I just want to talk about the news tonight, which you should understand to mean “I want to say things I already said on Twitter earlier today, but I want to use more words.” There were two big stories today; the missing Titanic submersible, and Hunter Biden pleading guilty to a couple of minor tax violations and a gun charge of some sort.

Let’s start with the easier story. I don’t care about Hunter Biden. If Hunter Biden is a criminal of some sort, convict and punish him for his crimes. I’m fine with that, and it doesn’t affect my opinion of Joe Biden, particularly since Dad appears to be going to great pains to get the hell out of the way. There is an argument being made out there that Hunter is actually being treated more harshly than, just for example, someone who hadn’t been targeted endlessly by the entire Republican Party for the last five years, might have been. I, myself, have turned my taxes in late before, although I think in Biden’s case the issue was he didn’t pay taxes at all for two years. I’m unclear on what the deal is with the gun charge although apparently it’s just going to be dealt with somehow. Whatever.

You might think, knowing the– ahem– basic outlines of my politics, that I might be pissed about Hunter Biden being held to a higher standard than most Americans while, oh, I dunno, some other president’s son-in-law can accept two billion dollars from the Saudis the minute his father-in-law leaves office and nobody does anything about it. I am, and this is probably obvious, still pissed about the other thing, but honestly? I’m a teacher and I’m well and Goddamned used to the idea that ethically and legally I get held to a higher standard than most people because of my job. I really don’t have a problem with the idea that the progeny of public officials need to keep their noses cleaner than most. One way or another it doesn’t appear that dude is going to jail. He’ll be fine. I’m not pressed about it.

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I genuinely hope that the five men aboard the Titan are dead. That probably sounds mean, but the simple fact is that I don’t think there is any chance of them being rescued and it is therefore better for them to have died in some sort of explosive decompression incident, where they likely would have gotten little to no warning of what was about to happen and they didn’t have time for any of it to hurt. Because the alternatives are all terrifying. There is literally nothing they can do inside that thing to save themselves, and while there is a slight chance that the vehicle has managed to make it to the surface and will be found, it seems like there’s a really good chance that the process of heading for the surface would have killed them anyway, and dying from the bends, from what I understand, is fucking awful.

The other option, of course, is that four men who have gone their entire lives not being told “no” very much and the pilot of the vessel are trapped in pitch black, with little to no food and no bathroom facilities, slowly getting colder and colder– the ocean is fucking cold, and it seems reasonable to think that dying of hypothermia at that depth is a genuine danger, and could happen before asphyxiation, depending on a bunch of variables I have no access to– sitting in what amounts to a tin can with no seats and unable to get away from each other. The part of my brain that writes and reads horror stories is pretty certain that there has already been some unimaginable violence inside that tin can, if it’s the case that the submersible lost power or got stuck somehow. I would be shocked if they were rescued. I would be even more shocked if they were rescued and at least one of the five hadn’t been murdered.

There has been some other discourse on Twitter about how everyone on the internet has suddenly become an expert in deep-sea diving, which, on one hand, isn’t entirely without merit, and on the other hand, as someone with no relevant expertise of any kind, I don’t feel like anything that I’ve said really constitutes any kind of leap that an actual expert wouldn’t make, and the places where I could be wrong– maybe however far down it traveled before losing contact with the surface isn’t deep enough for the pressure to crush the ship, or maybe carbon nanotubes insulate really well and hypothermia isn’t a realistic problem. I could be wrong about those things.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it? The only way they’re getting rescued is if they’re bobbing around on the surface right now and they are found before they run out of air, and the prospect of running out of air while floating on the surface is a breathtaking bit of irony.

I didn’t mean to put that pun there, by the way, but now that I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in.

One way or another, though, the basic variables don’t seem to be all that complicated. I am, in general, pro expertise of all kinds, and I wish I knew more about literally everything than I do. And maybe I know so little about this that I don’t even recognize the degree to which I’m wrong; if you don’t quite understand what I mean by that, argue with someone about evolution sometime. So, yeah, I am no kind of expert at all, and I could theoretically be wrong about a whole lot of shit, but as near as I can tell most of the shit I could be wrong about just makes it suck more, and I’m absolutely certain that I know enough about human nature to be deeply worried about what’s happening inside that submersible if they’re still alive.

Anyway, I’m off to play Subnautica, a game about deep-sea exploration, and a game I had planned to start playing this week before I knew any of this was happening. It’s a coincidence, I swear.