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.
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.