The Outsider Perspective Issue 349 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the NBA Draft’s number one pick, Victor Wembanyama. The guy is an athletic freak, on par with Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Unofficially, he’s between 7’3″ and 7’5″, depending on which site measures him. His wingspan, fingertip to fingertip, is eight feet. He’s been torching the French leagues and comes into the NBA as another international talent, showing the growing reach of basketball.

This week, I will touch on the reaction on social media to the Titan submarine disaster. It was something I couldn’t shake the more I saw it—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

The NHL announced it was banning “cause-based” jerseys next season. While they didn’t specify the causes, the implication is undoubtedly over the Pride Night jerseys, which an increasing number of players refused to wear. The NHL called this a distraction from the overall game and experience. It’ll be worth watching how the other major sports leagues view this development. This comes as Bud Light has launched a massive new ad campaign called “Easy Summer,” trying to recapture the brand identification and market share it had before. Critics are bashing this move, as Bud Light relies heavily on country music and NFL stars. One of the critical parts of this campaign: Bud Light is giving away $10,000 a week in free beer to win back consumers.
An IRS Whistleblower has alleged severe misconduct on the part of the DOJ in investigating Hunter Biden. Aside from the expected feet dragging and slowing down of the process, the whistleblower alleges that the DOJ was tipping off Hunter Biden’s lawyers about what was coming to aid in the defense. Democrats voted against releasing this whistleblower document, while Republicans overwhelmingly voted to do so. Republicans cited the precedent Democrats started by releasing Trump’s tax returns, a serious norm violation.
Elon Musk continues to win. Along with Ford and GM, the electric car maker Rivian announced it was adopting Tesla’s charging standards. The comparisons being made here are to gas stations, which isn’t quite correct. Musk won’t own the EV gas stations of the world – he’ll own the USB cable to charge all the vehicles at the faster possible rate right now. One market analyst estimates this technology alone could be worth $100 billion by itself. One of the assumptions people had for a long time would be that other car markers would develop their own chargers or a universal charger would appear. Neither has happened. Tesla is the only game in town with fast-charging tech. If Musk continues to win on this front, whatever he paid for Twitter will be a rounding error.

Where you can find me this week

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[06/19/2023] Prosecuting Trump does not restore the Rule of Law – Conservative Institute

[06/23/2023] Hunter Biden Plea Deal Proves US Intel Elites are a Joke – Conservative Institute

The Bizarre Inhumane Reaction to the Titan Submarine Disaster.

I was figuring out how to approach this topic because it was so weird to watch in real-time. Rarely have I felt more out of touch with some of the broader public responses to a story than I have with the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submarine, which was visiting the Titanic wreckage.

I thought it was easy to see this as a tragic event; everyone felt for the victims and their families. Instead, I’ve seen the exact opposite. And that’s been… strange, bordering on bizarre.

I’ll give you an example. The most viral post I saw went to a poet on Twitter. She wrote:

Dying in an ocean as deep as your pockets…in a vessel as tiny as the shanty houses you turned your noses up at….In a darkness as expansive as your ego…going to see the final resting place of the souls whom you disturbed with your curiosity, but they still eagerly welcomed you.

That poem was, of course, copied and pasted by other accounts and went to other platforms. On Twitter alone, it has 8 million views. That number is higher once you count all the other methods where the text got used elsewhere.

I agreed with conservative columnist/journalist T. Becket Adams, who tweeted,”‘ Feminist poet’ doesn’t know any of the Titan victims, one of whom was only 19. Doesn’t know first thing about their character or quality. Simply invented characters just so she could hate them. For this, she has been rewarded with 21K+ retweets, 139K+ likes, and 7.9M+ views.“

Also, I thought this was a good point, “Her tweet is every bit as voyeuristic at their deaths as the motives she imagines for them, which says enough to require little further.”

But she wasn’t alone. I had people I knew on Facebook and other platforms defending the cracks at those who died. I even read long, vehement posts defending the privilege to mock the dead. The New York Post Editorial Board noted this trend too:

Donated to political candidates the New Republic dislikes, as OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush did?

Then you deserve to die in an undersea tragedy.

That was the strong implication of a truly gross piece the left-wing rag pumped out Wednesday about the missing Titanic sub, bearing the headline “OceanGate CEO Missing in Titanic Sub Had History of Donating to GOP Candidates.”

Yet TNR’s Daniel Strauss thought it mattered that “Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate currently stuck on the missing Titan submersible that was running a tourist expedition of the Titanic wreck, has been a consistent Republican donor over the years.”

What possible relevance could this have to the Titanic sub story?

None — which the magazine implicitly admitted by deleting its tweet on the article.

It still shows how progressives routinely accept the idea that being on the wrong side of the political aisle means you merit a grisly death.

And it’s not just TNR.

Lefty MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal tweeted of the affair: “Next time some rich white person wants to take Sam Alito on an expensive trip, please take him to see the Titanic.”

I struggled for a while, wondering if I was cherry-picking examples of extreme reactions. Or if it was just me. But I saw it across the board – from commentators to journalists to meme accounts. The Post notes the political nature of all this, which is true; there is one. The travelers were generally wealthy or Republican.

Apparently, these characteristics deny a person some basic humanity. I think Ben Dreyfuss hit the nail on the head when he said:

If your first reaction to seeing the story of the Titanic tourist submarine that went missing is to focus on the fact that they could afford a $250k excursion and then tweet about how they deserve to die, you should touch grass but that grass should be in a mental institution.

Ben Dreyfuss (who is, yes, the son of Richard Dreyfuss) wrote a longer piece titled: “Let’s Discuss The Left Wing Psychopaths Who Think The Titanic Tourists Deserve To Die.” He’s a liberal and, basically, the only sane one I saw write on the topic.

The Wall Street Journal had an exclusive report saying that the US Navy heard what it believed was the Titan implosion just hours after launch. The Navy passed that information along to the US Coast Guard, who went to investigate. The report added, “While the Navy couldn’t say definitively the sound came from the Titan, the discovery played a role in narrowing the scope of the search for the vessel before its debris was discovered Thursday, the officials said.“

The Navy, understandably, wants to keep the technology being used to detect such things private. The Coast Guard was best positioned to investigate the findings and used that to determine where to search.

In other words, to everyone involved, this was far less likely to be a search and rescue mission and more of a verify the findings mission. You include the people involved in search and rescue, but the belief was a catastrophic implosion. On those terms, it was good because the deaths were likely very swift – I will spare you the many stories describing a catastrophic implosion.

The reaction to this tragedy, though, is what catches me off guard. The lack of a certain level of human decency is not present. If anything, the glorification of death itself gets celebrated, all while families are actively mourning and being told what happened. It’s all ghoulish.

By chance, I was watching old newsreel footage and came across the Pathé News Special for the Hindenburg disaster. Pathé News was a British newsreel and documentary company. It became famous for creating the news clips people watched during the silent movie era through the world wars.

The Hindenburg disaster occurred in 1937. One of the jarring things I’d forgotten about is that there are clips of it flying over Manhattan on May 6, 1937, just hours before it went down in flames. The tail of the zeppelin carries the Nazi swastika on it, which tells you even more about the exact era this is in.

The newsreel reports it in a straight news fashion but is sympathetic to the victims. Given the era, such an event getting caught on film was a spectacle. But in the roughly five-minute news clip, you get the terror and somberness of the event.

There should be something similar to that here. We should get the somberness of the moment. But that’s missing, even with the Titanic involved. For some weird reason, everyone is bringing on James Cameron to wax philosophically about sending subs down to the wreckage – the very thing he did. I remember seeing the IMAX movie of the Titanic exhibit as a kid and the submarine footage. Again, it’s weird to watch people like him say this is wrong when they did it for the same reasons the explorers did here.

Contrasting the Hindenburg disaster and the reaction to it with this is stark. People had humanity with the Hindenburg. It’s been harder to find it with this Titan incident.

I also don’t get the blistering responses of people mocking anyone who went out of curiosity about the Titanic wreckage. We’re literally in the middle of a month where people are loudly declaring pride for who and what they have sex with, and everyone is supposed to affirm that. But if someone wants to visit the Titanic, that’s somehow worthy of mockery? There’s a similar thing with the disdain that goes into people who die on Mt. Everest.

It’s a mockery from small-minded people living in bubbles encased with fear and little vision. Pretending you understand the motivations of someone who wants to visit the wreckage and pretending that’s important when death like this occurs is hubristic in the extreme.

At one point in our culture, we lauded the explorers and people who pushed the envelope. We wanted people to push boundaries and visit the frontier in everything capacity, whether space, land, sea, or anything. That’s somehow lost.

Bill Safire, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon (and one of the best writers ever), penned an emergency speech for Nixon in the event Neil Armstrong and Ed Aldrin didn’t return. It is considered one of the greatest speeches never given. When I watched the sad news come in from the Titan wreckage, the words from this speech came back to mind. It is written about space but could easily be rewritten about the sea.

The specific situation NASA feared was that Armstrong and Aldrin would land on the moon but be unable to take back off. If that happened, the only choices were either slow death due to lack of oxygen and food or suicide. NASA hadn’t figured that out yet. And listening to the early reporting of people in a sub running out of oxygen, this speech came back to me.

So I’ll leave you with it as a tribute to the people lost to the Titan tragedy. May they all rest in peace, and their families find comfort. Bill Safire’s Apollo 11 moon tragedy speech for Nixon:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.

In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.