Photo by Ahmed akacha on Pexels
All I wanted to do last night was relax after a hard day’s work of editing and writing. I picked up my phone and studiously avoided Twitter. Twitter used to be my daily news feed, as I followed all the major newspapers and many of their journalists. But after the Musk purchase, the site has become a cesspool of toxic blue-check denizens spewing right-wing transphobia and hate and bizarre and sleazy ads invading my timeline.
Now, I go directly to The New York Times or The Washington Post. I also check out the Boston Globe since I live here, and I’ll sometimes check out my super local online newspaper, Your Arlington for things like local restaurant reviews.
But, if I’m looking to just relax and zone out, TikTok has become my new addiction. The mighty algorithm knows that I want to watch soothing work-in-progress videos for watercolor artists or people trying out new vacation destinations in Ireland. Sometimes, it will throw in a funny dog video or a beautiful ballet variation for variety.
I have mostly trained it to avoid the outrage machine that most other social media outlets thrive on, but yesterday, oh yesterday. My feed was chock-a-block with videos about those stupid billionaires on that stupid submersible. I refuse to link to sites about that idiotic story. Boneheads with more wealth than brains meeting their deadly folly is not something I care to read about.
If you need to read about news of our ocean waters, you have to read about the awful crash that drowned hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean (and because of global warming, where the richest nations and corporations on earth create pollution that will only exacerbate migration crises as the poorest people feel the worst impacts of this).
This New York Times story outlines the painful contrast of a billionaire’s mega yacht going out to help hundreds of migrants so desperate for a normal life that they will risk their lives at sea -- a sea that is literally teeming with hundreds of other mega yachts of the disgustingly rich. I say disgustingly rich because as the desperately poor risk their lives just to continue to live, according to this one economist in an NPR interview, it would cost the world’s billionaires $30 billion per year to solve world hunger. Doesn’t seem like much when you consider that Elon Musk made $93 billion in 2021.
Of course, these billionaires would never give away that much wealth, but shouldn’t they be taxed to help alleviate some of the world’s suffering? They should be taxed anyway, if they’re going to demand government resources to help them out when they stupidly spend their money on a submersible that fought all attempts at safety regulation.
Ok, it’s now time for some meditation and time for the end of this rant!
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