Monday 16 May 2011

What a set of plankers

You can always trust the Aussies to do something dumb, and the recent reports I've seen of a new "irl meme" of "planking" only goes to show this. Essentially it is the art of lying face down in public places and taking a picture of it, generally in weird or famous places. It actually started in good old blighty, but has really become popular over in Aus, presumably because they're the only people stupid enough to think it's actually funny.

To be honest, the only remotely cool planks are those done on things which look impossible to lie down on or done using something totally weird. Ones like the following:


But it's pushing planking to make it actually funny or cool that ended up with the death of a 20-year old guy in Brisbane, when he tried to plank on a seventh floor balcony and winded up plummeting to his death. It must suck for the guys friends and family, but the media and government coverage of the incident has just become stupid.

For example, police have been reported as stating that they won't tolerate these "dangerous stunts" and that they will be punished with fines or even jail sentences in serious cases. Let's put this in context. One person has died in an accident, so now anybody who is lying down on something the police deem as dangerous will get fined. That to me seems like a massive over-reaction. People die from stupid causes every year, including common things like using a toaster and putting on your trousers. This doesn't mean we ban trousers, or arrest people using their toaster irresponsibly. We may put a caution on for people to avoid doing common stupid acts, like using a fork to fetch their jammed toast out, but when people do it anyway it is their responsibility and their fault. I'm fairly sure the guy knew it was fairly stupid and dangerous when he went to plank on the balcony, but he chose to do it anyway. Do we need to protect against this? Why should we? The number one rule of life is that we die at the end of it. Do we really need to protect against people doing stupid things and them going wrong? To me the answer is no, unless it is putting other people's lives in danger, people should have full right to potentially screw up their own life.

We don't stop people from playing rugby, even though it is a sport which in essence is just an excuse to hit each other. We don't stop people from snowboarding, even though it is strapping a plank of wood to your feet and throwing yourself down a mountain. And we don't stop people from skydiving, even though if something went wrong you'd quickly become a pancake on the pavement. Doing stupid stuff is fun, and the danger that goes with it adds to that. If we start taking away the danger and the stupidity from the world, we're left with a very boring place. If someone dies doing it, so what? There's 6 billion odd more of us in the world. I don't think anyone other than the friends and family of the person who died really have a right to care so much about this death that laws need changing or police need to be alerted.

Let people do stupid stuff, it's the only element of natural selection we still have left in the world.

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