There was an insightful post about the submarine on the r/redscare subreddit regarding the existential horror of the sub story. It's pretty disturbing to imagine being trapped inside a tiny, cold, dark capsule, lost in the middle of the ocean with five other people, not knowing your fate. Very little food, water, or oxygen on board to sustain you, no way out. You are completely powerless. There is nothing you can do, nowhere you can go. You have no idea if anyone's trying to rescue you. It seems like a deeply strange and surreal way to spend your final moments.
On a personal level, I could imagine myself in the 19-year-old's shoes. I like the ocean! If my dad had asked 19-year-old me, "a space just opened up last minute on a submarine to go see the Titanic, you interested?" I absolutely would've said yes. There's a terribly sad, ironic contrast between what the trip was supposed to be: a fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a major part of modern history, and the grim death that awaited. I feel no joy or schadenfreude. It was a horrifying situation that I wish on no one. I only hope they did not suffer too much.
Yeah. I feel like when there’s a mine collapse and miners get trapped underground, that typically gets a lot of coverage? It’s a very similar “buried alive” scenario, and I think that’s something most people find viscerally terrifying, worse than a lot of other deaths. Here there was also the Titanic element. Normies love the Titanic. My Uber driver on Thursday brought up the sub thing unprompted, and her theory was that they were down there searching for sunken treasure. I don’t think for a minute that they were, but my point is, the Titanic still has a kind of doomed glamour that makes people think about things like that.
Also, the fact that there were a lot more people on the migrant ship probably *hurt* the story, from a human interest angle. As Josephine Tey observes in one of her books, “ten thousand people drowned in floods is news; a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy”.
Yes, I had the same thought and remembered Sam Harris interviewing someone about research into empathy for individuals vs groups--easier for people to conjure for the former. Why "Save the Children" is a thing and all that.
I get the impression that anyone who was even moderately familiar with the situation KNEW that the sub imploded at the moment that communication was lost. The fact that the tracking signal disappeared at the same time as the comm signal meant that an extremely high-energy violent event had occurred, since the tracker was a separate unit with its own power and pressure-resistant shell. But for the next three days, the media published breathless updates about strange noises and the slowly dwindling oxygen, leading people to imagine five terrified people in a claustrophobic chamber counting the hours until suffocation, when in fact they knew that those men had been dead since Sunday.
Yes. I've had both (perhaps conflicting feelings) respect for the knowledgeable men who held their tongues and led the search play out in case they were wrong, and disdain for the news media who covered it breathlessly, leveraging the oxygen count for clicks.
I recently heard from a former Navy man who had served on subs, how terrifying it is to know that there is likely no way of escaping if certain things go wrong. He said that the only reason there is an escape hatch (paraphrasing - he told the story in technical terms) was to placate mothers and congressmen. I know this wasn't a sub, but I remember his account of how scary the training was, and then on the sub, when an alarm would go off.
My understanding is that serving on a submarine is 100% voluntary (in the U.S. navy anyway), which traces back to the story of the CSS Hunley, which is pretty wild.
I think that many of them did know, or could have found out with a minimal amount of checking, but they made a conscious choice to exploit the most sensational angle for clicks and views.
I'm not trying to claim I'm a genius or anything but the first time I heard of the sub being lost I assumed it had imploded and everyone had died instantly. It kind of felt like there was a media push to make this story into Thai Cave Kids: The Squeakuel.
From the latest I’ve heard it sounds like it was an almost immediate catastrophic event several days ago so (fingers crossed) they never knew what hit them.
Oh how awful. Obviously the poor man thought it was safe or HE wouldn’t have gone. Get the mic’s out of these people’s faces for a few weeks for heaven’s sake.
At the end sure, but there may have been some small period of distress first. The implosion was surely immediate, but there hay have been a second or recognition as something went bad first. Much longer though and likely they would have communicated.
KATIE NO IT'S CALLED "LEXEND" AND IT'S MADE FOR NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE. WHY DID YOU TELL EVERYONE I USE COMIC SANS NOW EVERYONE IS BULLYING ME FOR USING COMIC SANS
I would not be surprised if a bunch of these hardcore COVID-prevention folks have already had COVID.
But even if they haven't, well, I've been living my life undistanced and--where regulations permit--unmasked since I got vaccinated over two years ago, and I've never had a positive COVID test, either. (I'm actually hoping I have had COVID unbeknownst to me, because I'd much rather get it several times while I'm relatively young and healthy. Intentionally delaying exposure till you're older makes no sense to me.)
And let me tell you, a hug from a friend or a shared meal in front of a fireplace on cold winter nights can do wonders for your mental health. I really do feel sad for these people who are inflicting isolation and depression on themselves for no discernible benefit.
Totally. I have blithely walked the earth totally unconcerned (and no Covid) for the past 3+ years-- which naturally drove everyone crazy, especially my germaphobe co-workers, who practically wore hazmat suits when the office re-opened.
You'd think it was the Chernobyl exclusion zone. And for all their effort, they all got Covid at least twice!
This was a very sad segment. So much mental illness out there masquerading as support for this or that cause. I have a neighbor in my building, who is probably about 60 or so, and she has barely left the apartment building since Covid began, and when she is in the hallways, which are all open air centered around the atrium of our building, she literally wraps toilet paper around her face and clips it behind her head with a hair clip.
I have another neighbor in my neighborhood, who never leaves the house without a mask on, and just seems to be so full of anxiety about her health, which is not great from what I can tell (obese, general anxiety, lots of fights with other neighbors), and you just wish these people could find some peace in their lives. Especially here in Southern California where you could literally spend your entire life outdoors and in full sun.
At a certain point one just wonders if this is similar to people who have a genuine belief that their odds of being killed by a cop are close to 100%. If all you’ve been reading during COVID is the most hysterical takes, you might not be wrong for thinking that your odds of hospitalization or worse with COVID in 2023 are extremely high.
Possibly. But getting it would probably “cure” a few of these folks since in all likelihood they’d have a bad cold for a week and realize like everyone else has that it’s genuinely no bigger deal than other common illnesses for otherwise healthy adults.
My entire family getting covid definitely "cured" me of my covid-paranoia. We all tested positive after my husband and I tested following some travel as a precaution before heading back to work. Sure enough, we both had it. I had a runny nose. He was completely asymptomatic. We tested our kids too because preschool (we don't send our kids to school when we know they are sick, so we wanted to get a good idea on quarantine time). They were also asymptomatic. Getting it allowed me to shrug off my anxiety. I still vaccinate, but I got rid of my mask obsession.
I’ve been living life as normal as possible since March 17, 2020. Me and my Dad were hopping the border to get lunch jn another state in June 2020. I’m unvaccinated and I just try to eat healthy and exercise. I got it once, made potatoes taste like dirt for a week and I got some pinpoint nasal congestion.
LA was a land of panic for most of COVID. Summer 2021 I went to South Carolina to visit my folks and it was so, so normal down there. Even when they closed GOLF COURSES, LA county was the last to open within a two hour radius. Just some silly, silly stuff.
Yeah the at home tests have something like a 60% false negative rate, no? A friend of mine got it from her boyfriend (who was confirmed COVID) and it took 10 at home tests before one came back positive.
I don't think Katie's description of the migrants on the boat is accurate. They're not refugees, they're not fleeing from war. The vast majority of them were from Pakistan, for example. These people pay human traffickers exorbitant amounts of money to get them to the European mainland because they know they can exploit the extremely flawed and completely overrun EU migration system. They know the dangers of crossing the sea this way, but they also know the reward. If they make it, they will eventually travel through most of Europe on their way to countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands etc. Once they get there, they can get the rest of their family flown to them.
This is a business. A very deadly business, but a business nonetheless. Most people in Europe know this, the EU is trying to come up with solutions for this problem but so far has failed.
Yeah... I’m Pakistani American and all I can think is the people who can afford to get on those boats can afford better lives than most exactly where they were born. Similar to illegal border crossings into the US from Mexico and Canada by Indian nationals... they’re clearly middle class at a minimum, going through terribly treacherous conditions even with entire families because it’s allegedly a shortcut.
And yes, Pakistan sucks terribly and I count my blessings that I’m an American first and foremost. But middle class life in Pakistan is still better than risking your life in that way.
But wouldn't middle class people in Pakistan buy plane tickets? Àlso I heard Norway has a large Pakistani immigrant community, why, I do not know, but I am betting that the people who heading to Europe already had family there.
The big thing is. If they were middle class on Pakistan, why leave? Unless it is to try and ensure a better future for their children.
Getting visas to exit Pakistan for most western countries is crazy expensive. $185 per application attempt with a crazy long waitlist. 9 months in Karachi last I checked. Most people are denied on the first attempt. None of my family in Pakistan (which is everyone besides my immediate family) will make it to my wedding as a result, for instance. And then plane tickets are $1200-2200 depending on when you go. So even if you have the $$$ to try and try again, actually getting a visa to lots of places is far from a sure thing. The Pakistani passport is one of the weakest, BUT I do have visa free entry to North Korea lol.
And simply put: the grass IS greener on the other side, but perhaps not green enough to justify the journey. Opportunity and social welfare is incredibly abundant basically anywhere else. A shitty American degree opens more doors worldwide than a great Pakistani degree would anywhere. People just want to get the hell out, but again, I don’t think this decision is made rationally.
Also, why look so far away? If you really want to feel empathy for migrants, hundreds (if not thousands) of migrants die trying to get across the southern US border every year. There are tragedies all over the world we could be paying attention to instead of this. You could play the Olympics of human suffering game until you're blue in the face.
Is it just me, or were the comment section of the last episode and the Weekly Thread overrun by a considerable number of ahem... very unpleasant people?
It’s hard to know if you should ignore ( don’t feed the trolls), or push back, and maybe make it worse.
But honestly, this thread is something I really enjoy in my life. And it’s rare, and kind of awesome. So I do t think we should give it up without a fight.
Yeah I’ve got to be honest, stuff covered in the episode about Olympus spa really, really pissed me off. Because that’s a spa that I go to routinely! I definitely had more aggressive takes re: the spa, and re: the homeless man who murdered the pregnant lady in Seattle in broad daylight. I could have been a lot more tactful. But I do generally try to write thoughtfully worded comments, and I think most people here do the same. I really value this community.
I don’t see how any takes on those things could be too aggressive!
My sister lived in a South American country for ten years. She is enraged by the takes some people have on crime here. She says they have no idea what it is like to live in a place where crime is truly rampant. Punishing people who commit crimes is really important.
Pretty much always ignore. The minute someone on any kind of forum reveals themselves to be someone I don’t want to interact with, I just ignore and block. Like, ok, this is going to go nowhere. Disengage. Life is far too short.
This is literally how execs out here talk. I had a character use “retarded” in a script about a working class Boston family and my exec wrote in her email, “we absolutely cannot have this character use the R slur.” It took me a minute to even understand what she meant.
I, uh, think it was the discussion of dicks that tempted a few commenters to act like them! I was surprised by how civil the first few days of circumcision discussions were, but at a certain point the comments regressed to the internet mean.
If any of the comments arguably pass the (fairly high) bar at which I should consider a suspension or a stern email please email me to let me know. Our comment sections are usually great but I'm committed to clamping down aggressively when jerks get in there.
Agreed. I didn't see anything that required moderation. I would never want Jesse to start acting like the moderators at Slate.com. Those folks have started acting like kindergarten teachersm
To echo Jane, Tyler, and Greg: it was just off for *this* typically lovely forum. I actually checked to make sure I wasn't mistakenly on The Free Press Substack. I love Bari and especially Nellie, but their comment section is not engaging (I know they don't have control over that). One of the best parts of being a PRIMO is getting to chat with people like those mentioned above as well as Bored Nihilist, Midwest Molly, Muliebrity, Duchesse des Esseintes, etc.
Although I'm embarrassed to admit that I was first drawn to Muliebrity because I didn't know what that word meant: I just thought that she also liked mules.
Absolutely. TFP comment section is comically bad. They don’t do themselves any favors either because every article seems to take cancel culture as its main subject. There was just a two parter on high school debate club hijinks. THE LIBS ARE RUINING DEBATE CLUB!!!! I think cancel culture is dumb (one of my recent writing projects took dead aim at cancel culture and race) but Jesus Christ, there are more interesting things in the world. Either take on dumb internet bullshit with a gleeful wink or just be interesting and free of MSM dogma. TFP also falls in the middle. Except for TGIF, which I continue to find delightful and is basically the only reason I subscribe.
Additionally, I recently signed up for the lindy newsletter and enjoy it! Anyone else read it?
(The only other one I pay for is a golf newsletter called the Quadrilateral, which is written by one of the guys who incidentally helped design my home course, rustic canyon in Moorpark CA.)
I’m a newbie for sure (primo for months, never a timely enough listener to comment), but it’s been interesting to see what comments looks like and more so yet to read that they’re not the norm?
There has been a hostile and combative element lately that was really uncommon in the past. The open thread has been a place where I have poured out personal sorrows, which is a risk online, and been treated almost entirely with kindness and empathy. I’m just hoping the recent uncharitable attitudes are a temporary shift.
Yeeeaaahhh. I feel so conflicted. The threads have been amazing but I agree, I think now that so many people have signed up for prime membership, it has gotten crowded and hostile.
But also. I dunno. For the last 3 months or so, Jesse's takes on things have really bothered me. No clue why as I disagree with Katie too, but her views or the way she expressed them does not annoy me
Katie can back up her beliefs somewhat, even if I don’t always agree with her. Jesse just seems puzzled by stuff that seems relatively asinine. That’s what annoys me, at least.
I think yeah, it is that she backs up her beliefs, even if I disagree. I am not sure Jesse's beliefs are asinine. I really do not know what it is because even when Katie talks about stupid shit, it doesn't annoy me. I gotta figure out why Jesse ja been annoying me.
Yeah the comments here are great but I’ve been a bit more vocal about Jessie sucking uncut knobs with his garbage takes recently so I wonder if people are such snowflakes that comments like that are considered mean or something.
Welcome! I would say the Wednesday open threads are where people share more about their lives and general perspectives, whereas obviously the individual episode comment sections tends to be more about, you know, that individual episode.
I thought the same thing. This is such a jovial, civil forum and there were some unpleasant vibes going on. Not that everyone has to agree on everything but it was a little weird. Very off brand.
I am by no means an expert on the enlisted nuclear side, but women first were admitted to nuclear power school for air craft carriers in 94.
The stolen valor for both disabled veterans is disgusting to me, coming from a military family and lots of military colleagues and friends. And stolen nuclear engineering cred is further gross as an actual nuclear engineer. What a grifter and lier She deserves everything coming to her
Agreed. I usually DGAF about stolen valor, if somebody wants a free cup of coffee that bad, let'em, its just sad and more than a little pathetic. Still, this seems to be more than that.
It's pretty bad. It's one thing if you're doing it to get a free lunch at a fast food place (still gross but more sad than anything) but when you're building your brand/business on a false biography like this, it reveals a pretty rotten moral framework. I have no interest in being in the military because it sounds very difficult and very dangerous, but the tradeoff is I don't get to pretend I did the difficult and dangerous thing. I wonder if this will catch up with her.
Thought process; military = white supremacy organization for evil country. Intersectional person has had words said to them and words are literal violence and/or are being hunted by cops and rapists.
I think the sub story got more attention because we thought they might still be alive and were (most of us ) rooting for them. Remember the boys trapped in the flooded caves in Thailand? Or the miners trapped in the collapse in Chile for a couple of MONTHS? I’m pretty sure all of these people were poor and not white. Both of those stories were wall to wall coverage.
As a trainee typesetter, many years ago, I was taught that for readability the body copy should always be in a font with serifs, like Times New Roman. The sans serif fonts, like Arial, were for headings only. Maybe thinking and reading have changed since then, but I'm inclined to agree with Jesse on this.
I learned the same a few decades ago (not as a typesetter though) and serif fonts are still my personal aesthetic preference, but there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence now that sans serif fonts are easier for dyslexic people to read, and Comic Sans in particular for some reason. I'm not sure whether this is true for non-dyslexic people as well.
As I've got older and my eyesight has got worse, I've pivoted back to serif fonts after using Arial for years. I find them (literally) easier on the eye.
Several of my old friends went full zero covid. They are all highly educated people who have never taken a college level science course. Their knowledge of biology and other scientific disciplines has some significant gaps that zero covid types exploit. They are very left win, young to early middle aged and very into disabilty activism. Covid was the chance to reorder society more to their liking and they are upset about that.
The biggest risk factor for severe Covid is age: your risk of death doubles every 6 years. Being immunocompromised roughly doubles your risk, except for sever conditions like having an organ transplant or SCID. In those cases, a lot of infections are a much greater risk and if you have an organ transplant you can drastically reduce your risk y frequently boosting. My friends think of themselves as medically severely vulnerable but they are either mildly immunocompromised or have a condition that doesn't raise the risk of severe Covid. They have an entire information ecosystem (there are a few scientists and doctors but mostly it's highly educated non-scientists) that feeds them Covid doomerism. SARS-COV2 downregulates MHC I? Now our immune system can't recognize it even though countless other viruses do the exact same thing. A report of the virus infiltrating the brains of people on high doses of steroids? It must chronically infect the brain even though viruses end up in unusual tissues when you're on steroids. There is nothing you can do to convince them that they're wrong. Even telling them they're wrong makes you a eugenicist and part of a disability genocide.
I would love all those "misinformation researchers" who spent countless hours tracing the "misinformation networks" that spread information suggesting that the lab leak was plausible and linking them to other unsavory ideas to start tracking the information networks that spread ideas like SARS-COV2 is airborne AIDS. Because that's actually not true and those beliefs are really causing people to ruin their own lives. They're basically in a cult and have sacrificed so much that it's hard to break away from Zero Covid.
Part of the blame rests with the CDC, which is either entirely incompetent or knowingly misled the country about Covid risk. Part rests with doctors who often told their patients things that weren't true. I heard a doctor insist back in summer of 2020 that we knew for certain that a recent spike in California was due to people hanging out at the beach without masks. Another told a relative of mine who is old and medically vulnerable that contracting Covid pre-vaccine would almost certainly kill them. Their estimated risk of death for someone their age with their risk profile was something like 10-15%. People were simply getting inaccurate information from their doctors and the government and it's hard for people to wrap their heads around that.
Disability activism does seem to be a common link here. A “multiply disabled” friend who strangely has no COVID restrictions when, say, traveling to Australia with her SO, posts “anti-masking is disability genocide” infographics.
I also do see a higher correlation among people who have very nebulously defined invisible disabilities.
Make that nebulously defined SELF DIAGNOSED invisible disabilities and that sums up most of the 100% Covid people I know.
What I find fascinating is that they were shrieking LISTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS in 2020 and 2021 but now that the CDC and public health agencies determined that the need for pandemic precautions has passed, they are highly suspicious of the science and the CDC. The shoe is truly on the other foot.
Ohhh yes. POTS seems to be one of the big ones lately under the self-diagnosis umbrella... listen to scientists, unless it’s about the reality of a diagnosis!
so strange because the diagnostic test for POTS is easy and non-invasive (they just put you on a tilt table and test your heart rate/BP at different positions)!
I suspect the invisibility and breadth make it easy for folks to claim without actually seeking a proper assessment for any one of a million reasons, including cost and insurance, accessibility, etc.
I see the same thing. Also with people who claim to be disabled by a non-real disease like Adrenal fatigue (as opposed to Adrenal insufficiency which is real). And with people who dump a ton of diseases that haven't been shown to be autoimmune into the autoimmune bucket -- I'm thinking of people who say fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disease/
I think a lot of people are probably just biological byproducts of the standard American diet and standard American lifestyle. That is to say, they eat garbage, they don’t exercise, their sleep sucks, they have no way to regulate stress, and don’t go outside. It’s difficult to feel great when this is the lifestyle situation and of course they are going to look for some kind of answer about why they don’t feel good. Might just be a matter of getting to bed earlier and putting down the Doritos.
Not to sound glib, but I think some of these people just really, really like working from home. (I was already WFH when Covid happened but if not I would have done a lot of mental gymnastics not to go back into the office)
The person I know who makes a big fuss about masking etc still (calling out others all over social media for not wearing masks, calling people who are happy about the end of restrictions 'genocidal', claiming to be high-risk because of various self-diagnosed ailments which are not actually proven risk factors and getting cross when the NHS won't dispense paxlovid to them like sweeties) did all this while in the same time period attending a free-for-all sex party. It's virtue-signalling, part of a checklist of beliefs people think they have to have in order to be a good person.
(The same individual was basically threatening to cut ties with anyone who believed in or entertained the idea of a lab leak, because it's 'racist'.* Now, I don't know exactly what happened but from what I have read there is a compelling case for it originating in the virology lab that just so happens to be in the city where the disease first emerged. But in this person's mind objective reality and what really happened are less important than whether something can be seen as 'racist').
Can I ask if/how they identify the the LGBT+ community? I worked in public health PR at the height of the pandemic and the way everyone is forced to dance around saying: some gay men (or “men having sex with men”, MSM) are leading extremely high risk lives during a pandemic, spreading hot only COVID but meningitis as well - as if it would be a cultural affront and not a common sense “don’t dig your own grave!” precaution. And I don’t know how to say this out loud or discuss it without being shot down as homophobic.
You can! Yes, they do identify as LGBT+, specifically as a trans man.
In their specific case I wonder if what I'm seeing is a difference between the online/social media persona (which is carefully curated to be hyper-progressive and avoid the kind of criticism that they constantly level at others) and how they actually behave. I think it's fairly likely this particular person doesn't actually take a load of precautions against COVID, but they keep up the 'people who don't wear masks on public transport are genocidal' posting because it is consistent with the image they want to convey. Going to a gay sex party/orgy is OK, because it is associated with the LGBT community and therefore not a target for criticism - in the same way that progressive public health voices condoned BLM protests at a time when they were calling to criminalise people seeing their families.
Re. homophobia, the whole monkeypox thing last summer was so fascinating and infuriating. Even though it was overwhelmingly affecting gay men, you had people arguing that targeting the response, vaccination etc at that community was wrong or somehow stigmatising, analogous to the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis etc. Some people were really muddying the waters in the name of...I'm not really sure what. What was the intended outcome? Germophobic worried-well types getting vaccinated against something they were unlikely to catch, at the expense of (likely the most marginalised) MSM who were at far greater risk?
The CDC and their decisions and "public health officials" and different things that happened during, around and because of covid have really made me rethink my support for Medicare for All. I worked very hard for Bernie and other politicians that support MFA but now I'm not.
Same here. I am quite worried that if we got Medicare for all, the system might refuse to pay for certain essential services unless you had already undergone specific procedures. Like leaving someone with a bill for a flu hospitalization if they didn’t get a flu vaccine even though the flu vaccine isn’t very effective
I’m rethinking my support for many things. I was thrilled that the ACA allowed some very low income friends to actually get health insurance, but now realize it is fraught with problems. I don’t know what to believe, who to trust anymore. I kinda miss the 80’s when all we had to worry about was nuclear war.
On the sub story: American media focuses on the story with an American angle. My Italian friend was very clear that the migrant boat was a bigger story than the sub in Italy. Americans simply are not involved in one of them.
I am UK based and while I am not sure how the amount of coverage varied exactly. I had certainly heard about the migrant boat before the submersible. Both are tragic situations just for different reasons.
That guy who lives in the basement with an air purifier also has pronouns in his bio. I wonder what the correlation between having pronouns in your bio and suffering from some sort of mental health condition do these correlate?
Having pronouns in your bio doesn't necessarily mean you're a basement air purifier guy. But being a basement air purifier guy likely means you have pronouns in your bio.
Please re-read my comment. You've mixed up the direction of what I said. All fruits are apples vs all apples are fruits (and not even as strong as that).
It’s sort of like how certain extreme stances have populations on both the left and the right. Putting your pronouns (especially the more insane ones) in your bio can be a sign that you’re signaling to the elite class or that you’re just suffering very severe mental illness, especially when your pronouns are gibberish.
The thing about the woke hiring was almost certainly just about cost savings. Guy said “hey we want to be inclusive not just hire a bunch of 50 year old white ex-navy sub dudes”.
What he really meant was “I can’t afford actual experts”.
Or they’ll tell him it’s impractical to build a suitable cylindrical pressure hull to operate as a tourist venture. (Not that fighting to look out of a single 20” window seems very appealing to me. An ROV would have a better view without the same risk.)
Apparently they had an old guy but he wouldn’t sign off on the plan to have a composite pressure vessel with none of the sort of non-destructive tests you’d normally do on a critical composite structure like that, and he was forced out.
So I think this was more “I don’t like what the old guys are saying” than “I can’t afford to pay them”.
Regulations are for nerds! Full steam ahead! I suppose given this, I don’t feel *super* bad for the guy who created this death trap, but I assume all of the people on board believed that this vessel had been subject to the same regulations that, say, an airplane would’ve gone through before being allowed to operate.
The waiver they had to sign was reasonably clear, and it sounds like the clientele had been involved in other “extreme” adventure stuff. But they probably did not realize the degree to which this operation was out of line with the “best practices” of the (small) deep sea community (James Cameron’s commentary is fairly revealing - yes he’s a filmmaker but also a genuine expert in the field).
I wonder how clear it was in terms of “we have not undergone the strictest regulatory testing on this vessel” etc. I’ve signed waivers for marathons before but was also under the (assumed) impression they would have the streets closed off at intersections.
It specifically said “this is an experimental vessel that has not been approved by any regulatory agencies or certification authorities” or something to that effect.
There are not, to my understanding, any “regulations” per se, but there are private organizations that do certification inspections on submersibles, and the other companies that do dives to Titanic get approved. These guys were unique in not seeking certification.
Oh wow. That’s kind of crazy to consider. Maybe it’s hubris or perhaps not taking those words literally? I can’t imagine there’s any way I would get into that vessel in most circumstances, but especially that one.
Yeah one of the DEI hiring policies the company I work for was to create more entry level jobs with more responsbility and pay a couple thousand dollars more a year for them. Effectively underpaying and overworking more people with fewer opportunities for advancement. Progress!
This is precisely how the diversity programs in Hollywood work. Minus the overworking part. but since the studio is paying for that writer and not the actual production, there really isn’t anywhere for them to go in terms of upward mobility.
Since you work in Hollywood how do you feel about every major TV show being the Burger King Kids Club? Every show needs at least 2 black people one asian or latino and probably 2 white people but that depends on how many lesbian cops there are.
I THINK IT’S GREAT. REPRESENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. ESPECIALLY BECAUSE THE COUNTRY IS 90% BIPOC AND 100% TRANS SO IT IS ALL WONDERFUL. SAME ANSWER FOR WRITING STAFFS AND CREWS. :::NERVOUS LAUGHTER::: HA HA HA.
The problem with Mediterranean migrant discourse is that nuance is forbidden. In a way, it's rather like gender discourse, like how saying that you're fine with transwomen but not in women's sports or prisons is verboten.
Anyone who strays from the party line that they are all desperate refugees fleeing war with no other option than to take a boat across the Mediterranean - and that they will all later integrate seamlessly into European societies - is a racist, islamophobe, nationalist etc.
The thing is, there's a lot of nuance to the migrant crisis. There are enormous issues with integration. There's the undeniable fact that many people crossing the Med are economic migrants, not refugees (people smugglers charge around 2000€ a head, or almost twice the average Greek monthly salary - and that's just the cost of crossing the sea, I'm not taking into account the cost of getting from Pakistan to Libya). There's the fact that Europe is not a single state, and when rich Germany decides to throw open the doors, impoverished Greece bears the brunt.
This creates space for the actual literal far-right to swoop in and gain support - as we see happening across Europe. I'm furious about this, because there is now an extremely high probability that a far-right party will enter a governing coalition in Spain after our elections next month. When everyone is scared to speak about the issue, and the only people who WILL speak out are far-right demagogues, we're in trouble.
Agreed. Imagine you live in an impoverished area and suddenly coaches full of mostly (about 90%) young male migrants are dropped off into your area, without any consultation or warning. And imagine crime rates, rape and violence go through the roof, because of trauma and inability to integrate etc. And you're a bigot if you complain. Or as is the case for a lot of working class voters, you'll be told your views are ignorant and uneducated. Like you say, if only far-right parties are going to address this then don't be surprised when they gain support on these issues. It's easy to be on the side of 100% open border when you know it's never going to negatively effect you personally, you just get to feel virtuous. It is a much more nuance issue that we really need to be able to talk about openly.
I would be careful about generalisations though. I live in a city that took in almost 100.000 refugees in 2015/2016 in the crime rate barely changed. Right now crime is considerably down compared to 2013.
Yet if you ask people on the street I am sure most would believe that crime is way up. Probably because of some cases that got a lot of publicity. Sometimes "felt reality" is not actual reality.
That doesn't mean that the integration of these people isn't a huge task. But I think the probelms are elsewhere (in school eg.)
I (perhaps naively) didn't think this could happen in Germany ever again, but the complete suppression of any nuanced discussion around the issue of immigration is at least in part responsible.
What happened years ago in Cologne on New Year's Eve was awful and I was in Germany at the time. The way it was reported was essentially to blame the women who dared to feel terrified as they were being groped and assaulted. It was so nasty. I remember male friends, who I had previously thought of as sensible people, saying things like 'well, I guess if you walk around in short skirts in dodgy parts of town after drinking at night ...'.
Now, in the UK, the way asylum seekers are treated is disgusting and there are plenty of people who cheer it on. And all the left says is that all immigrants are heart surgeons who we are so happy to have because without them the NHS would fail even more than it has already.
As an immigrant (white, EU national, so I claim no victimhood) I find the discourse so frustrating. It also means I have to be 'the good immigrant' for my lefty friends, when I'm just a bog standard person and I have no idea if I'm a net positive or net negative to my chosen home, the UK, or how you'd even calculate this.
That's actually a lot scarier than what's happening in Spain - the Spanish far-right never really went away (hell, Vox just got a mayor elected whose name is literally Francisco Franco), but we always look to Germany as the shining example of how to learn from history and move forward.
I remember Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian writing an atrocious article about the Cologne attacks. It really felt like people on the left were tying themselves up in knots about it, because they couldn't accept what had happened.
I feel so conflicted about a lot of these issues - I'm also an immigrant. I'm very well integrated, but I'm also visibly foreign, to the point that people will often do a double-take when I speak Catalan. I'm white, so like you, I don't face victimhood (unless I dare to voice a political opinion, then I get told to fuck off back to my country).
In my case, I'm lucky enough to qualify for EU nationality because of my grandparents. I know how deeply unfair it is that other people have to jump through hoops to come to Europe, but those of us with a burgundy passport have won the lottery. The difference in quality of life between South Africa and here is almost unfathomable, and if someone told me I had to go back home to one of the world's most violent countries, I'd be devastated. I understand people emigrating in search of a better life, I really do, but...every system needs limits. And we need to be able to talk frankly about it.
>>I'm very well integrated, but I'm also visibly foreign, to the point that people will often do a double-take when I speak Catalan.
I get this reaction too, Swedes are kind of shocked that I'm American, speak fluent (but not perfect) Swedish and have a relatively mild, easy to understand accent.
I just don't think AfD are that scary. I think they're the same sort as MAGA Republicans, and that a lot of objection to them both is mostly just class-based aesthetic chud-hatred. I'm happy to hear differently, though.
For my money as an immigrant to Germany (but the kind of immigrant that Germans mistake for Dutch), the fact that all polite political conversation in Germany has extreme concern over being a Nazi at its center has the unintended consequence of increasing xenophobia and other nasty -isms. I read your second sentence as reflecting this idea, too.
(I'm new and I saw complaints about new commenters being dickish, so I'm gonna preface this by saying it might seem callous but I'm still trying to give my practical take without being unkind. If i miss the mark, holler! This has been driving me nuts so I'm still chewing on it.)
The migrant shipwreck and the missing sub were both horrific tragedies.
I can't speak to media coverage, but (again as a layperson, experts correct me) if you put a gun to my head, I would want to be assigned the missing sub rescue/recovery 1000000%:
"Five identified victims, all in the same place, with a known travel plan and known resources and a rough timeline for survival. If they're alive rescue will be technically challenging, but if they're not, we can provide closure to their families"
vs
"Overloaded ship with unidentified 350-500 individual souls, no way to triage dehydration/crush injuries/etc, probable panicky crowd dynamics, little/no flotation devices per person, which is important because again, we cannot confirm how many victims need assistance or how many bodies need to be retrieved"
Look. I KNOW I'm being mean and callous, but I just feel like one of these disasters was a lot easier to manage than the other disaster, and I don't really think the logistics came down to wealth or race, yknow? It's a lot harder and a lot grimmer to manage a rescue of a few hundred people than it is to attempt a rescue of a few people.
Amy, I would also like to extend a welcome. Your honesty and forthrightness is refreshing. I think we've gotten a lot of trolls lately, probably drawn in by the circumcision discussion. The usual pattern is that they come and go pretty quickly.
Thank you both -- I was a little nervous that I'd been too Firm in my opinions over the last couple of days, but I've been lurking a while and really enjoying the conversations. ❤️
Welcome. Isn’t it a refreshing thing to be able to post an opinion? Now that I’ve alienated all my former social media friends by being “on the wrong side of history”, I find this group to be generally respectful and open minded.
Yes, one feels more like a movie and one feels depressingly real. Also, one feels fun and exciting and has a simple solution (find the submarine thingy!) and the other has no good solution.
I don't think it's mean or callous at all. I think it's valuable to consider these things which surely factor in. I also wondered what kind of reporting could or should be done from the ground in that situation. It wasn't that it wasn't covered here.
I hope you don't have the sense this is a particularly sensitive community. That you even prefaced your comment like that means that you probably won't, say, respond to anyone asking if they're a "retard." Welcome!
I think I had a little attack of nerves because actively engaging in an established community can be a little stressful - you want to calibrate to the existing ecosystem without causing too many waves. 😅 You guys have been great!
Not 'dickish' at all (hello, I'm pretty new, too) and a very measured take. There was an excellent article (academic) on reactions to danger, I think it was centered around the Charlie Hebdo attack, and some were saying 'why so much concern for a small space of journalists when ISIL is in Tunisia, etc.' or similar. What Katie surmised was right, that location is a factor; people are going to empathize most what they're familiar with, include geographically and culturally. And as you say, the magnitude of tragedy. Both are tragic, but 5 is a more cognitively manageable loss than hundreds, including dozens of children, both hard to imagine/bear, but the latter more so.
If I were a young healthy man, I’d choose the ship, especially since my financial prospects, should I survive, would be much better in Europe. If I were a sixty-something billionaire, well shoot. I’d buy a yacht! But if given only two choices, I’d go for the submersible.
Oh God, i was originally thinking "which rescue operation would i have wanted to be involved with".
If it's "which situation would I personally want to participate in" yeah, if I was a young and very fit man, maybe the ship?
The submersible?
Personally, no victim blaming or shaming at all: you could not have physically gotten me into that thing. (I feel the same about all extreme tourism, this isn't me trying to Be Smarter than the victims, I just grew up on all the Death In [Park] books and a family member saying "if you fuck up in the wilderness, expect a helicopter in 12-36 hours IF weather and terrain permit," so my immediate response is always "okay sure, sounds fun, and if everything goes wrong, what does Plan B look like?")
Well yeah and anyway, come home safe from submersible and you have a photograph and maybe a teeshirt. Make it to Europe as a migrant and you have a whole new life. Lol that New Yorker article was saying travel wasn’t a transformative experience? She just chose the wrong type of travel lol
There is the Identifiable Victim Effect to explain the greater empathy/interest for an identifiable person or small group of people vs. a vague undifferentiated mass of people. Given the questionable state of social science research, we can't be sure about this.
Yes, one of the reasons the Titan debacle was so fascinating was that it was happening to a small group of people that Westerners could relate to better as individuals, even if some of them were horrible rich people. The migrants who drown in the Mediterranean are largely anonymous to us, because they're participating in an unsanctioned activity where no official channels are used to identify them. (In fact many discard their IDs.)
All the psychoanalysis trying to explain our fascination with this particular tragedy seems to ignore Occan's Razor.
We are absolutely obsessed with all things Titanic. Wasn't it the highest grossing movie ever? If these same 5 guys in the same submarine were lost prowling some random spot in the Atlantic Ocean, the story would be a footnote.
I also think there’s the novelty factor. It isn’t often that a tourist submarine disappears (for several reasons). I don’t think this was the only maritime refugee disaster this year, just the biggest. We know how they go, the actual rescue personnel were there (that’s who tool the most common pictures). It’s no wonder the interest wasn’t there.
There was an insightful post about the submarine on the r/redscare subreddit regarding the existential horror of the sub story. It's pretty disturbing to imagine being trapped inside a tiny, cold, dark capsule, lost in the middle of the ocean with five other people, not knowing your fate. Very little food, water, or oxygen on board to sustain you, no way out. You are completely powerless. There is nothing you can do, nowhere you can go. You have no idea if anyone's trying to rescue you. It seems like a deeply strange and surreal way to spend your final moments.
On a personal level, I could imagine myself in the 19-year-old's shoes. I like the ocean! If my dad had asked 19-year-old me, "a space just opened up last minute on a submarine to go see the Titanic, you interested?" I absolutely would've said yes. There's a terribly sad, ironic contrast between what the trip was supposed to be: a fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a major part of modern history, and the grim death that awaited. I feel no joy or schadenfreude. It was a horrifying situation that I wish on no one. I only hope they did not suffer too much.
Yeah. I feel like when there’s a mine collapse and miners get trapped underground, that typically gets a lot of coverage? It’s a very similar “buried alive” scenario, and I think that’s something most people find viscerally terrifying, worse than a lot of other deaths. Here there was also the Titanic element. Normies love the Titanic. My Uber driver on Thursday brought up the sub thing unprompted, and her theory was that they were down there searching for sunken treasure. I don’t think for a minute that they were, but my point is, the Titanic still has a kind of doomed glamour that makes people think about things like that.
Also, the fact that there were a lot more people on the migrant ship probably *hurt* the story, from a human interest angle. As Josephine Tey observes in one of her books, “ten thousand people drowned in floods is news; a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy”.
Yes, I had the same thought and remembered Sam Harris interviewing someone about research into empathy for individuals vs groups--easier for people to conjure for the former. Why "Save the Children" is a thing and all that.
I get the impression that anyone who was even moderately familiar with the situation KNEW that the sub imploded at the moment that communication was lost. The fact that the tracking signal disappeared at the same time as the comm signal meant that an extremely high-energy violent event had occurred, since the tracker was a separate unit with its own power and pressure-resistant shell. But for the next three days, the media published breathless updates about strange noises and the slowly dwindling oxygen, leading people to imagine five terrified people in a claustrophobic chamber counting the hours until suffocation, when in fact they knew that those men had been dead since Sunday.
Yes. I've had both (perhaps conflicting feelings) respect for the knowledgeable men who held their tongues and led the search play out in case they were wrong, and disdain for the news media who covered it breathlessly, leveraging the oxygen count for clicks.
I recently heard from a former Navy man who had served on subs, how terrifying it is to know that there is likely no way of escaping if certain things go wrong. He said that the only reason there is an escape hatch (paraphrasing - he told the story in technical terms) was to placate mothers and congressmen. I know this wasn't a sub, but I remember his account of how scary the training was, and then on the sub, when an alarm would go off.
My understanding is that serving on a submarine is 100% voluntary (in the U.S. navy anyway), which traces back to the story of the CSS Hunley, which is pretty wild.
A lot of the volunteer ethos goes back to British navy press ganging not only Brits but also American sailors
That was a horrific story. Interesting to learn about the volunteer policy.
Some people knew they were dead, the media is mostly made up of morons with zero science acumen whatsoever.
I think that many of them did know, or could have found out with a minimal amount of checking, but they made a conscious choice to exploit the most sensational angle for clicks and views.
I'm not trying to claim I'm a genius or anything but the first time I heard of the sub being lost I assumed it had imploded and everyone had died instantly. It kind of felt like there was a media push to make this story into Thai Cave Kids: The Squeakuel.
I agree with you entirely.
From the latest I’ve heard it sounds like it was an almost immediate catastrophic event several days ago so (fingers crossed) they never knew what hit them.
Well said, Human Being.
Because she's grieving, I'm being charitable towards the kids Aunt who publicly implied that dad forced him to go.
Oh how awful. Obviously the poor man thought it was safe or HE wouldn’t have gone. Get the mic’s out of these people’s faces for a few weeks for heaven’s sake.
I've expressed this on the wednesday thread, but anyone finding glee in this or any death is a terrible person.
If only there was some way to avoid this terrible fate.
At the end sure, but there may have been some small period of distress first. The implosion was surely immediate, but there hay have been a second or recognition as something went bad first. Much longer though and likely they would have communicated.
KATIE NO IT'S CALLED "LEXEND" AND IT'S MADE FOR NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE. WHY DID YOU TELL EVERYONE I USE COMIC SANS NOW EVERYONE IS BULLYING ME FOR USING COMIC SANS
Lexend sounds like a cholesterol medication.
Come on Lex, own it: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
Everyone knows Calibri is the only proper font
Garamond!
How dare you. Sarifs or bust. I know it's hard for people with dyslexia, but I need the sarifs.
This is cope from Lex
I can’t wait for the pod on the communist worker revolt at Blocked and Reported
I'm with you Lexer, Comic Sans is actually good
Permabanned for spreading malicious rumors. I expected nothing less from a member of the notorious white nationalist forum rDr*ma 😒
Still better than Arial tbh.
I thought you were joking but I looked it up.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lexend
As they should. Comic sans is for children and comic book writers.
what's with all caps? is this not a safe space?
Srry I didn't notice bc I was crying rly hard as I was typing it
Sounds like you're srsly out of spoons Lex
I would not be surprised if a bunch of these hardcore COVID-prevention folks have already had COVID.
But even if they haven't, well, I've been living my life undistanced and--where regulations permit--unmasked since I got vaccinated over two years ago, and I've never had a positive COVID test, either. (I'm actually hoping I have had COVID unbeknownst to me, because I'd much rather get it several times while I'm relatively young and healthy. Intentionally delaying exposure till you're older makes no sense to me.)
And let me tell you, a hug from a friend or a shared meal in front of a fireplace on cold winter nights can do wonders for your mental health. I really do feel sad for these people who are inflicting isolation and depression on themselves for no discernible benefit.
It reminds me of something my dad used to say- if you never drink, smoke, or eat anything unhealthy you won’t live forever. But it will feel like it.
You should write a book of you and your families aphorisms. Id buy.
YES!
Clever dad!
In moderation, of course! The other extreme isn’t appealing either.
Totally. I have blithely walked the earth totally unconcerned (and no Covid) for the past 3+ years-- which naturally drove everyone crazy, especially my germaphobe co-workers, who practically wore hazmat suits when the office re-opened.
You'd think it was the Chernobyl exclusion zone. And for all their effort, they all got Covid at least twice!
.
This was a very sad segment. So much mental illness out there masquerading as support for this or that cause. I have a neighbor in my building, who is probably about 60 or so, and she has barely left the apartment building since Covid began, and when she is in the hallways, which are all open air centered around the atrium of our building, she literally wraps toilet paper around her face and clips it behind her head with a hair clip.
I have another neighbor in my neighborhood, who never leaves the house without a mask on, and just seems to be so full of anxiety about her health, which is not great from what I can tell (obese, general anxiety, lots of fights with other neighbors), and you just wish these people could find some peace in their lives. Especially here in Southern California where you could literally spend your entire life outdoors and in full sun.
At a certain point one just wonders if this is similar to people who have a genuine belief that their odds of being killed by a cop are close to 100%. If all you’ve been reading during COVID is the most hysterical takes, you might not be wrong for thinking that your odds of hospitalization or worse with COVID in 2023 are extremely high.
A few years ago there were some polls where the average person overestimated their chance of death from Covid by a factor of 500.
Sounds like these polls:
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/americans-overestimate-hospitalization-covid-study
Possibly. But getting it would probably “cure” a few of these folks since in all likelihood they’d have a bad cold for a week and realize like everyone else has that it’s genuinely no bigger deal than other common illnesses for otherwise healthy adults.
My entire family getting covid definitely "cured" me of my covid-paranoia. We all tested positive after my husband and I tested following some travel as a precaution before heading back to work. Sure enough, we both had it. I had a runny nose. He was completely asymptomatic. We tested our kids too because preschool (we don't send our kids to school when we know they are sick, so we wanted to get a good idea on quarantine time). They were also asymptomatic. Getting it allowed me to shrug off my anxiety. I still vaccinate, but I got rid of my mask obsession.
I’ve been living life as normal as possible since March 17, 2020. Me and my Dad were hopping the border to get lunch jn another state in June 2020. I’m unvaccinated and I just try to eat healthy and exercise. I got it once, made potatoes taste like dirt for a week and I got some pinpoint nasal congestion.
LA was a land of panic for most of COVID. Summer 2021 I went to South Carolina to visit my folks and it was so, so normal down there. Even when they closed GOLF COURSES, LA county was the last to open within a two hour radius. Just some silly, silly stuff.
I was in the hospital for something else and had a positive Covid test. I had sniffles. You could have had it.
Yeah the at home tests have something like a 60% false negative rate, no? A friend of mine got it from her boyfriend (who was confirmed COVID) and it took 10 at home tests before one came back positive.
I don't think Katie's description of the migrants on the boat is accurate. They're not refugees, they're not fleeing from war. The vast majority of them were from Pakistan, for example. These people pay human traffickers exorbitant amounts of money to get them to the European mainland because they know they can exploit the extremely flawed and completely overrun EU migration system. They know the dangers of crossing the sea this way, but they also know the reward. If they make it, they will eventually travel through most of Europe on their way to countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands etc. Once they get there, they can get the rest of their family flown to them.
This is a business. A very deadly business, but a business nonetheless. Most people in Europe know this, the EU is trying to come up with solutions for this problem but so far has failed.
Yeah... I’m Pakistani American and all I can think is the people who can afford to get on those boats can afford better lives than most exactly where they were born. Similar to illegal border crossings into the US from Mexico and Canada by Indian nationals... they’re clearly middle class at a minimum, going through terribly treacherous conditions even with entire families because it’s allegedly a shortcut.
And yes, Pakistan sucks terribly and I count my blessings that I’m an American first and foremost. But middle class life in Pakistan is still better than risking your life in that way.
But wouldn't middle class people in Pakistan buy plane tickets? Àlso I heard Norway has a large Pakistani immigrant community, why, I do not know, but I am betting that the people who heading to Europe already had family there.
The big thing is. If they were middle class on Pakistan, why leave? Unless it is to try and ensure a better future for their children.
Getting visas to exit Pakistan for most western countries is crazy expensive. $185 per application attempt with a crazy long waitlist. 9 months in Karachi last I checked. Most people are denied on the first attempt. None of my family in Pakistan (which is everyone besides my immediate family) will make it to my wedding as a result, for instance. And then plane tickets are $1200-2200 depending on when you go. So even if you have the $$$ to try and try again, actually getting a visa to lots of places is far from a sure thing. The Pakistani passport is one of the weakest, BUT I do have visa free entry to North Korea lol.
And simply put: the grass IS greener on the other side, but perhaps not green enough to justify the journey. Opportunity and social welfare is incredibly abundant basically anywhere else. A shitty American degree opens more doors worldwide than a great Pakistani degree would anywhere. People just want to get the hell out, but again, I don’t think this decision is made rationally.
Also, why look so far away? If you really want to feel empathy for migrants, hundreds (if not thousands) of migrants die trying to get across the southern US border every year. There are tragedies all over the world we could be paying attention to instead of this. You could play the Olympics of human suffering game until you're blue in the face.
Exactly!
Good lord, that is terrifying. How could you do Angela dirty like that?
Clearly DALL-E or whatever hasn’t spent much time in Cabot Cove.
She looks like Smeagol
I agree. Putting that photo on was very tasteless.
Is it just me, or were the comment section of the last episode and the Weekly Thread overrun by a considerable number of ahem... very unpleasant people?
Yeah- some of the newcomers have not covered themselves in glory. Be insightful, or earnest, or funny. Don’t be a dick.
A commenter asked me “if I was a retard” in one of the comment sections, which was a weird new low
I think I saw that. I was horrified!
It’s hard to know if you should ignore ( don’t feed the trolls), or push back, and maybe make it worse.
But honestly, this thread is something I really enjoy in my life. And it’s rare, and kind of awesome. So I do t think we should give it up without a fight.
Yeah I’ve got to be honest, stuff covered in the episode about Olympus spa really, really pissed me off. Because that’s a spa that I go to routinely! I definitely had more aggressive takes re: the spa, and re: the homeless man who murdered the pregnant lady in Seattle in broad daylight. I could have been a lot more tactful. But I do generally try to write thoughtfully worded comments, and I think most people here do the same. I really value this community.
I don’t see how any takes on those things could be too aggressive!
My sister lived in a South American country for ten years. She is enraged by the takes some people have on crime here. She says they have no idea what it is like to live in a place where crime is truly rampant. Punishing people who commit crimes is really important.
The senseless murder of a pregnant person by a noble victim of the failing dystopian state of Freedonia bothered you? Weird.
Pretty much always ignore. The minute someone on any kind of forum reveals themselves to be someone I don’t want to interact with, I just ignore and block. Like, ok, this is going to go nowhere. Disengage. Life is far too short.
He R-slurred you! That would result in full scale cancellation in Hollywood.
Right?? He should DO. BETTER.
This is literally how execs out here talk. I had a character use “retarded” in a script about a working class Boston family and my exec wrote in her email, “we absolutely cannot have this character use the R slur.” It took me a minute to even understand what she meant.
That’s just good, solid, patriotic rhetoric by the King of Dunks. You got upset because the MSM lives in your head, sheeple.
I, uh, think it was the discussion of dicks that tempted a few commenters to act like them! I was surprised by how civil the first few days of circumcision discussions were, but at a certain point the comments regressed to the internet mean.
If any of the comments arguably pass the (fairly high) bar at which I should consider a suspension or a stern email please email me to let me know. Our comment sections are usually great but I'm committed to clamping down aggressively when jerks get in there.
Thanks! I didn't see anything unusually rude for online chatter. It's just that most discussions here are unusually kind. :-)
Agreed. I didn't see anything that required moderation. I would never want Jesse to start acting like the moderators at Slate.com. Those folks have started acting like kindergarten teachersm
Exactly. It didn't rise to the level of bad internet behavior, it was just off key for this particular forum.
There's a guy named Jesse who comes in here with the worst takes.
He's been repeatedly debunked by Ben Collins.
He needs to *do* *better*.
It's not that bad. Just a few people failing to read the room. It's happened before, usually they get bored and move on pretty quickly.
To echo Jane, Tyler, and Greg: it was just off for *this* typically lovely forum. I actually checked to make sure I wasn't mistakenly on The Free Press Substack. I love Bari and especially Nellie, but their comment section is not engaging (I know they don't have control over that). One of the best parts of being a PRIMO is getting to chat with people like those mentioned above as well as Bored Nihilist, Midwest Molly, Muliebrity, Duchesse des Esseintes, etc.
Although I'm embarrassed to admit that I was first drawn to Muliebrity because I didn't know what that word meant: I just thought that she also liked mules.
TIL that Muliebrity does not mean a very famous mule. A little disappointed frankly.
Absolutely. TFP comment section is comically bad. They don’t do themselves any favors either because every article seems to take cancel culture as its main subject. There was just a two parter on high school debate club hijinks. THE LIBS ARE RUINING DEBATE CLUB!!!! I think cancel culture is dumb (one of my recent writing projects took dead aim at cancel culture and race) but Jesus Christ, there are more interesting things in the world. Either take on dumb internet bullshit with a gleeful wink or just be interesting and free of MSM dogma. TFP also falls in the middle. Except for TGIF, which I continue to find delightful and is basically the only reason I subscribe.
Additionally, I recently signed up for the lindy newsletter and enjoy it! Anyone else read it?
(The only other one I pay for is a golf newsletter called the Quadrilateral, which is written by one of the guys who incidentally helped design my home course, rustic canyon in Moorpark CA.)
I’m a newbie for sure (primo for months, never a timely enough listener to comment), but it’s been interesting to see what comments looks like and more so yet to read that they’re not the norm?
There has been a hostile and combative element lately that was really uncommon in the past. The open thread has been a place where I have poured out personal sorrows, which is a risk online, and been treated almost entirely with kindness and empathy. I’m just hoping the recent uncharitable attitudes are a temporary shift.
Yeeeaaahhh. I feel so conflicted. The threads have been amazing but I agree, I think now that so many people have signed up for prime membership, it has gotten crowded and hostile.
But also. I dunno. For the last 3 months or so, Jesse's takes on things have really bothered me. No clue why as I disagree with Katie too, but her views or the way she expressed them does not annoy me
Katie can back up her beliefs somewhat, even if I don’t always agree with her. Jesse just seems puzzled by stuff that seems relatively asinine. That’s what annoys me, at least.
I think yeah, it is that she backs up her beliefs, even if I disagree. I am not sure Jesse's beliefs are asinine. I really do not know what it is because even when Katie talks about stupid shit, it doesn't annoy me. I gotta figure out why Jesse ja been annoying me.
Yeah the comments here are great but I’ve been a bit more vocal about Jessie sucking uncut knobs with his garbage takes recently so I wonder if people are such snowflakes that comments like that are considered mean or something.
Is saying Jesse sucks wangs mean?
Is calling people snowflakes mean?
If so, I’m a real fucking asshole.
I mean, if we have to be honest, it's certainly not edifying........but if you don't harass people, I don't see why you couldn't say that.
I think you’re allowed to disagree with the hosts of our religion/podcast.
Welcome! I would say the Wednesday open threads are where people share more about their lives and general perspectives, whereas obviously the individual episode comment sections tends to be more about, you know, that individual episode.
“Covered themselves in glory.” I am now using this expression in my daily life.
I thought the same thing. This is such a jovial, civil forum and there were some unpleasant vibes going on. Not that everyone has to agree on everything but it was a little weird. Very off brand.
Not just you :(
I can't profess to know every regular poster. But the last couple of threads have contained a lot of unfamiliar names with very strident opinions.
It has been getting worse that since the Patrick Tomlinson episode.
Speaking of which, nice harmonic convergence with the current episode: https://twitter.com/HackingButLegal/status/1665680262183677954
Some guy was trolling me by dumbing down 3 paragraph responses into a single sentence and trying to appear smart. It was weird.
Sounds like a good faith attempt to really understand you!
I am by no means an expert on the enlisted nuclear side, but women first were admitted to nuclear power school for air craft carriers in 94.
The stolen valor for both disabled veterans is disgusting to me, coming from a military family and lots of military colleagues and friends. And stolen nuclear engineering cred is further gross as an actual nuclear engineer. What a grifter and lier She deserves everything coming to her
Agreed. I usually DGAF about stolen valor, if somebody wants a free cup of coffee that bad, let'em, its just sad and more than a little pathetic. Still, this seems to be more than that.
It's pretty bad. It's one thing if you're doing it to get a free lunch at a fast food place (still gross but more sad than anything) but when you're building your brand/business on a false biography like this, it reveals a pretty rotten moral framework. I have no interest in being in the military because it sounds very difficult and very dangerous, but the tradeoff is I don't get to pretend I did the difficult and dangerous thing. I wonder if this will catch up with her.
It depresses me that stolen intersectional valor is punished way more severely rather than actual military
Thought process; military = white supremacy organization for evil country. Intersectional person has had words said to them and words are literal violence and/or are being hunted by cops and rapists.
I think the sub story got more attention because we thought they might still be alive and were (most of us ) rooting for them. Remember the boys trapped in the flooded caves in Thailand? Or the miners trapped in the collapse in Chile for a couple of MONTHS? I’m pretty sure all of these people were poor and not white. Both of those stories were wall to wall coverage.
Ha! I shouldn’t comment while I listen. Katie just said basically exactly that;)
As a trainee typesetter, many years ago, I was taught that for readability the body copy should always be in a font with serifs, like Times New Roman. The sans serif fonts, like Arial, were for headings only. Maybe thinking and reading have changed since then, but I'm inclined to agree with Jesse on this.
Love a niche typesetting comment 😍
Shout out for Atkinson Hyperlegible font by the Braille Institute. It’s been a game changer for me.
https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont
Pleasing on the eyes!
I learned the same a few decades ago (not as a typesetter though) and serif fonts are still my personal aesthetic preference, but there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence now that sans serif fonts are easier for dyslexic people to read, and Comic Sans in particular for some reason. I'm not sure whether this is true for non-dyslexic people as well.
I don't think I knew that! (I've reached the age where I can't say for sure that I didn't already know something and then forget it.)
As I've got older and my eyesight has got worse, I've pivoted back to serif fonts after using Arial for years. I find them (literally) easier on the eye.
Several of my old friends went full zero covid. They are all highly educated people who have never taken a college level science course. Their knowledge of biology and other scientific disciplines has some significant gaps that zero covid types exploit. They are very left win, young to early middle aged and very into disabilty activism. Covid was the chance to reorder society more to their liking and they are upset about that.
The biggest risk factor for severe Covid is age: your risk of death doubles every 6 years. Being immunocompromised roughly doubles your risk, except for sever conditions like having an organ transplant or SCID. In those cases, a lot of infections are a much greater risk and if you have an organ transplant you can drastically reduce your risk y frequently boosting. My friends think of themselves as medically severely vulnerable but they are either mildly immunocompromised or have a condition that doesn't raise the risk of severe Covid. They have an entire information ecosystem (there are a few scientists and doctors but mostly it's highly educated non-scientists) that feeds them Covid doomerism. SARS-COV2 downregulates MHC I? Now our immune system can't recognize it even though countless other viruses do the exact same thing. A report of the virus infiltrating the brains of people on high doses of steroids? It must chronically infect the brain even though viruses end up in unusual tissues when you're on steroids. There is nothing you can do to convince them that they're wrong. Even telling them they're wrong makes you a eugenicist and part of a disability genocide.
I would love all those "misinformation researchers" who spent countless hours tracing the "misinformation networks" that spread information suggesting that the lab leak was plausible and linking them to other unsavory ideas to start tracking the information networks that spread ideas like SARS-COV2 is airborne AIDS. Because that's actually not true and those beliefs are really causing people to ruin their own lives. They're basically in a cult and have sacrificed so much that it's hard to break away from Zero Covid.
Part of the blame rests with the CDC, which is either entirely incompetent or knowingly misled the country about Covid risk. Part rests with doctors who often told their patients things that weren't true. I heard a doctor insist back in summer of 2020 that we knew for certain that a recent spike in California was due to people hanging out at the beach without masks. Another told a relative of mine who is old and medically vulnerable that contracting Covid pre-vaccine would almost certainly kill them. Their estimated risk of death for someone their age with their risk profile was something like 10-15%. People were simply getting inaccurate information from their doctors and the government and it's hard for people to wrap their heads around that.
Disability activism does seem to be a common link here. A “multiply disabled” friend who strangely has no COVID restrictions when, say, traveling to Australia with her SO, posts “anti-masking is disability genocide” infographics.
I also do see a higher correlation among people who have very nebulously defined invisible disabilities.
Make that nebulously defined SELF DIAGNOSED invisible disabilities and that sums up most of the 100% Covid people I know.
What I find fascinating is that they were shrieking LISTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS in 2020 and 2021 but now that the CDC and public health agencies determined that the need for pandemic precautions has passed, they are highly suspicious of the science and the CDC. The shoe is truly on the other foot.
Ohhh yes. POTS seems to be one of the big ones lately under the self-diagnosis umbrella... listen to scientists, unless it’s about the reality of a diagnosis!
so strange because the diagnostic test for POTS is easy and non-invasive (they just put you on a tilt table and test your heart rate/BP at different positions)!
I suspect the invisibility and breadth make it easy for folks to claim without actually seeking a proper assessment for any one of a million reasons, including cost and insurance, accessibility, etc.
Yeah they're calling the CDC genocidal now...
Speaking as a person with a nebulously defined invisible disability, we're not all like that.
But I know the type.
I see the same thing. Also with people who claim to be disabled by a non-real disease like Adrenal fatigue (as opposed to Adrenal insufficiency which is real). And with people who dump a ton of diseases that haven't been shown to be autoimmune into the autoimmune bucket -- I'm thinking of people who say fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disease/
I think a lot of people are probably just biological byproducts of the standard American diet and standard American lifestyle. That is to say, they eat garbage, they don’t exercise, their sleep sucks, they have no way to regulate stress, and don’t go outside. It’s difficult to feel great when this is the lifestyle situation and of course they are going to look for some kind of answer about why they don’t feel good. Might just be a matter of getting to bed earlier and putting down the Doritos.
Not to sound glib, but I think some of these people just really, really like working from home. (I was already WFH when Covid happened but if not I would have done a lot of mental gymnastics not to go back into the office)
The person I know who makes a big fuss about masking etc still (calling out others all over social media for not wearing masks, calling people who are happy about the end of restrictions 'genocidal', claiming to be high-risk because of various self-diagnosed ailments which are not actually proven risk factors and getting cross when the NHS won't dispense paxlovid to them like sweeties) did all this while in the same time period attending a free-for-all sex party. It's virtue-signalling, part of a checklist of beliefs people think they have to have in order to be a good person.
(The same individual was basically threatening to cut ties with anyone who believed in or entertained the idea of a lab leak, because it's 'racist'.* Now, I don't know exactly what happened but from what I have read there is a compelling case for it originating in the virology lab that just so happens to be in the city where the disease first emerged. But in this person's mind objective reality and what really happened are less important than whether something can be seen as 'racist').
*Needless to say, said individual is white.
Can I ask if/how they identify the the LGBT+ community? I worked in public health PR at the height of the pandemic and the way everyone is forced to dance around saying: some gay men (or “men having sex with men”, MSM) are leading extremely high risk lives during a pandemic, spreading hot only COVID but meningitis as well - as if it would be a cultural affront and not a common sense “don’t dig your own grave!” precaution. And I don’t know how to say this out loud or discuss it without being shot down as homophobic.
You can! Yes, they do identify as LGBT+, specifically as a trans man.
In their specific case I wonder if what I'm seeing is a difference between the online/social media persona (which is carefully curated to be hyper-progressive and avoid the kind of criticism that they constantly level at others) and how they actually behave. I think it's fairly likely this particular person doesn't actually take a load of precautions against COVID, but they keep up the 'people who don't wear masks on public transport are genocidal' posting because it is consistent with the image they want to convey. Going to a gay sex party/orgy is OK, because it is associated with the LGBT community and therefore not a target for criticism - in the same way that progressive public health voices condoned BLM protests at a time when they were calling to criminalise people seeing their families.
Re. homophobia, the whole monkeypox thing last summer was so fascinating and infuriating. Even though it was overwhelmingly affecting gay men, you had people arguing that targeting the response, vaccination etc at that community was wrong or somehow stigmatising, analogous to the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis etc. Some people were really muddying the waters in the name of...I'm not really sure what. What was the intended outcome? Germophobic worried-well types getting vaccinated against something they were unlikely to catch, at the expense of (likely the most marginalised) MSM who were at far greater risk?
The CDC and their decisions and "public health officials" and different things that happened during, around and because of covid have really made me rethink my support for Medicare for All. I worked very hard for Bernie and other politicians that support MFA but now I'm not.
Same here. I am quite worried that if we got Medicare for all, the system might refuse to pay for certain essential services unless you had already undergone specific procedures. Like leaving someone with a bill for a flu hospitalization if they didn’t get a flu vaccine even though the flu vaccine isn’t very effective
I’m rethinking my support for many things. I was thrilled that the ACA allowed some very low income friends to actually get health insurance, but now realize it is fraught with problems. I don’t know what to believe, who to trust anymore. I kinda miss the 80’s when all we had to worry about was nuclear war.
If you haven’t taken college level math or science I’m not sure you can be called highly educated.
On the sub story: American media focuses on the story with an American angle. My Italian friend was very clear that the migrant boat was a bigger story than the sub in Italy. Americans simply are not involved in one of them.
I am UK based and while I am not sure how the amount of coverage varied exactly. I had certainly heard about the migrant boat before the submersible. Both are tragic situations just for different reasons.
That guy who lives in the basement with an air purifier also has pronouns in his bio. I wonder what the correlation between having pronouns in your bio and suffering from some sort of mental health condition do these correlate?
Big venn circle.
Having pronouns in your bio doesn't necessarily mean you're a basement air purifier guy. But being a basement air purifier guy likely means you have pronouns in your bio.
Precisely.
Please re-read my comment. You've mixed up the direction of what I said. All fruits are apples vs all apples are fruits (and not even as strong as that).
Why are you looking for a fight? Who exactly are "people like me"? People who have a differing opinion from you?
Jesse - If you're looking for examples of incivility and just plain unpleasantness in the comments, take this example right here.
Ahem. What are *your* pronouns?
It’s sort of like how certain extreme stances have populations on both the left and the right. Putting your pronouns (especially the more insane ones) in your bio can be a sign that you’re signaling to the elite class or that you’re just suffering very severe mental illness, especially when your pronouns are gibberish.
You are correct that pronouns in bios is fairly common. But so are rates of mental illness in America.
The thing about the woke hiring was almost certainly just about cost savings. Guy said “hey we want to be inclusive not just hire a bunch of 50 year old white ex-navy sub dudes”.
What he really meant was “I can’t afford actual experts”.
Or they’ll tell him it’s impractical to build a suitable cylindrical pressure hull to operate as a tourist venture. (Not that fighting to look out of a single 20” window seems very appealing to me. An ROV would have a better view without the same risk.)
Apparently they had an old guy but he wouldn’t sign off on the plan to have a composite pressure vessel with none of the sort of non-destructive tests you’d normally do on a critical composite structure like that, and he was forced out.
So I think this was more “I don’t like what the old guys are saying” than “I can’t afford to pay them”.
Regulations are for nerds! Full steam ahead! I suppose given this, I don’t feel *super* bad for the guy who created this death trap, but I assume all of the people on board believed that this vessel had been subject to the same regulations that, say, an airplane would’ve gone through before being allowed to operate.
The waiver they had to sign was reasonably clear, and it sounds like the clientele had been involved in other “extreme” adventure stuff. But they probably did not realize the degree to which this operation was out of line with the “best practices” of the (small) deep sea community (James Cameron’s commentary is fairly revealing - yes he’s a filmmaker but also a genuine expert in the field).
I wonder how clear it was in terms of “we have not undergone the strictest regulatory testing on this vessel” etc. I’ve signed waivers for marathons before but was also under the (assumed) impression they would have the streets closed off at intersections.
It specifically said “this is an experimental vessel that has not been approved by any regulatory agencies or certification authorities” or something to that effect.
There are not, to my understanding, any “regulations” per se, but there are private organizations that do certification inspections on submersibles, and the other companies that do dives to Titanic get approved. These guys were unique in not seeking certification.
Oh wow. That’s kind of crazy to consider. Maybe it’s hubris or perhaps not taking those words literally? I can’t imagine there’s any way I would get into that vessel in most circumstances, but especially that one.
Yeah one of the DEI hiring policies the company I work for was to create more entry level jobs with more responsbility and pay a couple thousand dollars more a year for them. Effectively underpaying and overworking more people with fewer opportunities for advancement. Progress!
This is precisely how the diversity programs in Hollywood work. Minus the overworking part. but since the studio is paying for that writer and not the actual production, there really isn’t anywhere for them to go in terms of upward mobility.
Since you work in Hollywood how do you feel about every major TV show being the Burger King Kids Club? Every show needs at least 2 black people one asian or latino and probably 2 white people but that depends on how many lesbian cops there are.
I THINK IT’S GREAT. REPRESENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. ESPECIALLY BECAUSE THE COUNTRY IS 90% BIPOC AND 100% TRANS SO IT IS ALL WONDERFUL. SAME ANSWER FOR WRITING STAFFS AND CREWS. :::NERVOUS LAUGHTER::: HA HA HA.
The problem with Mediterranean migrant discourse is that nuance is forbidden. In a way, it's rather like gender discourse, like how saying that you're fine with transwomen but not in women's sports or prisons is verboten.
Anyone who strays from the party line that they are all desperate refugees fleeing war with no other option than to take a boat across the Mediterranean - and that they will all later integrate seamlessly into European societies - is a racist, islamophobe, nationalist etc.
The thing is, there's a lot of nuance to the migrant crisis. There are enormous issues with integration. There's the undeniable fact that many people crossing the Med are economic migrants, not refugees (people smugglers charge around 2000€ a head, or almost twice the average Greek monthly salary - and that's just the cost of crossing the sea, I'm not taking into account the cost of getting from Pakistan to Libya). There's the fact that Europe is not a single state, and when rich Germany decides to throw open the doors, impoverished Greece bears the brunt.
This creates space for the actual literal far-right to swoop in and gain support - as we see happening across Europe. I'm furious about this, because there is now an extremely high probability that a far-right party will enter a governing coalition in Spain after our elections next month. When everyone is scared to speak about the issue, and the only people who WILL speak out are far-right demagogues, we're in trouble.
Agreed. Imagine you live in an impoverished area and suddenly coaches full of mostly (about 90%) young male migrants are dropped off into your area, without any consultation or warning. And imagine crime rates, rape and violence go through the roof, because of trauma and inability to integrate etc. And you're a bigot if you complain. Or as is the case for a lot of working class voters, you'll be told your views are ignorant and uneducated. Like you say, if only far-right parties are going to address this then don't be surprised when they gain support on these issues. It's easy to be on the side of 100% open border when you know it's never going to negatively effect you personally, you just get to feel virtuous. It is a much more nuance issue that we really need to be able to talk about openly.
I agree that this is a complex issue.
I would be careful about generalisations though. I live in a city that took in almost 100.000 refugees in 2015/2016 in the crime rate barely changed. Right now crime is considerably down compared to 2013.
Yet if you ask people on the street I am sure most would believe that crime is way up. Probably because of some cases that got a lot of publicity. Sometimes "felt reality" is not actual reality.
That doesn't mean that the integration of these people isn't a huge task. But I think the probelms are elsewhere (in school eg.)
I would imagine that where the refugees come from makes a difference. Ie, a more conservative theocracy? Or a more moderate part of the world?
https://www.thefp.com/p/two-bombings-in-one-night-thats-normal
Yes, it's so worrying. I've just read this https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/26/far-right-afd-wins-local-election-watershed-moment-german-politics
I (perhaps naively) didn't think this could happen in Germany ever again, but the complete suppression of any nuanced discussion around the issue of immigration is at least in part responsible.
What happened years ago in Cologne on New Year's Eve was awful and I was in Germany at the time. The way it was reported was essentially to blame the women who dared to feel terrified as they were being groped and assaulted. It was so nasty. I remember male friends, who I had previously thought of as sensible people, saying things like 'well, I guess if you walk around in short skirts in dodgy parts of town after drinking at night ...'.
Now, in the UK, the way asylum seekers are treated is disgusting and there are plenty of people who cheer it on. And all the left says is that all immigrants are heart surgeons who we are so happy to have because without them the NHS would fail even more than it has already.
As an immigrant (white, EU national, so I claim no victimhood) I find the discourse so frustrating. It also means I have to be 'the good immigrant' for my lefty friends, when I'm just a bog standard person and I have no idea if I'm a net positive or net negative to my chosen home, the UK, or how you'd even calculate this.
That's actually a lot scarier than what's happening in Spain - the Spanish far-right never really went away (hell, Vox just got a mayor elected whose name is literally Francisco Franco), but we always look to Germany as the shining example of how to learn from history and move forward.
I remember Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian writing an atrocious article about the Cologne attacks. It really felt like people on the left were tying themselves up in knots about it, because they couldn't accept what had happened.
I feel so conflicted about a lot of these issues - I'm also an immigrant. I'm very well integrated, but I'm also visibly foreign, to the point that people will often do a double-take when I speak Catalan. I'm white, so like you, I don't face victimhood (unless I dare to voice a political opinion, then I get told to fuck off back to my country).
In my case, I'm lucky enough to qualify for EU nationality because of my grandparents. I know how deeply unfair it is that other people have to jump through hoops to come to Europe, but those of us with a burgundy passport have won the lottery. The difference in quality of life between South Africa and here is almost unfathomable, and if someone told me I had to go back home to one of the world's most violent countries, I'd be devastated. I understand people emigrating in search of a better life, I really do, but...every system needs limits. And we need to be able to talk frankly about it.
>>I'm very well integrated, but I'm also visibly foreign, to the point that people will often do a double-take when I speak Catalan.
I get this reaction too, Swedes are kind of shocked that I'm American, speak fluent (but not perfect) Swedish and have a relatively mild, easy to understand accent.
I just don't think AfD are that scary. I think they're the same sort as MAGA Republicans, and that a lot of objection to them both is mostly just class-based aesthetic chud-hatred. I'm happy to hear differently, though.
For my money as an immigrant to Germany (but the kind of immigrant that Germans mistake for Dutch), the fact that all polite political conversation in Germany has extreme concern over being a Nazi at its center has the unintended consequence of increasing xenophobia and other nasty -isms. I read your second sentence as reflecting this idea, too.
(I'm new and I saw complaints about new commenters being dickish, so I'm gonna preface this by saying it might seem callous but I'm still trying to give my practical take without being unkind. If i miss the mark, holler! This has been driving me nuts so I'm still chewing on it.)
The migrant shipwreck and the missing sub were both horrific tragedies.
I can't speak to media coverage, but (again as a layperson, experts correct me) if you put a gun to my head, I would want to be assigned the missing sub rescue/recovery 1000000%:
"Five identified victims, all in the same place, with a known travel plan and known resources and a rough timeline for survival. If they're alive rescue will be technically challenging, but if they're not, we can provide closure to their families"
vs
"Overloaded ship with unidentified 350-500 individual souls, no way to triage dehydration/crush injuries/etc, probable panicky crowd dynamics, little/no flotation devices per person, which is important because again, we cannot confirm how many victims need assistance or how many bodies need to be retrieved"
Look. I KNOW I'm being mean and callous, but I just feel like one of these disasters was a lot easier to manage than the other disaster, and I don't really think the logistics came down to wealth or race, yknow? It's a lot harder and a lot grimmer to manage a rescue of a few hundred people than it is to attempt a rescue of a few people.
Good take-- not at all "dickish."
Welcome!
Amy, I would also like to extend a welcome. Your honesty and forthrightness is refreshing. I think we've gotten a lot of trolls lately, probably drawn in by the circumcision discussion. The usual pattern is that they come and go pretty quickly.
Thank you both -- I was a little nervous that I'd been too Firm in my opinions over the last couple of days, but I've been lurking a while and really enjoying the conversations. ❤️
Welcome. Isn’t it a refreshing thing to be able to post an opinion? Now that I’ve alienated all my former social media friends by being “on the wrong side of history”, I find this group to be generally respectful and open minded.
Same. Too bad your posts do literal violence to trans kids though!
Firm opinions are welcome. As hominem attacks and low effort shit posting less so.
Yes, one feels more like a movie and one feels depressingly real. Also, one feels fun and exciting and has a simple solution (find the submarine thingy!) and the other has no good solution.
I don't think it's mean or callous at all. I think it's valuable to consider these things which surely factor in. I also wondered what kind of reporting could or should be done from the ground in that situation. It wasn't that it wasn't covered here.
I hope you don't have the sense this is a particularly sensitive community. That you even prefaced your comment like that means that you probably won't, say, respond to anyone asking if they're a "retard." Welcome!
I think I had a little attack of nerves because actively engaging in an established community can be a little stressful - you want to calibrate to the existing ecosystem without causing too many waves. 😅 You guys have been great!
Not 'dickish' at all (hello, I'm pretty new, too) and a very measured take. There was an excellent article (academic) on reactions to danger, I think it was centered around the Charlie Hebdo attack, and some were saying 'why so much concern for a small space of journalists when ISIL is in Tunisia, etc.' or similar. What Katie surmised was right, that location is a factor; people are going to empathize most what they're familiar with, include geographically and culturally. And as you say, the magnitude of tragedy. Both are tragic, but 5 is a more cognitively manageable loss than hundreds, including dozens of children, both hard to imagine/bear, but the latter more so.
If I were a young healthy man, I’d choose the ship, especially since my financial prospects, should I survive, would be much better in Europe. If I were a sixty-something billionaire, well shoot. I’d buy a yacht! But if given only two choices, I’d go for the submersible.
Oh God, i was originally thinking "which rescue operation would i have wanted to be involved with".
If it's "which situation would I personally want to participate in" yeah, if I was a young and very fit man, maybe the ship?
The submersible?
Personally, no victim blaming or shaming at all: you could not have physically gotten me into that thing. (I feel the same about all extreme tourism, this isn't me trying to Be Smarter than the victims, I just grew up on all the Death In [Park] books and a family member saying "if you fuck up in the wilderness, expect a helicopter in 12-36 hours IF weather and terrain permit," so my immediate response is always "okay sure, sounds fun, and if everything goes wrong, what does Plan B look like?")
Well yeah and anyway, come home safe from submersible and you have a photograph and maybe a teeshirt. Make it to Europe as a migrant and you have a whole new life. Lol that New Yorker article was saying travel wasn’t a transformative experience? She just chose the wrong type of travel lol
There is the Identifiable Victim Effect to explain the greater empathy/interest for an identifiable person or small group of people vs. a vague undifferentiated mass of people. Given the questionable state of social science research, we can't be sure about this.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/identifiable-victim-effect
Or in other words, why a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic?
Or something that is happening all over the world all the time to people who aren’t members of your society is not that interesting.
Something that is a pretty novel spectacular drama involving a bunch of high status members of your society, very interesting.
It’s not about “racism”.
Yes, one of the reasons the Titan debacle was so fascinating was that it was happening to a small group of people that Westerners could relate to better as individuals, even if some of them were horrible rich people. The migrants who drown in the Mediterranean are largely anonymous to us, because they're participating in an unsanctioned activity where no official channels are used to identify them. (In fact many discard their IDs.)
I mean two of the dudes on the sub were Persian, it’s not about race or skin color.
Make one of the dudes on the sub black and another Korean and the public/media is even more excited about it not less.
All the psychoanalysis trying to explain our fascination with this particular tragedy seems to ignore Occan's Razor.
We are absolutely obsessed with all things Titanic. Wasn't it the highest grossing movie ever? If these same 5 guys in the same submarine were lost prowling some random spot in the Atlantic Ocean, the story would be a footnote.
I don’t think so. I think “Tourist submarine disappears” was always going to be a story because those three words rarely end up in the same headline.
Titanic was the highest grossing movie because it was perfectly designed for a specific type of t(w)eenage girl in the time before social media.
I also think there’s the novelty factor. It isn’t often that a tourist submarine disappears (for several reasons). I don’t think this was the only maritime refugee disaster this year, just the biggest. We know how they go, the actual rescue personnel were there (that’s who tool the most common pictures). It’s no wonder the interest wasn’t there.