I've been noticing this more and more, there's an insistence that pointed economic or environmental criticisms of some consumption habit, usually almost exclusively partaken by the upper middle class and wealthier people, must actually secretly be a purely cultural critique. I'm sure these guys work for Exxon or some shit, lmao.
There's a very thin line between "being critical of my treats" and "being a member of the fun police".
Cruises and amusement parks are intended to be these egalitarian activities, places where you don't need a ton of money to participate and you get this very convenient access to all the entertainment you could ask for. When you talk about abolishing cruise lines because they're a hellish carbon-emitting mess, you're still left with the question of how a few thousand people can entertain themselves for the one week off they're allowed to have every year.
Simply being a consumption-scald is :LIB: tier shit. You need more on the table than telling people not to enjoy themselves.
Cruise ships are egalitarian? They cost a fuck ton of money and are unbelievably exploitative of their staff. Sexual assault is rampant, and there are reports of even sketchier shit going down.
Not to mention carbon emissions are only one part of the environmental destruction. Defend your treats all you want, go on cruises if you need that I guess, but I'm not convinced it's possible to run these things in a just world.
Tourists basically took over Venice because of the cruise ship industry. Venetians have been fighting them for years. I just read that Italy banned large ships from docking but the ban got circumvented by shuttles taking tourists from the ships to port. You're not going to stop consumers from getting treats.
I think a nuclear ship that's chartered with a state and run by the staff could work, but that's so far removed from how the industry is currently structured that it's not even worth talking about. You'd need to destroy or retool all the existing infrastructure to support nuclear ships and actually charter the ship with a state industry instead of a shell company.
He died as he lived: while riding a Rollercoaster on the decommissioned aircraft carrier cruise ship that sailed into the South China sea
Cruise ships are egalitarian? They cost a fuck ton of money
You can get tickets on a Carribean Cruise out of Galveston or Miami for $200-$300/night. That's peanuts compared to airfare plus accommodations. The low tier food packages are also cheaper than most of what you'll pay on the mainland.
unbelievably exploitative of their staff. Sexual assault is rampant, and there are reports of even sketchier shit going down.
Oh absolutely. Abysmal working conditions, abusive management, and shit-tier hygiene all help keep costs low and profits high.
But this isn't unique to cruise liners. You're just describing capitalism in the aggregate.
Defend your treats all you want, go on cruises if you need that I guess, but I’m not convinced it’s possible to run these things in a just world.
I think we've destroyed a lot of the local amusements and activities in big urban centers in our rush to maximize real estate rents. That forces people to travel if they want cheap fun.
In a just world, you wouldn't need to travel a thousand miles to find fresh air and clean swimmable water.
But closing off yet another door for escape won't make people see you as a champion of global justice.
$200-$300 a night is a lot of money for someone like me.
I don't think making a critique is closing a door. I'm a rando on the internet - I can't stop you going on a cruise. You can't be up in arms at someone pointing out the monstrosity of these things on hexbear.net of all places. Do you think libs are going to see these comments and get scared away from left politics? Or do you just enjoy cruises and hate to see someone talk smack?
I'm curious if anyone with this take has any sort of vision for social change. Unless a transition to a better world - communism or socialism or whatever - is going to be pretty much entirely peaceful and non-disruptive of supply chains, you either have to accept the fact that many of our treats are going to completely disappear (at least for a decent period of time), or admit that we don't actually want to pay the price for change. That's the trilemma. If you're a Westerner and you want the cheap (or expensive) treats at your fingertips continuously into the future, you need the empire to keep doing its thing, externally and internally.
My personal take: we don't really have a choice. Cruise ships are going away because they're unsustainable. That's not a moral judgement. Unsustainable literally means we can't keep it up due to resource limits and environmental destruction, and the crumbling American empire is probably going to make a large portion of them economically and socially unviable.
Do you think libs are going to see these comments and get scared away from left politics? Or do you just enjoy cruises and hate to see someone talk smack?
Honestly, I hate cruises. They're a miserable experience, particularly if you're in an interior cabin on rough seas. I'd much rather spend a week on an island than on a boat. But I also recognize flying in to Jamaica and spending six days at a resort is going to run you more than time on the boat. $200-300/night is the cost of a nice-ish hotel and it comes with travel included.
I have family that regularly go on cruises because they've got kids and cruises are a great way to let your kids have a bit of freedom without being terrified they'll get lost or kidnapped. I understand the appeal, both from a convenience and budget perspective. Frankly, if the USSR was doing industrialized vacations, I suspect they'd be churning out cruises like sausages. Big messy low-cost-per-unit relatively homogeneous solutions are exactly their style. It would probably be closer to $50/night and you'd get all the booze you could drink comped, but otherwise?
I’m curious if anyone with this take has any sort of vision for social change. Unless a transition to a better world - communism or socialism or whatever - is going to be pretty much entirely peaceful and non-disruptive of supply chains, you either have to accept the fact that many of our treats are going to completely disappear (at least for a decent period of time), or admit that we don’t actually want to pay the price for change.
I mean, if I had my way I'd reopen AstroWorld in Houston and I'd put big parks like this in easy reach of every big population center. And I think that would rapidly eat away at the demand for cruises. I'd also go down to Alabama and Mississippi and Florida and invest a ton of money in beach cleanup and preservation. These areas used to be beautiful. Oil exploration and river dumping have ruined them over the course of decades (BP's Deepwater Horizon in particular devastated the Gulf Coast).
I think the drive to go on these cruise vacations is more a consequence of treats already going away at a local level. Mass market consumerist vacations at sea are simply absorbing the excess demand.
But obviously I don't get to make these decisions any more than I get to decide how many cruise ships get launched. I do think a "Save Our Beaches" / "Save Our Parks" message would sell better than "Abolish Cruise Lines". Portraying cruises as these ugly obnoxious pig styles that people are herded onto as an alternative to the beautiful local venues cannibalized at a profit seems like a better sell than simply throwing up my hands and announcing "The World Is Coming To An End So Now Cruise Lines Are Going Away" when the sheltered settler-colonialists of the First World feel neither the risks of climate calamity nor the impending collapse of the cruise liner industry.
None of our limited resources for updating power infrastructure should be used on cruise ships
I mean, this is fundamentally an engineering problem of mass transportation. You can do it on cargo ships. You can do it on cruise ships. You can do it on war ships. However you want to do it, you need to be able to move large ocean-going vessels across wide bodies of water while producing limited amounts of waste.
We're not doing it anywhere, atm. That's a huge problem right now and an even bigger problem into the future. Worrying that someone might use efficiency technology for fun instead strict materialist value add is pointless if we're not doing it in either space.
yeah
we should all have more vacation than that and then maybe wind power cruise ships would be viable.
we can have nice things, remember not having enough nice things is part of why regular people in communist countries were susceptible to western consumerist propaganda
1500 is what I spent on my car. I'm not spending that on a week-long cruise. What are you even talking about?
The scale of climate destruction requires dramatic infrastructural changes. I'm talking re-doing all our infrastructure to resemble Utrecht. I'm talking everyone going vegetarian. I'm talking banning single-use plastics and SUVs. I'm talking about requiring electronics to run for decades and banning the advertisements that make people want a new one every couple of years. You'd better believe I'm talking about turning every last cruise ship into a corral reef.
1500 is what I spent on my car.
I have no idea where you get a car for $1.5k in this market. My wife just got a RadRunner for about that price.
The scale of climate destruction requires dramatic infrastructural changes. I’m talking re-doing all our infrastructure to resemble Utrecht.
I mean, good luck with that. But I see people struggling to sell the idea of basic wind electricity in a market where its basically free money.
I can't imagine a shift on that scale happening in my lifetime.
I got it before the pandemic price hike. Older lady was finally selling her 1999 civic, below market at 2000. I haggled her down to 1500 because the suspension was garbage. I've had to replace the suspension but that was 300 bucks and mostly it runs great.
I mean, good luck with that. But I see people struggling to sell the idea of basic wind electricity in a market where its basically free money.
I mean, yeah, we're probably all going to die. It's just that like, if you don't want to die these are the kind of changes we have to make. If we're clear about that, we can be clear about our politics being a revolutionary project and not just a series of engineering and economics problems.
The synthesis is getting people motivated to fight to change the system.
Sure. Yelling "stop going on cruises and sit at home reading a book" doesn't seem like that'll get the job done.
A condition for averting climate catastrophe is a broad feeling that we have individual responsibility for our consumption, so that frustration with the system (I’ve got to drive to get to work!) spills out into mass activism.
I don't see a shortage of willingness among people to take personal responsibility at various levels. But a ton of that enthusiasm is diverted into consumerist activities and grifts. Whether we're scolding people about recycling or scolding them about plastic straws and grocery bags or scolding people until they install solar panels on their roofs, there's a fixation on individual actions that never seems to make a dent in industrial activity.
Individualism in the face of cataclysm breeds overconfidence on one hand (I'll be climate change proof if I just live in a Tiny Home!) and defeatism on the other (Why even bother with any of this shit when the coal fired power plant next door produces more waste in a day than I could produce in a lifetime of Rolling Coal from a monster truck?)
I see the scalding-people-online shit as an anxiety release mechanism rather than any kind of dialectical synthesis. You'll have as much luck telling people to "Read Settlers" ad nauseum.
people want to find some way to justify to themselves how excess consumption is somehow negotiable
It isn't a question is negotiation, as individual consumers aren't in control of industrial projects.
they need to be cajoled, scolded, and tire-slashed the rest of the way to the finish line.
Haranguing random schmucks over their consumption habits does nothing to change the fundamental functions of productive capital.
why are you talking about killing the bourgeois so much
Except you're not. You're talking about ethical ways to take a vacation
they’re in control of buying cruise packages and plane tickets lmfao
I haven't purchased a cruise ticket in nearly a decade and yet the amount of emissions cruise liners put out have only gone up, roflmoa.
Neither do I have the luxury of taking the train when I need to leave Texas. Houston to NY is a three day Amtrak ride. I can't even get to Colorado without a car, and that's a full 18 hours driving. teehee
democratic forces also aren’t nothing
They are in a kleptocracy
and finally, consumer choices on their own aren’t enough but convincing people that this matters is everything
People are already convinced. They just don't have agency or direction to do anything about it. Even the conversation about wind-powered cruise liners is moot when no cruise liner is willing to experiment or invest in the technology.
I already explained the material side but also marxism doesn’t give you a license to do arbitrary harm as long as it has no world-historical impact.
Marxism gives you an understanding of the dialectical forces driving human society. Its not a license to do or not do anything, any more than a degree in Chemistry is a license to burn things.
What you're implying is Leninism/Maoism. And that is a big thing we're never allowed to talk about because :fedposting:
Which is really where all this terminates. Any conversation about opposing climate change at a practical scale has to involve the kind of mass mobilization of communities to rebel against their immediate material conditions. Like, not just to abstain from buying plane tickets but to actively dismantle airports. Not just to abstain from driving cars but to shut down gas stations and highways. Not just to abstain from electricity but to actively shut down power plants.
Nobody on here (or anywhere in the First World) has any plan on how to do that. And even just whispering the idea is enough to get you crushed under a pile of FBI jackets.
Not to mention that cruise ships, like cargo ships, shop around for the countries with the laxest regulations on maritime vessels and register/license them there so they can effectively be a ship of [insert country] and exempt from any stricter standards to a large extent.
You quite literally cannot make them more efficient and less destructive because they will simply not go along with that. Before one could even think about making luxury cruises into something sustainable and humane you'd have to raze the entire industry to the ground in some way and rebuild it from the ground up to prevent the same sort of lawlessness from even being possible.
"Going on a big boat with lodgings in a nice place" isn't necessarily something completely unsalvageable, but to be salvaged it would need to be designed with a socialist ethos that values the workers operating it, ensures the safety and humane treatment of the environment and locals of the places it visits, and prioritizes the safety of vacationing workers over cramming in as many flashy faux-luxury treats coated in salmonella as physically possible. I don't think such objectives could be met with massive oceangoing vessels, personally, but smaller ones operating shorter trips, closer to shore, with fewer people might be something that could reasonably be achieved in a socialist society.
Yeah, flags of convenience is the term/insult from memory, Panama and Liberia are probably the most well known, but I think some landlocked countries are getting in on the easy money too.
So the US has that one act that says only US-flagged ships can deliver goods to Puerto Rico or something, right? The US could probably change the cruise industry overnight if they had some law that was like "ships with more than X paying passengers must be US-flagged to dock at US ports". Especially if it was a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada.
I feel like that would just result in the cruise industry designing ways to ferry passengers out to only load the main ships in international waters because it would still end up being .4% cheaper to go to such an expense than to have to comply with regulations and deal with liability.
Or you'd just have rogue US states like Florida flaunting the regulation or coming up with some bullshit special zone things to let cruise ships continue operating with impunity. If not them then Louisiana or Texas would do it to try to attract more money to themselves.
There'd need to be stronger and more widespread actions taken to bring the industry in line, like actively making it impossible for them to operate and getting as many of their owners and executives into custody as possible, physically impounding the ships, etc.
You quite literally cannot make them more efficient and less destructive because they will simply not go along with that.
In the US you can, because you control the port system that they use to pick up passengers. In island nations, you can, because you control the port system that they use to drop off passengers.
Not a coincidence that Jamaican and Puerto Rican governments are utterly colonized by US industry. If places like this put their feet down - or if ports in Galveston and the Florida Keys refused to take on vessels that emitted in excess of X amounts of waste - the entire industry would be forced into a race to re-engineer themselves. The first ship capable of meeting new standards would suddenly have exclusive access to a wildly popular destination resort.
Naturally, that's never going to happen because of the way the industries are cartelized and the governments are entirely captured. But the cruise line industry is crazy vulnerable to a handful of municipal governments.
If places like this put their feet down
Grenada.png :sicko-wistful:
Cruise ships are disease factories and lack onboard hospital resources, so if you're dying of something you're getting shunted into a local hospital at the next port of call. There's also the inherent increase in demand on the medical system when you dump 5000 drunk people into a local population, many of whom will treat the port as a playground.
Also, the aforementioned diseases will spread into the local population after the cruise ship leaves.
every single cruise ship is a crime against humanity and the environment.
every single one.
almost exclusively partaken by the upper middle class and wealthier people,
STOP right there.
OK I'm going to take a wild-ass guess and say you haven't been on a cruise ship. Ever. That your entire idea of cruise ship comes from "Titanic" or the 80s series "Love Boat". Upper middle class and wealthier people my ass. The most common complaint on a cruise ship is that you're among The People of Wal-Mart[tm] and you can't get away.
https://www.royalcaribbean.com/cruises/?departureCode_GAL=true
$472 from Galveston, five nights with a stop in Cozumel. How do you beat that price? If you know what you're doing, you can get it even cheaper. It's a tiny room, but who stays in the room? A cruise ship is just a big floating hotel. They're so smooth you don't know you're on the water, and there are a ton of restaurants, most of them free included in the room rate. Booze costs extra, gambling costs extra, shore excursions cost extra. But there are all sorts of ways to sneak booze on board.
I've been on cruise ships and they're not my cup of tea, but I can see why people like them. They're cheap. Wealthy people wouldn't be caught dead on one of these floating trailer parks.
OK...I'll entertain that idea. Where can one find such wealthier shorter cruises? Provide links. Frankly I'd like to take one.
degrowth: (actual materialist science, not ideologically constrained to say 2+2=5)
anti-degrowth neoliberals:
if you can decarbonize them, what's the problem?
The absolute state of scientifically illiterate idealist/utopian socialist PMC lmao
Degrowth movement has issues, especially in making the "the west needs to eat less beef and drive less" argument popular, but man the anti-degrowthers are just reddit bazinga brains. "Don't worry bro, we can have as much of everything we want with zero environmental consequences with the power of ⭐️technology⭐️"
Leigh is correct here: The only goal for stopping climate change is to reduce c02 emissions and decarbonise all industry and transport, regardless as to how you feel about the industries themselves, be it cruise ships or otherwise.
To say that Leigh Phillips works for Exxon is preposterous.
He has authored probably one of the best books on modern ecology ever written, not to mention co-authored a book entirely dedicated to showing the superiority of economic planning and arguing for the all-out nationalisation of major corporations (ie: commanding heights of the ecomony).
Leigh is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and he is right.
the idea that you can decarbonize everything, including cruise ships, seem rather far fetched but i dunno
It's completely doable. The technology for it already exists, it just needs government support (and state planning) to be implemented, not to mention for the iron grip of the fossil fuel companies to be liquefied.
Cruise ships, shipping and aviation for example could all be retrofitted to use carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon fuel or hydrogen fuel cell tech instead of oil or LNG.
Naturally, this would require an absolutely massive expansion of carbon free electricity, and really the only way that you can do it at scale is through nuclear and/or hydroelectricity power.
ngl kinda skeptical. the reason cruises are cheap in the first place is massive subsidies, tax evasion and regulation skippin on the high seas. just substituting for hydrogen doesn't make up for that, surely. plus, what hydrogen even since much of what we have is 'hydrogen, clean, sort of'.
i dunno i'm seeing a future where tourism is much more local
He's critical of both the USSR and China, yes.
He has described his position as "Neither Bejing nor Bezos" (sort of like the nonaligned nations slogan of "neither Washington nor Moscow" back in the day)
Leigh is a bit of a free-speech fundamentalist, for lack of a better term, and I have mixed feelings on that (he gives very good reasons, but I also have my qualms).
In any event, insofar as his views on ecology, modernity, state planning, and democracy are concerned I think he's highly underrated as a political thinker on the left.
People take third-campists much more seriously than pro-Beijing socialists.
Right, sorry, I meant American workers. I'm being America-centric again. In the work I do, we frame things in terms of "opposing US meddling" as opposed to "supporting the communists" because it tends to go over better with the semi-radicalized people we rely on while mobilizing.
By third campist, I thought you meant neither-washington-nor-moscow, style politics, not Trotskyism.
never understood cruise ships. just, like, go to an actual place if you wanna go on holiday. plenty of interesting places out there, and lots of them are even next to the ocean too, with the bonus of actually being able to swim in it rather than having to swim in a pool? on a ship? on the ocean?
I would go on a sail-powered communist cruise ship if that was a thing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Passenger_ships_of_the_Soviet_Union
Not sail powered, tho
Not sail powered, tho
:sadness: mfw no communist pirate cruise ship
Sure, get rid of the engine, bring back the sails, and its a requirement that all "customers" spend 3 days out of 7 working the ship. :maybe-later-kiddo:
Also might be fun to require everybody to learn to operate/maintain a nuke reactor and drive system while on their holiday.
S. S. Means it would be steam-powered. If you want it to be more sustainable gulag you need it to be an SV (sailing vessel)
You'd probably have to gulag everyone who's ridden any type of boat/ship then
lol, Freedom of the Seas standard fuel consumption is rumored to be around 28,000 gallons per hour. How are you going to decarbonize that, put nuclear reactors on them, sell galley slave class tickets for real cheap?
Hydrogen might be used for boats and stuff when there is spare renewable energy
I wasn't expecting real answer to the snark, but that really is a great point :rat-salute-2:
Yeah but if you actually require the use of green hydrogen the cost of your cruise ships will go up a ton. Petty bourgeoisie won't be able to get their yearly cruise anymore!
It's not even a cruise ship specific thing since you would also need some new tech for international shipping to work at all. But if there was somehow a surplus of renewable electricity then green hydrogen could be cheaper than oil
Yeah the solutions I have seen proposed for shipping are using hydrogen, ammonia, wind, or nuclear. Hydrogen and ammonia need to be specified to be produced with clean energy. Wind takes up more space and uses more labor I think. And nuclear isn't gonna work cause no offense to the nuclear fans but I think 5,000 floating reactors will probably result in a couple of issues. No matter what, clean shipping is going to be more expensive for at least a few decades compared to now because of the huge "fuck the future" discount oil gets.
I can imagine, in the presence of justice, a college-level engineering class where a bunch of young people try to bring back derelict forms of petit-bourgeoisie entertainment in a world-friendly way. Somebody decides to present on the decarbonized cruise ship.
In the presence of libs this would not be how it works
