i was thinking of the way to do it that would def land your ass in jail if caught but would avoid bonus penalty charges for things that spectacularly go kaboom for political reasons.
Obviously the classics are still known for a reason. Everyone is saying fire but I think if we put our heads together we could summon the kraken.
A spokesperson for Marina Port Vell said that the boat had not been damaged in Friday’s action. “After a quick action on behalf of the security team, the incident has been corrected and the boat is now in a perfect state,” the spokesperson told CNN.
Cannot stress enough that a new paint job is not the kind of action that’s going to fix jack shit. More than likely, it’s barely an annoyance. Few people on the planet have not heard the message already. If you don’t want them joyriding a massive yacht everywhere, remove the yacht.
So, while you’re entirely correct, someone on the team of “let’s harass the inconceivably wealthy” would probably still appreciate this action because it’s better than nothing.
It’s also possible they’re trying to get the media to cover it more, rather than cause actual property damage
And end up like Will Van Spronsen, who was called a terrorist and demonized by almost everyone for doing good. (Reddit would suspend your account just for mentioning him.)
The super wealthy’s propaganda tools are more powerful than ours because they control the media, and there aren’t as many people who are awake to what’s happening as you might think. I’m all for direct action like what you describe, but we still need the red paint to make people aware of what’s going on. And I promise, it does do something. What do the unlovable rich want that they can’t buy? Love and respect. (Look at fucking Elon, that pathetic insect.)
I recently read a sci-fi book called “Station Six” by an anarchist author who goes by S.J. Klapecki. Let me quote one of the characters:
He wants to live like good King Arthur, loved and cherished and appreciated by his serfs. I like throwing a wrench into that. I think it’s important. And, who knows, maybe the next set of malcontents will learn something from us. I doubt it, but there’s my optimism for ya.
You and I look at the activists pictured and think, “What was the point,” but the majority of people are still learning their ABCs of why this whole system is fucked. Sure, I’d have preferred the ship got destroyed completely, but these folks still did a brave act that has hit that sweet spot where it will get media attention without being entirely buried like a Will Van Spronsen (who, for the record, is a god damn hero and I’m not disparaging him at all).
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Not sure whose disinformation campaign you’ve been hearing, but he set fire to unoccupied buses, not “trying to blow up a building with people in it”
But I’m sure the fascists are happy someone from sh.itjust.works came along to defend them. What a shocker.
Edit: What I should have said is “exhibit A” – This is why we still need the red paint, so thank you for illustrating my point
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Are you volunteering?
Uh. Lemme check. Yes. We’re well past the “please stop killing me, it’s really mean :(” stage. They know. They are choosing to jetset anyway.
If the disgustingly rich haven’t shifted their focus by now, they’ve basically made their stance known already and stuff like this strikes me as just toying around. It makes activists feel like they accomplished something, and then it’s rectified quite literally the same day and everyone continues about their business.
Wanna join in or would your parents worry?
So what have you done yourself? Stolen any boats?
It’s too easy to sit and criticise other peoples protests from the comforting you gaming chair.
And yet, here we are talking about it. Sometimes keeping the conversation going is in itself a win.
