Thunberg and "her cult" were not half as bad as these guys pretend

I mean, these guys = this guy on Australian Sky News - Andrew Bolt - and the guy he comes to interview, Brendan O'Neill.

'Obsessed with doom’: Greta Thunberg has ‘gone bust’
22nd Aug. 2022 | Sky News Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHZym4QG7UQ

As no one is saying they are mere children, I think I can dish it out to them ...

I

It so happens, 0:35 time stamp, the Swedish Church has not pretended she is the successor of Christ.

I was suspecting there was a bad translation with "efterfölgare" - which can mean both "successor" and "follower" - it was not that.

It was actually the word "efteträdare" which clearly means only "successor."

And the context is a tweet from one single parish of the Swedish Church, in Limhamn, which is a fairly hyped part of Malmö where I lived a little less than half my life.

The tweet said "announcement : Jesus from Nazareth has appointed one of his successors, namely Greta Thunberg"

And this tweet from this parish was arguably a bit glib, so a clarification came up, from people of the parish, namely that this referred to following Jesus and about doctrine, and was absolutely not about the role of Saviour.

The bishop of Lund (he doesn't have apostolic succession, but is "successor" of real Catholic bishops who had up to 16th C, a bit like Anglicans) in which Malmö and therefore also Limhamn belong, he criticised this use of twitter. The tweet that was your ultimate source was from December 1st 2018. On December 6, five days later, the parish announced on their last tweet that they were leaving twitter.

Source, if you know Swedish or know someone who does:

Svenska Kyrkan : Nej, Svenska kyrkan har inte utnämnt Greta Thunberg till Jesus efterträdare
https://www.svenskakyrkan.se/ga-till-kallan/nej-svenska-kyrkan-har-inte-utnamnt-greta-thunberg-till-jesus-eftertradare

II

As you mentioned a bit before 1:14 that she was not offering practical solutions, that contradicts your claim on her lecturing the world on how to run their advanced 21st C economies.

If anything, she was lecturing on how not to do it, and it so happens, there is no obligation for someone who calls out a wrong solution as such to provide the right one.

But arguably, she was most of all lecturing on there being something more important than how to run an advanced economy. And that is something that England could have needed to hear in 1846. You have heard of the "Irish Potato Famine" of a "Disaster" ... it would have been a very, very mild disaster hardly hurting anyone and certainly not killing 1 million, if the tenants whose own potato crop had failed had been allowed to eat sufficient from the wheat crop they had grown for the landlord.

But hey, the landlords knew how to run an advanced 19th C. economy. They were contracted to sell most of that wheat into England ... and they did, business as usual. 1 million dead, and they are still not sufficiently blamed for it, as if it were just a question of an independent Ireland (it wasn't) with independent farmers (they were in fact tenants) chosing to trust the potato and dying from that bad wager. Sometimes, "business as usual" is a crime. A bit like the Holodomor in Ukraine. To be fair to the UK, they are not trying to take back parts of Ireland.

Greta Thunberg was not saying how to conduct business as usual. She was not even saying how to conduct business later when you stop doing business as usual. She was just saying, whether right or wrong, that CO2 is one of the items where business as usual is wrong.

And Western depence on petrol and gas has in factplayed into the hands of a Russia that's not sanctioned as hard as it could have been otherwise.

III

1:33 To start.

Thunberg, thank you for noting that TH in Swedish is T, but the first syllable is closer to "tune" (esp. US pronunciation) than to "tun", and "berg" is closer to "berry" than to "burgh."

2:29 You just said she was sixteen.

While in Australia she could not then have married without judicial consent, in some states of the US she could.

That's not a case for calling her a "mere child" ...

IV

5:20 Incredibly backward, incredibly regressive ... I get the thing about people's heating bills. Warmer clothes inside are an option.

I get poor people being angry.

I can imagine there is something to be said against Greta Thunberg. But that is clearly not on the level of the criminal Irish Potato Famine. Which, let me remind you, was not conducted by men listening to a "mere child" of sixteen, but by men who knew their way through the London stockmarket.

I get it, she could even be wrong. I support her ideas half and half because one thing that cutting down fossils would also cut down is transports, and one thing that transports do is delocalise economy. Her measures could contribute to relocalise it.

What I do not get is why Brendan O'Neill is pretending doomsday prophecy is "incredibly backward, incredibly regressive" - as if Doomsday cannot come and we somehow "already discovered that" - there is sth that St. Peter said about people who think that. Look it up in II Peter 3:4 to 7.

Is Brendan O'Neill even Catholic? Or will he be among those who take a breath of pure relief when he hears of two frauds getting killed in Jerusalem, after plaguing the world with their "incredibly backward, incredibly regressive" message and somehow managing to push governments into complying. Because, Apocalypse 11 verse 10 says there will be that type.

If you are calling Miss Thunberg - do pronounce it Tuneberry, I think she likes both tunes and berries, and it's the closest I can get to tell you the Swedish pronunciation in writing - if you are calling her a "doomsday prophet" - in my book you are giving her a compliment, even if you pretty obviously do not mean it as such.

"it's the closest I can get to tell you the Swedish pronunciation in writing" (At least to people who knew IPA only as a beer type - but it would be annoying to copy symbol after symbol from an IPA table to give the phonetic transscription.)

V

5:40 I definitely do think you have a point about shielding a message from criticism by saying "she is a child" ...

When I have argued she was not, I am obviously arguing she did not need such shielding, she could cope with criticism. As long as it is criticism of her message and not of her person.

And I think Brendan O'Neill might have been at least half of the time trying to comply with that rule.

ASIDE:

As I am looking for a way to find an email to either Brendan O'Neill or to Spiked where he's publishing, I am looking at an online podcast from today:

Why fossil fuels are the future
https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/why-fossil-fuels-are-the-future/

Alex Epstein talks to Brendan O’Neill about why human flourishing depends on cheap and plentiful energy.

Alex what? Yes, Alex Epstein. Wonder how close he is to that other Epstein?

OTHER aside:

Miss Tuneberg may have contributed only marginally, but the mine project in Kallak is not going the way of Beowulf Mining. And as one grandmother came from Westrogothia, where Beowulf once ruled (at least in parts near the much later Gothenburg), I do not quite appreciate the abuse of his name by miners. Or, misuse. The County Board has said that the consequences would be too disruptive for a mine calculated to be in use for only 14 years. And so, the applications by Beowulf Mining have been turned down. Vivat Lapponia!/HGL

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallak

Last news according to English wiki is obviously "Before the mine is established, the project needs to be approved by the Swedish environmental court." Sourced in an article from March, stating "Even with the government's concession, the company still has to win approval from a Swedish environmental court and is subject to a long list of conditions."