Yes but the Liz Truss disaster shows the power of financial institutions and markets to completely banjax a Govt’s economic and political programme if they don’t think that the country can pay its way. It’s a terrible straight jacket that Labour has to live with. “They spent all the money last time” was still winning the Tories votes in 2019 (despite being total nonsense).
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Let’s hope so!
Between you and me I think she’d be fine in an apocalypse anyway. I’m just concerned that I might be her first meal once she realises the score. Dog eat dad world and all that.
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Any format of hot coffee served in a tall glass - usually tastes disgusting plus it always blow your fucking mouth off
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I don’t get the current media frenzy about this bloody stupid submersible poking around the Titantic. I mean, five rich people deliberately doing something inherently dangerous? Meanwhile, there are far more people desperately crossing the Mediterranean, attempting to get into the US, dying homeless on the streets of cities around the world, getting bombed to hell in Ukraine, killed in religious riots in India, being run off their land in the Amazon . . . the list could go on. There’s bad news galore - but the media focus is on five dickheads in a tin can!
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Hear, hear.
The fucking BBC can’t shop banging on about it - yet again, a total lack of perspective when there are far more pressing issues both nationally and internationally
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Imagine the movie rights and Netflix doc are being snapped up as we speak
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Even if they are not found I’m sure there will still be a movie…
Spongebob Shityerpants?
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Imagine how much it’s costing to try and find these absurd fools?
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Easy story, billionaire adventurer looking for the Titanic and the oxygen countdown making it perfect for 24hr news.
The same ships going down everyday just doesn’t sell, everyone just tunes it out.
I know that. I’ve worked for a newspaper. I still don’t get it.
You understand the psychology yet you still don’t get it?
OK 
It would make a great “eat the rich” movie in the same style as Triangle of Sadness or The Menu.
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Meanwhile…
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I feel sorry for their families, it sounds a horrible episode to have played out in public.
Agree 100% on the perspective and coverage of it also.
I’m like that lad in the pub on the Fast Show
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I’ve always thought you hung your shampoo or face wash or whatever (he says like his wife hasn’t put him into a 5-step) from it from the tap. Could be wrong but I’ll continue in my matching ignorant bliss.
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You somewhat misread me, possibly because you have not had the undiluted pleasure of my company and conversation in person.
I get the news business. If it bleeds, it leads. I saw it firsthand in my office. The police scanner was. permanently on and when a report of a car crash came through, off went a photographer. Distasteful I thought then and so I still think, but there it is. I didn’t last long in that job.
This particular story also has a mythological dimension, a retelling of Icarus, which could yet be elevated but given the realities and demands of the business seems unlikely to happen.
My point is simply that this is a tiny pimple of a story while there are great gaping abscesses of far more significance repeatedly and systemically happening every day. I suppose because they happen everyday they’re not news any longer. People get bored and much of this, as has been pointed out in the discussion of UK politics above, is not so much just above their comprehension but not of interest to them until there’s a crisis.
So, yes, I get the psychology - but I think it’s a choice made by rich and powerful interests to keep the minds of the population in the gutter. It exploits the weaknesses of people rather than enabling them to understand the true nature of the world we live in.
If you still have difficulty understanding what I’m saying, I suggest you think further about the varied meanings and uses of the word “get.”
Thank you for reminding me. Another thing I don’t get is this pathetic “Based On A True Story” crap so many films and TV shows rely on. I don’t want reality, reformed and manipulated as it inevitably is. I want imagination and creativity!
From the LA Times - worth chewing over:
Commentary: As those aboard the Titan submersible suffered, social media laughed
The exploitative coverage of the death and terror unfolding in real time as the search for the Titan sub continued was compounded by the public’s reaction on TikTok and Twitter.
A frantic international search is still underway for the missing Titan submersible, yet there’s already a documentary about the tragedy set to air on U.K. broadcaster Channel 5 at 7 p.m. local time Thursday. This would be mere hours after the clock stops on the available oxygen inside the vessel, which vanished Sunday near the wreckage of the Titanic, and the five people inside — including a father and his 19-year-old son — will have slowly suffocated.
It is looking increasingly likely that even if the Titan is located, a rescue might not be technologically feasible. The unimaginable tragedy has attracted the bizarre media feeding frenzy that we have become accustomed to in the 21st century — a minute-by-minute accounting of the claustrophobia, freezing limbs, confusion and mood swings that might be taking place inside the Titan — a sardine can the size of a minivan, with one small porthole.
The exploitative coverage of the death and terror unfolding in real time has only been compounded by the public’s reaction on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Gleeful best describes the tenor of many posts — which include making fun of the video game controller used to pilot the Titan, laughing at the billionaires inside the submersible, jokes about the effects of lack of oxygen on the human psyche or substituting fart sounds for the knocking sounds that rescuers apparently heard underwater.
Let’s not forget the unsettling digital trail of missing passenger Hamish Harding’s stepson, Brian Szasz, who attended a Blink-182 concert during the search and posted about how the music helps him through hard times. Rapper Cardi B criticized him, he shot back and an extremely unhelpful online beef went viral, with countless strangers piling on for all the wrong reasons.
Like a digital Tower of Babel, social media is evolving into an increasingly ugly and chaotic space — a real-time repository for our worst impulses, uninspired musings, scatalogical humor and ill-formed thoughts that should be kept to ourselves. It is an online Mall of America: vast, vacuous, relentlessly commercial and soul-sucking. And in a time of immense crisis — political, ecological, social — it has become a garbage dump of vile commentary publicly aired because that’s just what we do now.
There is much to unpack about this particular incident with the Titan, including the fact that five days before the submersible vanished in the Atlantic, a boat carrying 750 migrants capsized off the coast of Greece. Only 104 passengers survived. That horrific accident has not received anything close to the round-the-clock obsessive media coverage as the Titan.
There is also the unfortunate name of the company that built the Titan submersible: OceanGate, which thanks to its suffix, intrinsically smacks of scandal. The Titan is piloted by that company’s CEO and founder, Stockton Rush, who allegedly glazed over potentially hazardous conditions onboard in favor of the bottom line. Tickets for the eight-hour voyage cost $250,000 each.
Finally, there’s the allure, mystery and legend of the Titanic itself. An ill-fated ship synonymous with hubris and known for exposing the basest impulses of the uber-wealthy who fled the sinking steamliner in life rafts while leaving sequestered third-class passengers to die. That disaster occurred in 1912 — the same year that America’s presidential election pivoted on the issue of economic inequality, which peaked in 1929 just before the stock market crash and the Great Depression.
Income inequality today is even worse. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires have more wealth than half the population. It’s little wonder that regular folks on social media are cheering on the orcas attacking luxury yachts. There is real anger at the wealthy and at the ways they squander their money on vanity projects — like commercial rockets to the moon — while the planet literally burns.
Nonetheless, as one sane commentator posted on Twitter, it is possible to hold space for both the drowned migrants and the missing billionaires. In fact, to maintain a shred of our human decency, it’s necessary to honor all levels of human suffering and death.
And social media can be harnessed for good, when we try. Some users are tracking marine traffic in the area via satellite and posting their findings. Others are actively trying to combat the rampant misinformation surrounding the Titan’s disappearance.
Imagine for a moment that there was a camera inside of the Titan and we could watch the mounting desperation in its hull. If we had to actually look at the pain in the dying men’s eyes, would we still joke about it?
I hope not. But I wonder, as the gap between our brains and our online avatars becomes perilously porous, we seem to have lost contact with the flesh-and-blood-filled vessels that contain our hearts.
No doubt the LA Times has resolutely avoided the story until this commentary and so cannot be accused of exploitative coverage. You think? I mean the pot never calls the kettle black. Does it?
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