Toot link; transcript:
Greta Thunberg could have, by now, carved out a very comfortable life for herself as a liberal grifter-celebrity offering platitudes about personal responsibility at Davos. Instead she connected the dots between ecocide, capital, and empire, aiming squarely at the heart of the beast. And now fresh out of captivity she downplays her own suffering to recenter the urgency of aid to the Palestinian people. No wonder she’s hated by the fascist+lib coalition that rules this world.
Author: JP (@jpbreton@mastodon.social)
why did you hate her?
Nothing wrong with her. I was just sexist, ageist and a coward.
Saw a woman trying her best to make a change and getting praised for it. Decided she was somehow annoying and didn’t deserve all the attention she was getting.
Well, I’m not like I used to be.
It takes genuine courage to confront your own biases and outgrow them, you should be proud
Sick personal growth, dude. Love to see it
Abso-fucking-lutely well said. Kudos to you for having the strength of character to admit your failings and be able to reflect on them. A willingness to say “I was wrong” without throwing a tantrum or doubling down is sorely needed in this world.
good on you for escaping your toxic past self.
Welcome to the Former Bigots Club! Membership perks include randomly cringing at a memory of past convictions, profound sadness when you see other people stuck in that same pit of hatred and occasionally imposter syndrome making you wonder if you’re really a good person.
Thank you for sharng this. I really needed to see an example of being decent and growing today.
Congrats on the growth.
Wow, what a nice self-reflection, congrats sir
I have tears in my eyes reading this.
I am proud of you.
Thanks
I really really REALLY want to hear ONE sentient answer to this question. I cannot understand it. I can’t even understand the ROUTE your logic would take.
Yes, there are influencers out celebrating their own actions a bit too much for promotional purposes. The worst I’ll ever feel for them is rolling my eyes and not caring about them.
I want to believe I could be convinced otherwise, but I almost feel like regardless of what circumstances you were built up around or how you learned about a person like her, there has to be something fundamentally wrong with you to have hatred for someone showing concern for the world’s path of self destruction, and putting themselves at risk for everyone’s sake to try to resolve it.
It is taught and conditioned behavior, and that conditioning can be deep. The answer may never get any more satisfying than that.
I’m a middle aged white guy raised in 80s and 90s white conservative america. Looking at somebody trying to do something good for themselves or others and thinking “what a dumbass/asshole” feels as natural as breathing when that’s how the role models in your life have always acted.
And the fun part with that conditioning is that some of the knee-jerk reaction feelings still get sent out from those tangled old neurons.
Follow up question if you will: What changed for you?
As you say, the conditioning is there and deep. What triggered you to re-evaluate your stances on beliefs so deeply held?
I’m also a middle aged white guy raised in the 80’s. My parents were democratic, but even I fell for some of right-wing propaganda when I was old enough to vote, but didn’t have world experience. It’s insidious. I can only imagine I’d still be there, if not for my social structure guiding me towards a more progressive understanding of the world.
They responded over here, but I’ll contribute my own experience.
I think it’s really hard to understand bigoted thinking if you have never been a bigot yourself. There’s a certain emotional logic behind the need to feel superior that all too easily twists your brain into fabricating or accepting bullshit premises. On those premises, you can then build a logical framework to rationalise your hatred. It’s not that the logic itself is necessarily unsound, but even a formally correct conclusion can be false if its premises are.
Essentially, it’s not the route, but the starting point.
If you can suspend your disbelief for the sake of an example, suppose you didn’t believe that climate change was really that serious. There are numerous ways to come to that conviction, but I’ll pick one for the example and say you’re scared of change and it’s more comfortable for your brain to shut out the worries and tell itself it’s another baseless fad.
Regardless of the specific example, I think we agree that people tend to jump on hype trains even if they’re bullshit. There are also plenty of people riding such trains to prominence and success – for recent examples, look at all the AI or Crypto grifters. They exploit the attention a topic gets to capitalise on gullibility. Isn’t it justified to hate Sam Altman, for example?
You might be able to guess the next step from here, because it’s not actually illogical in itself. If climate change is a hoax, the people believing in it are gullible. Those who capitalise on such gullibility are grifters. Under those premises, people who exploit the attention climate change gets to garner fame and prominence are grifters, and it is right to hate them.
The logic is sound enough. The reason the conclusion is false isn’t that the logic is bent, it’s that the premise is. And that premise is sustained by an emotional factor, which is ultimately very human.
The upside is that bigotry can sometimes be broken out of.
In my case, bitterness at my own situation fueled resentment against “SJWs”, whom I perceived as entitled in their demands for accommodation and respect, because I myself didn’t have much support or respect. Petty jealousy, born of misery. Why should I go out of my way to indulge them? Why should they have a better life at my expense?
You might be able to spot the error already, but I took a long time to even get to the point where I could look for it in the first place. I slowly found a few reasonable people among the progressives, then a few more, then eventually many more until I was faced with two contradictions: For one, these people generally seemed respectful, even towards me in my cautious forays into their spheres, instead of the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth keyboard warriors I expected. Secondly, it didn’t actually cost much effort to respect their wishes.
The root error was that they didn’t want a better life at my expense, but to my benefit as well. A more accepting, inclusive world would be more pleasant for me too. They weren’t my enemy. Where I expected a fist, I found an outstretched hand.
That realisation was the start of a painful journey of reprogramming myself. I don’t think I’ll ever be fully done. The best I can do is try to make fertiliser of the pile of shit my past self was. That’s why I write this, in the hope that it will help someone understand their “enemy” a little better. And just maybe, it will help get someone else out of that miserable pit of hatred.
Not op but I can take a stab. How often do we see empty patronizing platitudes from those privileged enough to make them without consequence… often all it is are just words. So much so that when you see someone taking a public stand, especially someone as young as Greta was when she entered the public spotlight, it’s easy to just be a jaded bitter asshole, rolling your eyes at some foreign tween who thinks that she’s going to fix the world’s problems. How naive she is. There’s no way she’s actually going to make an actual impact other than bringing groans from those who would see her fail.
We often hate those who are closest to us we envy for having the conviction that we lack.
Not OP either, and I’ll take yet another stab. All I was exposed to of her early on are the “HOW DARE YOU” sound bite repeated ad nauseum and the headlines of how people responded to her UN speech in the in conservative-liberal msm news mill. Months or maybe a year later I’ve actually bothered to watch the full speech, and realize that she’s not talking to all of humanity as a whole but indeed the world leaders. They stole not just her childhood and future, but by all accounts my childhood and future as well, solely for their and their friends and their descendants gains. All of ours. If someone feels like “No! Not me! I’m fine!”, they are just deluding themselves.
It’s easy to get blinded by corpo owned media’s agenda. It’s harder to be empathetic and recognize the point of view of someone who has been portrayed as an endearing laughing stock and dismissed for being just a child.
Ah so it’s self hatred.
Ressentiment?
In my case, it was mostly sexism.
Yes, but you qualified that with “from those privileged enough”. Greta was never politically powerful by herself.
Besides, you also said your response is to roll your eyes; to ignore her, at absolute worst. I have done that too. I’ve gotten mail from dozens of charities about being SO CLOSE to fixing some problem like homelessness or bee colony collapse, and scoffed at their constant efforts for my attention. But I don’t HATE them. I don’t enlist efforts to burn down those charities. I don’t take time out of my day to try to prescribe harm to them.
You HAVE to have some truly despicable damaged core to do such a thing.
Don’t underestimate the power of the slur “westoid” and other similar ones. In much of the world, westerners are automatically coded as naive, idealistic and ultimately stupid. In Greece, we had our fair share of do-gooders who thought they new better than us trying to fix us. The classic cultural example is the film Never on Sunday, which is basically all about the comical journey of an American classicist from naivety to understanding. Even now, in 2025, a prevailing understanding of the 10 years of financial crisis is that austerity was about prudish narrow minded Germans and other westerners ruining our country by enforcing their naive protestant economic superstitions on us. And Greece is an EU & NATO country mind you. So, a swedish schoolgirl going around lecturing people fits the “westoid” stereotype a bit too much.
(I’m explaining, not endorsing. Greta is based as fuck.)
The answer I generally hear as to why people dislike young activists, not just Greta Thunberg, is that they overly simplify problems.
But this is usually an argument put forward by people who over complicate problems as a defense mechanism. If it’s complicated, I don’t have to do anything.
You have to remember that everyone is the hero of their own journey. So when a 90 pound teenage girl says you’re doing a bad job at something, you dismiss her, and when you can’t dismiss her, you villify her so you remain the good guy. You do this because denigrating a teenager takes only slightly more effort than doing nothing, and infinitely less effort than doing the right thing.
The truth of the matter is that nearly every problem is simple. The complicated part is getting everyone on-board with the same solution.
She’s a prophet. Not in the sense of foreseeing the future via totally-not-hallucinated-visions-which-are-messages-from-god but in the sense of standing at the gate and preaching to people why what they are doing is wrong.
People don’t like being preached.
When you are being preached by people of authority and power, you can’t hate them for that. I mean, you can, but you better - for your own good - not show any resentment about the preaching. Not where they can hear you, at least.
But when a random nobody does that? Time to let all that anger loose! Who are they to preach to us?
Yeah, given the amount of actual real insufferable assholes out there that even put work and intent into hurting others, I’m also curious why someone would take the kind of time out of their day to focus their ire on her.