Take Care NOw

Here are some book recommendations to prove it!

y’all need to go see the titanic jokes they were making back THEN.

“To celebrate the occasion we have temporarily recolored all Aperture Science appliances in these regions to your favorite flavor of gay.”

These are a group of the most obnoxiously privileged people in the universe, who paid obscene amounts of money for the sole purpose of gawking at a mass fucking grave and acting like this made them Awesome Explorers Who Did Totally Real Science while gushing about how it’s just like a movie with zero respect or reverence for the reality of what they were seeing. Just for the cool factor.

So when I say that the level of arrogant disregard for their safety on the part of the company that knowingly, willingly sent them down there in unsafe and unrated death cannisters while lying to them about it is so egregious that the entitled billionaire pricks who fucked around and found out have my complete and total sympathy as victims?

Yes, the concept of “isn’t this so fucking cool” tourism visits to the wreck of the Titanic is ghoulish; yes, it’s skeevy as hell that anyone signed up for them; yes, they paid obscene amounts of money for the privilege of desecrating a mass grave; yes, the fact that the submersibles being used were not certified or rated by any safety board is publicly-accessible knowledge and there were records of dangerous issues in the past.

(How many of YOU knew about them before yesterday? Do you think OceanGate made that information accessible to its potential clients? Be honest.)

What part of that changes the company’s ethical obligations? What part of any of that waved a magic wand and made a baseline duty of care disappear in a cloud of glitter?

These people are tactless, obnoxious, stupid tourists, and they didn’t deserve to die like this because of it.

OceanGate had a responsibility to be truthful about the purpose of their tourist rides and they weren’t–even now they’re still maintaining the fiction of these being “research expeditions”. They had a responsibility to have meaningful emergency procedures in place that they blatantly fucking don’t. They had a responsibility to give anyone onboard the opportunity for informed consent–REAL informed consent, involving being EXTREMELY FORTHRIGHT about the lack of safety testing, proactively informing them of previous near-disasters and the steps that have (not) been taken since to correct the problem.

They had, at bare minimum, the responsibility to ensure that they didn’t put UNTRAINED MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC in a death tube that HAD NOT BEEN SAFETY-RATED IN THE SLIGHTEST and had NO EMERGENCY BEACONS OR INDEPENDENT NAVIGATION CAPACITY, period, at all, no matter how charmingly they could fast-talk the suckers or how many forms they got them to sign.

These appear to be a group of people with more money than sense–who got scammed by a sleazy, corner-cutting corporation. They were charmed and painted a picture and assured that it was tooootally safe, with just enough risk to sound exciting. We’ve all seen the way these “innovators” talk. These people–except the CEO on board, in fairness–don’t deserve to die for their poor judgement any more than the idiots who fall for the hype and buy Teslas that burst into flames and lock the doors. Regardless of their character or morality, the victims had every right and every reason to assume that this so-called “expedition” carried risks comparable to real scientific missions on real, safety-tested submersibles.

It didn’t.