Environmentalism is the ultimate luxury item. Only the rich can afford to work themselves into a lather about the mooted possibility that people 100 years from now might be 2 percent less wealthy than they might otherwise have been. Ordinary people are too busy trying to make sure the lights and power stay on. People living in actual poverty are too selfishly concerned with trying to find something to eat and make sure their kids survive past five years old.
So it’s no coincidence that the so-called “schools climate strike” was mostly restricted to the privileged scions of the bourgeoisie attending wealthy private schools. Environmental activism is invariably the preserve of the idle middle-class who can afford to make a career out of annoying the hell out of people trying to work for a living.
A 20-year-old climate activist who glued himself to a road in a protest lives with his parents in a lavish mansion, it has been revealed.
Well, there’s a surprise.
Extinction Rebellion protester Eric Serge Herbert has been arrested five times for his demonstrations, which included blocking the entrance to the Brisbane Magistrates Court and stopping traffic with a canoe on a road.
The former school captain was living in Sydney and studying nanoscience at the University of New South Wales before he dropped out and returned to his family home.
If you’re too thick to actually learn how to do something useful, just go and sponge off mummy and daddy. After all, mums and dads are wealthy enough to probably vote Green.
The waterfront five-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast also comes with a freestanding aquarium, vacuumaid, a triple lock garage and a private jetty, The Courier-Mail reported.
But they have solar panels, surely?
Despite claiming to create a classless society, communist regimes were invariably obsessed with class. While ostensibly lionising the proletariat, communist leaders were almost mostly drawn from the middle-classes. So, they invariably engaged in an elaborate charade of “prolier-than-thou”, desperate to disguise their bourgeois origins.
Nothing has changed.
Herbert has claimed on social media that he does not live with his parents, but during his first court appearance in June, the climate activist told the magistrate he lived with his parents who supported him…Herbert, who is unemployed, has been fined $2,050 and has stayed in the Brisbane watch house for several nights.
Herbert, who is a triplet and one of five children, went to Unity College, a Catholic and Uniting Church school in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast.
As Orwell noted in The Road to Wigan Pier, “causes” like these attract the idle and the useless like “bluebottles to a dead cat”. Perhaps realising their essential uselessness, the pampered scions of the elite try to kid themselves that they’re part of some noble cause, rather than just worthless prats getting in the way of people who are actually doing something useful.
Herbert was fined $550 for gluing himself to a zebra crossing in Brisbane’s CBD and causing three hours of traffic chaos on June 17.
He was then handed a $600 fine for blocking Victoria Bridge with a canoe on June 26.
The climate activist blocked the entry of the Brisbane Magistrates Court on July 11 and was fined $400 and had a conviction recorded. Four days later he blocked streets in the city and was fined $500.
On July 17, Herbert was arrested for public nuisance and was bailed.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7267721/Extinction-Rebellion-protester-20-lives-parents-emission-spewing-five-bedroom-mansion
It’s high time police and the courts took up journalist Rita Panahi’s suggestion: just leave these stupid children right where they are – put a couple of traffic cones around them and let motorists take their chances.
They’ll unglue themselves and scurry back to their parents’ mansions in no time.