this is probably the best take I’ve heard so far on the debate of people being told that they aren’t having enough ‘compassion’ for billionaires making bad decisions and paying the obvious consequences for it

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

this is a bit heavyhanded but shhhhh shhhh

The Submersible Titan Implodes

I think what has made the Oceangate sub so special is a rich person is suffering from his own actions. Usually when they cut corners and defy regulations it's workers, consumers, and other groups that suffer. But here Stockton Rush had to lay in the bed he made.

The other thing that makes it interesting is no regular person would be in this situation. I don't mean we would have done research on the company, known better than to visit a grave/history site, or even being afraid of the ocean. We would have never been able to even afford that $250k ticket, it was something only for the wealthy.

It also displays media bias. We get hour to hour coverage of the rescue but 700 asylum seekers sinking at sea barely gets a peep.

The arrogance of this man. He saw the warnings as personal insults 💀💀

“I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.” —Famous last words and a fitting epitaph, by OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush

Titanic Director, James Cameron, who visited the Titanic 33 times onboard a submersible and also holds a world record for the deepest dive ever at 35,787 ft in the Mariana Trench, has weighed in on the Titan disaster, saying, “I knew Titanic submarine imploded on Monday and rescue was a charade.”

👉🏿 https://metro.co.uk/2023/06/20/titanic-sub-ceo-was-worried-about-resurfacing-18980155/amp/

👉🏿 https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/amp/

👉🏿 https://www.thedailybeast.com/missing-sub-boss-oceangate-ceo-stockton-rush-was-sued-for-fraud-in-florida-by-marc-and-sharon-hagle

this CANNOT be real this HAS to be elaborate marketing for bioshock 4 or something (source)

Paul-Henri Nargolet was an experienced diver. He was 77. He was also a sad elderly widower who openly admitted he was sanguine about death. He know Oceangate was…questionable and a potential death trap. But he was fine with going out quick. He still let a 19 year old kid get on that death trap sub.

Stockton Rush is the obvious villain here.

But I have questions about Paul-Henri.

people saying that users aren’t being compassionate enough towards the billionaires stuck in the death coffin at the bottom of the ocean and calling us “ghouls” for bringing up the absolute absurdity of the entire situation and it’s like……of course no one ever deserves to die by suffocation or freezing to death and it’s a hope that by some miracle that these people are found and somehow saved. however people are aloud to point out the irony of how our current wealth gap is so high that there are people who are able to spend 250k, an amount that most people don’t see in their entire lives, like it’s a movie ticket. except instead of seeing a movie they are entering a death chamber to the bottom of the ocean so they can gawk at the mass grave of over a thousand people

“the CEO of the company tricked them and he’s the real capitalist villain while the other passengers are blameless” I agree that the CEO (who is also stuck in the submarine with them) is as grimy as they come and cut corners in order to make as much money as possible. that’s a given. but as we are seeing now, most people who have never even stepped foot in the ocean their entire lives could see that this was a disaster waiting to happen. you don’t have to be a maritime expert to see that. the submersible has no emergency beacon, is controlled by an off brand game controller, made from parts from a camp store, navigated by texts from above, is bolted in from the outside, and has a contract that passengers sign that mentions “death” three times on the front page. most people couldn’t be paid to step foot in it - and these people paid 250k to go to the bottom of the ocean in it

once again, no one is relishing at people dying stuck in an essentially gutted out minivan at the bottom of the ocean. especially when one passenger is 19 and the other is a legitimate titanic researcher. but people are allowed to be mad that thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxpayer money and resources are being used to try and literally pluck these people out of the ocean and save them from a grave that they literally helped dig themselves into without a care in the world. they are the 1% who can put themselves in peril as much as they please and spend money and waste resources like it’s water but will always expect to be saved from the brink of death by us regular folk so they can call themselves an “adventurer” at their next luncheon

since theres a lot of discussions about shipwrecks and deep sea submersibles happening right now, im just gonna quickly recommend this video which details how caladan oceanic found the samuel b roberts.

the samuel b roberts was a destroyer escort sank during the battle off samar during ww2. the wreck was found last year and is 22,621 feet/6885 metres deep which is almost 10,000 feet or 3000 metres deeper than the titanic and is currently the deepest wreck ever found.

in the video, you see a deep sea submersible (which can go down to 36,000 feet/10,973 metres) that isnt a tin can finished up with duct tape, super glue and glittery gel pens. it is piloted by an expert and they swap out pilots every day to avoid exertion or fatigue, and they have a very complex sonar system for finding wrecks. the longest they can go down is 16 hours and they keep in contact with their ship above and have to get clearance just for half an hour more.

when they find the wreck, they look around it to ensure they can identify it and map it out as well as they can, and then head back up to shore. they then hold a funeral service for those who died and leave a wreath on the ocean surface above where the wreck lays.

while im somewhat sketched out by the founder victor vescovo, the company does important work in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean and finding wrecks which are the gravesites of those who passed. and they are not disrespectful to those whose graves lay 22,000 feet/6700 metres down on the seabed.

and what i would like to point out is how the samuel b roberts is protected against unauthorised disturbance by the sunken military craft act. you would need a permit from the naval history and heritage command (and a submarine that can withstand all the pressure) to go see it.

which, as ive said many times in the last two days, is something that the titanic should also have protection against. there should be laws in place that do not allow people to treat a mass fucking gravesite as a tourist spot.

"From the creators of Arrested Development..."

Some highlights from this insane article

And below is my personal favorite paragraph in the entire article bc um… what the fuck? And in what world is the ocean safe from nuclear war ??😭😭

EDIT: FORGOT TO MENTION THE OCEAN TEMPERATURE IS NOT STABLE!!! ITS RISING DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

If you're still kind of obsessed with OceanGate, Behind the Bastards just did a couple of episodes about Stockton Rush and they get into details about how many times he blatantly ignored people straight up telling him "this is unsafe and you will get someone killed," and how like plain old common sense should have told him it was unsafe. This is absolutely the new high water mark of a libertarian doing something stupid everyone involved paying the consequences.

Okay, there is something that is genuinely annoying me about the OceanGate discussion. It's that so many people are calling Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, one of the people that died in that submersible, a conman who was scamming people.

Listen.

If he was actually a conman.

If he was actually scamming people.

HE WOULD HAVE NEVER GOTTEN IN THAT SUBMERSIBLE

Calling him a conman is giving him too much credit. A conman is someone that at least KNOWS their product is crap. And someone that knows their product is crap never uses it themselves. Stockton genuinely believed in the submersible idea enough that he was willing to subject himself to the same thing he was subjecting to others.

Stockton Rush wasn't trying to con anyone with OceanGate. He was just that stupid

Titanic submarine expedition 🫡