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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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, 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.
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Sure. Yelling "stop going on cruises and sit at home reading a book" doesn't seem like that'll get the job done.
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.
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It isn't a question is negotiation, as individual consumers aren't in control of industrial projects.
Haranguing random schmucks over their consumption habits does nothing to change the fundamental functions of productive capital.
Except you're not. You're talking about ethical ways to take a vacation
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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
They are in a kleptocracy
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.
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.