[averagewall]

I agree we should respect people and no mock them for making mistakes that they pay the ultimate price for. It doesn't matter that they're doing it for fun instead of some desperate survival need. Early aviators gave us aeroplanes and balloons by taking foolish risks and many died, but we glorify a few survivors because of their important contributions.

For some reason, many kinds of deaths are protected from mockery by society, but not adventure accidents. Those are fair game and bring out the cruel uncaring side of otherwise seemingly nice people.

If the Darwin awards included death from alcoholism or suicide, any mention of them would be blotted out from the "polite" internet like HN. Somebody will probably complain about me linking mental illness to accident deaths just to enforce the social more that we must not disrespect certain arbitrary groups of people but other groups are fair game.

[PoachedSausage]

The problem is that some people are engaging in needlessly risky activities, they then put the people that rescue them at risk. For example, in the UK we regularly have people rescued from mountains who are woefully ill equipped, like this guy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-41306122

Yet properly equipped mountaineers can get unlucky and die anyway. The difference between death by hypothermia because you climbed a mountain in only your underpants and being well equipped but getting hit by an avalanche? In the first case the coroner has a verdict of "death by misadventure" because you took unnecessary risks.

[dsego]

It's become a sort of joke in croatia, tourists in flip-flops trying to hike into mountains (famous stereotype is of czech tourists), and currently the rescue by HGSS (mountain rescue) is free of charge, and they often have to deploy a military helicopter (they don't have their own), which is costing the tax payers a pretty penny. The rescuers are mostly volunteers.

Examples of irresponsible behavior : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-368792...

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/08/croatian-mounta...

[gspetr]

There are some candidates that died under influence, but they did so in a spectacular way: http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2017-06.html