Friday, June 27, 2025

“Poop Cruise” and the Hidden Machines of Modernity

The deck of the Carnival Triumph before the nightmare began

Sometime in the small hours odds February 10th, 2013, a diesel generator on board the Carnival cruise ship Triumph caught fire. The incident caused no casualties, and the ship remained intact. But the fire consumed several power conduits, disabling main power and propulsion. Nearly 3000 passengers and over 1100 crew were adrift on the Gulf of Mexico.

Netflix has perfected a content creation system wherein they produce “documentaries” with a combination of existing footage and new interviews. This works in documentaries like Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War, where most interview subjects are historians, diplomats, and social scientists. You need specialists prepared to go beyond the obvious. That's what makes Trainwreck: Poop Cruise such a missed opportunity.

When central power failed, the Triumph's kitchen had to discard tons of perishable food, and the ship's interior became unbearably hot. But when passengers contacted loved ones on shore, another fact captured the public's attention. Without power, the ship's plumbing quickly failed. Within hours, the companionways became choked with human feces. Without anywhere to drain, the sewage clung to everyone's feet.

Director James Ross interviews several passengers and crew: a Bachelorette party, a father and daughter, a young bachelor meeting his future father-in-law for the first time. The ship's tour director and head chef. In direct narrative, these survivors describe the sensory overload of the shit-choked interior, while on deck, passengers descended into Gomorrah-like levels of disinhibition.

But at only fifty-five minutes, the documentary doesn't have room to explore beyond this surface level. Yes, being trapped in a confined space with limited food but flowing rivers of poop, sounds like a trip through the depths of squalor. But without further analysis, it becomes superficial, the sensory revulsion of anyone who's used a week-old Porta-John. We don't get much insight into how it happened, or what it can teach us.

Early on, one bachelorette party member talks about the ship resembling a skyscraper. This shouldn't go unremarkable. Smarter critics than me have observed that cruise ships produce more pollution than many cities: diesel fumes, plastic and paper waste, food packaging, and especially sewage. Solid waste gets held for disposal on-shore, but the sewage gets discharged into the ocean.

The Carnival Triumph after staterooms became too hot and smelly for human habitation

Cruise companies keep their ships glamorous and fun through an elaborate network of human and mechanical systems. The Triumph's crew complement of over a thousand included mechanics and technicians, cooks and hospitality staff, maintenance workers, and others the passengers never see. That's besides the enormous machines, which consume fuel enough to make your leafy-green Prius look paltry by comparison.

Thousands of workers and hundreds of machines means ships have countless moving parts, all prepared to break. Companies have to prepare for every eventuality, and have supplies for repair ready early, because, as the Triumph's crew discovered, resupply may be days away. The investment in human skills will also be substantial.

Extending the analogy between cruise ships and cities, the technological capacity to house and employ so many people in such proximity is astonishing. Urban designer Jeff Speck contends that cities are environmentally sound because close quarters means less energy expended in transportation and climate control. I won't disagree with Speck, as he isn't wrong. But cities require more energy to get food in, and sewage out.

Humans change the environment wherever we go. Unlike other animals, humans don't instinctively slot ourselves into our ecosystem; scholars dispute whether humans have instincts at all. We must constantly make choices about our food, shelter, and entertainment. Technology has created the illusion that we don't have to make some of those decisions anymore, but that's a phantom. We actually just don't have to see our decisions anymore.

Because it's a closed environment, the Triumph amplifies it when our choices become visible again. If sewage systems in Manhattan or Chicago collapsed, it might take weeks before residents noticed, not the hours needed on cruise ships. But sewage processes haven't advanced meaningfully since Joseph Bazalgette pioneered urban sewers in the 19th century. Researchers suffer from the “poop taboo,” making sewage research a dead-end enterprise.

Perhaps director James Ross expected audiences to draw these conclusions without being prompted. But I only caught it because I've read about urban design. When I've tried discussing the “poop taboo” with friends, they've gagged and silenced me. Creating the Triumph's sensory immersion without discussing what it means for us, lets us continue ignoring the parallels with the human environment. But as the Triumph's passengers discovered, failure to plan for disaster, doesn't prevent disaster from happening.

Friday, June 20, 2025

Food, Economic Injustice, and You

Much modern farming less resembles gardening than strip-mining

Amid all the ICE raids which crisscrossed America last week, tipping into street protests in Los Angeles, the Omaha meatpacking raids got forgotten by the national media. This perhaps isn’t surprising. A substantially industrial city with limited glamour, Omaha often gets overlooked unless something catastrophic happens, like blizzards closing Interstate 80, or local darling Bright Eyes releasing an album.

Yet this raid speaks to an undercurrent in American policy. Specifically, since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation establishing the Department of Agriculture, American ag policy has focused on abundant yields and low prices. This has involved persistent overproduction of commodity crops, coupled with price supports, ever-improving technology, and efforts to create markets internationally.

As George Pyle writes, efforts to bolster production probably made sense in the middle 19th century, during a civil war, when threats to food supply were common war tactics. But conditions have changed markedly, and our central approach hasn’t kept pace. Agricultural technologies based on diesel-burning equipment and ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers have resulted in bloated yields, as Vaclav Smil writes.

Nick Reding describes how consolidation in the ag processing industry has cut wages so low, workers can only make rent by taking double shifts. Such marathon hours are often only possible when workers supplement themselves with illegal amphetamines. Though I broadly support drug legalization, amphetamines are so destructive that even I prefer they remain illegal. However, workers use them for one basic reason: to keep working, and get paid.

Nor are these outcomes unexpected. As Greg Grandin writes, President Clinton knew that subsidized American crops were artificially abundant and cheap. Before NAFTA went into force, he authorized what was, until then, the largest increase in Border Patrol manpower ever. Clinton knew that lifting trade barriers on subsidized American agriculture would cause food to hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing.

And he was right. Rural poverty in Mexico’s agrarian south quickly exceeded 70%, forcing workers, mostly men, to abandon ancestral farms and go anywhere that work existed. Something similar happened when Clinton forced Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to sign a free-trade agreement as a condition of American involvement in deposing Haiti’s illegal coup. Now, Mexican and Haitian workers comprise the largest number of America’s undocumented population.

Pigs don't live in pens anymore; this is where your pork comes from

Numerous White Americans remain invested in farming and agriculture, but primarily as owners or live-in bosses. Because much industrialized agriculture uses machine labor, full-time farmhands usually aren’t necessary. Workers remain necessary while planting and harvesting, but these aren’t full-time positions. This work mostly gets done by migrants—a condition few White workers would accept. Undocumented laborers mostly do this work.

That brings us full-circle to the meat processing plants which began this essay. Before 1990, meat processing was considered semi-skilled labor. The meatpackers in Upton Sinclair’s propaganda novel The Jungle were mostly White, first- or second-generation Eurpoean immigrants. But as Nick Redling describes, meatpacking industry consolidation after 1990 drove wages so low that workers with kids and mortgages can’t afford those jobs anymore.

Currently, America enjoys the cheapest food in world history; per George Pyle, most Americans pay more for packaging than for food at the supermarket. But food is historically cheap because it requires undocumented workers pulling abusive hours in Spartan conditions to plant, harvest, and process it. Workers with legal rights would complain to the NLRB under such conditions; undocumented workers have nowhere to complain.

Eyal Press claims that killing floor workers are among America’s most despised, doing work which consumers demand, but which offends our morals. We expect faceless strangers to kill, dress, and package our meat. Similar problems abound in related fields. Tom Russell notes that the Trump Administration wants a border wall built in regions where only Mexican migrants have the skills necessary for such epic construction.

Anecdotes of supervisors demanding long hours and dangerous work from meatpackers are legend. These demands come with the threat, either explicit or implicit, that we’ll call La Migra if you don’t perform. But like a nuclear warhead, this threat works only when unrealized. Once you drop your atomic bomb, literal or metaphorical, it’s expended, gone forever. And management is left with a vacant killing floor.

Donald Trump heard the threats of calling Immigration, and instead of recognizing them for the rhetorical device they were, he believed them. He authorized his administration to perform massive round-ups that look good on right-wing cable TV, but undercut employers’ labor pool. If this doesn’t stop, agriculture employers will have to start paying workers what they’re worth—and you’ll see it in your grocery bill.

Friday, June 6, 2025

Don’t Pretend To Be Stupid, Dr. Oz

Americans used to like Dr. Mehmet Oz

The same day I posted about Senator Joni Ernst’s faulty rhetoric surrounding Medicaid cuts, Dr. Mehmet Oz claimed that uninsured people should “prove that you matter.” The cardiac surgeon, Oprah darling, and failed Senate candidate is now Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator, meaning he administers decisions for who receives assistance in paying medical bills. His criterion for proving one matters? “Get a job or at least volunteer or … go back to school.”

Last time, I got Aristotelean and dissected Senator Ernst’s rhetoric, noting that she changed the “stasis of argument” mid-sentence. That is, she pretended to misunderstand the core dispute, sanding off nuance while condescending to her constituents.. When someone said people would die unnecessarily, Ernst pretended they meant people would die at all. She thought it appropriate to remind constituents that humans are mortal—and, in her tone-deaf follow-up, sound an altar call for Jesus Christ.

While Ernst’s constituent wanted to argue the morality of preventable death, and Ernst veered dishonestly onto the fact of mortality, a friend reminded me this argument skirted an important issue. Who will die first? When the government makes decisions about paying medical bills, the outcomes aren’t morally neutral: chronically ill, disabled, and elderly Americans stand the most to lose. The same bloc of Americans whom, you’ll recall, certain politicians permitted to die during the pandemic.

Dr. Oz said what Senator Ernst only implied, that hastening human mortality is okay for certain undesirables. This administration, and indeed conventional American conservatism throughout my lifetime, has tied human worth to economic productivity, and especially to productivity for other people. If someone needs assistance, America’s authorities won’t help you create a business, learn a skill, or otherwise evolve to benefit your community. Their imagination can’t expand beyond getting a job working for someone else.

Nor was this subtext. Oz said aloud: “do entry-level jobs, get into the workforce, prove that you matter.” This correlation between “you matter” and “you work for others” has lingered beneath much of America’s work ethic throughout my lifetime—and, as an ex-Republican, I once believed it, or anyway accepted it. But as anybody who’s faced the workforce recently knows, today’s working economy isn’t a source of meaning or dignity; it often actively denies both.

Even laying aside demi-Marxist arguments like “owning the means of production” or “the surplus value of labor,” employment spits in the human face. Minimum wage hasn’t increased in America since 2009, and as anybody who’s worked a fast food dinner shift knows, employers who pay minimum wage definitely would pay less if the law permitted. Even if the workers receive enough hours to qualify for employer-provided health insurance, they mostly can’t afford the employee co-pay.

Lest anybody accuse me of misrepresenting Dr. Oz, let’s acknowledge something else: he lays this onus on “able-bodied” Americans. We might reasonably assume that he expects healthy, young, robust workers to enter the workforce instead of lollygagging on the public dime. But even if we assume they aren’t doing that already (and I doubt that), the pandemic taught many workers important lessons about how America values labor. Specifically, that it doesn’t, except through empty platitudes.

In 2020, executives, attorneys, bureaucrats, and others went into lockdown. Americans laughed at highly skilled professionals trying to do business through Zoom, thus avoiding the virus. Meanwhile, manual trades, retail jobs, construction, and other poorly paid positions were deemed “essential” and required to continue working. These jobs are not only underpaid and disdained, but frequently done by notably young or notably old workers, disabled, chronically ill, required employment to qualify for assistance, or otherwise vulnerable.

As a result, the workers most vulnerable to the virus, faced the most persistent risk. Sure, we praised them with moralistic language of heroism and valor, but we let them get sick and die. Americans’ widespread refusal to wear masks in restaurants and grocery stores put the worst-paid, most underinsured workers at highest risk. Many recovered only slowly; I only recently stopped wheezing after my second infection. Many others, especially with pre-existing conditions, simply died.

Dr. Oz has recapitulated the longstanding belief that work is a moral good, irrespective of whether it accomplishes anything. He repeats the myth, prevalent since Nixon, that assistance causes laziness, citation needed. And despite hastily appending the “able-bodied” tag, he essentially declares that he’s okay with letting the most vulnerable die. Because that’s the underlying presumption of Dr. Oz, Senator Ernst, and this administration. To them, you’re just a replaceable part in their economic machine.

Thursday, June 5, 2025

Don’t Pretend To Be Stupid, Senator Ernst

A still from Senator Ernst’s notorious
graveyard “apology” video

Reputable news outlets called Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) graveyard rebuttal last week “sarcastic” because, I think, they deemed it ideologically neutral. Accurate descriptors like “condescending,” “mean-spirited,” or “unbecoming of an elected official” might sound partisan. And mainstream media outlets today will perform elaborate contortions to avoid appearing even accidentally liberal. Better to call her “sarcastic,” from the corporate overlords’ perspective, than analyze Ernst’s motivations.

I have no such compunctions. I’ll eagerly call Ernst’s argument what I consider it: deeply dishonest, predicated on bad faith. For those who need a refresher, Ernst’s constituents expressed outrage at her support for a budget bill which included severe Medicaid cuts. At a Parkersburg town hall, a constituent shouted “People are going to die!” After stammering a bit, Ernst replied: “We are all going to die.” When that comment drew national attention, Ernst responded by doubling down.

Let’s postpone the substance of the debate now. We all already have our opinions on the moral and legal motivations for steep Medicaid cuts; my regular readers probably share my disdain for these cuts. Rather, let’s focus on Ernst’s rhetorical approach. Specifically, I’d like to emphasize Ernst’s decision to pretend she doesn’t understand the accusation. The audience member, in saying people will die, meant people will die needlessly and preventably. Ernst chose to explain that people will die at all.

In classical rhetoric, we speak of the “stasis of argument,” the point of real contention when people disagree on important points. In general, we speak of four stases of argument, that is:

  • Fact (will people die?)
  • Definition (what does it mean for people to die?)
  • Quality (is this death necessary, acceptable, or moral?)
  • Jurisdiction (who bears responsibility for this death?)

In saying people are going to die, Ernst’s constituent argues from a stasis of quality, that cutting Medicaid and other programs will result in needless and morally unacceptable deaths. Ernst attempts to shift focus and claim that death, being inevitable, shouldn’t be resisted. Death is just a fact.

The stases listed in sequence above move from lowest to highest. Rhetoricians consider facts simple and, usually, easy to demonstrate. When facts become ambiguous, we move upward into definitions, then further up into moral considerations, and finally into the realm of responsibility. Moving upward usually means acceding the prior stasis. We cannot argue the morality or responsibility of facts without first acknowledging their reality.

Sometimes, shifting the stasis of argument makes sense. When the state of Tennessee prosecuted John Scopes for teaching evolution in public schools, the prosecution proceeded from a stasis of fact: did Scopes break the law? Defense attorney Clarence Darrow redirected the argument to a stasis of quality: did Scopes do anything morally unacceptable? Darrow essentially admitted the fact, but claimed a higher point of contention existed.

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

However, the reverse seldom applies. Moving up the ladder means adding nuance and complexity to arguments, and moving down means simplifying. By shifting the stasis onto the physical reality of death, which all humans face inevitably, Ernst removes the complexity of whether it’s good or acceptable for someone to die now. If an accused murderer used “We’re all going to die” as a courtroom defense, that would be laughable.

Ernst knows this. As a law-n-order Republican, Ernst has a strict voting record on criminal justice, border enforcement, and national defense. She knows not all deaths are equal. By shifting her stasis of argument from whether deaths are acceptable to whether deaths are real, she’s pretending an ignorance of nuance she hasn’t presented anywhere else. She knows she’s moving the goalpoasts, and assumes we’re too stupid, or perhaps too dazzled by rapid wordplay, to notice she’s done it.

I’ve complained about this before. For instance, when people try to dismiss arguments against synthetic chemicals by pretending to misunderstand the word “chemical,” they perform a similar movement. Moving the stasis down the ladder is a bad-faith argument tactic that bogs debate down in searches through the dictionary or Wikipedia to prove that blueberries aren’t chemical compounds, an that human mortality doesn’t make murder okay.

Moreover, this tactic means the person isn’t worth talking to. If Senator Ernst believes that human mortality negates our responsibility to prevent needless premature death, then we have two choices. She’s either too stupid to understand the stakes, which I doubt, or she’s too dishonest to debate. We must humor her while she’s in office. But her term is up next year, and honest, moral voters must remove her, because this rhetorical maneuver proves her untrustworthy for office.