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Greta Thunberg: Little Tyrant?
I’ve listened to portions of her speeches before the UN and Davos, and that’s what she sounds like, a little tyrant.
She’s manipulative as well. There was the case when she rode a German train she said was overcrowded, and where she posted a photo of herself sitting on the floor because she couldn’t find a seat. Turns out she had a first-class ticket with an assigned seat, and the staff on the train made every effort to courteously direct her to that seat.
Reading between the lines from this article on the BBC website, I see parents who are terrified that she will commit suicide if she doesn’t get her way. A comment by her mother on Thunberg’s Wikipedia page also confirms my impression — that she didn’t reduce her carbon footprint because of the climate, but concerns for her daughter.
Swedish child law makes it hard for parents to discipline their children with corporal punishment outlawed. I can see how parents of a difficult child like Thunberg would end up afraid of her. And with both their parents being celebrities in Sweden in their own right, they are especially vulnerable to cancel culture.
I originally thought of Thunberg as a child who was manipulated and brainwashed into what she has become. But if she was, I don’t know that her parents are culpable. They seem like victims who will breathe a sigh of relief when Thunberg is old enough to get out of the house. That won’t make them completely free of her — it will take about 10 years for that — but it will be a big step nevertheless.
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There’s always a tension deciding when a young adult should be considered responsible. I’ve always believed that, in almost all cases, very badly behaved young children are the products of poor parenting. Little kids are, by their nature, selfish and lacking in judgment. More mature guidance is required to shape them into pleasant, thoughtful human beings. There are probably a few exceptions, a few miraculously mature children, just as there are undoubtedly a few who can’t be shaped into decent adults not matter what efforts are made.
I don’t know who is responsible for Greta, and I guess it doesn’t matter to me. She’s the person she is, a rude, graceless, disturbed little creature. Your assessment could be right — wouldn’t surprise me at all — but I’m more perplexed by why so many seem to be enthralled by her. Do that many people enjoy being treated poorly by ignorant scolds? Do they think it frees them of whatever guilt they imagine they’re carrying? Is Greta the scourge with which they flagellate themselves and thus earn absolution for breathing our precious air?
I’m not into that.
And expanding on that insight, do the people who give her a venue in supposedly scientific bodies really convince the undecided of their seriousness?
Remember the basic argument about climate change, that it’s scientifically based. Yet Thunberg is not a scientist, and the focus of her arguments are not scientific.
These people who pretend to seriously listen to her, do no favors to their reputations as sober scientific climate advocates.
I have never been into it, but I understand there is a market for dominatrixes. This may be be a vicarious means to enjoy humiliation without suffering the welts.
First class seat – bad optics.
But I agree, this distrubed child might consider suicide once the world-wide left has dropped her as “an important voice in the fight against man-made climate change”. Once out of the spotlight, she won’t be able to handle the rejection . . .
Don’t paint word pictures that require us to claw our word eyes out.
I think of Greta as a victim of the world’s largest cult. If a kid is raised in a cult, we need to cut them some slack. We should save our condemnation for the adults that perpetuate this cult.
There’s something sick in Swedish culture. There are echoes of it in the other Nordic countries but Sweden seems to be an epicenter.
Me too. I know she’s got cognitive issues, and I can see that she has other developmental problems. She’s clearly a vulnerable cat’s paw of monied ideological interests.
But it’s equally clear she’s a miserable failed human being, and they’re always trouble for everybody. [No that’s not picking on a child. Greta has failed because she’s decided she’s failed. That one so young would fall into that trap speaks especially poorly of Greta – her youth is emphatically not exculpatory.]
The question is whether is is a victim of a cult or is she instead Veruca Salt?
Embrace the illuminating power of and. No matter how much of a cultist she herself turns out to be, she’s clearly enthralled by being elevated to the center of attention.
I was told last week that you don’t say Autism Spectrum Disorder anymore because apparently some people don’t like to be told they have a disorder. Thunberg thinks her autism is a super power. It’s a problem when a group of people who need the world to adjust to accommodate their complex needs can’t accept that this is indeed a serious disorder. God help everyone else when they become activists.
As a brother with 4 sisters, I wouldn’t call women a cult. They would string me up for that.
There was a story two weeks ago that a Facebook glitch had allowed people to see that Greta’s father was one of two adults posting messages in her name to her Facebook page, which makes me think there’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship going here between the parents and child.
Mom may truly be concerned that her daughter might kill herself, but dad apparently has no problem playing to the crowd of supporters who have seized on Thunberg as their latest Absolute Moral Authority prop. And autism or not, a 16-year-old given this much attention by the world’s media and its progressive politicians and celebrities probably can’t help but get a little inflated view of herself, and given teenage self-centeredness, that ego combined with anger has made her come across to others as a bit of a budding totalitarian, even if that ‘Up against the wall‘ remark in Spain really was a Swedish-to-English translation problem.
If I were mom, I probably would have real concerns that daughter’s not going to deal well with the idea a year or two from now that she’s no longer the hot new political face, and they’ve moved on to someone else, just as Cindy Sheehan no longer represented all Gulf War mothers of fallen soldiers, once her usefulness had passed. But she probably also needs to talk with her husband, if he’s the one giving voice to her words and stoking her fears about climate change in order to further that cause.
The British Historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out that little Miss Greta, our savior, has not visited either Beijing or Delhi or publicly ranted on the officials there. The point is that China has been responsible for building approximately 70% of the coal fired power plants of the last decade ( more plant capacity than the US ever had) and India 20% with other East Asian countries responsible for the rest. These coal power plants likely did not adhere to the environmental regulations as would be expected in the US or even Europe, and so these powers plants not only enormously increased the world’s “carbon footprint” – if that even matters, but more importantly to people with real environmental concerns these plants released huge amounts of toxins befouling the whole earth in a real environmental calamity.
Isn’t it interesting that little Miss Greta has chosen not to address these nations that have so befouled the earth but has instead has heavily criticized the Industrial West which likely will have the effect of sending more industry and the need for more coal plants to places like India and China? Could it be she is just another paid agent of China interested in destroying the West’s industrial capacity to give China the upper hand?
Furthermore, China alone has a larger carbon footprint than the United States and Europe combined so if we really need to change the world’s carbon footprint (a highly questionable assertion in the first place) the chances of making the necessary massive reductions in the earth’s total footprint sufficient to make a difference that would save the world from only reductions in both America and Europe seems mathematically very problematic. America has already reduced it’s footprint by over 40% in the last two decades and America and Europe combined account for less than 25% of the world’s carbon footprint.
The truly bizarre thing is that any sensible adult would give the slightest bit of attention to an ignorant, misguided, obnoxious child.
Who do they think she is going to persuade? She must be persuading someone, which in my view, indicates that there are some extremely muddle-headed adults out there.
How did those bananas get to her table? African canaries perhaps.
She doesn’t have to convince anyone. She is just the a prop to rally the cult and weapon to bludgeon opponents with.
My wife and I were actually talking about raising kids in Sweden over the weekend. We’ve been reading a Hedwiga book with our daughter. Hedwiga is a little monster and the book portrays it as good ol’ fun with no consequences or even a mention of adults discouraging her.
I posted this over the weekend and my wife made the comment it’s no wonder Greta is the way she is: https://www.facebook.com/chrishutch13/posts/10157373178897946. We don’t actually know if Sweden is much worse than what we see in most child-raising in the West nowadays but we’ve been a bit disturbed that her books are so popular with parents. Our daughter, Jadwiga, identifies with the girl as she shares a name and both are 7 year old 1st graders but we’ve been using the book as discussion starters with her for what not to do.
All religions have a variation that focuses on the suffering of their followers: some Japanese Buddhists starve themselves to death, some Hindus torture their bodies to advance their spirits, Simon the stylite lived for years on top of a pillar. It only makes sense that this new age Druidism has its own self-flagellators.
Greta Thunberg represents the human desire for divine suffering. Because she is young, supposedly she will die from global warming therefore she is an avatar of Gaia’s wrath.
http://ricochet.com/635937/archives/a-dark-echo-of-christian-martrydom/
How about picture pictures?
“The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades….“
I could be wrong, but I am still inclined to blame the adults around her. I don’t really care what the BBC says about them or what they say about themselves. In a world of 7 billion people, a mentally handicapped adolescent from somewhere adjacent to the Arctic Circle does not become the phenomenon she has without a sophisticated media relations campaign. There are angst ridden teenagers on every city block from Stockholm to Canberra, but only one Greta (or maybe a handful if you count the Parkland kids).
The ones who rise to such prominence don’t do so over their parents objections and without outside help. They are actively aided by sophisticated adults who want to make them the face of some cause or other. Greta herself, I’m inclined to cut some slack. Sure, she sounds like a tyrant. And maybe she’ll never grow out of it. If she still sounds this way at 40, I’ll put it all on her. But for now, she’s a kid, and kids are ignorant and myopic and self-centered as a rule. There’s plenty of reason to hope that like most of us have, she’ll grow up.
I’d like to see some one like Peter Schweizer trace the money flow. He has the Bidens dead to rights.
She is a 13 year old girl putting herself out there to, as she sees it, make a difference.
I applaud her. Most 13 year olds would rather hang out at shopping districts or send 100 texts/hr.
But good for her.
And shame on adults who would criticize her. And shame on adults who would use her.
Mozart began composing at age 5.
Yeah she’s actually just turned 17 I believe. Which does make you wonder about some sort of physical underdevelopment along with the mental problems. Maybe this is typical for those who don’t eat during their growth year.
No, we need to see to it she gets proper treatment for her condition. Once you step into the political arena, you are in combat, regardless of race, creed, culture, national origin, age, sexual preference, etc. If she’s going to keep coming out swinging, she gets everything she deserves coming back at her. Heck, it just might make her wake up to reality . . .
Tell me this isn’t an attempt to compare Mozart to Greta.
It never matters. My first suspicion was when she said “nobody was doing anything.” Her latest, that really showed me this is flipping into insanity, was the remark that we don’t need 100% NET ZERO, we need TOTAL ZERO. Has anyone thought to explain to her what this would really mean? (Probably something like an ancient Pict village, less food choices, cold crowded living, and herding lifestyle).
She’s 17, actually. Some 17-year-olds are leading hidden of lives of dedication to real causes — quietly studying subjects with the view to a career to actually do some good in the world (science and medicine). Other 17-year-olds are just trying to survive real physical threats (unlike climate change) — cancers and contagions that could kill them. Greta is no hero.