1,453 words
I usually adhere to the Roman custom of only speaking well of the dead, but I will make an exception for Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate and designer of the ill-fated Titan. As the Joker would say, “We live in a society.” OceanGate says a lot about that society, and I can’t help but see the funny side of the Titan’s catastrophic implosion.
Rush’s statement about not wanting to hire uninspiring 50-year-old white men is now infamous. It is also perfectly illustrative of the bourgeois boomer mentality that leaves the country worse off while being smug or clueless about it. Rush died as a 61-year-old white man. Obviously, 50-year-old white men are boring, privileged, and deserve to have their jobs given to diversity hires — unlike 60-year-old white men who were born into trust-fund families.
Bertrand de Jouvenel described the phenomenon of a society’s high and low allying in order to squeeze the middle. I have previously written about an example of de Jouvenal’s theory in microcosm where the upper part of the high segment, as epitomized by people such as Rush, is allying with the upper low, which is made up of lumpen elites and diversity tokens, to squeeze the upper middle — such as the now-proverbial 50-year-old white men. OceanGate is therefore Exhibit A that the faux elite hate us, or are at best arrogantly indifferent. They are objective enemies, and they do not even deserve our respect, as some objective enemies do.
Another lesson that OceanGate aptly illustrates is the state of our current elite. They are not just morally bankrupt; they are also mentally retarded. The bimbo-like stupidity displayed by White House press secretaries is more the rule than the exception among them, for example. Likewise, using a game controller to pilot a vehicle deep in Neptune’s realm such as the Titan wasn’t necessarily a bad idea — so long as there had been a backup system or two. But there wasn’t any. Moreover, according to a former passenger the Titan had lost communication with its surface support vessel on all of its four previous dives. As a military veteran, I can assure you that vehicles losing communication is a big deal even in the most ordinary of circumstances.
This should destroy any illusion that OceanGate was Faustian in the tradition of the Apollo missions or Magellan’s expedition. It was just dumb. Any such comparison is insulting to those serious white explorers who took calculated risks to advance mankind. Rush was instead following the proud cultural traditions of his Jewish wife’s people in cutting costs to increase his bottom line. For example, when describing the sub’s construction in 2021, he mentioned that “[t]he carbon fiber and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
And now he is at the bottom of the ocean as a result of his pursuit of the bottom line.
OceanGate also shows us that, with some notable exceptions, it is usually unwise to trust members of the elite or older people who are not part of the movement. There is little to learn from them, mainly because they are stupid, but apart from that, even if they aren’t malicious, they can’t be trusted to make safe decisions. Rush placing himself and others at risk solely for the sake of clout and money naturally brings to mind Donald Trump’s conduct during and after the stolen election of 2020. If anything nice can be said about Rush, it is that at least he (literally) went down with his ship — unlike Trump, who golfed at Mar-a-Lago while his supporters were being thrown into solitary confinement.
This is in addition to the fact that members of the elite tend to be arrogant. Rush had the hubris to name his submarine the Titan — because it was meant to explore the Titanic. He was tempting the fates. Furthermore, he was trespassing in holy space. OceanGate’s tagline in its early days was “Open the oceans for all of humanity.” This sounds nice, but humans should have to earn their encounters with nature. There is an inherent elitism in nature, as shown by what I call “the trailhead effect,” where the quality of people you encounter while hiking rises the further you get from the trailhead. Facilitating ordinary people such as money-grubbing CEOs and twerking black women to go to difficult-to-reach places is akin to defiling a sacred temple. To them, nature is merely a playground or a resource — and mass tourism tends to wreck nature if not properly managed. I would much prefer that the majority of nature remain mysterious and inaccessible.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s You Asked for It here
While conservation efforts are important, nature thankfully has a way of defending itself as well. OceanGate was an example of the laws of nature in action. Rush messed around and found out. I love nature, but I also respect and even fear it as I do the gods. Once when I was hiking Mount Baldy, my friends and I came to a narrow saddle appropriately called “Devil’s Backbone.” The conditions were icy and those who were coming down with better gear advised against it, as did my friends. I was obsessed with getting to the top — but then I remembered that there are those each year who end up having to be rescued or even die on that backbone, and many of them are more experienced than I. We turned back not out of cowardice, but out of prudence and respect, vowing to return another day.
These untamed encounters with nature help bring men back to what is real. Too many modern people seem to suffer from atrophied amygdalas. They have forgotten that there is an exterior, objective reality which, while sometimes majestic, can also hurt them in the form of avalanches or “scholars.” Subjective pipe dreams such as the imago dei of religious nationalists and the critical race theory of progressives should never take precedence over hard facts like IQ scores. Theories can help explain or supplement reality, but should never contradict it. We humans are not mere beasts, but we’re also not separate from nature.
The forces of nature — Komodo dragons, frostbite, deep-sea pressure — are simultaneously the most anti-racist and racist forces. They do not care about your race, what gender you identify with, or your environmental, social, and governance score: It’s all merit. Whites naturally have more merit. We don’t have white privilege, but we do have white advantage in most things due to our genetics. Given a fair playing field, we tend to outcompete everyone else in most fields by most metrics.
I can already hear some complaining that this essay is insensitive given how the families of the victims must feel. Rush’s family only seems to reflect his own tackiness, however. His stepson, Brian Szasz, was brazenly hoeing it up on Twitter with an OnlyFans model and talking about going to a Blink 182 concert after his father was reported missing. We all mourn differently, I suppose, but those of the elites of earlier eras would have ensured that members of their household at least knew how to appear to have proper decorum. Even vehement critics of the Hapsburgs could never accuse them of being uncouth.
But you can’t buy class. Rush’s maternal grandmother, Louise Davies, had so much money that she could pay to put her name on San Francisco’s Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. How the mighty have fallen, indeed. But there is a major white pill in this: Our adversaries among the faux elite have fallen so far into decadence that they can’t even pretend to be cultured anymore. It is therefore only a matter of time until a new aristocracy based on blood replaces them.
I’d rather think of the families of those 50-year-old white men who have to work jobs that they’re overqualified for because of race traitors such as Rush. The pursuit of “equity” doesn’t only impact individual whites, but their families as well. As the breadwinners, they are being forced to work more for less pay.
I also prefer to lament those families that were delayed or never came into existence at all due to affirmative action. When one segment of whites is forced to settle for lesser jobs, this naturally causes higher competition in a particular job bracket, and some who would normally be in that bracket have to instead compete at a lower level. The same then happens at that level. Wealth does not trickle down, but competition certainly does — and uncertainty about their ability to provide is a significant reason as to why many whites are now hesitant to start families.
Alas, the new, vibrant Lil Mermaid couldn’t save Rush from his titanic folly. At least he died how he lived: behaving stupidly and virtue-signaling.
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13 comments
Brutally honest. Like a breath of cold, fresh, mountain air.
Thank you.
And speaking of intersectional mermaids:
Dark Waters – StoneToss
BTW, LOL @ the Bud Light can!
Lot’s of gems in this article.
And now he is at the bottom of the ocean as a result of his pursuit of the bottom line.
I personally had my “WTF?” moment when I heard about the wireless game controller. Then I saw the video of Rush when he was showing the inside of the Titan after showing the controller and how it works, threw it to the side like it was an unwanted flyer you got from some random person on the street. Of course, the whole “I don’t want 50-year-old white guys” is now a meme at this point. These are precisely the kind of people I would want to hire to fly/navigate/maintain my private plane if I were a billionaire.
I enjoyed the commentary on respecting nature and the trailhead metaphor. Despite my disagreements with what Rush had to say about the old white guys I’m deeply saddened that he and the 4 other people had to die like this.
This essay was superbly crafted. Absolutely seamless.
Brian Szasz, according to your link, is the adult stepson of Hamish Harding, the British aviation mogul, not Rush. Whilst a stepson might be close to his mother’s replacement for his father it’s hardly a surprise when he isn’t.
This whole affair is a case of four overgrown teenagers and one actual teenager taking a clapped out old car for a fang. Rush, driving recklessly, comes off the road at breakneck speed and ploughs straight into a boulder. Enough said.
An interesting aspect of this story, which I heard mentioned is the apparent fact that the fate of the vessel was known but withheld for several days whilst the drama was given prominent global airtime. I never heard any details of what ‘rescuers’ were actually doing, more about oxygen trickling through the hourglass, and the mysterious thump, representing signs of life (actually the sign of death). A distraction from the Biden hearings perhaps?
I had a frightening experience on Mt. Baldy while training for Mt. Whitney. A gust of wind (gale, more like) blew through while I was on the Devil’s Backbone, and I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl back to safety, with heavy gear on my back. Damaged my knees. But there was a couple ahead of me who decided to taunt the gods, so they continued on foot and were blown off the trail. Hundreds of feet down. It was horrifying to witness. Utterly stupid. They survived but it was messy.
Never tempt or taunt, as they say.
To me it is a given that Nature is a resource that should be husbanded by man and not thoughtlessly squandered. And I always cringe whenever I hear Nature being deified or imparted with some sort of imaginary teleology.
But I really appreciated your description of the Faustian nature of exploration and the calculated risk of space travel.
In January of 1967, what would later be called Apollo 1 had been slated to fly the next month but was completely lost during a live tower test of systems. The crew were encountering endless communications problems when faulty wiring set off a fire in the oxygen-enriched cockpit and within seconds carbonized the three doomed white-clad Astronauts into toast:
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and the new guy, Roger Chaffee.
As a boy, I had a modest-sized painting in my room on black velvet commemorating Ed White’s walk in space in 1965, the second man to do it since Russia’s Alexi Leonov a few months earlier.
Just a wee Kindergarten lad from Las Vegas, Nevada in early 1967, I don’t remember the news droning endlessly about the Apollo 1 fire like they would today with so much umbilical gazing, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth.
There was some debate whether Apollo could meet the JFK goal of getting men to the Moon by the end of the decade, but there was no debate that the Apollo program would continue.
NASA took a deep breath from the tragedy and decided that they needed to back away from go-fever and return to the drawing board. The Apollo capsule was redesigned with a more ergonomic escape hatch, the wiring simplified and improved, and they would henceforth not be operating with enriched oxygenation at near sea level cabin pressures.
The next crewed NASA launch was delayed for the better part of two years with Apollo 7 over the Columbus Day weekend in October of 1968.
I remember the events as young people often do. My Dad had some holiday time off from his aerospace job in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our home then was located about a mile away from Walter White’s from the fictional TV show Breaking Bad. I don’t remember anybody trying to toss pizzas onto garage roofs, which is what happens to the poor people who actually live there today.
Anyway, that week over fifty years ago when people had been celebrating the New World discoveries of the Italian navigator, we had been visiting an aunt in Silverton, Colorado and driving back on the million-dollar highway. As we motored through the high desert heading home to Albuquerque, my Dad had the Apollo 7 mission on the AM radio and it was enthralling.
The sun sank into the West and the neon colors emerged over the Land of Enchantment. It was easy then to imagine what the space explorers were seeing from the heavens. What an amazing feeling.
🙂
It was just dumb.
Great now can we all move on to more pressing matters PLEASE?
A really insightful article about the Titan (or Titanic-II) misadventure. Also goes to show that there can be “fates worse than death”. This being scorn and ridicule after death. I’m sure well-wishers will be wrapping Stockton’s tombstone in carbon-fiber tape for years to come.
I’d disagree that: “not wanting to hire uninspiring 50-year-old white men is now infamous.”
Aside from a small # of white nationalist types scattered here & on a few websites, I’ll bet few know & that this quote has been censored by the media.
I won’t go into listing what was wrong with the sub, although I must add that in addition to not having communications, neither the sub nor the surface ship knew their location. Apparently not knowing both was considered routine here?
Your story is very insightful in that you highlight that our elites also appear to be dumb as well as openly hostile towards us. Perhaps they’re just completely blinded by hubris? Or possibly they’ve just highly sensitive to the slightest eddy-currents (as opposed to counter-currents) in social media perceptions?
My guess is that Rush was discouraged from his pet project by numerous professionally experienced middle-aged white men who advised him that his underwater craft was unsafe. I’m sure that was a bummer for Rush to hear. So uninspiring. Reality is a bummer, but don’t let reality stop you. Just hire young people who don’t criticize your harebrained venture, and trash those 50-something white men who made you doubt your own brilliance.
Stockton Rush was a member of the elite, and similar to the liberal elite had little humility or brakes on his own ego. Elites usually don’t listen to warnings coming from subordinates. Liberal elites are too arrogant to listen to warnings that their flights of fancy won’t work out. They will find out only when they crash into reality. Nature is not a toy to be played with.
One of the challenges of modern times is dealing with the white CEOs, chairs, etc. who speak out against the whites below them to save their own skin. They feel pressure to meet diversity pressures, else they could be replaced by someone who will. Unfortunately, I have not seen a great list of strategies to counter this behavior, but at least it should be pointed out as the news coverage has done here. Like any fool, Stockton Rush let his egocentrism run wild with his comments, but many CEOs are more careful and behave similarly without overtly saying they won’t hire 50 year old white men…. Hidden structural racism against white guys?
Apparently so. Bud Lite or InBev still have not fired that marekting exec ( Heinerscheid) or her boss who produced that trans-Mulvany commercial. They were given some sort of seperation from the company, possibly with a generous severance package.
They did this as they didn’t want to be seen as making any potentially unfriendly moves against the 2 woke marketing execs by an explicit firing. Losses are currently 27 Bn and rising.
So I guess you’re right. The anti-white hostility is apparently baked-in.
The corporate way is to avoid Twitter protests and to make changes quietly, or as quietly as possible. Nowadays there is nothing like a boycott, media shaming or loss in stock value to bring them to their knees. So I would not expect them to overtly fire anyone, especially over a sensitive area like race, immigration or sexuality. But ‘restructuring’ a corporate division is more typical. I’m surprised they went so far as ‘separation’. I’m not offended by much these days, but when any TikTok-er or Instagram ‘influencer’ shills a product and says they are about ‘honesty’ and ‘genuineness’ while cashing checks kinda bugs me. Only a matter of time till attacks come at Mulvaney from the Left for looking anorexic.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12240443/Anheuser-Busch-DENIES-report-fired-two-marketing-executives.html
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