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2009 Darwin Award Winners Announced
Greg Lindahl writes "From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!"
I have, on more than one occasion, been referred to as a future award winner. Given how epically my attempt at a 3-phase mains-powered coilgun failed... I feel they may be right.
At least I'll win something in my life. Even if it takes my life to win it.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
If they died honorably rescuing people or something, yeah. Jumping in a creek after a freaking moped, not so much.
These are Darwin award worthy?
First off, the rigor. Minor complaint, but it'd be neat if they linked to a police report, or a newspaper article on these incidents.
Second off, the stupid. These are by far not the stupidest deaths I've read about last year. the DAs are getting weak.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It is not the dead that are being insulted, it is the manner in which they decided to become so.
They're all random people no one knows, and frankly, people don't feel a lot for people they don't know. I think it's more stupid when people go "oh no, 50 people died on other side of the world - let's pretend we're sad" and then completely ignoring how many people die every die, and how many people die in wars and such. I can bet you don't really feel sad for the iraqi insurgents, do you? If you feel sad for a random person, you should feel sad for another random person too.
And black humor is old thing.
We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.
Sure, that guy who jumped over the barrier to relieve himself should have been more careful. But does that mean we need to celebrate his death?
That priest with the balloons--OK, he should have bailed earlier, or figured out his GPS in advance of his trip. Clearly he made some mistakes. But he was trying to do something for a charitable cause.
Lots of smart people make dumb mistakes; we're all only human. An old saying "There but for grace of God go I" seems to apply in many of these situations.
That DUI woman who drowned in the creek--she's a pathetic sort of person, obviously lacking in common sense. But not knowing the full story (the author speculated and extrapolated an awful lot in this case) I hesitate to condemn her as deserving of the Darwin awards.
All in all it was a mediocre set of awards this year. I've seen better.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
It's a little distasteful to insult the dead. I may get -1 flamed for this, but am I the only one who feels this way?
It is impossible to insult the dead, although it's possible to offend their living friends and relatives...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
We killed the site. Can they get a Darwin Award for that?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Slashdot editors: Take Darwin's picture off this. He deserves better.
Ha! Died while posting!
http://www.darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8080/
For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Meh. People have different senses of humor. There's nothing wrong with not sharing someone else's sense of humor. There's arguably something wrong with wishing them dead because their sense of humor differs from yours...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Of course. http://www.darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8080/ is your friend.
Thats because theyre not in our Monkeysphere.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Last time I checked, Congress still has 535 members.
I do take this kind of seriously. When I was 10 and in school, one of my classmates, in fact her entire family, died instantly when they drove off an over pass or a freeway. I was brought to school over this overpass everyday. At that time there was very little traffic. To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.
I can't help but feel these cautionary tales are a good public service. They remind us that the world is dangerous, and the miracle is that we humans have a brain that we can use to survive. Unless we don't.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
All sorts of people find all sorts of things distasteful. It doesn't make anybody wrong or right. There's no reason to get judgmental over something so trivial as humor. I think our ability to sit back and chuckle at life rather than get offended is a tremendously useful trait.
+1 Disagree
Blowing your balls off with a railgun qualifies as unusual in my book.
Right. The lady in question was driving a moped because she had a prior DUI. She ran a police roadblock into a flooded street and ended up going over an embankment into a flooded creek. The police rescued her. She then jumped BACK into the creek.
Yes indeed, could have happened to any one of us.
But yes, things are less funny when people die because, you know, we've got so few people and it's so hard to make new ones.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"And when you go around mocking the people who died doing something stupid, often times you are too busy laughing to know the whole story."
And how would knowing the whole story make her actions any less stupid? Her actions led to her death. Mocking her actions is a good thing-it might encourage others not to do similar things.
I'd like to think I would never do anything as stupid as that but if I do, I fully expect to be mocked for it. Because I'd deserve it.
Read the article though and regardless of it, they were an idiot. She went into the creek on the moped, the officer PULLED HER OUT with a rope, interviewed her, and when he went to the car for a second she bolted and jumped back into the creek.
Don't matter what she was jumping in for, she was an idiot.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Didn't these "Darwin Awards" start as as email spams that mostly consisted of urban legends?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We're not insulting them; we're honoring them for removing their genes from the gene pool before they could replicate.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
No basically what they are saying is that whatever genetic or environmental conditioning that person had that led them to make the poor choices that led to their death has died with them, and thus hopefully has not been passed on to a future generation. Thus it ensures that the strongest and fittest of our species survive and reproduce.
It sort of falls along the lines of why does our society really needs labels such as "Do not use on roof" on a snow blower, "Caution moves when in use" on a scooter, or "Not for personal hygiene" on a flush-able toilet brush. If someone is too retarded to realize these things on their own why do we protect them?
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...
Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?
I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.
Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.
It's a little distasteful to insult the dead...am I the only one who feels this way?
Yes. Yes you are.
Next!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
> I never understood the "don't speak ill of the dead" idea.
It is for historical reasons. We used to bury our dead with their stuff, but we broke their weapons before putting them into the grave, for our own protection. For the same reason, it was not wise to speak ill of them.
The reason why we still have that rule is best explained with the famous bananas and monkeys example:
http://paws.kettering.edu/~jhuggins/humor/banana.html
These things have gone from funny to angry and vindictive. In particular, that overpass-falling one strikes me as an easy mistake. Here in Raleigh, we just had two people do something very similar: an overpass (near the Crabtree area, for locals) looks for all the world like it's a single bridge. But in reality, each lane is its own structure, with about four to six feet between the two that drops straight down to the freeway below. I'd driven by a hundred times and had no idea, and while yes, I'd like to think I'd look before I leaped over, I could easily see paying more attention to traffic than the divider itself and making the same mistake.
That entry happened, according to the site, in Florida, so it's a different area. But there's certainly not enough information there to make a judgment call on his intelligence.
Granted. Or at least, an Idiot for the Moment. Which pretty much everyone could win an award for, I dare say. For example, almost every professional sports player, it seems :)
Not true. If you lose the ability to procreate before(?) having done so and live you are eligible
Thank you for clarifying and correcting me :)
Though I think my original parent is much more likely to die than self-sterilize; at least the imaginary self-caricature personae is...
Bachelor, are we?
It's perfectly possible to insult the dead. It's just impossible for them to be offended by it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Nonono, we're not mocking them for dying. We're mocking them for being stupid!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It appears now we ridicule people who do something unusual and pioneering (however naive), like the priest in TFA. Have we had the Darwin awards in centuries past, we would have ridiculed the death of every explorer we ever had instead of mourn it.
Yeah, but at least I had the common sense NOT to do several things that are almost guaranteed to make you appear in the obituaries. You will probably notice that the Darwin Awards rarely if ever show freak accidents. It's usually awarded for doing something that is almost guaranteed to kill you, and that you, as a being more or less capable of thinking coherently, should know that. Care to show me the logic in:
Taking a billiard ball in your mouth"
Digging out armed land mines to place them somewhere else?
Juggling grenades?
Using the blunt end of a loaded shotgun to crack open a window? (last line, not that the other short mentionings were any smarter...)
Cutting off your balls over a bet?
Or your head?
And so many examples more that are impossible NOT to end up lethal.
How do you want to defend ANY of those "logics"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What those parents were doing that was worth the life of their children was DRIVING THEM TO SCHOOL so they could turn out to be self-appointed judges for other people's mistakes, just like YOUR parents drove YOU to school so you could be here today.
You make the point for this thread better than anything anyone else has said. You have NO IDEA what happened, but you'll happily assume that the parents were grossly negligent ("instead of driving") and condemn them for an accident that may very well not have been their fault. In case you missed the point, the only difference between your saintly parents and "those parents" who are obviously scum for killing their children is that YOUR parent's child didn't die in a traffic accident and their's did. There's a saying that some civilized people use: "There but for the grace of God go I". In case you don't understand, it means "whatever it was that happened to THEM could have happened to ME, instead."
I expect you've never seen black ice form on an overpass, or a sleepy 18-wheel driver try to use your lane, or any of a thousand other things that could have caused the accident without it being the fault of "those parents" you regard so lowly. But obviously, they were negligent somehow, because YOU know they were, even after you admit you know NOTHING about what happened.
He didn't die, but he might be unable to reproduce.
It puts an air of arrogance that they themselves are obviously smarter than everyone who has died unnaturally simply because they themselves are still alive.
People who go out of their way to kill themselves despite numerous, clear safety measures are stupid. Sure they may have reasons for what they did, stupid reasons. OK, there still significant disagreement over the meaning of "intelligence", but taking reasonable steps to avoid death is a handy rule of thumb (excepting making a sacrifice to save other lives). You can read the comments of family members for many of these submissions, and the usual theme is not "he made a noble sacrifice" but "he was always doing crazy stuff like that".
Plus, anyone who breaks into a live power station to steal the copper from the power lines (which is about half the Darwin Award submissions these days) is not only stupid but an asshole, and deserves all possible criticism.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
On slashdot, aren't we?