In the age of online mobs it's probably very commendable for the news outlets not to throw anybody to the lions, especially since in this case the responsibility seems difficult to establish. Is it the fault of the captain? The Egyptian pilot? Some technician that caused directly or indirectly a blackout on the ship? The Egyptian authorities who authorized the ship to cross during bad weather? Etc...
It's a very good thing that the media was more cautious IMO. And conspiracy theories don't need anybody feeding them, you have armies of losers online doing nothing but making that stuff up 24/7.
I don't think there's anything "strange" going on (a rather conspiratorial wording in and of itself IMO), it's just that it's very hard to place the blame with the information currently available, especially since all the first party sources have a very strong incentive to push a certain narrative.
The Costa Concordia on the other hand was much more clear cut and you had the extremely embarrassing recording of the coast guard telling the captain to return to the ship and him cowardly refusing to do so. There's no such thing here as far as I know.
Again, I don't care to find them excuses. "Somebody called me a loser so I decided to spew bullshit online" is what losers do.
I'd much rather empathize with this captain who was targeted solely because she's a woman. That seems like a much better use of my time than caring about keyboard warriors on twitter or 4chan.
I'm talking about addressing systemic issues in our culture (like calling any group we don't like by a bad name) that are definitely, provably, obviously, causing more of the bad behavior that we're trying to criticize.
I live in a very "purple" area and even though I am "blue" I get along with "red" people easily by, I dunno, not calling them "deplorables" when they say something that offends me.
It's up to each of us if we want to link our identity with a zealous cause and never back down because we're afraid of social penalties from our in-group, or if we want to actually learn how to get along. But if you go around calling people "losers", you should consider how that might be adding to the problem you're trying to solve.
Edit: btw I agree 100% with everything you've said except for the "armies of losers" phrasing. That's all I'm trying to communicate to you. That there may have been a more constructive way to get your (correct) point across.
I understand your feedback, and I generally try to be level headed in these matters, but I simply think that it's a losing battle.
Playing the victim is a competitive sport online, suffice to see the outrage caused by "literally whos" who post some silly extreme take on some social network. It then gets posted and reposted everywhere to rile the troups.
My point is, if a nobody like myself calling a bunch of people "losers" online is enough to motive some of these people to change their behaviours, IMO they were just looking for an excuse to do so. In truth in my experience they're not arguing that in good faith, they're just cherry picking in order to "both-sides" the issue.
I think it's a waste of energy to try to build bridges with these types of people, they're not interesting in honest debate, they just espouse the form of a civil debate in order to bog you down. So I just explicitly reject them without engaging, if you're the type of person who likes to spread disinformation like the one discussed in TFA then you're a loser in my book and I move on with my life.
Note that I'm not singling any particular faction here, while I do think that the right wing is definitely employing these tactics at a much greater scale, the left is definitely not above them either. It's standard internet discussion tactics, unfortunately.
I cherish HN because it's one of the only relatively mainstream online forums I know of where these types of discussions don't turn completely one-sided. It's far from perfect but places like reddit, facebook, twitter or 4chan are effectively lost to civil discourse as far as I'm concerned.
I'm saying "civil" means not saying "armies of losers". More or less by definition. If you're not trying to build bridges with most people most of the time, what are you doing exactly?
Again, my only point, is that your idea that calling them losers will do anything except trigger a double-down is hurting your own cause.
Also, HN is a niche echo chamber similar to those others you mention, in many ways.
Cruise ships tend to have the name of the captain widely promoted, so it's trivially findable public information. The same is not true for random freighters. And Schettinos name was widely broadcast because there were clear points to criticize his and the crews specific behavior (which we do not have here), which lead to death of a bunch of people (which we do not have here). It's a really odd point of comparison - there's plenty of nautical accidents where this isn't widely reported because it's not especially interesting and there aren't immediate reports of the captains misbehavior to report on.
Do you remember when a subreddit managed to frame someone innocent for the Boston marathon bombing?
This kind of thing happens regardless of whether the media correctly identifies the person(s) responsible, especially if the scapegoat people run with fits into preexisting prejudices (e.g. nobody in the country questioned it when the German police blamed the murders of Turkish minority business owners on "probably the Turkish mafia" until it became clear they were part of a terrorism plot of the _National Socialist Underground_, a white nazi group).
It's also worth questioning what good identifying "the person" responsible in the media would do. If anyone directly involved faces criminal charges, we'll probably find out once they've been found guilty. But anyone involved in software development should know that saying "this person did it" when doing a post mortem on a catastrophic incident like this is not a productive use of anyone's time unless the goal is just to have someone to sacrifice in order to avoid addressing the underlying problems that led to the incident.
Also, while the Canal was blocked for days, the ship did not sustain any critical damage and the cargo seems to have remained safe and secure. The captain of the Costa Concordia on the other hand killed 32 people and sunk his ship. The two incidents are hardly comparable.
While you are being downvoted for exposing the obviouness of the subreddits accusing others (something I have no issue with).... But the real guilty parties are the mainstream media when they let storytelling enter their coverage like what we had when white Tim Mcveigh did the Oklahoma bombing and all the large media outlets like CNN, NY Times framed muslims for that. We saw the similar coverage of the German pilot who crashed Germanwings recently by the (white) media and how different it would have been if the pilot was not white.
The white media would have covered fascist France run by dictatorial Macron differently if it was say in Russia or China or Bolivia:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Schettino