I think he's pointing out that the outrage over the death of a mindless reptile and the glee over the death of a human being makes you a fucking sociopath.
Yeah, that does not track. You have admitted in here that you have felt amusement over the death of a human being. I suspect you not throw stones from glass houses.
I am not amused by the death of every person. Or even every person that gets eaten by something. It is context dependent. Lets look at a number of cases:
Person dies as a result of terminal illness: Well... damn. That poor bastard.
Person dies from parasite infection because doctors misdiagnosed it: This is sad.
Person victim of a rape-homicide: Also sad, and makes me angry at the perp.
Swimmer a few meters off beach in really shallow water: Getting hit by a shark is fucking weird. Look at aerial photos of a beach sometime. There are sharks everywhere. A person being bitten by a shark is rare, because the sharks dont usually view them as prey items. Except for tiger sharks. They view hunks of metal is prey. Usually shark bites are the equivalent of a toddler putting something in its mouth to investigate. The shark just has lots of teeth. I dont find this any more tragic than a car accident. Sad, but it is bad luck. No one acted stupidly here.
Surfers getting hit by a shark: Surfers ring the proverbial dinner bell. Their chance of being attacked at a beach is much much higher than the swimmers a few tens of meters closer to shore, because they look like food to a great white shark. The chances for everyone on that beach being attacked may be one in several thousand. When you restrict the pool to surfers, it is much higher. Surfers however have a sort of group ethos common to most extreme sports. They take what precautions they can, but they rationally accept the risk in order to have their fun. Even then, they surf in areas miles away from the preferred hunting areas of great white sharks, and get hit as attacks of opportunity by sharks in transit.
This guy: OK. Lets deal with some assumptions here. You are all assuming that this guy in this case is dirt poor. There is nothing in the article to suggest this. That they go poaching to provide food for their families is said, but only once a week? What do they do the rest of the week? Does he fish conventionally? Work in tourism? Is he unemployed? They (he and his friends) can afford things like dive fins, mask, snorkel etc. Not sure if they were free diving or using tanks. But even the gear for snorkeling gets expensive. So, why are we making this assumption that the guy is dirt poor? Because he lives in Africa? This is not the Central African Republic. This is South Africa. Is it poor? Yes, but not as poor as much of the rest of the continent. Is it a paradise? No. Is it THAT god damn dirt poor that you think a fisherman cannot afford a fucking boat? Even really dirt poor fishermen in the congo have boats. So, unless you have actual evidence to the contrary...
but poachers often choose their line of work due to the high profit margins and how relatively difficult it is to get caught. I don't think you can really play the "OH NO BOO HOOS HE IS SUPER POOR HE HAS TO DO THIS TO SUVIVE" card here.
We have a winner.
There are precautions shellfish divers and spear fishermen can and do take when they are in waters with sharks. For example, not tying a bunch of dead fish to your body, but instead tying them to your spear so that if you are approached by a shark, it does not take your liver with your catch, and you can let it munch on the spear shaft. Using a boat so you are not swimming for three miles in the
nexus of S.Africa's great white population at the surface like a very stupid seal is another.
Put this in perspective. Dyer Island, the island they were swimming to and from, is a
fucking seal colony. Even the seals take precautions. They swim through that whole area at top speed, minimizing their time at the surface, and when they are at the surface, they breach (propel themselves out of the water) so that the shark can only see them to target them half the time.
So, these guys were swimming in an area that has one of the largest and most conspicuous great white populations on the planet, in an area the sharks use to hunt, behaving like an injured or terminally stupid seal.
When someone does something this stupid, they deserve what they get. They have earned it. If you cannot afford the safety equipment, you should not do something.
Actually, darwin awards are obviously stupid actions. Given how rare shark attacks are, this is actually (likely) a rational risk/reward tradeoff.
Shark attacks are rare because they are derived by dividing the number of shark attacks by the number of swimmers. These guys increased their probability of attack WAY the fuck beyond that. See above. We dont have the statistics for attack probabilities for shit like this, because the number of people who do something this moronic is so low. No one bothers to collect the numbers. I suppose the best approximation for how moronic these guys are is to look at studies where biologists studying Shark Breaching tie a fake seal to the back of their boat and tow it along at low speed. The attack probabilities are fairly high per unit time, and it is a god damn miracle that these people had not been attacked before now.
it doesn't make economic sense to build a boat or boats large enough to haul all of them when they can do the job without
Traveling to and from a seal colony, doing what any local person, particularly a fisherman, knows will attract sharks?
maybe because they live in a dirt-poor, crime-ridden shithole, building a boat is just an invitation to get it stolen
South Africa is not like the rest of Africa. It is not fun, but it is not the congo. And in the congo, fishermen have boats. You are making way the fuck too many unwarranted assumptions about economic status here.
And this is still ignoring the fact that there are a total of two shark deaths in that area over the space of a year. That's out of how many thousands, tens of thousands of people swimming out there?
See above. The statistics for shark attacks on recreational swimmers and surfers just... do not apply. The other death was a freak accident. This was not. This was a guy swimming while ringing the dinner bell.
This guy got hit by a ridiculously unlikely freak occurrence
A car accident is a freakishly unlikely occurrence. Unless I get drunk and decide to speed down a winding road, then I am playing Russian Roulette, and it is just a matter of time and repetition. The only thing this guy could have done to make his attack probability higher would have been to have a piece of rancid tuna tied to his leg.
or perhaps having a boat makes them and their illegal activities more visible to the authorities
I am reminded of an episode of World's Dumbest Criminals....
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- PeZook
