I admit it, I've had an interest in disasters. I feel bad about it, but I feel also like I've learned something about how human beings break down under pressure

and I find myself thinking about "Titanic" right now, and the role played by a nearby ship, the "Californian"

"Titanic" should never have existed in the first place. it was a crime, that it even existed. human technology and society couldn't support it properly

so of course it went to the bottom and because the society that built "Titanic" was awful and dysfunctional, the failure of the dream killed a thousand people or so

everything about "Titanic" was gross, in both senses of the word. both just BIG, and "gross" in the sense of disgusting. it was a vessel built to float not on water but on the stratification of humanity into a rarefied upper class and a solid dense mass of lower class humanity

I bet a lot of "Titanic" nerds still talk endlessly about the design of the ship, as if this or that technical fix could have made the idea work

forgetting that the only reason "Titanic" floated at all was because of a huge number of human beings shackled to _coal_. digging coal out of the ground, turning coal into coke, shoveling the coke into a boiler, over and over and over

"Titanic" was merely the biggest artifact of human society's positive _addiction_ to easily burnable carbon. white civilization, "Western civilization", just MAINLINED that shit, and it's almost killed us all

well

that's to one side. I wanna talk a little about a side-effect of "Titanic" going down, and that's the "Californian"

I don't remember all the details, but "Californian" was a few miles away and they saw the lights of a ship that was firing off skyrockets

and they did nothing

they convinced themselves it was just "company signals" or people having a party, and they did nothing

never even bothered to check. it wouldn't have taken long but it was just too much effort for them, for reasons unknown to us