Never understood the appeal
Oh god what it actually looks like.
You’re trapped with a billion people in their ugliest sloppiest clothes slouching around scavenging for more hot dogs. There’s no escape! Never mind the rain and the slopping water everywhere, it’s the people the people the people.
So it’s like being locked in a shopping mall that wobbles.
And people pay for that.
Nope, I don’t get it either.
Not just people, but cruise people, similar to game show contestants, they mostly invest in scratchers and have one brake light out on their minivans.
The video brought to my mind certain phrases in my favorite of Neal Stephenson’s books, Anathem.
And all that norovirus turning folks into human squirt guns . . . .
“a shopping mall that wobbles” hahahahaha exactly.
And thank you again Ophelia. :)
All part of the service.
Not sure why people wearing comfortable clothes is a big deal — at least I did not see any of the men in that video trying to access the women’s restrooms. I don’t “get” NASCAR or chamber music, but I don’t look down my nose at people who do like those things. As for the water and movement, well, no matter how many shops and decorations there are, it is still a ship floating on a lot of water. Heard enough from my Dad about weathering storms in the South Pacific during WWII in much smaller ships so that all seems mild.
I am fine with criticizing the industry of cruising which has a lot of issues but the “look at those slobs”
take is kind of cringe, IMHO. Especially since I just came from PZ’s page where they are raving about how only cis white males like Dawkins try to push the “lie” that sex is binary in humans. The tone of many of the comments there are (as usual) very “look how much better we are than those people” without offering much in the way of anything but haughtiness.
Way back in 1969 the parents of my then-wife’s brother showed us pictures they’d taken on a cruise. I imagine that at that time cruises were less nasty than they seem to be today (at least the ships were smaller) but I still wondered what on earth was the attraction. I haven’t warmed to them in the half century since then. We get cruise ships visiting Marseilles and disgorging vast numbers of tourists wandering about wondering what they can do. (I don’t see them, because now I’m too old to go to the city centre except very infrequently.) They spend enough to make it all worthwhile for the city. God help them if it’s winter and they come on a day with a strong Mistral: Mediterranean or no Mediterranean it can feel colder than you can imagine on a windy day.
I thought I was one of the last people on earth to use “in” with a ship. It’s right, of course: no one travels “on” a ship.
I gave up on PZ when he jumped onto the trans bandwagon, but your post encouraged me to go back. It’s just as bad as you say. I won’t be going there again for a while.
Athel Cornish-Bowden #10
Growing up with a Navy man from that era gave me quite an interesting vocabulary all around. The one thing my Dad feared more than anything was being below the waterline should the ship hit a mine or get torpedoed. He said he would always try find a place to sleep near the top deck even if it meant sleeping in a closet. The one time he had a chance to go on a pleasure cruise (decades after the war) he refused because he still had nightmares about what he saw and experienced during the war. No more ships for him. He would happily take a small boat out for fishing but no ships.
Athel Cornish-Bowden #11
I visit the PZ Kool-aid page most days because having a regular reminder of how the “educated elites” in a society can be cool with all kinds of false and vile beliefs/practices keeps me alert and centered.
My father was a merchant seaman on the WW2 Atlantic convoys. He said those ships were built so fast that they could roll in a Dry Dock.
In that case, to be on rather than in the ship could have led to a rapid entry to the water.
I didn’t care for the wobbly times, nor the shopping mall sections, either.
Fortunately, the ship is not usually wobbly. Also fortunately, the ship is massive and contains many other places to go.
But the wobbly aspect is a major issue, like turbulence for an aircraft, in that it is sometimes very bad and cannot be consistently minimized. It’s one of the reasons I prefer a resort on land.
The shopping mall aspect is like going to the (enormous! varied! well-stocked!) gift store in an amusement park and forgetting that there is anything else in the park. Which some people do, I have to agree. And the shopping areas do get crowded.
If I had taken a cruise that was crowded and wobbly like that the whole time, and the only thing to do was shop, I would not have come away from it thinking that it was a fun time. I was worried about all those things. I was wrong.
I don’t understand why it is difficult to understand that some people really enjoy cruises, and that giving up the pleasure for a global issue out of their direct control, like climate change, is difficult. It’s really easy to give up something you loathe, much harder for something you enjoy.
There was an anecdote I read a long time ago about camping, and how there are people (“city folk”) who cannot get past the presence of all these bugs. The veteran camper says that there are precautions to minimize the problem, and you get used to them and ignore them, but the city folk just cannot get to the point of ignoring the bugs and enjoying all the other aspects of the activity. I’m with the city folk in this case, I hate dealing with bugs, but I can see the appeal in cruises, and would probably rather go on a cruise for a few days than go on a hike or go camping for the same amount of time.
Southwest88 @ 8 – Well sure, it is a look down the nose variety of post. I do look down my nose at a lot of things, which is indeed probably cringe, which is why I don’t do it often here, but once in a while I let rip. I wear comfortable clothes myself – I wear sweatpants at home but not outside. I think people should be a little less sloppy in public spaces like restaurants and cruise ships than they are in their bedrooms. It’s all arbitrary and judgey but then I am judgey.
I’m not claiming that it’s not difficult for people who like cruises to give them up. I’m claiming that cruises are a particularly non-essential way to hasten climate change and a particularly large contributor to climate change and that therefore we should stop doing them. We as in all of us; we as in the humans who are wrecking the planet. Yes, sure, that’s easy for me because I think they’re repulsive, but does that really matter? Should cruise companies keep building bigger and bigger cruise ships because lots of people love cruises?
Clothes/sloppiness – I often wear track pants and a tired old shirt at home. If I’m going to the hardware/garden store I’ll wear whatever I’m working on, complete with dirt or wood shavings. Any other time I try and present myself in a context appropriate way, without my bare belly hanging over my pants or bum crack showing. It just ain’t hard.
Cruises – not for me (well, maybe Antartica – that would tempt me but also make me feel really bad), but I have family by marriage that love cruising. Then again they struggle to walk one kilometre without stopping for a rest.
When to burn carbon – This requires value judgements doesn’t it? I try to avoid trivial and unnecessary boring of carbon and creation of methane (from food waste). But there’s also no point sitting inside slowly dying of boredom. I fly for business and an overseas holiday maybe once a decade if I’m lucky. People who pop across to Sydney for a show and some shopping over the weekend do my head in.
Judginess – I’ve been told I can be judgmental. I’m with Ophelia. Life is about making judgements. I’m not always right. I don’t always tell a person what my judgement about them or their behaviour is, but you’re either not alive or you’re vacant if you don’t actually hold views…
And if there’s anything this whole blog & website is about it’s JUDGING. Judgey McJudgeface, c’est moi.
Ophelia @ 17
I agree completely here.
No, they shouldn’t.
My point, by way of example: whenever some restaurant (or more likely a high-level executive) does something bad, there are calls to boycott the restaurant. Inevitably, people will start saying how terrible the restaurant is, how bad the food or the atmosphere is, no big loss. Well, if that’s their attitude, they aren’t boycotting anything, they are just adding another reason to continue avoiding the restaurant. The people who are doing the boycotting are the ones who actually want to go to the restaurant except for whatever the Problem is.
It’s like clockwork. CEO of Biggus Burgerus says a Bad Thing, and suddenly the Biggus Burgerus is deemed flavorless and dry. People who insist they aren’t making any sacrifices by avoiding the place are asking other people to make sacrifices.
(It’s possibly more like: If I can’t convince them to stop because of the Problem, I’ll convince them to stop because of the lack of quality, because getting them to stop is the most important thing.)
I know that isn’t your intention (or the intentions of others here) to follow that model, but it sure seems similar to me. I know you aren’t trying to convince anyone, just musing about it, but surely you can see the similarity with the other example.
To me, the real issue is more about the cruise companies, and about convincing people to care more about the environmental impact of cruises than the fun of a cruise. But mostly the companies. Things that are great fun but dangerous get restricted all the time.
Ophelia Benson #16
As a member of the comfortably sloppy community, I will bravely resign myself to bearing your harsh judgement in noble silence, in the same way that my beloved and oppressed community has had to bear so many other slights over the century. :)
Someday we may rise up against the slobphobes but not this year – it is not our time yet.
Oh, did want to mention that loose clothes are sometimes worn to cover up any weapons a person may be carrying concealed. The legal interpretations about what is and what isn’t “brandishing” in many US states are so confusing that many people carry concealed even where open carry is legal.
I always wear my clothes somewhat loose, but I try not to do the sweatpants in public. I’m sort of with Ophelia on that, because when you are in public, you are having an impact on other people.. I don’t give a damn what they think about me, but I do care enough not to be a total slob. But loose doesn’t have to be sloppy; I wear loose shirts because I have for all my life tried to hide my larger chest so men don’t stare at me, and I try not to be sloppy. It isn’t that hard to do.
I have been on a total of one cruise. It was a nightmare. Between cigar guy and the lack of having a private table while dining, it is difficult for a lot of people. You have to be at least somewhat gregarious on a cruise, and that can be awful. Plus, they controlled where we went, and I got sick of seeing churches, churches, and more churches. I am sure they probably have natural history museums, botanical gardens, art museums, and other interesting stuff in Germany. We finally got the final afternoon on our own in Berlin, and took a lot of time to linger at things like the Berlin wall.
Also, a lot of cruise ships have a history of dumping waste in the middle of the ocean if they aren’t going to get caught. It costs money to dispose of it properly, and they hate spending the money just to keep from polluting the ocean. For a long time, people thought the ocean was too big for us to cause a problem; it could handle anything we put in it. That hasn’t been true for a long time, and now that there are nearly eight billion of us, it’s less true than ever. Even without going on cruises, we are all contributing to the pollution of the oceans. No need to add to it with a not-fun week of hanging around with people who don’t like the same things you do.
Sackbut @ 20 – Ah yes, I take your point. On the other hand this post was just about the personal taste/yuck aspect, not the destroy the planet aspect. I may have slopped them together in other posts, I don’t know, but I don’t think I did here.
No doubt I kvetch about them too much but keep in mind, I can see the damn things from right here, where I’m sitting, during the season. They’re here almost every day, for at least half the year. They’re my King Charles’s head.
Ophelia #17
“I’m claiming that cruises are a particularly non-essential way to hasten climate change and a particularly large contributor to climate change”
I’m not going to quarrel with ‘particularly non-essential’, but ‘particularly large’ doen’t fit this data.
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
Go down the page to the pie-chart.
It shows Shipping as 1.7% of emissions. I expect that would be mostly cargo rather than cruise ships.
I meant particularly large in the sense that they burn 80 thousand gallons a day. Large for a single vehicle for a non-essential purpose. I assume these new even bigger ships will burn more.
I went looking for fuel consumption figures for Icon of the Seas, assuming that maybe there were efficiency improvements to mitigate the size a little. It turns out that’s a complicated question. This article explains that the Icon of the Seas has two different fuels, one of which (LNG) is new for cruise ships, and which has a different set of problems. The cruise line makes claims about how energy efficient these engines are, while critics say those claims are “greenwashing” and nonsense. Icon of the Seas has the largest LNG tanks ever installed on a ship; LNG tanks leak, and the leaked methane may be overall worse greenhouse gas emissions than carbon dioxide.
I am generally fond of watercraft – I used to sail (little dinghies) and occasionally accompanied family and friends who had somewhat larger sailboats (i think 30′ was the biggest), and also used to enjoy canoeing, especially when my kids were younger. I have been on exactly one cruise – it was a circumnavigation of Iceland, about 7 year ago, and an amazing trip. There were a few hundred passengers, and the daytime activities usually involved getting into a fleet of Zodiacs to travel to an island to see birds and/or geology (though there were a few bus tours and some cultural activities). The evening program comprised lectures from biologists, geologists, and birders, but tended to end fairly early since the days started at around 6-7am. Though this is the only sort of cruise I would be interested in, it does occur to me to wonder how the per-passenger carbon footprint compares to the giant floating shopping malls (which I find completely unappealing for so many reasons).
If I absolutely had to be locked in a shopping mall, I would like it to be one that wobbles.