Risky Business

August 15, 2022 Longrider Civil Liberties, General News, misanthropy 12

So people are doing stuff that the authorities regard as an unnecessary risk.

Hundreds of people ignored official advice and walked to St Helen’s Fort off the Isle of Wight during the weekend’s low tides.

This is a repeat of the chees rolling thing. People take risks. Life is full of risks. Humanity survives by taking risks. If we didn’t we would not have survived this long. Risk is inherent in our makeup.

The coastguard had previously warned against taking “unnecessary risks” by walking to the fort.

Define unnecessary. And you saying it, doesn’t wash. It is up to each of us to decide what is unnecessary. I ride a motorcycle. There are plenty who would not take that risk. You wouldn’t get me skydiving or bungee jumping. These are personal decisions and it is up to each of us to decide – not the authorities. And I applaud each and every one of those people who ignored official advice and went ahead and walked anyway.

No one died. And if they had, it was a risk they chose to take in full knowledge of what they were doing.

H/T Ian J via email

12 Comments

  1. The problem I suppose is that when someone gets cut off by the tide and drowns the blame game starts and the cries of ‘something should have been done’. If the authorities make lots of announcements and put warning signs up, then they have covered their arses and the rest of us can invoke Darwin.

    • It was the late Auberon Waugh who said that you can have a compensation culture without a welfare state but what no one would do is have both. We have gone down that route and the consequences are what we see all around us now.

  2. Perhaps slightly O/T but every time I hear of a copper or some other pretend-public-servant (paid for by US) refusing to jump into water to save a drowning kid, I think of my mother as a VOLUNTEER ambulance-driver in WWII, driving down North Road in Plymouth while the bombs were actually landing in the road in front of her.

    We’ve lost the moral right to survive….

  3. There’s an interesting theory called Risk Homeostasis.
    Basically there’s a certain amount of risk that people will tolerate. But also there’s a certain amount of risk needed as well.

    Let’s say you have a risk scale and normal life is about a ten.
    You then change things so that things are riskier and the scale value moves to twelve. People will change their behaviour, act in a safer way, to bring it back down to ten.
    Conversely, if you change things so things are safer and the scale value moves to eight, people will change their behaviour and act in a riskier way to bring it back up to ten.

    Not only is this true for individuals, but across populations as well.
    Make cars safer by adding airbags? Average speed goes up by 10mph – risk returns to previous levels.

    So all this nanny ing is just pointless. Because if you make things safer, people just take more risks. All its doing is job creation, which is probably what they’re after in the first place. Think how many Health and Safety officers and trainers there are now. All there to teach us such vital things as “be careful working at height”

  5. I understand where you are coming from but in fairness to the coastguard it’s them that have to pull the dead bodies out of the sea if it goes wrong and nobody should need to do that if it can be avoided.

      • In my experience even when the risk is low there will be some cretin who through wilful stupidity still makes a mess of it.

        Witness the moron who was killed last summer trying to climb down the cliff at Durdle Door because the path was busy

        • Yes, fine. That’s life. Darwin will sort ’em out. That does not mean that we need nanny telling us what to do and to not take what is a low risk.

    • Part of the Coastguard’s job is to drag dead bodies from the sea, amongst diverse other activities. Are you saying they should cause redundancies by putting themselves out of a job?

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