And our lives really are, ultimately, our own. Well, at least until we bring kids into the world. We can certainly choose to give up part of this autonomy, but we shouldn't demand it from anyone else.
Also, yes internet I understand that falling from a mountain bike at a slow speed can impact your head just as hard as falling from a high speed, that isn't the point, or even entirely true.
Reckless behavior increases the impact on anyone involved in an accident with you, mentally impacts anyone that might see your brains splatter, increases insurance premiums, uses hospital resources, etc.
As well, insurance and hospital costs are likely reduced since I'm more often just dead rather than maimed. Plus I'll have less diabetes and heart disease since I'm not sitting inside watching CNN and Fox news all day getting fat and being "safe"
How do you know this? Have you interviewed everyone ever on why they got angry? There are a variety of reasons and it's very highly unlikely that you are correct.
I'm sorry, I can't agree with this. There's plenty of anger and disdain for all those things. There's plenty of "fuck fatties", "fuck rich fat cats", and "fuck drunks" sentiment, and I don't go out of my way to engage in communities I know to be hateful or particularly negative. (Unless HN counts??)
1. Public health campaigns - They don't get outraged by junk food, sports cars, etc. because there isn't advertising telling them it's unequivocally bad. Government will tell you that not wearing a helmet, smoking a cigarette, etc. is universally bad so it's easier for people to see someone "doing a bad thing". People get angry when other people "break the rules".
2. They know someone who was affected. I'm guessing if your cousin got hurt because they weren't wearing a helmet, you might carry some emotions that could be released when you see someone else taking the same risk.
3. Human nature. Back in tribes, if our Uncle was trying to scale giant cliff faces for fun, we'd be at greater risk of less food / losing a war if the tribe let him risk his life for little to no tribal gain. Especially if the young kids thought it was cool and wanted to try it too. People are persuadable and can be influenced. It's not unreasonable to think that glorifying death defying sports or financially rewarding them will result in more people risking their lives.
4. Bullying. If you see someone doing something different or not fitting in, some humans feel compelled to yell at that person to increase conformity and cohesion.
5. Low self confidence. They might be highly critical of themselves and see an opportunity to criticize others.
For me, #3 is the most common answer. People in strong, healthy communities feel safer so they probably don't want what they consider a "risky" behavior to spread.
No, please stop. This canard has been repeated by the anti-helmet crowd for decades, despite having been disproven countless times. Even if you're a number-crunching robot and care for nothing except how much cash it will cost today, helmets are a huge win.
> Also, yes internet I understand that falling from a mountain bike at a slow speed can impact your head just as hard as falling from a high speed, that isn't the point, or even entirely true.
You're riding so slowly that a fall won't impact your head much, but merely kill you?
In fact, my bike-loving, safety-loving friends never say they're angry at someone riding without a helmet. Usually someone just calls them an idiot.
But as others have said, in any country with a social safety net, someone's injury/death ends up taking resources away from others (hospital bills, loss of productivity, loss of repaying the cost of your childhood, not taking care of parents or kids, etc.)
There's nothing bizarre about seeing someone who abuses their safety net as selfish or irresponsible.
First of all, helmets dramatically reduce risk of injury[1]. Why do American football players wear them if they aren't protective?
Second, much of the bike riding done in the US is on roads shared with cars, and most of our accidents involve cars. We likely have more accidents per mile here than any place with dedicated bike infrastructure.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/sep/22/bicycle...
People aren’t angry at you for riding without a helmet, they’re angry at you for riding on the sidewalk
Neither of those is exactly a glowing recommendation in my book, though. If anything, they tend to make me suspicious, since it's hard to imagine any arenas where stability and sustainability are less valued than America and internet forums in 2019.
In specific contexts, even the most libertarian people seem to agree that complete autonomy simply isn't viable, e.g., in a spacecraft, or a military group in battle. When the survival of the group's members depends on everyone working together in a certain way, autonomy is surrendered.
I wonder if even America will come around on this issue in the future. As Buckminster Fuller said, we're all on Spaceship Earth. Its capacity for supporting human life looks more fragile now than any time I've been alive. I don't think Honnold's climb was particularly irresponsible, but there are countless actions that people do every day that are.
50 years ago, you could sit on your own land and burn a million gallons of oil, right up into the atmosphere, and we'd call that independence. Today, you're destroying our spaceship. (You didn't choose to live here, but neither did I.) There are many such issues that we once thought were only about individual freedom which have turned out to be global issues that affect us all. Every year, there seems to be less that I do that doesn't have far-reaching consequences.
The choice between Individual and Group isn't a binary decision -- almost nothing is -- but I've come to realize the sustainability threshold is much closer to the Group side than I ever before appreciated. We're way past Adam Smith.