What's something you whole-heartedly believe but just don't have enough evidence to prove it yet?

I'm not a member of XR (so I can't comment on all their activities) however I know someone who is and I asked them how they felt about some of the group's more daft antics; they said that although XR doesn't have any official leaders, there are people who have more authority than others who help manage different regions of the group and who do try to make efforts (in a democratically agreed way) to shut down any supporters who do dumb stuff that could damage the cause (such as the 2 guys in London who decided without telling anyone to pull that London tube stunt; their actions were very quickly denounced by the XR members!).

Knowing the people in XR that I do, I would not say that these are people being paid by the oil industries (if that were true then their whole lives would be the most elaborate act in history haha), but I wouldn't say that the group is immune to people proclaiming to be members of it with the intention of pulling stunts to damage the group's image (and I have wondered this about a lot of groups). From my perspective though, the group does have management/governence issues which have become more apparent as the group has boomed in size.

Overall, most of the dumbest stunts were simply pulled by dumb people and the media latched onto those incidents. And because the media only ever reports the dumb or controversial stuff done by the group (which is not actually that much), if you judge XR only by what you read often in the press, then your opinions are going to be skewed against them (having said that though, couldn't you say that about judging ANY group by only what you read in the press of them? The press is not them to educate or present balanced views about people and causes, only generate hyperbole and scandal to generate clicks and gain advertising revenue).

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent