I’ve been scuba diving for almost 2 decades and it really pisses me off seeing divers do this stuff. If you touch coral you kill it wherever you touched it, period. If you touch a whale shark you rub off a mucous covering that protects it from infection. If you touch an eel you can easily lose a finger because their vision is garbage and they don’t know what you are. There are tons of examples like this, without even going into the stuff that if you touch it it is going to HURT YOU. It’s just a bad idea to touch anything in the ocean that’s alive. And these videos encourage new divers that don’t know any better.

Do not do this. Leave marine life alone while diving. Look, don’t touch. Touching some marine life can literally kill them. This video sets a terrible example.

Very interesting, thanks for linking it! And they even have a name for the phenomenon I described.

“Intentional shifts in terminology might seem like a game of Whac-A-Mole – an ultimately unsuccessful effort to outrun a concept’s ugly implications. The Harvard professor Steven Pinker dubbed it the “euphemism treadmill”.”

Every few years some people decide you can’t use certain words because they have become negative terms to some group. So they invent a new term for the same thing and as the years go by and more people use the new term, it gets the same negative association that the old one had. Then the cycle begins anew.

Sometimes it’s good - a lot of slurs that were ok for anyone to say when I was a kid are now socially unacceptable and that’s great. But sometimes the SJWs take it too far and I think this is one of those times. I don’t understand the reason for the push to call them “unhoused” but I’m willing to be educated.

Once you hit middle age and have seen this happen a few times you’ll usually just roll your eyes and carry on.

I love to see it. The hope emanating from these people as they talk is infectious. People just need good opportunities, healthy society will follow.